The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

by Pete Walker

When we do not attend to our feelings, they accumulate inside us and create a mounting anxiety that we commonly dismiss as stress.

Stress is also the painful internal pressure of accumulated emotional energy.

Much of our unnecessary suffering is caused by the ghosts of our murdered emotions wafting into consciousness and haunting us as hurtful thinking.

We are ubiquitously besieged by familial and societal expectations to be “cool.” The pose of acting as if nothing can hurt or affect us has insidiously become our model of health and evolution. Many of us have become so cool that we are emotionally cold and chillingly aloof.

When we disburden ourselves of old unresolved traumas, energy wasted holding the past at bay becomes available for celebrating daily life.

Many childhood experiences have become, of necessity, deeply buried in the unconscious during the process of developing one’s adult personality. This separation or distancing from one’s childhood is no longer needed when the adult personality is fully and securely formed, but by then, the distancing has for most people become a part of that very personality. Separation from one’s childhood is temporarily necessary, but if it is permanently maintained it deprives us of inner experiences which, when restored to us, can keep us young in spirit and also permit greater closeness to our children.