The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

by Pete Walker

As we regain a deeper and more accurate feeling sense of the negative effects of our upbringing, we gradually becomes less minimizing.

Man cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. – Alexis Canell

Although I no longer needed to be busy to be safe as an adult, I kept moving because I unconsciously feared drowning in my emotional pain. I had not yet learned how to use grieving to drain my inner sea or become buoyant on it.

Now that I have released the bulk of my childhood pain, my compulsive busyness and destructive self-talk are almost non-existent and I feel relaxed much of the time.

Pain is excess energy crying out for release. – Gerald Heard

Unashamed crying creates deep, bodily-based feelings of peace and relaxation, as tears are the body’s most powerful way of releasing emotional tension.

The most profound relief of crying, however, comes from letting the natural sounds of weeping come up from as deep a place in the body as possible.

In tears your smile would glow forever. Do not be afraid to suffer, give the heaviness back to the weight of the earth; – Rilke

Sublimation falls somewhere in the middle of this continuum. It is the process of consciously channeling angry energy into playful or constructive activities, such as dancing, exercising, gardening, cleaning or chopping wood.

It is not humanly possible to love someone who is a constant source of hurt.

Verbal ventilation occurs when language is charged with feeling. Verbal ventilation is the grieving process of releasing pain by talking or writing about it. It is one of the primary healing processes of most formal psychotherapy.

When we air out our grief by talking about it, verbal ventilation dissipates our anger and evaporates our sadness.

Verbal ventilation is helpful to the degree that the listener is nonjudgmental and compassionate. True intimates can grieve together.

Many survivors derive enormous benefits from keeping a journal of their experiences and discoveries on the path of recovery.

Writing touches the unconscious in a way that talking does not. It gets beyond the old, to the truth of the real stories within.

Journal writing is a self-nurturing way of spending time alone. It accesses our intuition, aiding us to make wise decisions and realistic plans about our lives.

Cursing and swearing are very powerful forms of verbal ventilation, particularly for individuals whose speech is not carelessly littered with expletives. When profanity is not overused or used abusively, it is a very helpful angering tool.

You may find on the other side of that anger and sadness a reemergence of your indestructible urge to vibrantly express yourself and play with full abandon.

Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present, and can welcome all things. – Lao Tzu

Feeling is focusing on pain with the intention of relaxing any resistance to it, so that it may pass through and out of the body. Feeling is the reversal of the learned survival mechanism of clamping down on pain and banishing it from awareness.

Some feelings are so intense that they require the active emoting of anger and tears for resolution. No amount of feeling passively sad or angry can fully process the years of accumulated hurt of a wretched childhood.

Visceral sensations are often physiological correlates of feeling. If you hold your attention on them, if you feel them, you may become aware of their actual emotional content.

Thoughts, rest your wings. Here is a hollow of silence, in which to hatch your dreams. – Joan Walsh Anglund

Persistent passive focusing on any internal phenomena leads to its eventual integration and resolution in consciousness, as many seasoned meditators know.

The process of feeling helps dissolve the pain and unresolved grief that blocks our access to archetypal human experiences of great expansiveness.

Loving people allow and even encourage their friends to express and release their anger, as long as they are not abusive in the process.

No matter how unreasonable our anger may seem, we hurt ourselves by denying real experiences of it. If

The unvented pain of the past accumulates in layers in the unconscious.

I make this point to remind survivors of extensive trauma that even with a thorough grieving of childhood hurt, their old childhood wounds may occasionally reopen and require compassionate attention. As recovery progresses, however, these emotional flashbacks occur less often and are more easily resolved.

As I look at it now, what could possibly merit more perseverance than breaking the habit of fleeing and living outside the center of one’s being?

The end of a relationship, the loss of good health, or the death of a pet may stir up a tempest in our dormant inner sea of unresolved past pain.

When we feel genuinely loved for the first time in our lives, all our past suffering from lack of love sometimes resurfaces. All the tears we didn’t cry for our past loneliness becomes available for release.

Polarized emoting is a common problem in modern cultures in which unspoken rules relegate tears to women and anger to men.

If we are forced to rely on defense mechanisms throughout our childhoods, they rigidify as permanent states of being and strategies of living.

In moderation, daydreaming is a delightful form of entertainment, an important part of creativity, and a direct channel into the deepest levels of intuition.

Dissociation also allows children to stay physically present around trauma without fully experiencing it. Some children anesthetize themselves so thoroughly with dissociation that they feel little or no pain during beatings.

Alcohol, marijuana, tranquilizers, and opiates are widely used to dissociate from pain.

Carl Jung said: It is only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own nature.

The shallow breathing and constant tension of hypervigilance depletes us and leaves us susceptible to injury and disease.

Performance anxiety is the insidious hybrid of hypervigilance, perfectionism, and emotional flashbacks that throttles and inhibits our ability to respond gracefully and spontaneously.

Mild hypervigilance is also useful in our social lives. Many of us are prone to attract people as abusive as our parents via a phenomenon known as repetition compulsion

Many of us become habituated to obsessive thinking in childhood in order to distract ourselves from feeling the hostility and lack of love in our families.

Therapists use a variety of emotional release techniques to help survivors “drop down” from their obsessing minds into their feelings. Reichian therapy, bioenergetics, gestalt exercises, rebirthing, and Rosen Bodywork are some of the most proven of these techniques.

Self-disgust seems to be the unconscious, operant factor in most compulsive behaviors.

Whenever their feelings are stimulated, compulsives amplify their addiction just as obsessives magnify their worrying.

How can children feel loved by a father whose work addiction – or a mother whose compulsive fastidiousness – prevents the family from spending intimate time together?

When we take an active, creative interest in our appearance, we begin to heal the awful wound of being ugly in our own eyes.

Faces freed from the contortion of disguising disowned inner experience often relax into the natural beauty that is innate.

In moderation, working hard and being busily productive are among the great joys of life. Moving rapidly and fluidly through a variety of complex tasks is a thrilling celebration of our anthropoid genius – of our ability to simultaneously invoke intelligence, strength, focus, grace, and dexterity.

Grieving releases this tension and heals the malady that afflicts so many adult children: the syndrome of dramatically fluctuating between the extremes of anxiety-driven hyperactivity and depression-induced listlessness.