Blocked Emotions = Blocked Creativity
I always think of a creative block as an emotional block - indicating there is something I do not want to feel. If you are feeling blocked creatively, you might want to consider that what stands between you and your joyful creativity is unacknowledged emotional pain.
Many of us hold layers of emotional pain that we can have not consciously met yet. There is no shame in this. It is our human condition.
Some of us, sensitive in our souls and empathic towards others, can recall no obvious trauma when we were children to pinpoint why we suffer so much. Yet, mysteriously as adults, we feel unnameable angst, depression, grief, fear and anger as we navigate through daily life.
Unprocessed emotions arise frequently in day to day life to be accepted, loved and embraced, but it is easy to ignore the signals. Any time you catch yourself holding your breath, for example, you are repressing an emotion. Every time you feel any sort of tightness in your body, you are clamping down an emotion that could be felt and moved through.
Before you become a free and joyful creator, you will have to learn how to allow your creative blocks to take you in the emotional healing direction they want you to go. Your creative blocks always ask for the inclusion of your repressed emotions.
To not run away from your painful emotions is a courageous act. Emotional pain comes from the unloved places within you.
As an adult, you cannot expect that others will love you in ways that you do not love yourself. Turning toward your difficult feelings with love and curiosity creates a freely creative life. To invite up repressed emotions to be loved frees up new energy and provides the portal into a creative intelligence that you may not have accessed since childhood.
Clearing Emotions From Childhood
Until we integrate all the emotions that we could not process in when we were younger, we will walk around like little children in big adult bodies.
Many of us rarely examine the childhood beliefs that we filter our perceptions of the world through. We stay patterned in the beliefs that were laid down when we were young.
As children, we emotionally imprint upon our parent's emotional patterning. Born open, like a sponge, we take on the heaviness of our caregiver's emotional world. Spiritual teacher Michael Brown explains how our inner child lives inside our adult body:
"Experientially it is in the first seven years, any and all uncomfortable experience arising from our entry into the conditional world are imprinted into and affect the condition of our emotional body. Our emotional body is therefore where the record of these occurrences is kept."
Children literally soak up the "emotional-pain-soup" around them. I remember one instance, many years ago, noticing the exact correlation of my emotionality with my daughter's.
My four-year-old daughter was bathing in our old claw foot tub. I was sitting on the sofa in the living room nearby. The house was silent, and suddenly I felt piercing loneliness in my heart. At the same moment, my daughter cried out, "Mommy! My heart is falling out of my chest with loneliness!"
And, it should be noted, that trying to pin our uncomfortable feelings on a specific trauma from childhood, or searching for a childhood story of abuse to explain our emotional pain, is often too simplistic. We suffer ancestrally for all of those who have come before us. We inherit the pain from those in our family who did not know how to process their own emotional pain.
Strong Presence to Emotional Pain
Unprocessed emotion pain can feel overpowering. Emotional pain can feel so big, you might barely be able to think, create, function, work, or relate to other people. In such discomfort, it might be easy to think that you have to get rid of your pain by blaming others for it instead of enlarging your loving presence to it.
As you move through your emotional pain with love, your creativity will flow much more freely. You can do your self-loving work by feeling your emotional pain with awareness, touching it lightly at first, and taking breaks when it feels too unbearable. As you grow more strongly self-loving with your kind inner attention, the pain passes through your being at a faster rate until one day, your pain will be gone.
