Birthing Self-Compassion
Giving birth to my daughter marked the first time I was willing to feel my pain completely with loving awareness. Unknown to myself and undeveloped in my self-assertion skills, I did not anticipate that my choice to have a natural birth would begin my emotional transformation into a strong and confident woman.
It is helpful to understand the healing of emotional pain through the metaphor of childbirth. Labouring through difficult emotions often requires the same level of attention needed to give birth to a human baby. Feeling intense emotional pain with love and even anticipation can lead to the birth of self-compassion.
Deeply attending to emotional pain births us into unconditional self-love. It is possible to breathe through emotional pain as it contracts, intensifies, peaks and releases. The grace of self-empowerment arrives on the other side of birthing a suppressed emotion into the light of love.
The poet Rumi writes:
Every midwife knows
that not until a mother's womb
softens from the pain of labour
will a way unfold
and the infant finds that opening to be born.
...
Oh friend!
There is treasure in your heart,
it is heavy with child.
Listen.
All the awakened ones,
like trusted midwives are saying,
'welcome this pain.'
It opens the dark passage of Grace.
An Initiation
"The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain — to just be with it all." - Ram Dass
I wanted a natural birth. Determined to feel every part of the birthing process, twelve hours later, my baby girl was born without drugs.
After giving birth without painkilling drugs, I felt more confident than ever before. Electric with energy, I stayed up all night staring at my newborn, in awe of my own ability to witness and endure my own pain.
The more I stayed present to my pain as it intensified during 12 hours of labour, the more I was able to feel a larger benevolent force supporting me in my pain. I understood that my strength could be unending if I could remain in contact with this spiritual benevolence.
Enduring the pain of my baby birthing experience was an emotional turning point in my life. After labouring through intensely jagged pain for 12 hours to give birth to my daughter, I crossed over a threshold. I understood my spiritual strength for the first time. Through my willingness to feel the physical pain of giving birth, I innately understood that I was strong enough to live my life in alignment with my authenticity.
Encouraged by my newfound strength, my authentic self-expression began the process of birthing itself into my life right after the physical birth of my daughter. Mystically imbued, I stood up and spoke out about my unhealthy relationships. I intensified my intuitive creative practices and I changed my entire life to reflect my newfound power.
Leaving Old Conditioning Behind
As we labour through the emotional pain that blocks our authentic truth, our loving presence becomes stronger than our limited conditioning. It is important to know that life is divinely designed to trigger our emotional pain. What is not yet healed will eventually be revealed. The feelings that used to debilitate us are within our power to embrace.
When emotional pain is active, we can focus our energy, attention, prayers and questions upon healing it. We can ask our intuition to give us clues, guidance and support about how to release our discomfort.
A healing mudra, mantra or blessing might spontaneously come into our mind. Sometimes we might need to walk off our uncomfortable emotions. Other times we may need to breathe through our discomfort for a time, inviting our pain to release out of our body into a larger spiritual field of love.
The Emotional Body
Our emotional body is formed from birth to age seven. As children, we soak up the emotional imbalances of the people in our midst. As children, we can take on another's unhealed emotional pain as if it were our own.
Painful emotions arising in our current life offer up the opportunity to clear emotional blockages from the past. As spiritual teacher Michael Brown explains, "All our fear, anger and grief of today are the masked experiences of our own frightened child self calling us for help."
Many of us are unwilling to admit how much we emotionally struggle. If we do not take the time to clear old energies, we accumulate unprocessed emotional debris. Laden with emotional accumulation, we can forget that we are bright with creative potential.
Facing Pain vs. Avoiding Pain
In our emotionally repressed world, many of us habitually stuff down uncomfortable emotions. We force what feels unacceptable into deep storage until life feels flat, predictable and uninspiring. In this way, we stay emotionally young, lacking in self-confidence, unsure if we can meet the fierce challenges of adult life.
At key points in our life, we will feel called to integrate the emotions we could not embrace from our past. The choice is ours to repress or to express. If we refuse to address the non-integrated energies from the past, we will continue to dissociate away from our confidence, power and mature intelligence.
The Willingness to Feel Everything
"Mastering the ability to lavish ourselves with unconditional love is one of the greatest accomplishments we can achieve in this life."
-Michael Brown
As soon as we begin our adult life, the emotional cleansing work can begin in earnest. The re-parenting ourselves through our own compassionate presence can begin.
Allowing ourselves to witness our aching need, wrenching grief, annihilating fear, mortifying shame, and intense anger without sedation, emotionally naked as in natural childbirth, we arrive on the other side transformed - glowing and triumphant.
When we witness each layer of suppressed pain until it is accepted and integrated, it is gone forever, so long as we do not keep reenergizing the pain with the same old negative stories.
Spiritual teacher Chuck Spezzano writes:
"If we witness our suffering, at some point, it begins to unfold, sensation by sensation, and untangle itself. With emotional pain, if we freely give ourselves to pay attention to it, it begins to show us the issue surrounding and driving it."
"The root of the emotional charge is from the past. When we witness our suffering and don't turn away from it, it eventually takes us back to the roots where it began, and if we choose to watch it closely, even the roots will untangle."
With such self-honouring, it no longer matters what people think or how much they love us. We feel radiant on the inside. When we love ourselves unconditionally, we have earned our own joy. We feel self-compassion. We have birthed ourselves into wholeness.
Healing Your Emotional Wounds
Your deepest emotional wound becomes your greatest superpower - once healed. This prolific course bundle includes numerous written PDF lessons, plenty of visual examples, comprehensive psychological explanations of the emotional healing process, 8 art video demos and a PDF guidebook.
