Our whole life we endevour to remain strong. 'Be brave!' is what we hear all the time. But do we exercise the right kind of bravery to remain truly strong?
Our mind serves one purpose: to get us through life whilst encountering the least amount of pain. It protects us from repeated harm. When we get hurt we seek help. Most of us live and embrace this on a physical level. It makes complete sense to us to make sure our cuts or fractured parts of our bodies get looked at. Even though we know it may hurt a great deal to have it cleaned and stitched up or to have our bones repositioned! We accept this pain as something necessary for our healing. We pride ourselves on the bravery and strength we approach our injuries with, particularly if we don’t shed a tear in the process...
Is our inability to shed our tears the reason why our mental-emotional injuries linger?
Emotional unease is a symptom that our emotional body is out of balance and in need of an attention. It takes relatively little effort on our part to deal with this initial un-ease. It makes sense to do so because if left unattended, it only intensifies. And with it also the amount of energy necessary for its future correction.
Any challenging (and to us painful) emotions in fact are symptomatic of our psyche being out of balance. On some level there is something not quite right, needing our full attention! The more we are in tune with ourselves the easier are these emotions to detect. On the other hand, the more out of touch we are, the deeper we fall into dis-balance. In the long run, the deeper wounding we suffer, the more time we need to successfully nurse it.
Not being aware of the above we switch off and shut our wounds out, foolishly thinking they are gone. Yet, they slip into our subconscious where they can never heal. We start to sleep badly and may suffer nightmares. Which is nothing but our pain haunting us at times we cannot consciously keep our emotional lid on. Eventually, we may find ourselves malfunctioning in our relationships, at work, at home. Only when our life is on a verge of a breakdown it occurs to us to give it our attention and seek help.
Can we be truly brave and learn how to work with our emotional 'symptoms’, with our dis-ease? What if we had tools to turn what we currenly perceive as something which weakens us into our strength and finally heal?
Clearly, we cannot start to heal unless our warped image of what bravery looks like starts to shift. When we realise the same thing which was meant to serve us and keep us sound has somehow misunderstood it’s role. The mind has fooled itself into an idea that shielding us from pain is going to keep us safe...
We get crushed many times in life. We are hurting, yet on the face of our 'bravery shield' to the outsider we look happy and alive. On the inside, our minds are broken, our hearts weeping and we are slowly dying. How fabulously dual is Ego at work!? Pretending to be 'strong' we are truly weakened, riddled with anxiety, depression, PTSD, bipolar and other mental disorders. Surely, suppressed energy must expand at some point (?) spreading like a plaque onto our bodies...
When we have a bad cold, we seeks doctor's help, yet we are so worried to be perceived as weak to see a mind professional or an emotional healer - someone who can make us understand our confused mind and release our supressed feelings. Isn’t just about time to change our slavery to the common 'bravery' if we are to make it safely through life? What if we re-defined bravery as being authentic with our pain? What if we changed the way we see pain as a necessary (yet perfectly manageable) part of our daily life, and started to practice tackling it with our mind switched on?
Learn how to deal with your challenging emotions here, and why being authentic about how you feel is necessary if you like to stay emotionally healthy.
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Copyright © 2019 Michaela Patel