Have you ever wondered how some people ‘seemingly’ go through life without a care in the world, while others seem stuck in some time warp of pain? I have sometimes wondered if 'they' are careless or they just care (less). Some of us don’t even realize we are stuck. But the reality is that many of us do have issues, or in today’s vernacular, it is referred to as ‘emotional baggage’. Emotional baggage can be caused by trying to fast forward over a painful time, but we actually end up carrying it around with us for a lifetime.
Our emotional baggage comes from our life journey. It may be from a traumatic experience, the loss of a loved one, or any situation that was not healed at that particular juncture of our ‘life experience’. A wound does not heal if we leave any dirt or residue in the cut…and it will eventually fester. So too, will our emotional wounds refuse to heal if we don’t ‘clean them out’ as well. Much like the famed author and poet Henry Thoreau pointed to in his quote, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."…it can be pointed to our emotional baggage as well, that if we do not get to the ‘root’ of the pain….it will eventually ‘fester’ or manifest in any number of ways that affect our ‘now’.
Emotional baggage can also be likened to a diseased heart. New branches will actually grow from the heart to make up for clogged arteries, so they can bring blood to where it is needed in the body. But the reality is that there is still a problem with the heart for these branches to have manifested. In this way, our past takes us along different paths trying to keep us going forward, and all the while we are forgetting the reason for the detours.
Some wounds will heal in time on their own, but others will just keep us ‘stuck’ in that moment. If you want to get ‘unstuck’, you must revisit that memory and make peace with it or it will continue to interfere with your present time of life. And you are the only one who can heal the broken part where you are emotionally stuck. You must make peace with it, and to do that you have to accept ‘what is’. You don’t have to like it, condone it or want it to have happened….but you have to accept that it did happen and realize nothing is going to change the fact that it did happen.
The tricky part is that you must be brutally honest with yourself and be willing to take off your emotional armor and/or the protective shell that you have been carrying around all these years. If you find that it is too painful to revisit…you will learn that the ‘pain’ is very persistent in wanting to be cleansed and it is also quite patient in waiting for you to ‘deal’ with it. It is much like housework that you don’t feel like doing, or the pile of work on your desk. They will still be there when you get around to cleaning up. It doesn’t just magically disappear. And you will also find that it is constantly nagging you in the back of your mind until you do tend to it. But the trade-off for waiting for you to ‘deal’….is that you will feel stress, unhappiness, discontent, and DIS-ease.
Just as when we clear a path in an overgrown forest to take a walk, or tidy up our closet or clean up that junk drawer, we feel so good when look at a job well done and everything feels cleaner and brighter and easier to navigate. Making a clear path in our life journey, will help us to realize that underneath all the ‘clutter’ is a new us…..dusted off and navigating more easily to our new tidy and awakened ‘now’. Becoming ‘awakened’ isn’t some New Age Mumbo Jumbo. It just refers to having an aha moment or many strung together, so that you see things in a different way, or that your forgive yourself or someone else for ‘whatever’, or you realize that you are still you - no matter what your past was, or whatever it is that got you ‘stuck’, has no power over you any longer. Or it can be that what you 'thought' was true for so many years....has turned on the light bulb (hence the term En-LIGHT-ened) in your consciousness, so that you are free to feel what you are feeling now.
So Short Story LONG…if you want to get unstuck from a painful time or memory from your past…do the work and you will find that you are claiming a calmer, more peaceful, happy future for yourself. And the way to do the ‘work’ is really quite simple. All you have to do is love, forgive and embrace yourself or whatever was in your excess emotional baggage scenario. Easy as pie! You can do it….Goms is pulling for ya’ Hugs & Mush- Gommy
