Constriction and the fight mentality

Excerpt from The Heart of Healing, by Mary Ann Wallace, MD*

True emotional wellness comes when you allow every single flavor of energy movement in the body, which means that every emotion must find its natural voice. When you begin to pay attention to your mental patterns, you will begin to notice a relationship between the thoughts you are thinking and the emotions you are carrying. Then you will begin to notice an interrelationship among your thoughts, your emotions, and your physical structure. For example, if you experience chronic fear or anger, your body will begin to reflect constriction, and the sensations associated with that constriction sooner or later can become pain. If you pay attention, your emotions can provide clues through your body to what is getting in the way of your free and authentic interaction with life. In fact, you possess the best biofeedback mechanism on the planet!

The quality of emotion or bodily sensation you experience in response to different life situations depends on your belief system. Problems arise when beliefs, and the resulting constriction, take over. Whatever your beliefs are, they typically reflect a recurring theme, and the storyline can be recognized in our cultural archetypes and myths. A first step in moving beyond the storyline is recognizing that you hold different elements of it within the physical structure of your body.


Find The Heart of Healing at www.amazon.com/author/mawallace or any bookstore on request.

Psychology

We’ve come a long way in our practice of psychology. Our understanding has traversed the field of Freudian analysis, based on the premise of the psyche’s neuroses, and through Skinner’s behaviorism, nested in the notion that we all function as instinct-driven animals. Trainable but dumb. Jung, a protégé of Freud, introduced mysticism by way of archetypal characterizations. All of this was pretty heady stuff, though – oriented to and for the intellect and the intellectual.

Emotive-based therapies – think the primal scream – landed us squarely into the realm of the emotions, themselves, as that with which we need to deal. The notion was that by “releasing” emotions by “expressing” them we could empty the tank of the toxin. Now we understand, via such fields as psychoneuroimmunology and neuroplasticity, that neurons that fire together fuse in their synergy. Parts of the brain, such as the amygdala, map to certain high octane emotions of a negative nature, and the more of a workout they get, the more robust they become.

Enter meditation and mindfulness – the stuff of the ancient mystical traditions – and we finally have a formula that blends all of the above bodies of wisdom. By recognizing our thoughts and emotions, and observing them as passing phenomena, we employ the wisdom gleaned from Freud’s day when the inner landscape first became palpable as a place to work. We embrace the archetypal energy patterns unveiled and elucidated by Jung. We acknowledge and allow for the full panoply of the emotional field uncovered and portrayed by the emotives – without burning them into ever more deeply etched grooves in our neuronal systems by continually expressing that which we least want, as recent scientific explorations have discovered to be relevant.

We allow. We admit. We become curious as to the inner self and the possibilities there. We embrace what we find. We repress nothing, suppress nothing, and give expression to that which we wish to grow.

It is the wisdom of the time. For a practical method that uses this wisdom in day-to-day life, see: http://www.maryanniyer.com/articlesbydr.wal.html, and scroll down to the FEAD Yourself a Different Way article.