"We need to own and release the anger and rage at our parents, our teachers or ministers or other authority figures, including the concept of God that was forced on us while we were growing up. We do not necessarily need to vent that anger directly to them but we need to release the energy. We need to let that child inside of us scream, "I hate you, I hate you," while we beat on pillows or some such thing, because that is how a child expresses anger." *** "It is necessary to own and honor the child who we were in order to Love the person we are.  And the only way to do that is to own that child's experiences, honor that child's feelings, and release the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around." *** "We cannot learn to Love without honoring our Rage!

We cannot allow ourselves to be Truly Intimate with ourselves or anyone else without owning our Grief.

We cannot clearly reconnect with the Light unless we are willing to own and honor our experience of the Darkness.

We cannot fully feel the Joy unless we are willing to feel the Sadness.

We need to do our emotional healing, to heal our wounded souls, in order to reconnect with our Souls on the highest vibrational levels.  In order to reconnect with the God-Force that is Love and Light, Joy and Truth."

Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls

 
In order to stop reacting to life out of the old wounds and old tapes from our childhood - to become empowered to live life as a mature adult - it is necessary to do the inner child healing work.  And in order to do the inner child work we need to be willing to do the grief work.  Grief is energy that needs to be released.

Emotions are energy and that energy needs to be released through crying and raging.  In order to own our self, it is vitally important to feel our pain, sadness, and rage.   If we don't have permission from ourselves to feel the "negative" feelings then we also cannot feel the Joy, Love, and happiness.

We need to own and honor the feelings in order to start forgiving ourselves and start learning how to Love our self.  It is very important to own our feelings about what happened to us.   It is extremely important to own our right to be angry that our needs were not met.

Part of grief work is simply owning/feeling the sadness and the anger.  We need to feel the grief about what happened to us as children and then we also need to own the grief over what effect it has had on us as an adult.  Grieving is a very different experience from being depressed.  While we are grieving we can still appreciate a beautiful sunset or be happy to see a  friend or be grateful to be sad. Depression is being in a dark tunnel where there are no beautiful sunsets.

The deep grieving work is energy work. Once we can get out of our heads and start paying attention to what is happening in our body then we can start releasing the emotional energy. When we get to a place where the emotions are coming up - when the voice starts breaking - the first thing I have to tell people is to keep breathing. We automatically stop breathing and close our throats when the feelings get close to the surface.

At the point where the voice starts breaking and the eyes start tearing, the technique is to locate where the energy is concentrated in the body.  It can be any place from head to feet - much of the time it is in our back because that is where we carry stuff we don't want to look at, or in the area of the solar plexus (anger or fear) or heart chakra (pain, broken heart) or chest (sadness).  It can be very revealing what side of the body it is on (right - masculine, left - feminine) or what chakra it is near.

I tell people to scan their bodies for tension or tightness and then to breathe directly into the place we have identified.  Visualizes breathing white light directly into that part of the body. That starts breaking up the energy and little balls of energy start getting released.  These balls of energy are the sobs. This is a terrifying place to be for the ego because it feels out of control - it is a wonderful place to be from a healing perspective.  Empowering the healing is going with the flow - inhale the white Light, exhale the sobs.   Sobs, tears, snot from the nose, are all forms of energy being released.  You can be in the witness watching yourself - owning and releasing the emotional energy that has been trapped in your body - and control the process at the same time you are in the pain.  (It is very important to own the feelings - i.e. give our self permission to feel them.  If we are crying or angry and then shame our self for those feelings we are abusing ourselves for our wound and replacing the energy faster than we are releasing it.) 

By controlling the process I am referring to choosing to align self with the energy flow, surrendering to the flow, instead of shutting it down as the terrified ego wants to do.  It is very hard to learn this process without a safe place to do it, and someone who knows what they are doing to facilitate it. Once you have learned how to do it then it is possible to facilitate your own grief processing.

The anger work is also an energy flow process. The bat (tennis racket, bataka, pillow, whatever) is lifted over the head as you inhale and then as you hit the pillow you expel the energy - in shout, a grunt, a "fuck you", a scream, whatever words come to you.  Inhale, exhale - open your throat to say whatever needs to be said.  Own your voice.  Own the child's voice.  Sometimes the child in us will shout "I hate you, I hate you."  That doesn't mean we necessarily hate the person - it means we hate how their behavior hurt us.

It is vitally important for us to own our right to be angry about what happened to us or about the ways we were deprived. If we do not own our right to be angry about what happened in childhood it greatly impairs our ability to set boundaries as an adult. 

Every time we go into the deep grieving place and release some of the energy through crying and raging (sometimes we need to rage to get to the tears or vise versa) we take a little power away from that particular wound.  The next time we touch on that wound it won't be quite as emotional or terrifying.  (This is relative of course, if we have been suppressing something for many years it may take a number of sessions before we can actually feel that it has less power.)

It is terrifying to face healing the emotional wounds. It takes great courage and faith to do the grief work.   And it is what will change our relationship with our self at it's core.  Working from the outside-in (i.e. learning how to have boundaries, be assertive, etc.) it will take a very long time to change our behavior in our most intimate relationships.  Working from the inside-out by owning and healing our relationship with ourselves at a causal level - our childhood - will result in us surprising ourselves because we will start to naturally and normally own our right to speak up and have boundaries without even having to think about it.

It is our pain.  It is our anger.  If we don't own it, then we are not owning our self.