Emotional Clearing or Artful Emotional Living - Which Is It?

There is much talk about emotional clearing. Many kinds of practitioners are focused on clearing out “negative” or unwanted emotions.  There are therapists trained in Neuro Emotional Technique (NET), Somatoemotional Release, Aromatherapy, Primal Therapy, and Rebirthing (to name just a few of the techniques available).  Many of these practitioners stress the importance of clearing out negative emotions as the path to wholeness and higher spirituality. The belief seems to be that a negative emotion holds you back spiritually and that clearing the emotion is the answer to the problem. 

Where did this belief come from?  Well, we have lived the last several hundred years in the Age of Reason.  We have developed our left brains to the maximum.  We have denied our right brains as the seat of our emotions, our intuition and our hearts. When it comes to this topic, the New Age movement, even though it presents itself as having new ideas, is really simply following an old trend that says that emotions are problematic.  This belief can be found in current New Age literature such as Dr. Joshua David Stone’s writing.  It can also be traced back to Alice Bailey and other forerunners of our current spiritual movement.

How essential is it that we clear our negative emotions?

This is an important question at this time in our evolutionary history.  It does appear that negative emotions such as fear and anger are bubbling up to the surface so that we have the opportunity to release fear and anger.  The main emphasis is, of course, on clearing out so-called bad emotions to make room for the primary emotion of Love.  If it were that simple, if we could just clear out what we don’t want and bring in what we do want, then I’d say that clearing emotions is absolutely essential for your and my spiritual advancement.

Now, I ask you: Is it really that simple?  Have you found that you clear an emotion and it stays cleared?  Are you completely and consistently free of recurring negative emotions such as anger, frustration, fear, worry, anxiety, and pain?  Emotions are generated as a natural part of our experience.  Emotions are energy. They move and they gather force and they affect us on all levels including the physical, the mental, the etheric and the astral.  Yes, you can use your conscious will to alter an emotion. You can choose joy instead of pain. You can talk yourself out of a bad mood. You can put on an essential oil to feel better. You can have a rebirthing to remove a lot of anger in your general life.  You can do many things to eliminate an emotion in the here and now, but can you clear negative emotions and not have them return?  The answer is no, not really.

 Does this mean we don’t try?  Of course, it doesn’t.  But we might begin to question the seemingly unquestioned trend of emotional clearing.  Is it true that emotions are problematic?  Is it true that our emotional bodies cause us to get stuck along our spiritual journey?  Is it true that a person who is less emotional and more willful can use her mind to propel her along her path of initiation more quickly than someone who has a whole range of emotions?  Is it true that the mind is more powerful than the emotional body and that the mind should be developed and the emotional body should simply be cleared again and again and again?

These are the questions that need to be asked at this time in our spiritual development.

Emotional Regulation & Management

I propose that there is a better approach to the whole issue of emotional clearing.  Emotions are essential to us as humans.  We cannot manifest simply by thinking about what we want.  We need to add emotion to the process to give manifestation an extra boost.  Emotions are energy. We need our emotions to give texture, color and meaning to our experiences.  Emotions are an absolutely essential means to feeling our Godness within.  We cannot just think about being Divine, we must feel our Divinity.  We must feel on a physical, sensate level and on an emotional/perceptual level. Emotions are energy with thought form.  The emotional body and the mental body are intertwined and we have overemphasized our mental bodies to the detriment of our emotional bodies.

Tools and Techniques for Skillful Emotional Living

This is not the time in our evolution to focus only on clearing emotions which will simply be regenerated experience after experience.  This is the time to learn tools of emotional regulation and to develop the art of emotional living.  We need not to clear emotions so much as to learn to use our emotions skillfully.  This is the alternative to quick-fix emotional clearing. Our emotional bodies are underdeveloped.  We can learn to develop them through therapies that provide tools for emotional regulation.  Such therapies as body-centered psychotherapy, spiritual energy healing, Bioenergetics, Hakomi and some spiritual practices such Zen Buddhism offer variations on tools for emotional regulation and development.  Tools offered include breathwork to reconnect with your core self, boundary work to establish an energetic sense of self, body awareness skills to ground your sense of self in an emotional experience, conscious restructuring of emotional energy to enhance the meaningfulness of your life experiences, the use of transference to heal emotional wounds and the removal of energetic interferences that block the free flow of vital energy in you entire body system. 

Emotional regulation seeks to assist you to manage your emotions rather than just clearing them.  Emotional management allows you to retain the meaning of an experience so that you can build a sense of self that is alive, vibrant and able to have any emotion, at any time, in any situation.  Emotional regulation allows you to have your emotions as a reflection of the essence of your Divine Self .You cannot  carry the heightened energy of the Divine Self without emotional development.  This is wholeness. We are beings that have more than one body.  A truly healthy person has a balance between all the bodies including the lower and the higher bodies.  We currently have underdeveloped emotional bodies and overdeveloped mental bodies on the lower level of our body system.  Emotional regulation is a path to a balance between the mental and emotional bodies.  Development of our emotional body is essential to development of our spiritual bodies. It is an advanced form of evolution.  Higher level emotions such as Love, Light and Joy are only sustainable when we have learned the skill of artful emotional living. 

Thank you for your interest in learning and growing. 

Blessings to All,