THE HOLISTIC COOKING SCHOOL - ARTICLES

EMOTIONAL HEALING USING THE FIVE TRANSFORMATIONS

Amongst the most common dreams we share, is for our every day emotional life to be happy and fulfilling. Often, though, it seems that the greater the effort put into finding this peace, the more we undermine our results.

How can we practically recover this elusive happiness which, as children, we once knew?

What do feelings and emotions have to do with healing?

Emotions are the root cause of almost every illness. Anger, fear, unworthiness and other emotions weaken the physical body creating stiffness, aches, pains and general discomfort which eventually can cause more serious conditions like tumours and cancer if we cannot heal them.

People get sick for many reasons. Each diseased state is telling us that we are ignoring some part of our ‘self’ and change is necessary. In real and true healing, we also address the mental, emotional and spiritual bodies as well as the physical one.

Emotions are the foundation on which we build our life. They inspire and they limit us. Joy, bliss and happiness along with anger, fear, confusion and unworthiness makes us a whole person. But limiting emotions cause us to stay stuck in a false perception about the self. Fear plays havoc with relationships, careers, success and finances. Head colds for instance are a direct result of emotional confusion whilst toxicity motivates anger.

Emotions and beliefs also shroud our true divine self. As we explore spirituality, it is necessary to also acknowledge and eventually release limitation in the form of fear, denial and disbelief. This action takes courage and trust as we explore the inner workings of the ‘self’. As our world moves, there is a real and urgent need to change. External circumstances perpetuate the already abundant level of fear around us. Anger, confusion and mistrust all contribute to a society that is overwhelmed. It is time to change.

How do we identify limiting emotions?

Look at friends and family members as mirrors or reflections. What you see in another that bothers you or angers you is a part of yourself that has not yet been healed and loved. I suggest you look at your criticism of your dearest friends and then turn all that criticism around to yourself. This exercise gives you the opportunity to look at your limiting emotional issues. Allow others to reflect back your brilliance or limitations.

Once you have located your personal limitations, it is time for change.

Emotional patterns begin in the first place when we place a judgement upon them. This time, experience (feel) the energy of anger – but do not judge it – just experience it. Allow anger to run all the way down to your toes. As if you are sitting in a pond of red water – now enjoy it. Love the feeling that anger produces, from here we can begin communicating with anger. This helps us locate the core issue underneath the anger. Yes, that is correct! Strike up a conversation with anger. Ask it questions like “what are you teaching me?” Or “Why am I so angry all the time?” with these answers you are able to make changes.

What is the difference between feelings and emotions?

· The word EMOTION comes from the Latin word:

e-movere: to move: from the inside to the outside

An emotion is something that moves from the inside to the outside in different ways, or not, when it is stuck.

The word FEELING: is a movement inside. To understand our feelings, we have to check inside. We are not very well trained in our society and often not in our upbringing to do that. We often look more outside. For lots of us, it is difficult to feel the connection with the inside.

· The normal healthy flow of energy is “taking in” and “letting go”.

We breathe in (yin) and we breath out (yang). We take food in (yin) and we excrete waste (yang). We take energy in such as Heaven’s Energy and Earth’s Energy and let the energy go. Every cell of the body expands (yin) and contracts (yang).

We have feelings going on (inside) and we bring the emotions out.

When the healthy flow of energy gets stuck, we experience that as “imbalance” or “illness”. Often, we have feelings going on but we don’t express them in the form of emotions, in talking, singing, shouting, writing or creative ways. We often swallow them in and avoid addressing them to the right people or to sit with them in order to heal them.

Emotional Healing Using the Five Transformations

Often, macrobiotics emphasises physical healing, but whilst we are healing and cleansing our organs, we start healing our emotions. If we understand how the emotional healing process is working, we can help ourselves and get rid of deep old stuff held in the body often for many years.

Emotional body work, writing, massage and healing touch, talking therapy and seeing a counsellor and Chakra breathing can all be very helpful to bring us more in a healthy space and to help us grow spiritually. We have to address and face our hidden, dark agenda in order to heal relationships, old patterns (where we are stuck) and eventually ourselves.

This is frightening, whilst anger is often the impetus of motivation to accomplish goals, fear has the opposite effect. Confusion on the other hand, keeps thoughts spinning, causing a cloud of chaos. Happiness and joy are contagious and elevate everything we do, but why is it that joy is often the least experienced whilst fear, anger, confusion and unworthiness dominate? We have to go through the layers of our emotional healing in order to find the joy.

By facing our fear, doing the work around it that needs to be done, we are able to jump. We start healing our kidney energy on a physical level.

EMOTIONAL HEALING ORGANS FIVETRANSFORMATIONS BASIC NEEDS
FEAR KidneyBladderSex organs WATER Safety, reassurance, stability
ANGER LiverGall Bladder TREE Boundaries and structure to facilitate growth
SADNESS LungsLarge IntestineSkin METAL Recognition, acknowledgement of self
COMPASSION SpleenStomachPancreas EARTH Support, nourishment, care
GRATEFULLNESSJOYLOVE HeartSmallIntestine FIRE Joy, love, warmth

We gradually go to a deeper layer of healing our hurt feelings, we meet our anger; often we don’t want to feel the anger or we are so out of touch with our body, we even think we don’t carry anger. Food, for many of us, is a way to deal with our feelings and emotions. Whenever a feeling is coming up, we start to use food to suppress the feeling: coffee, chocolate, alcohol, cheese and dairy food, sweets and sugar are very well-known comfort foods. Often, after using these foods, after over-eating, we feel even worse and guilty. We know that this is not the way to heal neither to change.

Lots of this behaviour has to do with our upbringing, where father and mother kept us “sweet” with food, television etc, we had to be the “good girl” or the “good boy”. “Don’t speak up” was the non-spoken message! “Behave” or “work hard”. In fact, we swallowed our pain, anger or sadness and it hurts more and harmed deeply.

The patterns we developed often are rooted in our upbringing. After working with groups and in one to one sessions for years, I have discovered that certain patterns can develop especially when Mother was very dominant or controlling, she kept her sons weak. She took their lives over. Daughters, as she did not represent the feminine, show often lots of male energy: men became a threat and then they scare men as well.

If Father was absent (could be for several reasons) as a daughter, it is very difficult to blossom as a woman. We need, as children, the safe environment from father and mother, if not, we have an imbalanced image of what we are and what a real, deep intimate relationship is like.

If mother was weak, complaining a lot, she often turns her daughter into her mother. The daughter thinks ‘giving to exhaustion’ is the thing to do in life. She burns out in the end.

If father was dominant and controlling, he often keeps the daughters (or sons sometimes) in the place of ‘the good and small little girl’. Every present he gives, feels like blackmail.

There are some examples of how we can be injured in different chakas and related organs. The more we face the anger, the more we will feel that we carry lots of helpless anger but also justified anger which we never addressed and turned into helpless anger.

Getting rid of it, healing it, is a very important step to come to a deeper layer of our feelings, sadness. If we can grieve the old sadness, we carry and we suppress it, we start to feel compassion for ourselves. We start to feel our real needs and we can make steps in our life to et our needs met. Then we start to become more and more integrated, we start to feel gratefulness, joy and love. We start to feel deeply happy and give from the abundance, from the heart. Going through an emotional healing teaches us how to assess ourselves and heal our WOOD energy. It teaches us how to love ourselves and meanwhile how to heal our FIRE energy. It teaches us how to nourish ourselves and heal our EARTH energy. It teaches us low to respect ourself and how to heal our METAL energy. It teaches us how to reassure ourselves and how to heal our WATER energy.

Healing the physical and emotional body

Anger, Resentment and Guilt are feelings of the past, they are yang emotions. By working too hard, stressing the physical nature of our life, using lots of eggs, cheese, meat, salt, baked products, we make the body hard, stiff and too yang.

We arrive in a state where it is difficult to let go of these feelings and emotions. The emotions of the future are fear and hope. They are more yin. “I hope that everything will work out – but I’m afraid it won’t”, is an attitude which shows that the nervous system is overactive and Kidney’s weak. Yin foods, such as sugar, drugs and alcohol, contribute to this condition. Unbalanced emotions create turmoil and unhappiness. When the physical body (yang) is seen as the entirety of our life, then the yang emotions, sexual extremes and often repressed feelings predominate. When the spiritual essence (yin) is judged as our most important nature, then we experience the yin emotions, sexual weakness and often depression and anxiety.

Emotional health is daily happiness, where the body, emotions and spirit are smooth and harmonised. Inner peace gives us clarity, insight, creativity, spontaneity, live and compassion. You will discover the difference as you uncover your unconditional capacity to give and receive.