Hwee-Meng Tan
Supposedly someone shot you in the chest. Bang! Would you leave the bullet in your chest? Of course not. We would rush for immediate medical attention.
However, if someone was to maliciously attack you with hurtful words, chances are you would not attend to your emotional wound in a similar fashion. As a culture, we do not place any importance on healing emotional injuries. Unlike physical wounds, we do not see the risks that long-term emotional pain poses to our physical health and well-being.
Emotional wounding is very similar to physical wounding. We even use similar language to describe our emotional hurts. Some of these expressions include’you broke my heart’, ‘his words could have killed me’, and ‘your betrayal was like a stab in the back’.
In order to further explain this similarity, we need to travel beyond the realm of the physical body into the world of energy healing. Energy healing is based on the theory that our physical body is surrounded and interpenetrated by an energy body called the aura. The aura or energy body nourishes and feeds the physical body.
When 2 people touch, not only are they contacting on a physical level, they are also exchanging energy on an energetic level. The type of energy is dependant on the nature of the interaction. When 2 lovers meet, they send soft waves of pink, rose-light and green to each other. If your clairvoyant sense is opened, you can actually see this phenomenon. However, even if you do not see this phenomenon, you know the difference between a lover’s touch, an impersonal business handshake and an angry slap on the hand.
When 2 people argue with a strong intent to hurt each other with cruelty and rage, the energy exchange can take the forms of arrows, swords, or knives. Once again, even though you may not see this clairvoyantly, you still suffer the painful consequences of such a hurtful exchange. Most of us can relate to being in an argument where we have limped away feeling so wounded, like we have just been shot at, attacked or stabbed. On an energetic level, we have!
Let me share with you a typical story of how we carry our unhealed emotional wounds with us.
One of my clients walked in with an energetic knife embedded in her energetic heart from the back. (Our energy body has an energetic heart which is an exact replica of the physical heart). From my experience, many people who have been betrayed, carry this knife in the back. My client emphatically denied any knowledge of betrayal.
When there is a knife in the physical body, blood is lost. When there is an energetic knife in the energetic body, energy or what in Chinese is called qi, is lost. The energetic heart feeds energy to the physical heart. So, if there is an energetic leak, the physical heart does not get nourished. Over years, this would eventually lead to disease in the physical heart. So there is truth to people dying of a broken heart.
As I worked on removing the knife with energy healing, my client started feeling pain. Memories slowly re-surfaced. The betrayal occurred over 30 years ago and when it happened, it nearly killed her because it was so painful.
This story illustrates several interesting points about emotional wounding.
- Emotional wounding is as real as physical wounding. Physical wounding damages our physical body. Emotional wounding damages our energetic body. Since the energetic body feeds the physical body, any damage on the energetic body would affect the physical body over time. That is why it is so important to heal emotional wounds.
- Most of us deal with emotional pain by trying to push it away. We freeze our feelings, minimize them or deny emotional pain totally. We believe erroneously that if we do not feel the emotional pain, it would heal with time. This is where physical wounds differ from emotional wounds. Emotional wounds do not heal with time. The emotional pain lessens because we bury the wound. However, just because we pretend that the wound is not there, does not mean that the emotional wound disappears over time. My client has carried hers for over 30 years. This is not at all unusual. In my healing work with people, we have uncovered emotional wounds that have originated from past-lives!
So, how do we heal emotional wounding?
First of all, it is important to acknowledge the impact of the incident on you. It is very easy to rationalize with ‘it does not matter’ or ‘I should not feel this way.’ Have the courage to tell yourself the truth. “This hurts.” “I feel sad.” Or whatever.
Then, find a safe place and allow yourself to have your feelings. This step is very confusing for some because we think feeling our feelings is the same as acting out our feelings. It is not. Acting out our anger is to yell and blame another person. Feeling our anger is to breathe into the anger we feel and allow the anger to move through so that the anger does not stay blocked in our system. In fact, the more we allow ourselves to have our feelings, the less we will dump our feelings on other people around us. The key word here is to breathe. Keep breathing and feeling whatever comes up. You may have to move through different layers of feelings. If you really do this process well, you will notice a shift in yourself. You will feel more energized, a greater clarity, more peace or a sense of a burden being lifted.
Emotional wounds vary in depth and size. Some emotional wounds will heal in 1 session. Some may take more than 1 session to heal. For very serious ones like grief, it may take many, many sessions over a period of years. For very traumatic emotional wounding, you may need to seek professional help like a counselor.
(To Be Continued)
Hwee-Meng Tan is an acupuncturist, a graduate of the Deva Foundation and Barbara Brennan School of Healing. She has spent the last 15 years, working and studying with many thinkers, healers and spiritual teachers around the world. She will be offering private healing sessions from April 18 – May 19, 2004. For a more information, please contact Lapis Lazuli Light (Singapore).