04 Aug Flow and Those Dammed Emotions
Flow and those dammed emotions: here is a beaver lodge–a dam. Image by Dick Bauch, found on Wikimedia Commons.
Flow and Those Dammed Emotions
Oh yes, I am such a punster. If you read our last post on (un)blocking flow, you know I promised to talk with you about the dams we build that block our flow. Because my key insight in that post was
We don’t get to choose what kind of flow comes into our lives.
Abundance Is a Kind of Flow
Abundance = flow. (That’s what abundance means, etymologically–a wave, an inundation.) Flow includes stuff we want and love and like and stuff we hate and loathe and avoid.
How Are You Damming Your Flow?
What have you put in the way of your abundance? Let me guess: the same stuff I’ve put in mine, our dammed emotions. Emotions are what we shut down so we don’t have to feel all the places we have been hurt. Then: our bodies get tight. Our hearts get smaller. Our minds become land-mines–“land-minds.”
And we just get used to working around it so we aren’t reminded of the pain and sadness and grief and fear and hatred and loathing. But working around it is not simple; it’s not like we’ve piled up everything up in one neat, one easily avoidable spot. Noooo. We have this pile close in and that pile there and a biggish one in the corner. We are constantly having to move over and around and across all this stuff we’re holding on to to protect ourselves from…
Flow. In order to reach us, flow also has to move over and around and across. It has to break through our dams. Flow can be terrifying and scary and upsetting. The flow into our lives is immense. It’s not that we lack abundance. It’s that we are terrified of it.
Receive More
We have this choice: receive more or shut down. We have to get braver if we want more. This is how I know to receive abundance: risk, pain, openness, loving detachment, awareness. Oh yes, and telling the truth.
I want to say: there is no other way to abundance. I want to say this simply because I do not experience any other way.
Let me have your thoughts. Maybe there is something I am just plain missing here.
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Posted at 07:46h, 27 August[…] more realizations about flow and abundance, click here for a post about emotional blocks, or here for a category given entirely to […]
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Posted at 23:51h, 14 August[…] “Abundance = flow. (That’s what abundance means–a wave coming down.) Flow includes stuff we want and love and like and stuff we hate and loathe and avoid.” (from my blog post “Flow and Those Dammed Emotions”) […]
Marissa
Posted at 21:17h, 25 JanuaryYeeeeeeeeessssssssss. I very recently decided to commit full on to forgiveness, letting go, and compassion (mainly for self, also for others), and I finally am learning through some bodywork what those things are and what they mean. Forgiveness is in the bones, it’s in the body, it’s letting rattle free all the old traumas and letting them go, and compassion for how painful they were. When they are rattled free and released, and their knowledge integrated, then the energy is free to flow! It is the abundance that was terrifying… and it was terrifying because it would burst through and explode the land mines.
Beth
Posted at 22:41h, 25 JanuaryMarissa, you are a genius, including with words. I am awed. Thank you!
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Posted at 15:12h, 13 April[…] The point of that post was to ask you to notice if you were damming up your flow. (We even wrote a whole punning follow-up post about “dammed emotions” that may block […]
Joe Campanella
Posted at 20:02h, 05 AugustBeth I think you are on to something important when you say that our unwillingness to feel grief and pain blocks our abundance. My experience is that the heart center is the place in my body where I receive the most potent and what seems like the most direct energy from the larger reality. When I am in the Flow my heart is the place where the energy comes through me into the world. It is effort less. Yes, grief and pain and sadness seem to clog up that place, and perhaps anger is the boundary sentinel for all this. Unraveling these sequestered feelings often comes in this sequence: anger protecting fear, protecting grief, protecting shame. As usual these disowned experiences are behind a kind of energetic wall that keeps them mostly unavailable to my conscious mind. But like all disowned part these experiences also want to be brought to conscious awareness and so they pulse out into the circumstances of my life as projections on to others and events. Its these projections that cause me to be triggered. Its these triggers that are the key to finding, reframing and reclaiming the disowned parts. And with each one that comes back to present moment awareness I receive some gift, some qualitative gift of myself. This unwillingness to grieve my losses keeps me stuck and unable to heal, and just as importantly, unable to affirm that which I love and cherish. This affirming what I love and cherish is an act of gratitude and for me gratitude is the internal posture that opens the door to abundance. Grief allows me to release that which is passing so that I can love that which is arising. Being present to both this death and birth allows me to witness the underlying reality, the One Life that is in all these forms. They say the Healer, through the fullness of heart, can hold all experience as the One Life arising and dissolving. From this point of view grief is a denial of the underlying truth that form is always changing and that we are the underlying One Life. I practice gratitude each day and in my morning journal write this affirmation, ” I am the One Life, infinite and eternal, flowing into space/time as me, and this!” Whoohoo!
Beth
Posted at 17:59h, 06 AugustI love when readers get what I am saying and can bring additional meaning to it! Thank you, Joe.