What do you do when your heart tells you one thing and your mind tells you another? More often than not we listen to what we think is the voice of reason. We do what we think is right because we figure it is what's needed or expected.
It is often thought that following the heart is for the young or the retired. For now we need to do what it takes to get by, get ahead or make things work.
Sound familiar? How many decisions do you make based on what you think is needed to uphold the life you are living? You may be doing all the right things according to cultural norms. Maybe you have a job, a house, a car, a spouse, kids, electronic stuff etc. You take vacations, you support the right organizations, you watch the right shows, you talk about current events, you complain about politics. Maybe you are the model citizen.
But do you really feel passionately about all that? You probably had dreams when you were a child. You may even have some now! What do you really want from life? If you didn't have to go to work, what would you do? Maybe there is somewhere that you would like to make a difference or you have something you want to contribute to the world.
When you put aside your dreams to take care of “more important things”, you need to do something about the feelings of passion. Whenever you want to stop yourself from feeling, you actually lock up part of your body. In order to let the mind override your passion, you need to lock the upper part of your neck at the second vertebrae. This tends to create tension in the upper neck as well as the lower mid back.
When you fixate your spine in this way, it makes you feel less pain physically and emotionally. This also allows you to replace feeling with thinking. This can work well for some time. The problem is, the feelings have to go somewhere. Every time the possibility of feeling an emotion comes up, you add a little more tension to suppress it. Over time you have so much tension suppressing so much emotion that the contents are ready to blow up.
Pain and stiffness alert us to the need to feel these emotions but we tend to focus on the pain, and getting rid of it, rather than the feelings that are being suppressed. The fact of the matter is that if we would just feel the emotions, the tension would go away. But we think we know better and we think we feel fine. Except for this pain.
This tension pattern is referred to as Phase 4 in Network Spinal Analysis (NSA). It is exceptionally common these days because there is so much attention put on the things that we think we should do. Very little attention is put on what we would really love to do.
Most of us do not even know what we would really love to do. One way to find out is to make a list of all the things that make you really happy or bring you joy. Next, look at how often you do those things or how much of your life is focused on getting them. Then add more of those things to your life.
Emotions have a lot of power and it takes a lot of energy to suppress them. When this energy is released, it can be directed into the things you really want in your life. We discuss how to harness this energy in the workshops we hold regularly. If you have a tendency to replace feeling with thinking sign up for the workshop and bring a friend. You'll learn how to release tension and direct that energy into your passion.
Copyright Dr. Paul Newton 2009
