21 Understanding
the Inner World: Your
Internal Messaging System
We have a direct route to the authentic Self and to the healing it provides right here inside of us all the time. But it is the route we most avoid. A few centuries back we entered into what has come to be called the Age of Reason. At that time, our thoughts were considered to be the way out of the quagmire of irrational emotions. A sensible person was a person who used reason to manage his life. Emotions and other internal messages were considered to be dangerous and simultaneously frivolous—a quite irrational judgment, but one that stuck.
Emotional people, or people who are in touch with internal messages, such as intuition, came to be thought of as unstable. This was because emotions and other internal stimuli could not be trusted or relied upon at the time. They are here one minute and gone the next. They make us do things we later regret. They drive us insane or to a proximity of insanity. They make us worry, ruminate, and do all kinds of other things with our thoughts that are not at all rational. No. We need to turn off emotions and other internal stimuli in favor of thought. Thought is always rational. But, of course, this is not true.
What we have done in the name of reason is repress. We have repressed emotions, intuition, discernment, and other internal stimuli, as well as awareness of actions, words, thoughts, and anything else we consider to be unacceptable. We have, in fact, repressed awareness of our own inner world. And of course, anytime we repress awareness of our own inner world, our thoughts are not going to be very reasonable—or rational—because they cannot now come from wholeness but from only one segment of who we are. Thought that exists without a direct connection to emotion, intuition, or other internal messages, or which exists relative to a bunch of connections to repressed material, is not going to be reasonable. Indeed, repression makes us more unstable—not less.
But most of us don’t want to know what goes on in our inner world, because we have by now incorporated an archetypal memory that what we will find in there is not reasonable, and so it should not be allowed out into the light of day. Further, we don’t want to know what goes on in there because we suspect that we will find badness and all kinds of pain, betrayal, secret darkness, and angst that we just don’t want to have to wade through.
Because we don’t want to have to look at these things, there is also a large contingent of spiritual leadership, which is followed widely, that teaches that our so-called “negative” thoughts and emotions are dangerous to our well-being. According to these teachers, our thoughts are always supposed to be positive and our emotions are always supposed to be set on bliss, and when they are not, that is evidence that that bad old ego has stepped up and taken hold of us. Much like the old traditional ideas about the devil, these ideas about the ego set us up in a battle between various aspects of the identity. They do NOT facilitate an awakening to the authentic Self. They simply have people struggling and striving to rid themselves of an essential part of their being, in much the same way that the Age of Reason did.
Very commonly these teachings are meant to facilitate good luck and immense wealth as well as all manner of dreams come true. The bargain here is that IF the person can maintain positive thoughts and feelings at all times, THEN he will attract all of the things, people, relationships, and circumstances that will make his life better. When I have worked with followers of these teachings, I commonly find that they are feeling worthless because they cannot make their “negative” feelings and thoughts go away. Worse, they often feel that since they are unable to make these “negative” feelings and thoughts go away, they will never have the things they so long for in life. This makes these teachings nothing less than a form of spiritual abuse.
These teachings and those that remain from the Age of Reason have a very similar result—self-betrayal. Because we have believed these teachings, our emotional and internal growth is still way behind the curve, even in this age of vast technological improvements. Our emotions, our desires, our intuitions, and our discernment are essential to understanding both the identity we have and the authentic Self. We will not come to understand either, nor will we heal any brokenness until we have come to understand the inner world.
For example, our emotions offer us messages that could, if used wisely, be at least one very powerful aspect of an internal guidance system. Each of our emotions and each level of intensity of those emotions has a message to us, for us, and about us. That’s to us, for us, and about us. Our emotions do not relay messages to other people or for other people or about other people. They are our emotions—and they therefore deliver a message to us, a message that is meant for our ears only. They are about us, though we often want to make them about others. These emotions give us messages meant to guide us.
The first problem with convincing ourselves of this truth is that we believe that emotions are the same as actions. I have worked with several clients who would literally answer the question, “Were you angry?” with “No, I didn’t hit anyone or break anything.” Some of us are so used to being repressed that we do not recognize an emotion until and unless it becomes an action.
But emotions are not actions. They are not words. They are psychic sensations. Like body sensations, they can be painful or soothing—or a wide range of feelings in between those two. Like body sensations they tell us if something is out of balance, or if something is not working right; they can tell us when things are in balance or when things are working right. That is what they are meant to do. They are meant to give us information. They are not meant to force action—though sometimes we decide to act upon the information they give us.
If we are not paying attention to body sensation, if we are telling ourselves something doesn’t hurt when it does, we might be able to put things on hold for a while, but eventually the body will tell its tale. The same will happen with emotions. When I worked in the drug and alcohol field, about ten years of my career, we would often see addicts or alcoholics come into treatment who had been avoiding their feelings of grief for years by drinking or drugging every time the feelings came up. Not only did this make their addiction much worse, but it also meant that when they got sober, that grief was still there waiting to be received and utilized for inner healing—which, of course, meant that they had to now feel it stone-cold sober.
Repressed anger grows bigger until it either explodes in the outer world, or is incorporated into the physical body as illness or into the spiritual body as depression. Repressed fear often goes into the physical body—in the form of a stress-related illness. It can also just hang around on the fringes of consciousness and become a fundamental part of the choices we make, choices which, if they were made without repression, might look very different. Repressed sorrow can also become a physical illness, or it can just take the form of deep despair as depression.
Our emotions were never meant to be repressed. They were meant to give us messages—messages we miss entirely when we repress the messenger. But our emotions don’t usually give us direct messages. Again, they are not meant to force action. For example, if I feel like punching your lights out, that is not a message telling me to punch your lights out. But it might be a message that comes up so loudly that I cannot miss it, which may tell me that my situation, my relationship, my dynamic, or something else is not really matching my authenticity or is not protecting me, or is not treating me as if I were real.
An Introduction to the
Emotional Messaging System
How do we begin to hear the messages the emotions want to give us? We sit with them. That’s my way of saying we let the emotion have our full attention for long enough to get its message. We may have to work with it for a while before we really get the message, but if we do, we will get the message. The emotions want to give us their message. Yet we have been taught for so long, and it is so deeply ingrained in us, that our emotions are irrational and mysterious, and we don’t even know why we have them, that it is hard for us to believe they have a true message for us. Yet they do.
Sitting with an emotion may mean dialoging with it. This means that, either on paper or out loud, you have a real conversation with the emotion. You ask it what it wants, and you write down what it feels to you that it might say back. Or you say it out loud. You respond back to what it has said, and it responds back to you. You keep doing that until you are clear on the message.
Sitting with an emotion may mean meditating with that emotion in mind. I find that when I do this, the emotion comes close to revealing something to me, and then I pull away. And then I get close again, and then pull away. Finally the emotion will say something, and I will feel what it says deep inside. It has revealed its message.
Sitting with an emotion may mean dancing it out, running it out, exercising it out, if you are a particularly physical person. The point of this is not just release, as has been previously taught. Several years ago it was taught that all we needed to do with an emotion was to release it. For example, when handling anger, many would yell, scream, hit pillows or a punching bag, etc. Once the feeling was released, we just forgot about it and moved on. We just blew off some steam. But the anger would always come back again—because it hadn’t yet delivered its message.
That is not what we are talking about here. Here we are talking about movement as a way of listening. While you are moving, you are also listening; maybe you are even putting what it says into your next movement and the next and the next until you are clear on its message. The movement is both metaphorical and real—the movement itself is a communication from the psyche, and that is how it is to be received if it is to be effective.
After you have, for a time, taught your emotions that you are listening, they will begin to present their messages with a great deal more ease and simplicity. You will get the messages faster and without as much work and you will be able to make decisions then as to what you will do in response to that message. All of our emotions have this power to give us their messages, but the ones hardest to listen to are the difficult ones. There is a chapter for each of the difficult emotions and their empowering messages coming up in this section; in the next section you will learn about the internal messages of your personal powers.
An Introduction to Your Personal Powers
Intuition, discernment, and desire operate as a system of personal power as part of the internal messaging system. If they are heard and responded to as guides, they empower us to make effective choices. Whereas our emotions are meant to give us information about the internal world, our personal powers are meant to give us information about the external world and the life we want to create in that world.
Intuition is that quiet sense of knowing in which we simply know that something is off, someone can or cannot be trusted, something is toxic, something just doesn’t feel right—or something feels true, like the truest path—just to name a few of its functions. Most commonly we don’t really pay much attention to intuition, simply because we are not quiet and internally reflective enough to hear its subtle messages. But if we learn to ask for intuition to speak up so that we can hear it, what begins to happen is that we start to quiet down to listen for it (there is an entire chapter on intuition coming up).
Discernment is that ability to observe what is going on around us and bring what we see into the internal domain so we can sort it out and make sense of it from an inner perspective. In just the same way that we commonly do not attend to our intuition, we do not often pay enough attention to our powers of discernment. But if we can learn to settle down into a moment, we can learn to observe all the little and big things that are happening, how we feel about those things, and then bring both the internal and external experience together into a room in the psyche so that we can sort out the fine distinctions and come up with a whole picture that makes perfect sense (there is also chapter on discernment coming up in Part 4).
Desire is that special sacred force within us that comes directly from the Self and can help us define a life that matches the exact size of the soul. However, the good guy has been taught to put desire on the back burner while he cooks it all up for everyone else. It is not uncommon at all for the good guy to have absolutely no clue as to what he desires, since he’s so busy trying to take care of everyone else. And yet desire is meant to fulfill us—to complete the process of making that acorn into a beautiful oak tree. So, we must learn to experiment with desire as a daily practice, which will ultimately become a process. Once it is a process, we will be taking desire as a first lead, the first guidance for the step-by-step living of each day. We haven’t trusted desire,
because we think that it makes us selfish, but what we will learn in later chapters is that both passion and compassion are also forms of desire.
The rest of the chapters in this section and the next will give us some particulars about the healing capacities of specific difficult emotions, as well as illustrate the healing functions of the personal powers.