Healing Can Have Unexpected Consequences
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Abby Wynne, author of the new Heal Your Inner Wounds.
Many people say that they feel lighter after releasing grief, anger, or other types of emotional pain. But what happens next may not be expected—people can display signs of physical pain, or have unusual bouts of anxiety; I often hear of people who can’t stop crying and don’t know why. So, if it’s healing, then why does it hurt so much?
This weight that we let go of when we heal is the weight of stuck, solid, emotional pain.
In some cases, solidified emotional pain feels like rocks in the stomach, or coils wrapped around internal organs, constricting them so that they cannot do their job properly. It depends on the lesson, the circumstances, and the patterning of the person. The one thing all this solidified energy has in common is that it blocks the flow of life-force energy in the body. And, over time, this inevitably causes illness.
If your body has gotten used to heavy and stuck energy and has been working around it for years, you’ve probably been managing in survival mode. When you decide that enough is enough and you want to heal, you release this energy and it becomes active in your body for a while before it completely clears. Your body finds flow and is able to breathe again, and just like when your hand falls “asleep,” it’s actually the pins and needle feeling of “waking up” that really hurts.
Freeing up stuck emotional energy also impacts your emotional body—that part of you recognizes active emotion that you have not yet processed—hence, the crying, anger, or unexpected snappy responses. The danger comes when our mind observes our unexpected emotional pain and decides, “this is weird; I need to figure out what this is, where it came from, and why it is happening so that I can think my way out of this.”
No. Please. Don’t do that. When you do that, your brain looks at what is going on in your current life situation and creates something that wasn’t there, or goes back to the past and reignites old pain, instead of stepping back completely and allowing the pain to pass through you as you release it.
If you’re on the path of healing, I salute you. It’s hard work. And when you feel these unexpected side effects of healing (which are sometimes called, “a healing crisis”), know that it’s not a crisis but rather part of your natural process. All you need to do is breathe—breathe through the physical pain, the emotional pain, and the mental pain. Because when you tell your brain to step aside, that can hurt, too. Ground yourself, drink a lot of water, and rest. Know that your body will come back into balance once it gets back to equilibrium. This is you, bringing more light to the world. It’s vital that this work is being done at this time, because we need more light. And this is what it actually means when we say, “be the change you want to see in the world.”
Our thanks to Abby for her guest post! For more from Abby Wynne, read her article, “Inner Healing: Our True Soul Purpose.”
