the art and the process

22 March 2010

 Handle your emotions in a proper way, so that suits your best, is an art. All of us do handle their emotions their own way. To cry starts suddenly. Laugh also. Both are physical reactions of the body of something funny or a dramatic event we suddenly encounter. There are more examples like that. Yawning is one, blushing or scaring are others. In that way, emotions are to compare with milestones who mark our lives. After years we suddenly encounter emotional events from long ago. According as we grow older, this chain of memories expands more and more.
Especially this kind of happenings evoke my thought, that this looks like a kind of a process. Like making a bonfire is in fact starting a process. Because that bonfire only exists if we have something that will burn. Like wood or paper. And only if we have a lighter or matches and enough oxygen, the process of burning starts. Nothing happens if we have not all these 'preconditions' available and fulfilled. So are we also able to extinguish the fire by foam, water or a blanket etc.
Emotions or feelings lie at the base of what it means to be human. They are like a process in itself. To be fully alive we need to be emotionally expressive and free. This means that we also need to be free for opening up and exploring emotional patterns and releasing frozen emotions. Frozen emotions are emotions from the past, at a time that there was no room to honour them properly. That is: according to your needs at that time. Because 'people hurting people' is a very well known phenomenon.
CCI has developed an effective mechanism for releasing the results: a safe environment, a range of skills and techniques, and a network of like-minded people involved in the same processes. Those techniques can be in the body or cognitive, they can involve thought or action or feeling, speaking or moving or expressing emotion – quite a creative range of modalities in fact, a mix of both rational and emotional intelligences. This business is mostly done in pairs, one person 'working' while the other supports or simply gives attention, each taking a turn and then swapping roles. Respect and confidentiality are of crucial importance.
These skills and practices are taught first of all, and exercised in a CCI training workshop – this ensures that people are able to use them most efficiently to get results. There is a worldwide network of CCI communities where this training is offered

emotional release

Emotional release is a practice that continues into our everyday life. Hurt may have been caused in the past, release may be in the present, and the out working of it may still be in the future. Emotional release commonly generates insight (an 'Aha' experience), and it is useful to actively celebrate this new awareness, and to plan how to integrate it into our lives. This brings ongoing results. The CCI approach to this type of hurt is called co-counselling. However, there are also people within CCI who believe there can be pain within us that arises simply from being human, being cut off from where they came from as spiritual entity. So that pain is not caused by other people. Here the inner need is experienced as spiritual or as a longing for re-connection with 'the beyond'.
The CCI format is wide enough to allow room for working within fields such as these, called co-creating. All kinds of activities can be used within the CCI format to heal hurts of this kind - activities such as meditation (of various schools) or yoga or prayer; music, drawing, dance, and other forms of creativity; rituals or ceremonies, either spontaneous or intentionally designed, or creative mythologizing. Such activities may help transmute spiritual 'pain' or other feelings by making sense of them in a greater context.4

part of the process

Part of the process is that the physical body also manifests a fascinating principle: - it works to maintain the best possible internal environment for its own cells. Firstly it is continuously checking its own well-being within. And if it finds a situation that is not optimal, the body triggers systems to correct and restore the balance. It responds this way to invasion by bacteria or viruses etc, checking, correcting, restoring the balance. The process is a positive contribution to the body's own well-being, to maintain the best possible conditions for its cells and for the organism as a whole.
I believe emotions function in a similar way - checking, correcting, restoring balance. Each situation I enter is checked in an emotional way. This is based on my past experience - is this a safe situation to proceed in, should I be happy or should I perhaps be afraid? My emotional responses can also be part of a correcting action - my anger may defend me in a dangerous situation, my fear may spur me to escape. The balance that is restored is towards calm, to steadier happier emotions. Thus my emotions are also positive contributors to my well-being as a whole.
Here is another example. Perhaps I experienced a trauma early in life that leaves an emotional wound that still affects me in my present life. There will be signs of this in my feelings and behaviours, yet the principle of well-being will already be at work - even in early unrecognised ways - making attempts to repair the emotional imbalance. As I grow in emotional awareness I can begin to co-operate with this reparative drive. By checking my feelings I learn more about myself, my past and my present. This awareness is the beginning of a correcting process as my hurting emotions are respectfully released and healed, restoring a balance within. All this seems to be consistent with the aim of the phenomenon of life itself - to live awarely, to grow, to come into our full potential as human beings.