I am sitting in a café in Istanbul, Turkey. I have had the privilege of being here for a few weeks as I rebuild and rebrand my private practice and work on my body. I love my body and being in my body — which has been the positive outcome of my healing journey in the past decade.
As I move forward, however, it has been a very confusing time but a time of deep healing work. When you are on a healing journey, there is A LOT that people do not share with you. And that’s because they can’t. There is nothing that I, your therapist, or anyone else can say that will prepare you for what you will see.
My pain and struggles were turned into a business and then a book. And then another book and I am still channeling those emotions into perhaps another book. I’ve learned on my journey that I’ve needed less intellectual pursuits and more creativity to deal with my emotions. For me, that has been through dance and writing. Then it turned into yoga. I have transformed my body and healed a lot of physical pain over the years but the revelation of what truly happened is still amazing to me.
One of the things we learn to do on the spiritual healing journey is to find peace and humble ourselves. We don’t heal alone. Even if you feel alone, you learn to trust that if you are supposed to be healing in this lifetime, there will be opportunities or people that show up. That has always been my case and why I believe so strongly in the concept of relational spirituality — a more relational view that honors the idea of love and nurturing as part of the journey toward enlightenment. But it is not the easier path. It is far easier to isolate ourselves and do the work in isolation. Thanks to COVID, we have all be initiated into this way of working with our emotions and learning to transcend negative energy.
What will be revealed, eventually, is the clarity and understanding of why things happened the way they did. I still sit with client’s who have a broken heart where we keep verbal vomiting what happened. I understand. I have also learned that talking is only the first step in healing. It took me over 13 years to see that the man I thought I was going to marry, was secretly suffering from emotional imbalances secondary to his own awakening and that he harbored A LOT of anger and resentment toward his own mother. I was also shown that due to my ability to channel energy, I’ve been the sweet empath that has been acting this story our over and over again in my own life — causing serious harm to myself, my relationship with my own mother and to my hopes and dreams.
And, I have to sit with these emotions and realize I’ve manifested it all.
My relational trauma has been through the consistent feeling that masculine energy is unsafe. So, like so many women, I’ve overcompensated in my career. I have way too many diplomas (although I do love learning) and not enough healthy relationships. When I went through this breakup (how I healed initially is in my book Toxic Insecurity) and it ended, my anger was turned into a deep seated depression, a resurgence of anxiety and a complete shutting down of my heart chakra. Why? BECAUSE THOSE EMOTIONS BELONGED TO HIM and I took them into my body and thought they were my own.
Or perhaps they were part of who I am. Part of who we all are. They have been my shadow that I was never taught how to dance with.
My anger has been the main source of my struggles for the past decade. Most people do not have the support to feel their emotions let alone understand how to work with anger. As I took significant time off to do this work, I ended up alone in the middle of Argentina just to yell and scream. The first time was about my father’s side of the family (a whole other story). Then I went to rework things with my mother during COVID and the car became a place to scream. But this week, with the power of the new moon and a new opening to start a new chapter, I screamed from the grief of losing a large part of my soul in that relationship. Despite over a decade of work which included work across the mind, body and soul, the emotions that were still stuck in my body that were coming to the surface were raw and primal.
And the words that seeped from deep within my womb were, “You always abandon me. You are selfish. My own soul doesn’t even love me.”
When I was done with my melt down, I did a yoga practice and, again, realized that these were not my own thoughts. They are the thoughts of the distorted masculine energy that is confused, hurt and does not know how to heal.
Anger is only a waste of time if we cannot get through our temper tantrum and turn inward. We can block toxic people out of our lives but those emotions stay in our body. That energy controls our thoughts and actions. It calls in similarly toxic situations and we get opportunity after opportunity to heal but we don’t see it.
Anger is necessary right now. As the feminine continues to ask to be seen and to be heard, we will get to a place where our sacred rage of not being respected will become collective. It will result in changes in our culture and the way we work with our institutions. Yet, if we keep repressing our emotions by trying to go back to the way things have always been, we will have a major mental health epidemic that will not be solved through traditional talk therapy.
As a society we can choose to continue down the same path or realize that the path of relational spirituality will require us to pause, reflect, build community and let the anger flow into our creativity and ability to give birth to something new. As I reflect on the lessons I have learned and continue to learn, the biggest mistake I made was allowing the fear of not knowing how to dance (literally) to interfere with my soul’s desire to transform this anger into something far more beautiful. This process has also allowed me to see that this person needed his feminine energy nurtured because his mother failed him in helping him love and appreciate his own feminine energy. Healing of the mother wound truly is the healing and transformation of deep seated anger that our whole world is being asked to deal with now.
Hopefully, it doesn’t take the world as long as it took me to see and feel this lesson. We have an opportunity to shift and change and learn to respect the feminine energy in every one of our souls and in the true beauty of the world. But in the meantime, I have two love letters to write — one to that ex and one to my mother. For when we don’t clear the energy and remove the triggers that cause fear, the lesson does not end and the wound never heals. Anger is an invitation far too many of us don’t accept and want to get rid of as quickly as possible. But it is like a pesky family member, if you don’t learn to see her wisdom, you’ll suffer far longer than is necessary in this life time every time you sit down at the dinner table.
For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world. We need a critical number of women in positions of power, and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men. — Isabel Allende
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Previously published on Medium
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