The basic principles of Emotional Alchemy are:
Instead of trying to avoid an emotion, which challenges us, we try to work WITH the energy the emotion already brings us!
the rules we use are:
.) love the emotion you have
.) be thankful for the emotion you have
.)forgive yourself for having judged the emotion
.) trust in the inert ENERGY this emotion has
.)harvest the energy as something vital
The most powerful tool for harvesting the emotion is an exercise called the chipump, derived from the TAO-QuiGong system!
4.) MEET JUDGEMENT AND THE STORY OF HEAVEN AND HELL
Once upon a time in old Japan there lived an experienced Samurai! He was one of the deadliest warriors of his time and numerous enemies had met their deaths through his sword! As he grew older,
he knew his next battle could be his last, though his skill was still unmastered, his body started showing his first signs of age. He knew it would be just a matter of time, before he would meet
his maker...
That is when he started having nightmares! In his dreams all his victims haunted him with the feeling if shame, guilt and despair... One day he was in small fight with bandits near a
mountainlake. Legend had it, that a very wise shaman lady lived on top of the mountain, and in the forrest below, just when he beheaded the last two standing thieves with one single swing of his
bloodthirsty katana, it happened again, but this time in broad daylight, with himbeing wide awake: all his victims started crawling out of the trees and the earth of the forrest, accusing him for
taking their lives too early and leaving their families without protection. He knew he was hallucinating dew to his many days of hardly any sleep, but the faces and bodys of the victims felt so
real, so terribly real, that he screamed in fear and agony and started running uphill! He ran through forrests, jumped over mountainstreams and climbed like a hunted animal all the way to the
mountain top losing all his armour except his sword on the way... scratched and wounded he reached the hut of the shaman in panic and desperation!
The shaman lady took him in, put bandages with herbs on his wounds, and let him rest on a bed of wollen bearskins!
When a awoke he thanked the beautiful old woman in bearskin as she gave him medicine in a cup of bitter tea!
“Are you the shaman, of whom everybody speaks of her knowledge of all worlds in the here and there? “
“ I am just a woman who lives on a mountain, and likes to speak to the trees”
“ Tell me wise mother! Is there a heaven or a hell, after we die?”
“Why do you wish to know that?” she replied
“I am a warrior, who took many lives, so many I cannot count them anymore, and now they come to me in my dreams, and I am afraid, so afraid, that I will have to pay for my sins, that is why I
need to know. Is there a hell or heaven, or nothing after we die??”
“You should have thought of that before you fed those poor souls to your sword, and now come crawling to me like a beggar without honour, hoping for absolution.. what kind of a warrior are you
anyway? Did they not teach you courage and virtue in samurai-school?” here voice was stern and her eyes cold.
But the eyes of the samurai became even colder as he drew his sword in anger and hatred
“Watch your tongue old hag, how dare you call me honourless?? Do you know who I am, and how many lives I have already taken in my career?”
“ And now you want to add the life of an old woman to your pile? How much bravery is in that? Tell me, how much?? This does not seem to me as an act of bravery this is the mere work of a
selfabsorbed coward!”
The samurai eyes were filled with rage, he lifted the katana with both hands ready to strike her down, as she held her left hand high, changing her expression to kindness again and saying:”This
is HELL!”
Suddenly he realized, what he was doing, his eyes filled with tears, his hands started trembling.. he sank to his knees holding on to the shamans feet and sobbing
“ Forgive me please forgive me !”
She held his head in her lap, like a mother comforting her baby boy running her finger through his hair and gently whispered in his ear: “And this is HEAVEN!”
This story, which is so good, I just had to steel it from a movie sums it up mighty fine!
It is not our FEELINGS that torment us, it is the JUDGEMENT and the MINDSET we have in connection to those feelings!
Even the worst feelings like hate, shame & guilt, are just energies floating through your body until you start labeling them as something bad and unworthy to have and feel... and that is when
all HELL breaks lose for YOU!!
An interesting experiment measured the electromagnetic energy running through a human body in different circumstances:
Under many different results two stuck out, with almost the exact same amount of energy in brain and bodycells: one was of a massive full body-orgasm and one a soft electrocution (teaser) ....
the first one was labeled as “absolutely awesome” the other as “ouch that hurt”, although the energy in the body caused pretty much the same things to happen: letting the body shake, sweating,
heavy breathing, sighing, moaning, screaming and causing a short black out!
What has to be CLEAR to us, that the label and the judgment we have concerning certain feelings and emotions is a CULTURAL and a CONVENTIONAL one, like the big topic of HONOUR the samurai has in
the story above... This can also very clearly be observed with TABOOS in societies, like the following story from Albert Schweitzer, a doctor who volunteered for medicinal programs in Africa,
shows with brutal clarity: He once had a patient with a taboo (tabu- forbidden, unholy) for bananas, who came into the clinic, with high fever and under nutrishioned, his body rejecting any kind
of food, except mashed bananas... the patient did not know what he was being fed and responded well to the mashed banana diet until he almost recovered completely... this is when he found out
what he had been eating in the last three weeks, his religious feelings of SHAME and GUILT kicked in towards what he believed was unholy, forbidden fruit, that was now in his body, that he DIED
the next night in a FEVER dream!
The Bananas did not kill him, what killed him was his CULTURAL and CONVENTIONAL mindset of having done something wrong by eating the forbidden fruit, and the connection to a religious feeling of
guilt...
The feeling of being nourished was good until he knew what nourished him and had to DECIDE to label this feeling as something bad, and all the feelings he had during his recovery, which turned
everything from “yea I m alive” to “ I am not worthy of being alive”!
4.1 MEET THE “COMMOTIONS”
Our JUDGEMENT and our MINDSET in connection to a specific Emotional Element ( from sensation to emotion) actually has the power to CREATE and to DESTROY, and in smaller dosage has literally the
power to make life HEAVEN or HELL for us!
What is important to know here, that there are TWO forms of mindsets towards Feelings and Emotions: one is the primal instinct emotions, and the mindset towards them; and Two is ... the 2ndary
emotions, that come up, by dealing with the first ones... the so called “COMMOTIONS”: This is not an official term, this is what I came up, writing this book: A “commotion” I call an emotion,
that comes WITH another emotion and is usually linked to the JUDGEMENT and MINDSET we have to the first (usually a very primal emotions linked to our instincts), these “commotions” were created
during our evolution and adoption of new religions and cultures and conventions.. depending on the culture they can be labeled from an interesting point of view to a life-threatening wave of
guilt!
But KNOWING that these thoughts and feelings were CREATED by mankind along their evolution can help the intention to UNCREATE theme! This will be easier in a culture that has an ancestral memory
of several cultural revolutions, like Europe had from paganism, to monotheism, to the doctrine of science and technology and a sexual revolution in the 60ies...
but also an ethnic group with strong conventional mindsets and hardly any cultural revolutions in their history can be at least put into awareness, that their religion from NOW also has evolved
with time and used to be something different THEN... the more knowledge of the spiritual culture one has the easier!
The key point is: Any mindset conventional, cultural or personal that is inflicted on an emotional incident AFTER it happened, can reprogram not only your future events of similar emotional
content but, which is far WORSE also your past... so EVERY similiar emotion you felt in the past gets labeled and in the worst case summons up autoagressive energy until the very present up to a
point when your life can be in DANGER like the story of our african tribe friend showed!
That is why the advice: „CHECK WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT HOW YOU FEEL!“ cannot be taken into account often enough!!
This can be your first aid remedy, you quick healing process, your emotional emegency kit!
Going back to conventional:
The problem with conventional mindset, even in very profane culture like the first world; is that it works within us no matter wether we AGREE with culture or not, it is something that is in our
collective subconscious, in our mentality and this does not go away just through THOUGHT & awareness, but through something as thorough as the emotional experience that programed the mindset
in the first place... the therapies, which I found of being the most efficient in dissolving these programs, envolved:
4.2. techniques
.) full BODY ACCEPTANCE of the emotion
.)full body MOVEMENT....a combination of emotional reprogramming of physical exercises,
.) full body BREATHING
.) and ofcourse TIME, not only in regard of the full period of therapy but also within each session:
You do the exercises as LONG AS IT TAKES for the EMOTION to turn into nourishing ENERGY for you and not until you feel the first signs of fatigue, or even exhaustion... usually these are the
physical guards trying to hold on to the old mindset and program of the feeling... they appear 7-9 times fasteter than the REAL EXHAUSTION, which is why this work especially if it focuses on long
breaths with small spine waves, can almost NEVER be OVERDONE!!
And dear modern, first world people, who think they have overcome any form of taboo and conventional guilt through education and academic knowledge: you have not! The clerical oppression of
sexuality, intuition and the feminine over the last 1500 years in Europe and great parts of the colonial world has left its marks in our gene-memory! ( and let me stress, that I am not blaming
HISTORY for our emotional problems, everything that happened, happened for a reason, now we have the possibility to change that , at least in our emotional world!)
However, even if society and churches have evolved now, and are not ALL as punishing, and blaming as they were a few hundred years ago (oh some still are mighty fine, but looking at the broader
picture of the “reformed” churches, after the period of “scientific-inlumination”); our cells still carry the memory of being burned to the stake, because we in our ancestral memory once dared to
allow certain feelings, usually the sexual ones, to overflow our body and being, and thus had to be punished THEN!
.... remember the story in chapter one... in which you imagined a situation where your intimate bodyparts where exposed to inspection while you were in vulnerable state of mind? That did not
leave you comfortable right?? I thought so!
Very important to know: the EMOTION-JUDGEMENT or FEELING-THOUGHT relationship works in BOTH WAYS: A feeling/emotion causes us to connect a mindset to it,... but this very mindset also can EVOKE
the feeling: remember whenever you THINK about something emotional you suddenly FEEL differently?
Knowing this again can help us RELABEL our old mindsets and points of views... since it is just a thought, why should’nt it be replaced by another thought, that seems to be more helpful, vital
and constructive....?? Not always easy, or even possible,.. sometimes you have to go the other way, like we do and give the emotion a new quality before you can adapt a new thought to it, … but
anything that is thinkable is also doable, one way or another….
This is also why good Theatre, Film and Music work so well... They trigger memories of emotions in us! Ideally they also give us the opportunity to heal them, by enjoying them! (And this is ten
times stronger when you are an ACTOR than just a member of the AUDIENCE!)