This excerpt is from the second chapter of my new book Lighter.
You can preorder a copy of Lighter from different places in the US through this link.
You can preorder a copy of Lighter internationally here.
Emotional History
Healing is needed because everything we feel leaves a mark on the mind, and it all accumulates in our conditioning: our family dynamics, what we learned in school, our relationships with friends and partners, the views society imposes on us throughout our lives, our own relationship with ourselves, and any other experience or bit of information that passes through our being. All this comes together to create the totality of our conditioning. Our conditioning does not sit quietly—it permeates how we perceive ourselves, those we interact with, and the world. Our conditioning does more than impact our perception, it goes even further and molds the way we behave. When we talk about healing, and what we are actually healing from, we mean the heavy conditioning that is overloading the mind and slowing us down from living authentically. Our conditioning is literally the past that we carry with us wherever we go.
The conscious mind is sometimes able to forget, but the subconscious mind accumulates every reaction from the past. These reactions harden over time and develop into specific behavior patterns that arise when the mind is reminded of a past situation. How intensely we feel these reactive patterns is directly related to how many times we have reacted like this in the past. Healing is processing and unloading all the programming from the past that hinders our ability to live freely in the present.
Healing does not erase the past, and the point of healing is not to forget what has happened. Old memories from hard moments may come up even after deep healing has taken place, but what shifts is how we react to them when they arise. If the intensity of the reaction is decreasing, then real progress is being made. This has nothing to do with suppressing the reaction; it is just a measure of what is actually happening in the mind, It is possible to feel your truth without getting consumed by it or letting it control your behavior.
One of the most dominant parts of our conditioning is our personal emotional history, the lingering feelings that have stayed with us that relate specifically to the strong emotions we have felt throughout our lives. Developing an understanding of what we have personally gone through and how these challenges manifest in our emotional and behavioral patterns helps us unlock the rigidity of our reactions. Instead of being trapped in a cycle that repeats the past, we can break the cycle, make different decisions, and feel things other than our most prominent defensive emotions. Our emotional history can sometimes be so dense that it limits our capacity to change our behavior to the point that it keeps us in a state of mere survival. But no emotional baggage from the past is beyond healing.
Finding My Patterns
After hitting my rock bottom and spending a whole year practicing the three aspects of self-love—radical honesty, positive habit building, and self-acceptance—I had seen significant results, but my intuition was calling me to go deeper.
During that same time, one of my best friends from college, Sam, had been spending some time traveling through India. While he was there, a family that he was staying with told him about a silent ten-day meditation course that sparked his curiosity, and he tried it not long afterward. He went in looking for a new experience and unexpectedly found something much greater: He found his path.
After the course, he sent a long email to me and three other close friends. His message was all about love, compassion, and goodwill. I remember feeling shocked, as our friendship up until that point had never covered such topics. In fact, I had never heard him talk like this. I always thought of him as a trusted friend, but our previous conversations never entered into spaces of vulnerability. I could tell he was sharing his truth with us and that those ten days had ignited a serious transformation in him. His note came at a time when I was new to healing, but committed to the journey. While I had only meditated for about twenty minutes once in my life, after hearing about how powerful an experience he had, my intuition told me right away that this was something I needed to try. I signed up for a course that teaches the same technique here in the United States. Whatever he had gotten, I needed some of that, too.
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Beautiful. ❤️
Also: Just got the message from Amazon that my copy of Lighter is on the way. 🙌 Thank you for the inner work you do & for putting it out there in the world.
Love this! ❤️