How I'm Liberating My Heart From Emotional Barriers
Empower the Empath Newsletter ~ Volume 1, Issue 1 ~ August 10, 2024
I’ve been reading a lot of Henri Nouwen for the past couple of years. In his audio lecture On Suffering and Joy, Nouwen said that we often try to distance ourselves from extreme emotions.
This is an attempt to protect ourselves from pain and suffering. But there is a price to pay.
If we do not “mourn our losses,” as Nouwen says, then we deny them.
On a surface level, we pretend that nothing is wrong. That the words and behavior of other people do not affect us.
Yet, when these painful emotions are repressed, they do not disappear into the ether or dissolve into nothing.
We may say nothing is there. We may say that we feel nothing.
But it is emotional energy.
The Law of Conservation of Energy says that energy is neither created nor destroyed.
Pain, suffering, and bitterness left unmourned still dwell in the heart space.
Popular songs like Harden My Heart by Quarterflash (1982) or more recently Turn My Heart to Stone by MØ (2019) discuss this.
The first song - "harden my heart... swallow my tears... turn and leave you here"
The second song - "I wish I could turn my heart to stone / I would be better off alone... Wish I could let you go"
There is of course a problem with hardening our hearts or turning them to stone.
It is not sustainable.
When we harden our hearts, it is like we are building metal prison bars and walls around them.
These are meant to keep the heart safe.
The more pain we repress, the more bars and walls we construct around our hearts.
Unfortunately, while these walls may protect us, they also trap us in a prison of our own making.
The more walls we build, the less love can enter the heart.
Instead of feeling nurtured and nourished, we feel increasingly cold, distant, and isolated.
This is described beautifully in Michael A. Singer's book, The Untethered Soul.
In Chapter 12, Singer describes an allegory in which a person builds a house for himself. The more he stays in it, the more he feels safe and protected from the outside world. He no longer wants to go outside.
Ultimately, however, Singer advises that only by breaking down these self-constructed walls, are we able to experience freedom and enlightenment.
In one of the darker parts of the narrative, he describes the experience of the person in the house:
"It became pretty lonely in there. You were cut off from everything, and the only comfort you felt was the sense of protection your house afforded you.
You were no longer aware of exactly what you were so afraid of; you were just aware of always being scared and uncomfortable.
It was all you could do just to try to hold yourself together."
So many of us live in this way.
Trapped by vague, yet paralyzing fears of an uncertain future.
Mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) are the two strategies that have helped me the most in the past couple of years.
In mindfulness, we learn to sit with our pain rather than trying to deny it, hide from it, or repress it.
We sit with it. We shine the light of our attention on it. We ensure it feels seen.
In CBT, I learned to see how my own thinking patterns such as catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, and overgeneralizing were causing me intense, but ultimately unnecessary pain.
I want to close with one of my favorite mindfulness exercises: Leaves on a Stream. I found it on YouTube, a video resource from CHOC Children’s Hospital.
In this exercise, we place our thoughts and feelings on leaves that drift away on a stream. This helps us to see that we are not our thoughts.
Even if a thought appears again, we can put it on another leaf and let it go downstream.
In this way, we detach from turbulent emotions without denying them. The result is greater inner peace and clarity.
Thank you for reading! This article builds and expands on the ideas presented in my April 2024 Medium post, Unmourned Bitterness.