Weekly Reiki Articles - Om Reiki Centre

The Art of Inner Freedom

We like to feel we are free. Free to do what we please. Free to go where we please. Free to think what we please.

But even if we do have free will, how free are we really?

Because it is not easy to find true freedom.

No, if we think about it, it’s clear that our past conditions our present (and, as a result, our actions in it).

Consider, for example, a time you ate a certain type of food and were sick. Let’s imagine you ate a bowl of bad prawns and vomited everywhere afterwards. How likely do you think you’ll be to eat prawns again?

You might visit the finest restaurant in town, be all but guaranteed that their prawns are the freshest in the country, but the mere mention of prawns will probably make your stomach roil.

Your past experience is stored in your body, and the idea of prawns physically repulses you.

Of course, this kind of experience can happen on an emotional level, too. Perhaps you once sang to friends, they laughed at your voice, and you felt humiliated.

How likely do you think it will be that you will want to sing to people again?

Chances are high that the mere thought of singing to others will make you tense up.

And things can get more subtle still. Perhaps you have a colleague at work who often interrupts you when you’re trying to concentrate on your work. After he has interrupted you a number of times, all that is needed is for him to appear down the far end of the corridor for your stomach to tighten.

Maybe this time, he is heading towards you with a gift of coffee and donuts, but the moment you spot him, you reflexively tense up and want to shoo him away.

Or perhaps things are subtler still. Maybe when you were a child, your mum drew her eyebrows together when she was angry with you. Now, as an adult, when your partner makes the same expression (possibly simply because he is trying to puzzle something out), you get mad at him or her.

You say you can’t stand it when she looks at you that way. You say that it is aggressive. She can’t understand what you are going on about, but you somehow rationalize your irritation and ‘know’ that it is justified.

The thing to understand here is that the past ‘trauma’ (or negative emotion) of your mum looking at you has gotten stored in your body, and when the right stimulus arrives, you get triggered.

Interestingly, certain parts of your body specialize in storing certain emotions. For instance, anger is often stored in the liver and spleen.

Our language forefathers understood this and created expressions to highlight it (‘I was livid’, ‘He vented his spleen’, etc.).

So in many ways, your body is like a data bank – one that stores unprocessed emotions.

The Consequences of Accumulation

If it were simply a question of one case of bad prawns or one angry way your mother looked at you as a child, things wouldn’t be too bad. But all of these separate issues accumulate until you have thousands upon thousands of negative emotions stored in your body.

Your dad used to get angry when watching the football, and now you have a fear of football.

You had a bad experience as a child on school camp, and now you hate going out into the forest.

Your ex used to leave teabags in the sink, and now, anytime anyone does that, it pushes your buttons.

One thing after the next gets stored in your body until it is a bulging trash can of unprocessed emotions.

What’s more, the stress of the same often-repeated action can accumulate until it transforms into a raging snowball of emotions.

The irritation of each teabag your partner leaves in the sink piles up until the next time you spot a teabag clogging the drain, you’re just about ready to throttle him.

Because now it isn’t simply the irritation of a single teabag that pushes your buttons. It’s the accumulated irritation of hundreds!

This accumulation of grievances is often what turns previously loving relationships nasty. Unprocessed irritations get stored away in the body until your partner does something, and then they all seem to light up at the same time. When that happens, your love flips to anger, and everything about your partner disgusts you!

Over the course of our life, we store away thousands and thousands of unprocessed emotions (of all kinds) until we become something like a negative emotions garbage dump.

This, I believe, is why the older people get, the more rigid they tend to become. They think the same thoughts day after day. They repeat the same actions. They stick to the same patterns. They respond in the same way to the same event. They become creatures of habit who don’t like anything to rock their routine. And all of this because it takes a lot of energy to keep all of these unprocessed emotions contained, a lot of energy to avoid stored stress getting activated.

This leaves next to no energy to think, experience, and do new things.

The Way to Freedom

If all this sounds gloomy, there is a way out. There is a way to avoid letting the past condition your present and future, a way to reclaim your freedom. But you need to do the work to achieve it. Because if the unprocessed emotions that are stuck in your (energy) body keep you repeating the same thing, if they shape the way you respond and act throughout your day, then you can’t really consider yourself free.

Yes, on one level, you may have free will, but on a practical level, you are unlikely to use it. Rather, you will behave predictably according to past programming since the unprocessed emotions in your body will compel you to act and think in a certain way.

To find freedom, you need to work on a deep level. You need to get beyond the rational mind. Because as much as the rational mind can help in certain situations, it often doesn’t stop us from behaving irrationally!

Take the instance of vomiting up the bad prawns.

The next time you go to a flash restaurant and see prawns on the menu, you may know that the chance of them being bad is infinitesimal, but that doesn’t stop your stomach churning at the prospect of eating them. No, as we said, if you are like most people, you are not going to order the prawns, no matter how much you loved them before they made you sick.

What we need to do, therefore, is work on a level below the mind. We need to work on the body, or to be more precise, our energy body/field. Because it is there that our past programming is stored.

Eliminate the programming there, clear it from our body, and we will eliminate the issue on its deepest level.

To clear away even just a good percentage of the gunk we have accumulated in our energy field (body) over the years will take time, and it may be challenging, but it is doable, and the rewards are great.

So if you are telling yourself that you don’t want to revisit old hurts, even on a sub-rational, energy-field level, then remember my saying:

“You can kick a smelly sock under the bed, but it will still stink out the room.”

In other words, it does no good to bury our head in the sand, for the gunk in our system will still poison us.

So better to be proactive and do what you can to dissolve it. Most likely, we can never dissolve all of the unprocessed emotions in our system, but each one we do dissolve will leave us feeling lighter, happier and freer.

Once it is out of our system, it will no longer prod us to do certain things and avoid certain situations. As a result, in practical terms, we will reclaim more of our free will.

I’ve been doing this kind of work for years, and while I’m still no saint (sad to say!), I don’t carry around emotional gunk from past relationships.

What’s more, over the last two and a half decades of doing this sort of work, I’ve also learned and developed some great techniques for clearing our energy field of unprocessed emotions.

For years, I taught some of these techniques in my CBM course (in the B or Body part of it), but I could only ever spend about 2/3 of a day on them.

So a few years ago, I rejigged my CBM course into two 2-day parts, the first part devoted to clearing the past and lighting up the energy body (Redesigning Your Energy Body), and the second part (Mastering Your Chakras and Your Mind) focused on connecting to our body’s energy centres and integrating meditation energy into everything we do.

This new structure gives me far more time to not only teach a richer assortment of techniques but also to explore them more fully in class.

Naturally, you’re still going to need a lot more time than a pair of 2-day courses to complete a major overhaul of your energy body, but these courses will be a great start, and they will give you the tools to continue the work.

So if you haven’t already started doing this sort of healing, or if you have but would like more proven techniques, then come along to my Oct. 26-27 ‘Redesigning Your Energy Body Meditation Course’, and my Nov. 9-10 ‘Mastering Your Chakras and Mind’ course. I’m sure you’ll love them.

Whether you come or not, however, if you want to be free, you’ll need to do the inner work. You’ll need to clear the gunk out of the system that compels you to act and think in certain ways.

Do that, and you’ll feel a lightness in your body – a buoyancy and sense of inner wellbeing.

You’ll feel more emotionally balanced. You’ll feel calmer. And you’ll be better able to deal with the stresses of everyday life.

Article by Jeremy O'Carroll