Emotional Alchemy and the Power of Pleasure

A truth nobody wants to hear: doing whatever it takes for us to actually, sustainably, reliably feel good requires us to go and face our deepest, darkest pain.

The good news about that: the more willing we are to go in and feel those feelings, the more spaciousness we have to feel good.

Khalil Gibran said it beautifully — 'the pain really does carve out space for more joy'. If you're willing to be brave enough to feel your feelings, then on the other side of that is space. And maybe even bliss. And maybe even ecstasy.

Because creation energy — A.K.A. pleasure — doesn't arrive by accident. If you want to feel the full capacity of your pleasure, you're going to have to start to feel the full capacity of your pain. Good luck tuning into your ecstasy if you've spent the past many decades numbing your pain. That hit me when I first heard it. I resisted it and then I found coaches who helped me do it now its a practice I do and teach

Feeling Is a Skill

Feeling is a skill. And it's one that very few of us have been taught.

In fact, just the opposite.

From the moment we come out of the womb and we're thrust into this world, we're told: Shh, don't cry. You're okay, you're okay.

When a child is hurt, the parents run over and what's the first thing they say? You're okay. Don't cry. You're okay.

Because the parent doesn't know how to regulate their own emotions — and so they can't handle the child's emotions. And this has been happening for generations. We just pass it down, from generation to generation, because we don't know how to feel our feelings. So it's uncomfortable for us to witness our children feeling theirs.

Here's the question: what if bliss is any feeling fully felt?

Have you ever let yourself cry so hard that it felt good?

That's the alchemy. That's the doorway.

A Thousand Years of Uncried Tears

It has been said by our wisest that thousands of years of uncried tears is what's creating the devastation on this planet.

And I believe it. It's possible that part of what we're facing as a species right now is the byproduct of thousands of years of people who did not feel safe enough — or have the tools — to feel and express their feelings in a healthy way.

Scientist and mathematician Robert Edward Grant says that every unfelt feeling must be felt.

Eventually, we are going to have to feel these feelings. So we may as well have some fun doing it.

This is emotional alchemy. It's going to help you find the ecstasy in the expression of the pain. Because if you feel that sadness all the way — without shame, or guilt, or judgment, or oppression — then you can actually start to find a little bit of bliss inside of that sadness. And then that bliss starts to grow and grow, as the emotion gets expressed and seen and felt.

Our feelings simply want to be felt. And on the other side of that feeling is possibility. On the other side is space. And then we start to fill that space with pleasure. We clear our channels, and we fill them with creation energy.

The Three Planes

I want to share a concept from the Vedas that helps to illustrate this.

We have an opportunity to learn our lessons on the spiritual plane, the emotional plane, or the physical plane. And actually, it's faster, cheaper, and easier to learn our lessons on the spiritual plane.

If we can bring our consciousness down into the more subtle states of awareness, this is where we can access those lessons when they're still subtle — when they're still whispering at us.

And if we don't learn them there, they get a little bit louder. We start to have headaches. We start to act out on our loved ones. We start to have to go to the therapist.

But here's the trick: if we don't learn them on the psychological plane, then they show up on the physical plane — and it gets a lot more expensive and a lot more time-consuming. Because then we have to cut it out of our bodies as cancer. An experience that initiated my own spiritual awakening. 

These lessons get louder and louder until we pay attention.

Sourcing Safety First.

So before we dive headfirst into the deep end, there's something we need to learn first: how to source safety inside of our bodies.

Because if we push ourselves too far, too fast, it can feel retraumatising. And we can create a contraction in our body that sets us back.

So a really beautiful way to prepare is a meditation practice. One of the first embodiment practices we cultivate in Rebirth Your True Essence is creating a vessel of safety — anything that helps you come home to your body, anything that helps you regulate your nervous system.

Because the safer you feel in your own nervous system, the farther you'll allow yourself to go into these practices.

But we don't have to do it unprotected. We don't have to do it alone. And we don't have to do it all at once.

We start with safety. We start with the body. We start with one feeling, fully felt.

And from there — space. And from space — pleasure. And from pleasure — the full, radiant, ecstatic aliveness that was always meant to be ours.

Yesterday I felt and expressed rage that I have been holding for a very long time. I'll share more on this later. For now I am deeply grateful for the safety I have cultivated to allow such a big emotion to move through me, something that I didn't even know I was holding. I am dancing in the reclamation of the repressed power that was sitting underneath that rage and integration the life force energy I have now have access to that was unavailable before. 

With love,
Louise