Empowered Emotion with Rev Rachel

I had the great honor of sharing my emotional healing work with Rev. Dr. Rachel Wetzsteon on her podcast, REV with Rachel: Episode 15.

You can also listen to the podcast, right here:

“Through her fun, light, and intuitive work with her clients, she helps individuals heal emotions, transform, and reveal potential. Her wisdom shines as she shares her personal story and experience.”

— Rev. Dr. Rachel Wetzsteon

“The most important thing is that we can develop is our own self awareness, our own self love, and our own self acceptance. And I really feel that when we can show compassion and love to ourselves it absolutely transforms everything else in our lives.”

— Emma Robinson

Short on time?

Here's a time stamp of what we covered:

What is emotional healing? 2:00 - 4:30
3 points that are exceptional to the practice of emotional healing: 4:30 - 9:14
How emotional healing different than psychotherapy: 9:14 - 11:50
Fear and Trauma: 12:05 - 13:30
My personal journey with emotional healing: 13:45 - 24:30
Feeling supported and emotional healing: 27:00 - 29:00
Who I work with: 30:00 - 32:00
How I work with my clients: 32:00 - 34:45
Changes people see with emotional healing: 34:45 - 36:30
About the emotional body and the power of our emotions: 36:30 - 44:45

For more information on Rev. Dr. Rachel, please visit her online at drrachelw.com

Sacral Chakra: Healing with Creative Source

Our second stop on chakra wellness is the Sacral Chakra, the center for creativity, abundance, sexuality, and the pleasure of life.

*To get an overview on the seven chakras, you can visit my earlier post here: Chakra Crash Course

The Sacral Chakra

The sacral chakra is located a few inches below the belly button. This chakra is associated with the color orange and governs the sexual / reproductive organs (in men, aspects are combined with root chakra), pelvic area, kidneys, and bladder.

As you might have learned in my Chakra Crash Course or Root Chakra post, every chakra connects with a scent, stone, music note, and color. I’ll give a quick overview on each, but the majority of information I’ll be focusing on will be in relationship to the emotional / belief system / archetypal aspects of each chakra.

FAST FACTS:

• Color: Orange
• Essential Oils: Jasmine, orange blossom, ylang ylang
• Music Note: D
• Element: Water

Lessons from the Sacral Chakra

Our sacral chakra helps us to cultivate a zest for life, an attractive energy that is open to receiving the sweetness in life in all forms: relationships, financial abundance, beauty / creativity, emotional uplift, and in the creation of new life. Individuals with a healthy sacral chakra bring forth beauty and abundance in their surroundings through joy, laughter, intuition, and creativity. When this chakra is in balance, we are balanced in our ability to give and receive.

In our Western culture, I have found that this chakra is most frequently out-of-balance.  Take for instance our approach to work as a society: most of us in Western culture are very oriented towards our work (so much so, even our names come with titles distinguishing our work and education). From an energetic/ emotional perspective, we rely heavily on “making things happen,” a thought pattern that pulls from our solar plexus chakra, the seat of our willpower. Often times this leaves our sacral chakra, the seat of creativity and inspiration, or the thought pattern of “art of allowing,” underutilized or completely depleted. I have seen this contribute to anything from exhaustion, to reproductive and intimacy issues.

When we learn to balance and energize our sacral chakra, we access our source of abundance, joy, creativity, beauty, and passion. Instead of “making things happen,” we become an attractive force and allow-manifest our desires.

Patterns of Imbalance

When we experience some of the following, it can indicate sacral chakra needing attention:

• Excessive cramps (women)
• Impotence (men)
• Bladder infections / UTIs
• Low vitality / loss of energy / low  sex drive
• Depression / apathy
• Eating disorders
• Weight gain and loss
• Reproductive issues
• Constipation    

Patterns of imbalance happen on a continuum, sometimes we are simply not taking in enough “fuel” or energy to the center, and other times, we are blocking the flow of energy.  

From and emotional healing / energetic perspective the sacral chakra has much to teach us in either imbalance:

If we have an over-exercised sacral chakra (plenty of energy, but without proper flow to-and-from our root and solar plexus chakras) you may notice in yourself or others:

• Addictions to work, relationships, shopping, sex, drugs / alcohol
• Black widow energy (feminine), the need to be found attractive and destroy admirers
• Don Juan energy (masculine), the need to be admired at expense of true Self
• Over-taking / stealing, co-dependence, and lack of boundaries
• Parasitical relationships
• Self-destructive tendencies
• Jack / Jill of all trades, master of none
• Emotional manipulation

If we are lacking or leaking energy in our sacral chakra you may notice in yourself or others:

• Compromising vision or ethics to highest bidder or by feelings of lack and limitation
• Creative blockages and stagnation
• Starving artist energy
• Wounded child or patterns of abuse and co-dependence
• Lack of joy, passion, or momentum
• Over-giving, martyrdom, co-dependence, and lack of boundaries
• Lack of intimacy and sexual drive
• Chronic complaining, pessimism, depression
• Fear of emotions, inability to recognize or operate on emotional plane

Our sacral chakra is where our emotions live. Those that are imbalanced in the chakra can experience depression and anxiety, often living in fear over their own emotions.  This can lead individuals to shut down or turn off their emotional faculties. Extremism in the other direction, can lead individuals to be emotionally manipulative as a way to gain control in relationships.

When we are in balance with our sacral chakra, we recognize our emotions as our internal GPS system, guiding us to people, places, work, and relationships that serve our greater good.  After all, when we feel good - we do good.

Healing the Sacral Chakra

When working with the sacral chakra in session, we are clearing old belief systems and patterns of control to help move out energetic blockages in this area. Through emotional healing, we are shedding light on aspects of our consciousness (systems of thought) we have about ourselves and others. Through awareness, we are able to energetically release that which no longer serves us.

Those who are healing sexual trauma or patterns of co-dependency are most often re-balancing the sacral chakra in an emotional healing session. Our sacral chakra governs our ability to balance responsibility in relationships, and cultivate win-win, mutually beneficial relationships. The sacral chakra helps us to tap into our creative source, so that we may experience enthusiasm, personal creativity, and passion in our daily lives.

As part of my practice, I typically recommend exercises following a session to help move energy and create new, supportive thought systems and habits in our waking lives. While emotional healing works all on its own, I have found that when we combine active practice with inner work, we make changes easier and with less effort.  Here is an exercise from my toolbox, that can help balance the sacral chakra:

Energizing the sacral chakra: The art of allowing & creative flow

As I mentioned earlier in this post, our culture tends to support willpower (the energy of pushing) and tends to diminish the feminine-creative aspect of allowing (the energy of receiving). For this post, I would like to share a simple practice to open up and energize our sacral chakra.

Have you ever experienced being in a state of joy, and the feeling of flowing through a day? Instead of ticking boxes off a checklist, you seem to have the right conversations, with the right people, at the right time, and things seem to magically and effortlessly come together. That added smile at your local coffee shop, sparks a short, loving conversation with a barista. And the simple affirmation to your child results in a heartfelt hug. These experiences happen because self-love is contagious. When you are in love with your life, other people experience love in your presence.

Do you know what the most important part of any equation in life is?  You. So if you are experiencing lack or limitation in life, relationships, boundaries, romance, money or otherwise, it is often because we have not extended those things to yourself first.

I suggest a process of reverse engineering.  First, pinpoint the area of lack or limitation.  Let’s use a man who has been married a number of years, but feels undervalued and underappreciated by his partner. Here are some of the questions I might ask this person:

Have you ever taken yourself out on date, cooked yourself a nice meal, or spent a day or night romancing your inner God/Goddess?
Meaning, does this person connect with his own sexual / creative energy to bring romance, beauty, and zest into his personal life.

What do you do for yourself that feels creative and inspired?
Meaning, does he exercise his own creativity to feed his spirit, taking personal responsibility for feeling alive, enthusiastic and abundant in his own life.

How do you treat yourself, moment-to-moment, day-to-day?
Meaning, how is he teaching others to treat him?
In essence, how we treat ourselves, teaches others how to treat us in-return

When we heal patterns of imbalance in ourselves, we heal the patterns of imbalance in our relationships.

I typically recommend that we focus on one area that feels the most sticky. For instance, if we get to the question of, “What do you do for yourself that feels creative and inspired?” And the reaction is a laundry list of family responsibilities, lack of time, and even disgust at the suggestion of taking time for oneself as being “selfish,” we know we’ve hit the sticky question.  This can just be an indication that this area of our life requires a bit of attention.  Sometimes resistance is our friend in helping to distinguish where our attention needs to go.

I would then suggest that this client take 3 hours a week to do something creative and inspired.  This will feel completely foreign to most people, maybe even totally irresponsible. These are common reactions to a sacral chakra out-of-balance.  But this is where the magic happens.  For when we take time to feed our inspirations and desires, we enter into a space of enthusiasm and happiness, reigniting our love of life. What most people begin to notice is that when they love life, life begins to flow, things come together, and we open ourselves up to partake and allow in the fruits of life.

The Shadow: Healing in the Dark

Shadow work is some of the most important work we can do as individuals on the path to healing and wholeness.

For those of you who have practiced emotional healing, with myself or another practitioner, have experienced the transformative process of shedding light in dark areas. Some of what we do in emotional healing is shadow work.  

So what is shadow work and why is it important?

Shadow work is the ability to heal aspects of ourselves that we are not consciously aware of.  The reason shadow work is so important is that it brings awareness to belief systems, emotions, experiences, and generational thought patterns that affect our everyday decisions and outcomes. Shadow work can be compared to shining a flashlight into a dark cave: we are shining awareness (light) on information or systems of thought that were previously shrouded in darkness. By doing so, we can more clearly discern if we are holding onto truth or falsehood - or said another way - whether our beliefs serve our greater good or keep us from it.

UNDERSTANDING THE MIND

To understand shadow work it’s important to understand the mind.  Let’s use the classic iceberg analogy for this:

Imagine an iceberg, a great shard of ice sitting above the surface of the water. This represents our conscious mind. It is our active decision-making faculty and comprises less than 10% of our cognitive capacity. This is everything we can actively see - what we are aware of in the present moment.

Now if we were to look beneath the surface of the water, we would see that this iceberg is much bigger below: a mountain of ice, representing roughly 90% of our cognitive capacity. This is our subconscious mind. It holds all of our beliefs, experiences, familial thought patterns, and genetic information below the surface of our awareness.

It’s now we might realize that this iceberg sits in the ocean.  The ocean might be considered the collective unconscious, representing the combined cognitive information of all humanity. Just as an iceberg is influenced by the water in which it is held, the collective unconscious impacts our individual thoughts, feelings and emotions.

The iceberg is both an aspect of the collective, and independent of it.  So we are both influenced by the collective and, likewise, we influence the collective consciousness of humanity.

Using this analogy, we can see that when we are doing shadow work, we are working with the 90% subconscious aspect of ourselves. This is how we can help to heal not only our individual subconscious thoughts, but also the thoughts of our family, ancestry, and larger human family.

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When I say “shadow work” folks often become nervous.

The truth is that shadow work is simply bringing subconscious information to the surface, into our awareness, so that we can address and heal any negative influence it might have on our thoughts and beliefs.

I personally feel that shadow work is a necessary and powerful tool for personal growth of any kind.  It can be accomplished in any way that allows us to access information held beyond our active awareness: through meditation, emotional healing, chakra work, hypnosis, and other modalities that allow us to bypass the conscious and access information below the surface of our awareness.

SHADOW WORK, UNCOVERED

Let’s learn the power of shadow work through something we can all relate to: abundance.

A common theme with my clients is healing our emotions and beliefs around lack and limitation. Imagine someone, who we’ll call Jan, that has a desire to create more income, wealth, or abundance in her life. Let’s say she is active in personal growth and development.  Perhaps she has written down her financial goals and has been saying affirmations around money.  We can say that Jan is doing a really good job making strides to a better financial future. It is important to know that Jan is using her active conscious mind, the 10% of the iceberg above water, to make movement to her goal.

Let’s say Jan has made some progress. She has increased her monthly income, but still feels like she has to exert a lot of willpower to “make it happen.”  Jan decides to look at this through the lens of emotional healing, to see if there are any subconscious beliefs or thought systems that need to be healed around money.

Through emotional healing, Jan might bring forward experiences and decisions that have shaped her perspective around abundance. Perhaps she grew up in the Midwest where there was an underlying currant of “needing to work hard to get what you want” (collective unconscious and subconscious influences).  Let’s also say that Jan’s father grew up in the depression, where unaddressed feelings of lack and limitation were passed down to Jan generationally. This set the stage for Jan to build more evidence to support both of these generational and cultural belief systems.

Let’s also say that at 13 Jan started a babysitting business. Jan was making a healthy stream of income for herself at this age, and she really enjoyed doing it. Perhaps, during the course of an emotional healing session, a memory comes forward about a time when Jan was babysitting that went poorly.  Here is her story: There was a family where the children refused to sleep and Jan could never get the dinner cleaned up, between 3 unruly kids. By the time the parents are home, she is exhausted. Before handing her babysitting wages, the mother says a few harsh words to young Jan. Depleted and forlorn, Jan takes the money feeling awful about the evening. It’s not just the experience, but at that moment, Jan decides that making money never really was meant to feel good.  Maybe her Dad was right - "life is about putting your head down and doing with what little you have."

Jan, now 65, still carries the residual feelings of that young entrepreneurial experience within her. Trivial as it may seem, her subconscious mind has paired the idea of “hard work,” “pain,” and “exhaustion,” with abundance. And though her active mind has set goals and made strides, the subconscious part of Jan holds negative beliefs about herself and her ability to create abundance. Remember, the subconscious is more than 90% of our cognitive power.

By helping Jan to access the subconscious beliefs, we can shed the light of awareness onto them, releasing what no longer serves her.

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In our desire to do good work in the world and experience greater outcomes, let us not look solely to that which we can see.  Instead, let us be able to shine a flashlight into the darkness and bring forward all aspects of ourselves yet to be seen.