The Conflict Within
Restoring the Peace Between Body and MInd
Hundreds of therapies exist to help us with our problems, but my personal and professional experiences have led me to one, very important conclusion: In order for any therapy to be effective, it must do one thing above all else, it must end the discord between the feeling body and the reasoning brain.
The reasoning brain and the feeling body are always interacting with one another, and their relationship, will in many ways determine the quality of our life. With each passing day, the degree to which there is peace in us. Peace between what we think and what we feel, will determine the degree to which we feel calm or stressed. It will determine our mental and physical health. The depth of our relationship to ourselves, others, and the world, will always be determined by the relationship between our thinking self and our feeling self.
“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace within ourselves.”
Dalai Lama
The Mind/Body Conflict Is Real
We all suffer from mind/body conflicts. Our Mind/Body conflicts begin in our formative years when the people whom we are closest to, fail to allow us to process our emotions. The processing of our emotions plays a key role in our mental and physical health because the emotions we feel in our bodies are the only means we have of providing our thinking selves with a true understanding of how we feel. If we donget to feel what happens then we don’t get to understand what happened.
Here is a clear example:
A child is running, he feels joy and excitement, he trips and hits the ground. This child is very young and so still has access to all of his emotions. In the throes of the fall, the excitement turns to fear. Fear is the first emotion he feels as he loses control over his body. After the fear, howling tears of anger and sadness come from the fear and the pain. If this child is attended to, held, hugged, and comforted, his sadness/hurt/pain will have been acknowledged and his emotions will have been validated and he will fully know the truth of what happened and that there is comfort and love in the world to remedy his pain. I am often amazed how physical pain/hurt for the body is not separate from emotional pain. We often separate them and in doing so deny the emotional aspect of pain. If this child is comforted, if his fear and pain are acknowledged he will have processed those emotions and the event, and within minutes his body will become calm. He will have resolved the trauma. The comfort offered will make him feel loved and deserving of care, and the world will be right again. If his emotions are ignored or rejected by the adults that are important to him, his mind will challenge what his body feels. He will deny to himself his body’s organic emotional response, and this will give birth to an inner conflict. The adults that I look to for survival have told me that I feel fine and I should simply continue with my day. But my body hurts and that was frightening and I feel unsettled. Who to believe? My body or them. He will convince himself they are right because after all they are the all powerful parents. But his body, his nervous system and his brain will never fully believe it and the consequences of this will be more situations where he feels bad and thinks he shouldn’t, and that if he does, then there is something wrong with him, which in turn can lead to at best a constant neediness and at worst frustrating feelings that can turn into aggression.
Until our mind/body conflicts are resolved, they will continue to cause problems in our lives. Based on my own healing process, as well as decades of helping others, I can tell you one thing for sure: The way to resolve our mind/body conflicts lies in going back in time and processing our emotions. If we can find the courage to truly feel our past, buried emotions, and equally importantly, imagine the scenario in which the people who caused us to feel fear, anger and hurt could connect to us vis a vis those emotions, we can bring back harmony to our minds and bodies and end the conflicts that show up and cause problems.
Our emotions are not a luxury, they are a vital partner in our mind’s day-to-day efforts to understand our lives. Because connecting to our emotions is how we connect to our truth, it is the only authentic way we have of understanding ourselves, others and the world around us. Neuroscience now tells us that our brains are wired to protect us from feeling uncomfortable emotions, but when the mind decides how we feel, the resulting inner conflict leaves tension in our bodies, and hinders our future decision-making abilities because the information we will base those decisions on, will be faulty. Although pure emotions, such as anger and sadness are not pleasant, the information they supply to our brains keeps us clear. As children, our emotions flowed freely, but with each new event, that hindered our emotional processing, a conflict was formed, an internal conflict that we will continue to suffer from until the emotions are released and all is put right again. By allowing our emotions to flow freely once again, we can end the internal conflicts that arise from being kept separate from our body’s truth and we can overcome our problems and evolve, but by denying our emotions, we stay stuck. As long as we are separate from our truth, we will stay separate from our own true selves, and this will inhibit our ability to be truly close to others. Until our mind/body conflicts are resolved, they will continue to create problems for our bodies, our minds, our communities and our world. Over the years, I have often thought of the biblical quote, “..and you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. Nature intended us to keep feeling and processing our emotions so that we may live and love better. The Conflict Within will teach people how to restore the natural processing of pure emotion, because as we all move closer to our truth, so to, do we move closer to the freedom that comes when our minds and bodies are at peace.
Emotions vs Feelings
There is a difference between a ‘feeling’ and an ‘emotion’, and knowing the difference, is an important component of healing. Emotions are never the result of thinking, they are organic responses, felt in our bodies first, and then processed by our logical minds; a rapidfire sequencing that allows us to both understand and then accept the truth about the situations in which we find ourselves. Beliefs that come from information that is provided by our feeling bodies, by our emotions, will never be felt as a disturbance in the body. As we awaken to our unprocessed emotions, even and especially the uncomfortable ones, we will experience them as a natural and necessary process essential to our well-being. When we begin to realize the consequences for blocking real emotion, and we start to experience the benefits that come from releasing and processing them, we will embark upon a journey into healing that will bring into our lives positive changes that are instantly noticeable in both inside ourselves and in our world. The process of owning our emotional life, is the process by which we own our truth. We can never be well if we are denying our truth, we truly need to feel it, in order to feel better.
This Emotional Life 