Tapping for inviting your Spirit to come home…
Recently I had a wonderful email conversation with Patricia, who had taken one of my webinar/teleclasses. She gave me permission to share, and I have edited her emails slightly for readability.
Patricia wrote:
It is so helpful for me to combine your metaphor work with the tapping. What has emerged for me is an awareness of being very small and helpless. That allows my pain and disappointment to form almost an entity, that does the earthly work for me. It seemed so powerful.
I realized I have confused force and power. Force is big and loud, but afraid, while power is subtle and sure. I had locked my Spirit in a closet with piles of boxes in front of it. It never complained, just waited patiently with a little light shining from under the door.
When I allowed my little helpless self to grow up, then I was able to tell the entity that I wanted to let Spirit out. All this time it has told me it was weak and wimpy. I didn’t even know it was there, so I felt really alone and abandoned by the “God” out there. In allowing Spirit to come out, and me to greet her, I could see the difference in her power vs the entity’s force. I could easily see why I felt more protected by going to the force side. There is something mesmerizing about the noise. Almost like I will be bored by power. Hummm….good stuff.
BUT this morning something popped into my head that you said in one of the classes several months ago, that one of the things about wanting approval is that it is unconsciously withheld. It had a zing then, but I didn’t go deeper with it until today.
Gosh, I now see that approval is withheld by almost everything and everyone. What I perceive as kindness is really approval. My whole life has been around approval being withheld from me, and my in turn withholding it.
Yikes. Can you shed some light as to why this is. Is it about control?
How the Horse Whisperer learned to train horses kindly was by observing wild herds. When a young colt was misbehaving, the herd turned their hind ends to the colt, shutting it off from them. So is a similar thing, and in our DNA???
Thanks, Pat
Hello Pat, ( I replied)
To respond to your question, I don’t think that withholding approval is coded in us in a rigid way. It seems fixed only due to long habitual patterns of relating. And even DNA is no longer seen to be rigid, but known now as flexible and changeable.
I believe that our approach to power as humans is continuing to evolve as we become more aware. We are learning more about using power in a collaborative, co-creative way, “power-with,” instead of the “power over” which shows up as intimidation or manipulation.
The “entity of pain and disappointment” that you describe is a kind of energy field, held in place by your feelings and thoughts about past experiences and stories about pain and helplessness. Those stories can create an eddy or vortex of dysfunctional mental and emotional energy, a kind of shape or field where someone can get caught without realizing it.
It can grow in intensity until it functions as a kind of magnetic force that captures you and keeps you cycling in that painful energy field, like a leaf being caught and circling in an eddy at the side of the free flowing river. It feels like you are helpless. But when you step back to gain a bigger picture, you can see that all you really have to do is navigate to the edge of the eddy, and push off to rejoin the flowing stream of creative life energy.
Standing up for ourselves can trigger a feeling of danger and unworthiness. We are taught not to be selfish. Many of our cultures and religions treat wanting something for yourself as close to a sin.
I think the most powerful reinforcer of unworthiness in our culture is the family’s use of approval. Beliefs about needing approval, to feel like you belong, are handed down over the generations. They seriously and unconsciously restrict our ability to think, perceive and act from a place of our own truth.
Children are so often punished for having their own ideas, or for saying what they really see and feel. The culture in the family may be that the family belief system and values must be reinforced and replicated at all costs. A child can even be made to believe at a deep level that he or she will not survive, physically, emotionally, spiritually if they do not buy completely into the parents’ worldview.
This is an eddy, a dysfunctional vortex. We can get caught in it, but this is not the whole picture!
It is very hard to enter into an understanding of our sacred sovereignty when it is not being mirrored to us by the people and culture around us. We need to learn to do this for ourselves.
Feeling shut down in the process of wanting something for yourself comes right out of a place, as you say, of feeling young and helpless, like a child, lacking a sense of personal agency. But of course, telling someone to “just grow up” isn’t the best healing approach in most cases… :^)
So, I encourage people to go ahead and be selfish. I spell it Self-ish…the capital S means that our Soul is our Self, and caring for ourself means caring for our soul. If we don’t care for our soul, no one else will. So, BE SELF-ISH! It is a spiritual practice!
I believe that each of us is asked to come to as much understanding of this as we can in our lifetimes. When we change as individuals, we are helping to change the whole of human consciousness. That is my thought.
Love,
Rue
Reply from Patricia
Hi Rue,
After our last correspondence about power vs force, I was titillated by part of your answer, which read: “The “entity” functions as a kind of vortex of dysfunctional force that captures us, and I believe that the tendency to respond to it in a certain way gets handed down through the generations as an energetic pattern.”
So wonderful to have someone who can hear what I am saying!!! Yes, what you say makes sense, and I love the imagery of the “vortex of dysfunctional energy”, as that is exactly what it feels like.
I let my subconscious go to work, and I began to tap to get more information on the “vortex of dysfunctional energy” and “generations of energetic pattern” in myself, and I had an epiphany.
The dysfunctional energy that has been passed down to me is of Poverty Consciousness. At the foundation of all my thinking and feeling for as long as I can remember is that of poverty consciousness. That’s the heavy, stuck, hopeless, helpless feeling that is at the base of everything for me, so there is no way to work or wish it away by positivity. It’s the struggle that most of us seem to experience. All of the time it is there quietly staking its claim.
In observation, there is a poverty conscious environment among many people on Earth. We all react in our own individual, creative ways to try and pretend it is not there, to banish it from our lives. Some go with great gusto to be stronger than it is, some stay busy, some give up and just wallow in it, etc etc. It feels so powerful, we cannot look it in the face.
BUT (hee hee) the opposite of poverty consciousness is abundance consciousness, so why would we choose the first?
One reason is that we don’t really think we have a choice (which is where your metaphor work is so important) except to learn to manipulate the poverty conscious world.
However, more interesting is that given a choice when it does appear, we don’t totally, honestly want to give up the poverty consciousness. So what is the lure, the payoff that keep us there?
The answer seems to be in the power vs force. As I said in my email to you, “force is big and loud, but afraid, while power is subtle and sure.”
So poverty consciousness is force, and abundance consciousness is power. Fear vs Love*. Fear has boundaries, and Love* has space. We don’t feel safe with space, we only feel safe with constriction. It is familiar. We are afraid of power, so the vortex of dysfunctional energy has us under its spell.
So have I felt overwhelmed a lot in this lifetime? Have I felt I couldn’t stand up for myself? Have I given up on dreams?
You betcha!!! I think that is the growth we are all seeking–to love the spaciousness.
Thanks, Patricia
So, how could we tap for this?
Here is the way that I usually tap.
It is not “classic EFT” (which I do honor). This is just how I personally am most likely to utilize tapping, as a way to allow what I am experiencing and feeling and thinking to stay in the flow of the river instead of getting caught in the negative whirlpool. Tapping this way seems to open a space for new thoughts to come in, instead of pinning myself down in a place of trying to fix what is “wrong” with me.
I might start by contemplating feeling “small and helpless.” I might think of the internal conflict between wanting to choose what is right for me, and feeling like I need to make a choice that supports someone else.
The one is the voice in me that comes from my past, my training in my family, how I had to be to survive, the voice of my “good girl” (or boy).
The other is my true voice.
I pause to notice where and how I experience the conflict in my body.
I consider what are the emotions connected to the conflict?
I ask myself what is the intensity of my body sensations and the emotion, o-10?
What is the story that I am telling myself about feeling small and helpless?
I give the story a title.
Then I might create a metaphor, like Patricia did, of how I feel.
Patricia described a perfect metaphor for how she feels:
“I realized that I have confused force and power. Force is big and loud, but afraid, while power is subtle and sure. I had locked my Spirit in a closet with piles of boxes in front of it. It never complained, just waited patiently with a little light shining from under the door.”
What a poignant, powerful image!
I now take a moment to imagine that I am standing outside this closet where I had locked my Spirit. I would start tapping right there, just tapping through all the points as I talk conversationally to my Spirit.
I want my Spirit to know why I had locked that door, what I was trying to do, with my limited map of the world, just trying to keep it safe. I tell it, as I tap, that I hadn’t realized back then that this would become a terrible limiting problem in the future, but now I really want to invite my Spirit to come out of the closet.
While I am tapping, I imagine and talk to myself about going to the door, unlocking and opening it. If my Spirit seems reluctant to come out (no surprise there, I have been telling it all along how loud and scary it was out here), I would feel into what might help my Spirit to feel safe about coming home to me.
I remind myself that I am grown up now, and I have lot more experience of the world, strength, resources and creativity than I had back then, when I thought I had to accept those other peoples’ definitions of who I was and what was possible for me. I would let my Spirit know that I could take care of it now.
I let this inner monologue run while I tap, just saying the words that come to me as I think about and feel into this. In my experience, if I just start feeling and imagining and talking, my intuitive voice will follow my words. I find myself saying things that my conscious mind may not know, but that feel instantly true. I want these epiphanies, as Patricia called her insights, to settle into me and integrate deeply. I can do this with tapping (or whatever modality feels right).
I imagine how my Spirit might respond. Together we can work out a deal that we both feel good about. This is “power with.”
As Patricia observed, true power is subtle, quiet and sure. It feels good inside.
This is the power of Spirit, come home.
With my love and blessing to you,
Rue
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