The Hidden Insidious Effects of Trapped Negative Emotions (3)

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Becoming More Forgiving and Less Judgmental

One of the ways that you can change how you interpret and hence respond to events is nurture a less judgmental and more forgiving attitude. The inability to let go and forgive is one of the primary reasons why people end up with trapped negative emotions. Understanding the reasons why you are less forgiving and non-judgmental than perhaps you could be, and how to change that is therefore an important step on the road to no longer creating trapped emotions. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Reducing Your Egoic Pride

One of the reasons that people find it difficult to let go and forgive is egoic pride. Although there are positive types of pride, egoic pride is an insidious and damaging type of pride that ultimately ends up harming those that wield it even though they are likely completely unaware of this fact. And sadly, it is very common.
Egoic pride expresses as selfishness, jealousy, hatred, resentment, superiority, ill will, or anger toward others. Egoic pride leads those that are in its grip down a dark path to strong negative emotional reactivity, often starting with the feeling of resentment. And of course, this makes them unwilling to forgive others. Instead, they hold on to the real or imagined wrongs they have suffered, and allow themselves to feel angry, frustrated, resentful, etc. And in the worst case it may even drive them to pursue retribution against those they perceive have hurt them.

What they unfortunately don’t realize is how damaging holding onto negative emotions is to themselves – because if they did, they would certainly choose to change their ways.
Becoming aware of the nature and consequences of egoic pride and to what degree we are in its grip can be very helpful in nurturing the ability to be less reactive, more forgiving, and to let go. The problem is that even though it’s very easy to recognize egoic pride in others, it is often very difficult to recognize in ourselves. But of course, with increased self-awareness you should be able to catch it in yourself. A sure sign that your egoic pride might be out of control is if you are easily and quickly offended (and brought to anger, frustration, and resentment) and tend to hold a grudge.

The Liberating Effect of Forgiveness

It is so important to understand how much that letting go of old hurt feelings helps you. You may think that you are justified in holding on to hurt feelings because it punishes those that hurt you. But in truth, holding on to negative emotions hurts only you, not them. Those that you perceive have wronged you may or may not be aware of how you feel and may or may not suffer along with you. But your choice to hold onto the perceived wrong ultimately hurts you far more than anyone else.
The Buddha eloquently echoed this point when he uttered these words of wisdom: “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
They may have done something truly horrible and it may seem impossible to let it go. This is your opportunity to do something truly liberating – you can choose to forgive them unconditionally and free yourself of all of the negativity associated with the situation.

Forgiveness and Unconditional Love

One of the keys to becoming more forgiving is to foster the quality of unconditional love and compassion within ourselves. These qualities will motivate us to look beyond the surface of another’s actions to try to understand why they behaved that way. These qualities will enhance your ability to understand how and why they feel the way they do and why they have behaved the way they did.

When our hearts are full of love and compassion we are much more likely to get beyond our own self-centeredness, and we are much more forgiving, patient, and kind, we are much more interested in the welfare of others and making others happy, and we are much less likely to develop trapped emotions. Our tendency will be to overlook the faults and weaknesses of others, rather than to judge them. Our tendency will be to look deeper into the reasons behind another’s actions and feelings and understand that they are just doing the best they can based on the sum of all their experiences up to this point in their life.

Beyond Forgiveness

We may even realize the deep wisdom that if we were in their shoes, truly in their shoes, we would feel and do the same. And so often the harm we do to each other is unintentional or happens out of ignorance and looking beyond the surface will often make us realize this. These realizations take you to the lofty understanding that everyone is doing the best they can given their life history and experiences up to this point and that it really could not be any other way. Then you begin to see the challenges as simply opportunities for everyone to learn and grow.

The qualities of unconditional love and compassion are worth nurturing within yourself because they will create a life of positivity that will have you floating joyously high above the negativity and drama of most of the everyday world.

Taking Full Responsibility for Your Experiences

A very important realization that is both critical to self-empowerment and greatly facilitates changing how you interpret and respond to life’s challenges is taking full responsibility for everything that comes into your experience. For anyone on the road to self-mastery and mastery of their creatorship a crucial understanding is that blaming others is a hugely disempowering habit. When you blame others you implicitly are saying to yourself and the Universe “something outside of myself, over which I have no control, is the cause of my experiences and my happiness”.

Which of course is not true, because you are creating your reality absolutely without exception with your very own thoughts and beliefs regardless of whether you understand how. And by not embracing this you effectively abdicate your creatorship and you unconsciously create your experience which will likely contain more adversity and undesirable things than you would prefer.
The most productive attitude is “there is nothing being done to me.” By the Law of Resonance, you draw to yourself every experience your soul requires, in order to learn, evolve and grow.

Life isn’t happening to you, it’s happening because of you and for you.
When you accept this completely, you will begin to really see the gift in every situation, however challenging, and you will extract the pearl of wisdom from it and use it to propel your growth and evolution, and you will never again dwell on your past experiences with the slightest amount of resentment or remorse.

Focusing on the Pearl of Wisdom

Another way that you can change how you interpret and respond to life’s challenging situations is to always focus on the pearl of wisdom that every challenging situation almost always provides you – rather than focusing on the immediate problem or offense.
Is there a higher principle or ideal that can be gleaned from the situation? Is there a lesson to be learned? What pearl of wisdom does the situation contain that can help you grow to be a wiser, more loving, and happier being?

Focusing on the wisdom to be gleaned from, and the growth opportunity provided by, every situation takes you to a higher plane far above judgment, blame, recrimination, and any other negativity to something far more productive. And it will greatly increase your chances of never trapping negative emotions again and unwittingly suffering their insidious damaging consequences.

Cultivating Self-Awareness

One of the key skills that is important to transforming yourself so you can forever become free of negativity and the threat of trapping negative emotions is self-awareness. Self-awareness is essential to all forms of healing and transformation. Without awareness of your state of being no transformation is possible – awareness enables the choice to make a change. While this may seem obvious it is often overlooked. Without becoming aware of our defensive and negative thoughts and judgments how are we to choose to be different.

Nurturing and cultivating greater self-awareness is crucial to all growth including growing beyond emotional reactivity and holding on to negative emotions. One thing you can do that will help with this is to set the intention to become more aware of mental and emotional habits and behaviors. You might perhaps even ask for help and guidance – from the Universe, or God, or your spirit guides, or your higher-self, whatever works for you.

And believe it or not this will actually help you begin to catch yourself reacting in ways that perhaps you’d like to change. When you do catch yourself reacting go ahead and acknowledge it and give thanks that it has come to your attention. For example, you might say to yourself: “I’m feeling irritable for some reason. I’m really glad I can see that.” The increased awareness that you will cultivate will give you the opportunity to learn, grow, and change.

If you always respond to becoming aware of your thoughts and feelings with something like: “I’m really glad I can see that” and you feel genuinely pleased and grateful to be able to notice them and have the opportunity to address the source of them then you will find yourself quickly becoming more and more self-aware. And as you do you will find yourself gaining deeper and deeper insights into yourself and making more and more healthy changes. Just remember to be non-judgmental about anything you find in yourself that you would prefer to transform. You don’t have to make yourself wrong to transform yourself, in fact, it makes it harder. It is always most productive to notice your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors lovingly and without judgment.

With sincere intention and practice you can become very self-aware and this will facilitate much learning, growth, and change in yourself for the better.

Summing it up

Trapped negative emotions are one of the biggest causes of all sorts of adverse effects on your health and what you can manifest in your life. You create them when you interpret and respond to situations that unfold in your life with strong negative emotions that you are uncomfortable with completely feeling so you suppress them, which only traps them in the energy field of your body and hides them from you.

There are quite a few ways that you can release or clear existing trapped emotions from yourself that will give you relief from their adverse effects. But ultimately, you will need to fundamentally transform yourself if you want to avoid creating new trap emotions and subjecting yourself to their adverse effects in the future.

The choice to clear your trapped emotions and learn how to avoid creating more in the future should be a no-brainer once you understand how damaging they are to the quality of your life.

yogaesoteric

December 17, 2018