Reading Time: 4 minutesWhen we put the feelings of anxiety or depression under the microscope of hypnosis, we see that these intense, unwanted feelings are actually made up of subtle, fearful thoughts, such as “I’m not wanted,” “I’m not safe,” “I’m all alone” – thoughts that began somewhere in a past event or circumstance. As life moves forward, we naturally resist looking at these painful mental and emotional wounds. It feels better to avoid them, so we do what we can to bury them or push them aside.
People’s present state of being, and the decisions they make, usually are colored by the past. So when we’re dominated by anxiety or depression, that unwanted feeling is kept alive by subtly avoiding it or pushing it away. Paradoxically, these unwanted feelings can often be extinguished when we focus intently and directly on the emotional energy charge.
The following is a common example of how this process works. A woman came to me (I’ll call her Mary) arrived for a session plagued by anxiety that she had felt as long as she could remember. Although her anxiety had been managed somewhat by dealing with past abuse issues through traditional talk-therapy, there was still a lingering anxiety that was further triggered several years ago by experiencing extreme turbulence on an airplane. This event awakened a deep fear in her and was causing an increasing phobia of flying, which was problematic because she flies regularly.
But within our very anxieties and fears lie our keys and clues for healing.
The first step is to focus on the unwanted feeling and locate where in the body that energy charge is felt most intensely. In Mary’s case, she felt her anxiety in her chest. Even without a traditional relaxation hypnosis induction, she was already focused deeply enough to access the insights and images of her higher mind – the part of her that gives her symbolic dreams at night as she sleeps.
I asked her, “If that part of your body could speak, what would it say?”
She said, “I’m sad, alone and afraid.”
Now we had an emotion (anxiety), a somatic (feeling in the chest), and a mental thought (sad, alone, afraid) – the key ingredients to uncover the root of the issue and go directly to an underlying cause.
By letting her consciousness slide into the middle of the unwanted feeling in her chest and repeating the mental thought program of “I’m sad, alone and afraid,” it took her quickly and directly to a time where she felt this feeling before. Typically a person is taken to scenes in their present life, in which case we follow the steps for an Emotional Healing session. But in Mary’s case, she went to another life, and it became a Past Life Therapy session. In her mind’s eye, she saw images of a cold, damp, dirty alley in Europe. She was wandering homeless, alone and paranoid, with only the clothes on her back. We then went to the time where she first became homeless. She immediately had images of watching a burning house. She was feeling desperate and in shock, because her husband and children were trapped inside and died in the flames. With the deep shock of losing everything she knew and owned, she wandered the streets for years, simply existing and surviving in an emotional state of grief, fear and feeling totally alone. She died with these heavy, intense thoughts, and this thought-form energy residue was imprinted in her soul-essence – stuck in her physical, emotional and mental energy bodies, carried forward into this incarnation and awakened during the traumatic event of airplane turbulence in this life.
Once we went through the death scene of that life, she could rest in the high vibration of deep peace, love and security of the afterlife, and then consciously release the emotional and mental energy charges that had been carried in her soul essence that was attached to her present life body.
Afterward, she observed that the subtle, nagging anxiety was completely gone, she felt much lighter because she had dumped the heavy, fear-based thoughts and feelings. She commented that it was as if cobwebs had been cleared from her body and mind. Suddenly, many feelings and impulses in this life made complete sense. For instance, why crying children caused her to shudder, her deep empathy towards the homeless, and above all, the subtle grief, fear and aloneness that had lingered with her much of this life. A week later, she continued to note a large part of her anxiety was significantly released, yet attention was still needed on other aspects of her fears. Healing happens in layers, like peeling an onion.
Deep within the very anxieties and fears that we subtly resist lie the essential keys for releasing and healing those mental and emotional fears that prevent us from knowing our true soul nature of wholeness and completeness. We are always whole and complete, because we can never separate ourselves from our soul. The brilliant light of who we are simply gets covered up by mental and emotional “fear-dirt” from past experiences.
Various types of hypnosis can offer an efficient means by which people can become their own detective and release all fear-based problems through insight and wisdom. Whether we do past life regression or a present-life Emotional Healing session, a person will get a very clear sense of what it looks like and feels like to allow their life to be an expression of the part of themselves which is already whole and free.