How to Heal Your Emotional Pain
To heal your suffering, you must surrender to it.
On the 5th day of a 9-day silent meditation retreat, I woke up at 2 am filled with terror. Flashing through my mind, on a nonstop high-speed loop, were the scariest scenes of all the supernatural films that I had seen as a kid: The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist, The Omen, Poltergeist, Salem’s Lot. Demons, ghosts, vampires, and other kinds of malevolent entities, and a ton of creepy music, were cascading through my brain, along with the most intense fear I’ve ever felt in my life.
These films had given me all sorts of nightmares as a child, and I remember watching the films while peaking through a blanket over my head during the most terrifying scenes. As an adult, though, I didn’t walk around consciously afraid, as if the mere mention of one of them might send me into a panic.
But apparently a lot of fear from those movies was still accompanying me. And after several days of quieting my mind, that fear erupted into consciousness. I was panic-stricken, my heart was racing, and I was breathing in greedy gulps of air. Sweat gushed from every pore, soaking my clothes.
Each time my mind scrolled through the images, and my body squeezed out another bucket of sweat, the fear diminished a bit.
Two hours later, the fear and my racing heart subsided, and the images stopped. I exchanged my drenched t-shirt for a dry one, and fell into a deep sleep. The rest of the meditation retreat passed without any kind of incident.
That’s when I knew that I had truly healed this childhood trauma.
What that experience taught me, and which I have confirmed time and again during a multi-year healing journey, is that to truly heal some kind of emotional pain or trauma, you have to be able to feel the emotional energy around that event completely until it disappears.
To Heal the Hurt You Must Feel the Hurt
You must allow the emotional pain to move through you by accepting it, without pushing it away, repressing it or trying to escape it by numbing yourself.
You must meet it with compassion, openness, and the willingness to listen.
In other words, even as you are overwhelmed with the emotion — fear, sadness, grief, or anger — you meet that emotion with unconditional love. You surrender to it.
By embracing your pain, you allow that emotion to express itself, to be felt, fully and completely, without any resistance. That is what all emotional energy that isn’t resolved needs.
Because emotions are not just sensations — they are information, in a form that the body and mind convey, without words. They are asking to be listened to by being felt by you.
Then the emotions dissipate, leaving you with a more neutral view of your memories of the event they were attached to. And many times, but not always, you will come away with a deeper understanding of why you experienced a particular event in your life the way you did; you will derive a lesson or some wisdom from it.
For more than a decade, I have been on a profound healing journey. This is only one episode of hundreds that I’ve had. Each of them has been different, but they’ve all confirmed this same lesson: to heal your pain, you must feel your pain.
Meditation Is Key to Embracing Your Pain
Meditation is one of the key practices to feel your emotions. Our normal reaction to most emotional pain is to run from it or suppress it. Meditation allows you to get more deeply in touch with what you’re feeling.
The truth is that as human beings, we actually feel numerous emotions at the same time. We also shift quickly, moving from one emotion to the next, often almost imperceptibly. Meditation attunes us to the subtle and multi-layered fluctuations of our emotional state.
To feel your emotions without fleeing from them, and without rationalizing or interpreting them (another way to not feel them), you need to develop two key capacities: focus and awareness.
They are not the same.
The first, focus, allows you to remain with a single object of attention. It is about concentration, rather than your mind wandering. Shamatha or zazen, where you bring your attention to your breath, is a form of concentration meditation.
The second, awareness, allows you to be curious about and open to whatever arises in the mind. It is your capacity to notice what is there. Vipassana meditation cultivates this willingness to notice whatever arises in the mind, and to notice far more than what you normally perceive.
Each approach complements the other, so that when a difficult emotion or some thought surfaces and you become aware of it, you are able to remain with it rather than turning away.
Ultimately, as you develop each of these skills, your mind’s defenses relax, and emotions previously held at bay or that went unnoticed will start to surface. You might not be treated to a night of terror, but you will begin to notice just how much emotional energy is actually percolating beneath the surface.
Many find this discomforting and disconcerting, as if meditation were making things worse. You’re actually just becoming aware of what’s already there.
Meeting your emotions with as much openness, love, and compassion is the key for allowing them to heal. That is what meditation, along with the work I describe below, helped me to do when I faced my night of terror.
Ways to Deepen & Accelerate Your Healing Process
Meditation is an essential tool for healing, but it is not sufficient on its own to reach all of the emotional trauma and karmic issues you face.
Why? Two reasons. First, your mind’s capacity to protect you from all of your emotional pain, unresolved patterns, and past traumas, is well developed. That’s a big part of what our minds have been devoted to our entire lives.
Second, your emotions go far deeper than your mental state. The emotions are not just a mental reactions to events that you can remember. Yes, your memories are deeply intertwined with emotions. But you also carry emotional energy in your chakras (the energy centers governing different aspects of your lives), and your body itself (organs, tissues, and bones).
Some of these emotions are from prior moments in your life, some are from previous generations that you have inherited from your parents through your lineage (science and psychology are confirming that trauma is inherited), and some are from past lives. (Yes, you have past lives, and I’ve experienced memories from many of mine.)
The upshot is that not all of your emotional patterns and predilections are entirely yours. In other words, not every emotion can be traced to a moment in this lifetime or is explainable by psychoanalysis or reference to your upbringing. You are actually holding on to pain from relatives and other lives as well.
There are a number of powerful techniques for working with those deeply embedded emotions, especially those patterns that have been with you for much of your life and seem impervious to traditional therapy or even meditation and mindfulness practices.
The two I want to focus on here are energy healing and plant medicine.
Energy Healing
What is “energy healing” and how does it work? The healers I have worked closely with (whose bios you can read about here and here), are able to transmit enormous amounts of energy. It can feel warm and uplifting, as if you were being bathed in light, or electric and powerful, as if you were being rewired and connected to a divine source of energy. I’ve also received similar transmissions from numerous Divine Mother avatars, like Amma and Mother Meera.
This energy could be called Light, Source, Spirit, prana, or chi. The energy works directly with whatever it is that you are experiencing, whether emotional or physical, to help resolve it. (This kind of energy work is much deeper and more powerful than reiki, which is a very gentle restorative kind of energy work that people often encounter when first exploring energy healing.)
Energy healing has helped me to release pockets of pain and unresolved emotional energy, from deep within me. Such healing work can sometimes eliminate emotional pain altogether, allowing it to leave the body rapidly. In most cases, however, it doesn’t eliminate the pain, but rather accelerates the process by bringing the emotional energy to the surface to be felt and resolved.
The reason that energy healing from a clear channel is so critical to your spiritual healing is that many of our emotional patterns are too deep or too intense for us to bring up on our own. Our egos’ mental defense mechanisms are too strong and prevent us from accessing them, even with years of meditation practice. Energy healing can accelerate this process by bringing forth that which you resist, and many times are not even aware of.
Additionally, the energy from a clear channel can cleanse and remove layers of emotional pain, infusing you with a feeling of divine love and acceptance. By doing so, it super-charges your capacity to remain present to that which is difficult, allowing you to face your pain with greater ease.
Plant Medicine
Plant medicine refers generally to the use of some kind of hallucinatory plant or herb that, when imbibed, elicits a state of consciousness that is otherwise not available in everyday life. One of the most powerful of plant medicines, which should only be taken under the supervision of a qualified shaman, is ayahuasca.
On a retreat deep in the Amazon, I participated in 3 ayahuasca ceremonies with 2 shamans. Ayahuasca causes intense purges, often in the form of vomiting, which release any kind of negative energy, trauma or illness in the body and mind.
The first ceremony was an intensely emotional one, as I faced fears and emotional material from my relationships. I experienced facing my fear of death, which included the emotional agony of losing my family. I also faced unresolved emotional patterns that shaped many of my relationships.
The second night involved immense physical and emotional agony, which went on for hours. My body ached all over, but especially my belly button. The only word I could hear was somete — Spanish for “surrender.” As the ceremony went on, the plant medicine revealed to me that I was releasing a great deal of emotional pain from past lives carried within my current body’s cells. I reached out to one of the facilitators and said, “I never knew the healing could do so deep.”
The third night I faced, among other things, enormous amounts of shame and self-centeredness — aspects of my ego that still were not resolved. Part of that experience involved me babbling nonstop all night, as I shared some of my deepest, darkest secrets with the rest of the group!
The key message was that nothing could be simply “taken away”: I had to release it. And to release it, I had to feel it, again and again. The message, once more, was that I had to surrender to the emotional and physical pain.
How Deeply Can You Heal?
This is the question I have asked myself time and again, often with the belief that the healing could not go any deeper.
By relying on a combination of meditation, energy healing, and plant medicine, with occasional forays into other modalities, I have peeled back layer after layer of emotion.
After a period of intensive spiritual development while working closely with these healers, the dormant spiritual energy at the base of my spine — known as kundalini — was awakened. This was the most intense experience of my life, and you can read a bit more about it here.
The experience created a direct connection through my crown chakra to Source. With that came a deep knowledge of and connection to my chakras, which allows me go deep within them and experience reservoirs of emotion that I didn’t know were there. In other words, I now experience directly the kind of energy healing I used to receive from other healers.
This has led to a years-long healing odyssey, in which the kundalini energy at the base of my spine and the light coming through the crown chakra worked in tandem on some chakra or portion of my body, bringing up unresolved emotion from some prior moment — in this life or a previous one — that was never fully healed.
For example, one very intense period led me to purge and release the feeling that my mother didn’t want to give birth to me. This was an incredibly powerful and liberating healing — like a spiritual rebirth. And I learned just how deep is the karmic bond that mothers and children share.
At other points, I have experienced intense physical pain — symptoms that no medical doctor could diagnose. Tests came back showing nothing was wrong. But when I submitted to those symptoms, eventually an emotionally charged energy would emerge.
That is where I have experienced most of my past-life memories: episodes from another era, with people I had never seen before would flood my mind, bringing with them memories of intense emotional pain associated with betrayal, adultery, and physical violence. I watched as these images in my mind from an era I couldn’t identify and people I had never met flashed through my mind. Once the emotional pain was felt fully, it dissipated, along with the physical pain that had served as its messenger.
Our healing can also go so deep that we are finally ready to face the existential questions that lie at the very center of our being. Healing these kinds of emotional wounds often feels like backsliding, as if you were somehow failing on the spiritual journey, because the pain is so great. Instead, it’s a sign of your resilience and readiness to face the most crushing beliefs you have about yourself.
As you work to heal your own emotional wounds, remember these points:
- Your emotions don’t disappear until they are resolved. Every emotion, whether major or minor, stays with you, like a fine layer of sediment, until it’s fully healed. That little conflict you had years ago with someone? It’s lurking there, waiting to be addressed. Each time you get triggered is a sign that an emotion is there, waiting to be fully felt and understood.
- Your emotional wounds run far deeper than you realize. Your body and your energy field contain emotional energy gathered over lifetimes, from previous generations, and the countless moments of pain in this lifetime. In fact, you’re an endless bounty of healing opportunities. The same is true, though, of the positive emotions: You’re also the embodiment of countless moments of love, tenderness, and compassion. Remember that as you continue to heal your emotional pain.
- You can always heal. Some people fear that they’re beyond healing. In reality, you’re not broken or beyond repair; you’re already whole. Your wholeness is what you’re cultivating so that you heal your wounds with your presence. Sometimes a pain runs so deep that you may work with it for years, and it can feel like that part of you is beyond repair. It’s not. Each time you feel your pain without running away, you’re healing. Each time you deepen your presence, whether through meditation, energy work, or plant medicine, you’re healing.
- Your healing journey is never over. The reality is that each time you heal a wound or release a painful belief, another layer emerges. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed; it means you’re ready to go deeper. Over time, you stop seeing your emotional pain as negative, and you embrace your resilience to meet it and surrender, again and again. What I have seen, by exploring the deepest corners of my own psyche, is that healing can always go deeper. Don’t despair, though. That’s what makes us human.