Emotional Healing — Erasing Psychic Imprints

As promised earlier, I am elucidating for you the practice of emotional healing and erasing psychic imprints. Emotions are stored in the form of images and words. Even in the case of people going through physical abuse, the physical wounds may heal over time but it is the mind’s uncanny ability to store and recall thoughts in the form of images and words that causes the greatest grief.

The stages of emotional healing

In your quiet moments, when you recall painful incidents, you naturally feel indisposed. The more you try to forget them, the heavier they become, the faster you try to run away from them the quicker they get to you. At that moment, even the most promising methods rarely work. There is natural healing and there is conscious healing. Natural healing can take a long time, and sometimes it never happens.

The practice of emotional healing, of erasing your imprints of images and words, is a deliberate effort, it falls under conscious healing. The greater your effort the better and quicker the healing.

Feeling depressed (Click here for more depression quotes ), angry, constrained, down, pensive, and so forth are merely the symptoms of an emotionally wounded person. Like I said once, it means you are still hurt somewhere within, the pain is still there. You may have simply denied it. That is not going to help beyond a certain point. It is not worthwhile to fight the symptoms. Go to the root to heal yourself.

Others, those whom you look up to, and those who are genuine healers, may be able to trigger the healing process, they may be able to pinpoint it for you, but ultimately, your healing needs to occur within, it comes from your own effort. It is like someone may get you the job, but it is your performance alone that will get you the pay. Without further ado, let me share with you the two finest methods of emotional healing.

The yogic method – The permanent method of healing

This is the more difficult, but permanent, method. It can heal you beyond just the incident in focus. Success in all yogic methods depends on the aspirant’s ability to sit still, concentrate, and visualize. Maintaining one posture stills the primary energies, concentration stills the five secondary energies and readies your mind, and visualization is the actual healing.

The longer you are able to hold onto your visualization during your session of meditation, the quicker the healing. Visualization is like performing surgery; the patient (mind) needs to be perfectly still (posture) while the surgeon (you) concentrates and does the procedure (visualization). Here are the steps:

1. Posture: Sit still with your back straight. Preferably crossed legged but any other comfortable posture will do just fine for this practice.

2. Close your eyes.

3. Breath: Do deep breathing, just normal deep breathing, for a few minutes. The discriminating faculties of the conscious mind will become somewhat passive as a result.

4. Recall a person or an incident that caused you great grief in the past. Your mind will automatically pick up all related emotions and thoughts. Try to stay on that one person or incident though.

5. Visualization: Imagine releasing a soft, white light from your heart chakra in the form of compassion and forgiveness. The Anahata chakra, also known as the heart chakra, is a psychoneurotic plexus situated near your heart, in the center of your chest, at the vertical middle point between your throat and navel, between the two nipples. If you experience guilt because you did something wrong, visualize forgiving yourself. If you feel you are at fault for what you had to go through, forgive yourself still.

You will travel through a whole plethora of emotions as you do this practice. Bring back your attention and focus on the calming white light. Visualize yourself being infused with it. Do not hesitate from engaging in some self-dialog; your focus, however, should not be to binge and brood over but to erase and eradicate the imprint. It is not about right or wrong, it is just about forgiving for your own good.

Clean the whole canvas of images. Repaint it with your favorite scene. Imagine yourself in bliss and smiling, envision living your dream, being happy, and being healthy.

6. Take a few deep breaths again and slowly open your eyes.

7. If you believe in God, say your favorite prayer, or simply express your gratitude for all that you have been blessed with.

One session should last a minimum of fifteen minutes. Be consistent. Do not expect results in the first session. Once you have done it an enough number of times, around thirty, you will experience a miracle: after a  while, you will find that recalling that incident or person no longer aggravates or irritates you. On the contrary, you will experience peace upon such recollection. You have successfully transformed, metamorphosed, your emotion. It is a beautiful feeling, an empowering one.

Most yogic methods require an average of twenty-eight days of daily practice before they show any results. It takes usually six months before an aspirant starts to perfect the practice. Once you are able to practice intense visualization, you can accomplish just about anything you can imagine. Subsequent healing sessions accomplish much more, much quicker.

The intellectual method

Think about what happens when a child gets a new toy. He is fascinated. The more he gets to play with it, the quicker such attractions start to whither away. He gets over the toy. Earlier he would talk to it, play with it, even sleep with it; now, the toy is dead. Its sighting does not trigger any emotion in the child.

Similarly, as much as naturally, albeit ironically, when you experience abuse, rejection, failure, deceit, lies, and pain, your mind gets a new toy. The more you try to avoid it, the stronger the attraction. Here is an easy way to get over those emotions.

To carry out this practice effectively, you either need a mirror or a dictaphone. The steps:

1. Start looking into the mirror or turn on the dictaphone.

2. Recall a negative or a painful incident from your past.

3. Start narrating it verbally, either by talking to the mirror or recording with your dictaphone.

4. Try to recall every minute detail of the incident. For example, let us assume that someone you deeply loved broke up with you. The time, manner, their demeanor, and the news itself were most unexpected. Years have passed but you have not gotten over it.

As part of this exercise, recall that incident. Do it boldly. Think of the color of the walls, what you ate prior to being given that news, what you were wearing, what was going through your mind, how the other person looked, what artifacts were there in the room, and what the surroundings were. Recall all these and say them out loud.

5. You will experience pain and hurt. You may experience an emotional outpour. Be bold. Do it multiple times over a number of sessions. Play with this toy. After fifteen to twenty sessions, the impact will simply disappear. Forever.

6. You can later listen to your own recording. As you do, you will recall even greater detail. Over a period, as you do your sessions, the whole incident, the person, that phase of your life, will cease to matter.

It is paramount to recall as much detail as possible. And here is why: Remember Bo? If you do not recall the detail, you will not be able to erase it. If you are unable to erase it, whenever you are going to see a similar color to the walls, people with similar expressions, or even a similar type of food that you had that day, it will silently trigger the negative or dampening emotion in you.

Hence, I cannot stress enough the importance of recalling as much detail as possible. The information recall in the fifth session, for instance, will be much greater compared to the first. So, repeat this exercise until you get over the incident completely. The devil is in the details! Here is a nice article from wikiHow on visualization.

You can also do this practice with a friend who is willing to listen to you without judgment. You could take turns. You could help the other person heal, and they, you. This is why sharing, and talking it out with someone nonjudgmental can make one feel lighter. Each time you talk it out, it further reduces the impact of that emotion. This is the reason people tend to share their ordeals with their friends. This is the mind’s natural coping mechanism. When you speak about it, the imprint softens.

For more, read this post I wrote a while ago on the karmic trail and psychic imprints.

No imprint means no pain. No pain means you are healed.

Healing of the mind is almost like returning to your original state of peace and bliss, of joy and happiness, of compassion and tolerance.

Heal yourself; you owe it to yourself. Treat yourself; you deserve it. Be yourself; you are worth it.

Peace.
Swami