Emotional Enlightenment -Approaching The Inner Sanctuary of the Heart
By Paul Shippee
Shambhala Mountain Center hosts Emotional Enlightenment: Direct Path To Compassionate Communication with Paul Shippee, December 5-7, 2014
Peeling away the protective layers of our habitual patterns of thinking and reacting we come to vulnerability, soft spot, the inner sanctuary of the heart. Things are no longer black and white, either-or, but we enter the tender areas of felt experience and glimpse previously unknown realms of our being. Compassion and empathy can now come alive as felt experience.
For emotional healing to take place we move from exclusively head-thinking to the open fields of heart-thinking. As Rumi said, “Somewhere out there beyond ideas of right and wrong there is a meadow; I’ll meet you there.” We discover unexpected aspects of ourselves that feel strange but good. We would like to claim these aspects because we sense the power of truth in them. As we let go of automatic and familiar judgment and blame reactions we discover hidden adversaries that are termed shadow and shame and blame. Those names point to all the conditioned ways we have covered over our heart, pushed the world away, sabotaged relationships and condemned ourselves with limiting beliefs by suppressing unwanted emotions like fear, sadness, hurt, grief and joy.
There is always some ambivalence in working with emotional healing. As we uncover, see and own shadow aspects of ourselves we also glimpse the authentic aspects and begin to feel the power of befriending both of these.
Emotional healing is a lived and felt experience full of wonder, sadness, grief and joy. It is not an easy journey but is rewarded with delicious empowerment and a grounded satisfaction with who we really are. We find we can see through and abandon deception, confusion and hiding as we discover the raw directness of liberating honesty. Things become real and vivid and true as we learn ways to deal with uncertainty and change.
Working with emotional healing often feels like trying to catch the wind with our bare hands. The experience of transformation, transition and change feels elusive and slippery as we expose our old obstacles to authentic presence and true compassion. As the hidden fortresses of blame and shame and judgment begin to crumble and slide away from our grasp we may feel alternating mixtures of relief, surprise, fear, open-heartedness, tenderness, fresh air and homecoming.
Suddenly, the old fixtures of defense, aggression, impatience and fault-finding reveal their mask –their superficial lack of authenticity- and we begin to see the world in a new brilliance and also to feel the presence of nowness in our body. Even deeper and more subtle, we begin to touch the profound inner sanctuary of the heart. Strength and courage flow from somewhere in our being as fear and lack of confidence melt away. With this freedom comes a responsibility to stay connected with our feelings and needs and to enjoy an empathic presence with all beings.
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Paul Shippee, MA Psychology, studied Nonviolent Communication (NVC) intensively with founder Marshall Rosenberg and other NVC trainers. He has facilitated NVC groups continuously for the past 8 years and teaches NVC workshops around the country.