9

Clear Emotional Baggage

If you read the title of this chapter and thought to yourself, “Hmmm, I don’t have any emotional baggage”, then you are mistaken.  Everyone has some degree of emotional baggage and it is easy to appreciate this after I share with you what emotional baggage is and what happens to it when we don’t clear it.

 

What Constitutes Emotional Baggage?

Emotional baggage can be any reaction you still have to any events or situations that have happened in the past and are not happening in the present…as in right at this moment!  Think back to a situation where someone really embarrassed or betrayed you.  It could be a spouse, parent, co-worker or friend.  Do you know of anyone in your life whom you are afraid to call or confront?  Anyone you’d rather not be around because he or she is critical or negative?  In every single example from your past where you had an emotionally charged situation, unless you can recall the story and feel completely neutral or even grateful for it, it is likely that you have emotional baggage.

One of the most important concepts presented in this book is this: in order to heal your physical body, you need to have most of your energy in present time.  Any traumatic experiences from your past which you have not yet let go of, forgiven, or become thankful for, siphon your energy from the present into the past.  If a lot of your energy is going to your “past” via emotions that have not yet cleared from past experiences, then you will not have enough energy, Qi, in the present to heal your body.

For example, almost everyone can recount at least one incident in childhood where they were humiliated or embarrassed.  If you can’t, then think of a more recent incident.  I remember several from childhood that made a big impact on me, but since have cleared.  I remember walking home from school and having two neighboring boys making fun of me and trying to choke me with my winter scarf.  More memories resurface as I go deeper into my own personal healing.  Although some of the stories don’t seem to be a big a deal on the grand scale of things, any little bit of emotional “charge” that remains in the past is an energy loss. 

I remember that in fourth grade, my teacher asked all the students to raise their hands if they felt happy with their bodies.  As I began to raise my hand, I noticed that none of the other students raised their hands.  Because I didn’t want to be singled out as “different”, I quickly dropped my hand.  The silence was unbearable.  My teacher was shocked and so was I.  I couldn’t understand why the class jock or the class beauty didn’t raise their hands.  From that moment, the belief that was etched into my subconscious was that I didn’t deserve to feel good about my body if no one else did.  Wow!  An incident as innocent as a simple question from a teacher could have set up a life-long belief system that may have contributed to my chronic pain.

Here’s another story.  In the sixth grade, students were forced to recite speeches in front of their fellow students.  Most of us were terrified including me, not only because we had to speak in front of our fellow students, but because they would also be grading us.  After each speech, the teacher would ask the class to raise their hand to a corresponding grade.  If the student didn’t like the speech, they could grade it a “1” or if they loved it, they could grade it a “10”.  Well, I had a terrible time figuring out what to speak about because I absolutely hated speaking.  I wasn’t exactly the most popular kid in class.  I was the smart nerd.  My parents, being Asian, had no personal experience with this type of assignment and since it wasn’t something they were good at, such as math or English, I was on my own.  My mother helped me the best she could.  I did my speech on the subject of kindness. 

After the speech, during which my heart pounded so hard I felt like everyone could see it popping out of my chest, my class had to vote.  In typical fashion, the “popular” kids gave my speech low marks and the “outcasts” of the class gave me high marks.  It was degrading to see exactly who hated my speech because in my mind, it translated into hating me.  I was so angry at my teacher for forcing us to endure this type of humiliation, but I just swallowed my pride and said nothing.  I probably went home and cried to my mother.  Being a straight-A student at the time, anything less than an “A” was horrible in my mind.

Incidents like these from our childhoods can leave emotional scars that need to be healed.  Otherwise these scars can have a profound impact on our happiness and healing.  If you can’t remember most of your childhood, that’s a sign that you probably experienced enough trauma in childhood that your mind decided it was safer to forget it than to remember it.  Emotional baggage does not always have to come from things in the distant past.  Even things that happened yesterday that you are still reacting to will affect your energy in the present moment.  If you recently found out that your co-worker has terminal cancer and you have been feeling upset for days, you have developed emotional baggage associated with this event. 

Experiencing emotions are a natural and healthy part of our humanity, but re-experiencing emotions from past events over and over again is not.  Think of a young child playing on her own.  Maybe the child falls and starts to cry, but then looks around and realizes that no one is there to comfort her, so she just carries on playing, completely letting go of her emotional reaction.  If we could all let go as easily as young children, we would all be healed!  Unfortunately, we learn to catalogue and hang on to our emotional reactions for future reference. Certainly my own school experiences testify to this “hanging on” factor!

Why do we often hang on to our emotional reactions when they can’t possibly help us heal in the present?  The most common unconscious reason is that we want to prove our victimhood.  On some level, we really don’t want to be fully 100% responsible for our current experiences, so we look to the past to explain why we are what we are.  Consider someone who has suffered childhood abuse.   Abuse should never be condoned or tolerated, yet it is undeniably rampant in many countries and in many societies including our own.  Victims of abuse can suffer immeasurable psychological and physical damage.  The physical damage, however, fades with time, but the psychological damage often lingers on.  

I know several abused patients who have never been able to forgive their abusers and continue to suffer emotionally and physically (because they are now chronically ill) because they don’t appreciate the link between their current state of health and their energy currents.  Instead of blaming the abuser for their psychological impairments years after the abuse ended, the most courageous “victims” step out from the victim role and instead learn self-empowerment by letting go of the past and moving forward.

So many great spiritual teachers, such as Louise Hay, author of bestseller, Heal Your Body, have gone through horrible abuse in their past, yet have let go of their victim mentality and emotional baggage, so that they are free to share from their heart and empower others to do the same. 

 

Take an Emotional Inventory

So-called negative emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness are not “bad” for you.  They are only “bad” for you when they stick around indefinitely.  It is completely human to react with anger, fear and sadness to life events.  Life throws us curve balls and that’s how it has always been.  In the ideal world, we would feel our feelings completely and fully in our bodies, and then in a short time, when we are ready to move on, we let them go.  The time span could be as short as a few seconds or as long as a few days.  Aside from the benefit of having more of your energy currents in present time so your body can heal, there are side benefits as well.

I’ll give you an example as an illustration.  I decided one day to do an “anger” experiment.  There was an online store that I was using to market some fun T-shirts with cool Law of Attraction slogans.  I had uploaded a logo from a company who had given me special permission to use their logo.  Unfortunately, the store wasn’t able to contact me to verify that I had this special permission, so they shut down my account.  After multiple unsuccessful attempts to get my account reinstated, I decided that I was going to consciously stay angry at the store for a while.  I could feel “big” energy running throughout my body and it gave me a false sense of power.  Further attempts at communication were futile.  Nothing I did managed to reinstate my online store. 

Finally after three weeks (yes, a whole three weeks!), I decided that I’d better do an exercise to let go of my anger.  So I did.  I used TAT, one of the energy tools I’m going to share with you in this book, during which I forgave “them” for their “incompetence” while at the same time asking for forgiveness.  In this exercise, neither they nor I needed to communicate further.  This exercise was completely private and silent and no one knew that I was doing it.  After performing this letting go exercise, I knew that by the next morning I would receive an email from the online store owners. Sure enough I was right!  The owners had reinstated my account overnight!   The moment I let go of my anger was the moment when things started going my way. 

The side benefit of letting go of emotions that no longer serve you is that you attract more positive circumstances into your life.  Now it’s your turn.  I want you to take your emotional inventory, which means doing some honest work to determine where your energy has been going these days.  If we all had our energy circuits in present time, none of us would need any “healing”, so don’t feel guilty for having held onto emotional reactions.  We all do it unconsciously, but now you get the opportunity to bring them into consciousness for final resolution. 

Review the questions below and use a journal or notepad to answer them.  Consider yourself an emotional baggage “detective” and note down every single negative reaction you still have to events in the past as well as in the present, without self-judgment or guilt. 

1.        Is there anyone in my past with whom I am still angry for what he/she did or said to me or my loved one?
2.       Whom or what do I resent?
3.       When I think back to stressful or traumatic situations in the past, do I still have an emotional reaction?  And if so, what is that reaction?
4.      Whom do I blame for things going sour in my past or in my current reality?
5.       Who didn’t support me when I was growing up when I felt they should have?
6.       How do I feel about being chronically in pain?  Are there feelings of frustration, anger, sadness, fear?  What do they represent?
7.       Aside from experiencing chronic pain, what else is bothering me emotionally right now?  Finances?  Spouse?  Children?  Job?  And how do I feel about each of these?
8.      Write down all the people who hurt you in the past and what they did to you and rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how much charge you still feel about it.

 

To make things easier, ask yourself what bothers you, if anything, about:

         The environment
         The news on television
         The government
         The Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
         Religion
         Your relatives
         Your career or job
         Your co-workers
         Your hired-help
         Your income
         Your savings
         Your future

 

Even thing we judge negatively, such as government irresponsibility, contains seeds of emotional reactions that may not be serving us.  Even if we are a staunch environmentalist and do not condone the toxins spewing out into our environment, we don’t have to hang on to our anger and resentment.  Instead, we can take that energy and put it into action through our mission to create a better future for everyone.

 

Anger as your Ally

Just in case you get the notion that there are “good” emotions and “bad” emotions, I want to set the record straight.  Different emotions are just different qualities of energy frequencies.  They only become “bad” to us when they get stuck in our system or prevent us from moving on to a healthier place. 

Anger has gotten a bad rap.  I don’t know about you, but I got the distinct impression that when I was angry as a child, it was completely unacceptable.  In fact, my parents had a nickname for me.  In Chinese, my name is pronounced, Gun Ga Mun, or “Kan, Karen”.  In Chinese, the surname goes first.  Because of my bouts of irritability as a toddler, I was nicknamed, Gun Ga Mung, which translates into “Karen the Grumpy”.  At the time, my parents were struggling as new immigrants in Canada and my mother was in poor health.  She was depressed and needy at the time, so it is no wonder why I was grumpy.  It’s taken me years to finally have self-compassion for my childhood “grumpiness”.

So think for a moment about when you were a child?  When did you get angry?  When you didn’t get what you wanted or needed?  Or when you felt something was unfair or unjust?  Or when you were hurt?  Given this context, our anger is a useful part of our survival instinct.  Thus anger can be a useful tool to uncover the areas of our lives where we haven’t treated ourselves as well as we should or have let others mistreat us. 

Instead of judging anger as “bad”, let it be your guide to develop ways in which you can feel more nurtured, respected and loved.  Commonly, angry people need to develop and hold healthier boundaries so that other people don’t mistreat them or deplete their energy.  In our society, it is not polite to rant and rave when we’re angry.  We might seriously injure someone, either physically or emotionally.  What’s great, however, is that we can use energy psychology tools to turn down the volume (intensity) of the anger as we move through it.  Notice that I didn’t say “get rid of it” in this instance.  Many times, especially with perfectionists, anger isn’t even properly felt in the physical body!  Some of us stay mostly in our heads and don’t feel any emotion at all.  That’s a problem.

Stuck emotions live in our tissues and cause physical pain.  I know that someone is really healing when she finally is able to feel, acknowledge and honor her anger and its place in her life.  Anger can be your soul calling out to you and letting you know that you deserve better!  Feelings of anger can be scary to most people, but they don’t have to be.  With the energy techniques that I will share you with in this chapter, you will be able to move through intense emotions in order to release them, but more importantly, transmute them so that you can be in the space of receiving guidance from your Higher Self.

 

Letting Go of the Baggage

Here’s the fun part where we take pieces of our emotional baggage that we determine are no longer serving us and consciously choose to let them go.  Even intense emotions of anger and resentment related to abuse, for example, can clear surprisingly fast when you know energy psychology.  Energy psychology is a fairly new field of expertise, whereby negative emotions and the energy that they take up are cleared from your energy body.  The resultant energy is free to then return to present time where we need it to be if we’re going to heal and manifest what we truly desire in our lives. 

There are several different types of energy psychology techniques.  I’ll share with you the ones I know the best, EFT, also known as Tapping, TAT, Tapas Acupressure Technique and the Emotion Code.  They have a basis in acupuncture/acupressure, yet are very different in execution.  Other techniques such as TFT (thought field therapy), Sedona Method, and PSTEC are equally as powerful, so you may wish to explore these on your own as well. 

 

Tapping

Tapping or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) requires that you tap specific acupressure points on the head, torso (and sometimes hands) in order to clear energy blocks caused by negative emotions.  The most popular tapping form involves two stages.  In the first stage you are tapping while expressing the negative emotion.  This stage will last as long as you still have an emotional “charge” and repeated tapping will bring that charge down to a minimal level. 

The second stage involves reframing the situation positively where you choose a positive thought or emotion to replace the negative ones.  Here’s what’s cool: you can’t do tapping incorrectly!  Your intention is enough to make it work.  Even if you don’t think that you are tapping the right acupressure points, you will still release the negative energy.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that when people are brain balanced, especially with the LifeWave Y-Age Aeon patch, the energy psychology techniques work even better and faster.  If you are using the patches I highly recommend that you place an Aeon patch on the top of your head, on acupuncture point GV20 while you are doing the these exercises.  Here is a step-by-step protocol on how to do EFT using the basic method.  There is a more free-form method I now use.  If you’ve signed up for your bonuses, you’ll be getting access to some videos I created just to illustrate the creative ways you can use EFT.

 

Basic EFT Instructions:

1.        Choose an emotion you wish to clear based on a situation that’s bothering you.  For example, you might be angry at your neighbor Bob for letting his cat poop in your yard.
2.       Rate the emotional charge out of ten; ten being the highest and zero meaning none.
3.       Fill out the following starting sentence with the emotional situation you’re dealing with:
Even though I am _____ (angry) at ________ (Bob) for _________ (letting his cat poop in my yard), I deeply and completely love and accept myself and my feelings”
4.      While saying this sentence three times, tap the karate chop point on one hand with the finger tips of the other hand (see image).
5.       Then, tap the other acupressure points in the picture, one after another. 
a)     Inside eyebrow
b)     Outside eye
c)      Under the eye
d)      Under the nose
e)      Under the lip
f)     Collarbone
g)      Under the arm
h)     Top of the head
Tap each point five to eight times with the fingers of one hand (or both), starting at the inner eyebrow point and ending at the top of your head while you repeat out loud your negative emotion e.g.  “this anger”.  Feel free to alternate hands, if you like, or keep tapping just on one side.  It doesn’t matter because both will be effective.
6.       After one or two rounds, rate your emotional charge again out of ten.  If it has dropped to under two out of ten, then you can choose to move onto the positive round or remain tapping until the charge is a zero.  Don’t be in a rush to proceed to the positive round if you still feel a charge after the negative round.  It may take several rounds.  Doing the freeform style that I show you in my videos may help you become more creative in your own Tapping practice.
7.       When your emotional charge has diminished significantly and when you wish to do a positive round, then you can tap all of the acupressure points again and state what you’d rather be feeling.  For example, as you tap, you might say, “even though I have every right to be angry at Bob, I choose to forgive him and the cat for pooping in my yard”, or simply, “I choose forgiveness”, “I choose to be open”, “I choose to let go” etc
8.      To close the EFT session, just close your eyes and take a deep breath to integrate the new energy.

 

Tips for Success:

Don’t worry about doing it “right”.  Tapping is very forgiving.  Your intention is what matters most.  I purposefully did not write down the exact acupuncture points because approximating these points work just as well.  Some people have had excellent results just tapping in the middle of their chests!  Try different techniques and see what works best for you.