Reflections upon a Path to Union
These are the pages of a diary, footsteps in the sand, revelations, epiphanies, impressions and experiences upon a journey into ever expanding states of consciousness - a personal exploration into the spiritual evolution of humanity from duality to union.
Reflections upon a Path to Union
Talks on the Fundamentals of Spiritual Living ( Part Two )
Embarking on a transformative quest for emotional mastery can seem daunting, but it's a journey I've walked myself. Battling anxiety while navigating the ebbs and flows of life, I've unearthed practices that have profoundly shifted my spiritual and emotional landscapes. Join me as I share these life-altering insights, guiding you toward a deeper consciousness and a tranquil heart. Together we'll uncover the often-mistaken energies within us that shape our reality, learning to manage them with deftness and grace. This episode is an invitation to a dance with our emotions, where we learn the steps of awareness, detachment, and the art of evoking joy and compassion at will.
The mantra "This too will pass" has whispered solace into the lives of many, including myself, and in this episode, I'll share how it can anchor you amidst life's tempestuous seas. We'll embrace the practice of sitting with our emotions without being consumed by them, cultivating the resilience to breathe through discomfort and emerge centred and serene.
Welcome. I am Penny Frampton and I am the host of the podcast A Little Light on the Path. A Little Light on the Path is a series of talks about esoteric philosophy from a practical and experiential perspective. I'll be describing intellectual concepts from a point of view of how they impact our lives and our spiritual journey a point of view of how they impact our lives and our spiritual journey, how those ideas work out through our ordinary daily lives. In other words, how to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way. Today I want to continue to talk about the basic fundamentals of spiritual living, the basics of a spiritual-led life, spiritual Practice 101, if you like. I introduced in my last podcast the idea of man know thyself and how important it is to understand all aspects of the personality the physical, the emotional and the mental aspects. We covered how to become aware of and how to take care of the physical form and the reasons why that is so important before undertaking any potentially powerful spiritual practices. In this podcast, I'm going to talk about the emotional or astral aspects of the personality and the importance of becoming aware of them at a very basic and fundamental level. So, first of all, it is important to understand and to remember that you are not your emotions. Emotions are simply different qualities of energy experienced by the personality and given a name by the mind so it can file them and remember them. A quality of sadness you experience is different to the same quality experienced by someone else, but in order to communicate our minds label similarities of experience and what they might be related to. These experiences of the qualities of energy inform your character. People may say you are a happy person or in medieval times, you might have been called melancholic. However, there is an aspect of yourself, the soul consciousness, with which we become more and more aware of and attuned with. That is beyond the personality, beyond the emotions and the mind. At this level, you are not your emotions, as they are merely qualities of energy within the personality. And as you progress upon the spiritual path, these emotions transform into the qualities of energies experienced at that level of soul consciousness. For example, happiness becomes pure joy. So how do we gain good emotional health?
Speaker 1:Well, the first step, obviously, is to become aware of your emotions. It's surprising the number of people who are not aware of what they are feeling, and that's because they are run by their emotions. They are controlled by them at a subconscious level, subconscious level. Therefore, the first thing we must do is to become aware of any emotions that are running you or controlling you, and this takes practice, but simply stop at any moment and think to yourself. Become aware of what you are feeling in that moment. For example, at the moment I am feeling a little anxiety around speaking and expressing myself on this podcast, as the process is still new to me and I can feel a certain level of tension in my physical body and that's centered around my solar plexus. So, once you're aware of the emotions in the moment, what are you going to do with them? Are you going to let them continue to run your life in that moment? No, you're not. You're not. And how do we manage that? It's actually very simple. We just don't indulge them. I know that they are there, I'm aware of them, but we simply just sit with them, acknowledge they are there, but don't indulge them, don't place any focus with them. I'm aware of my anxiety in this moment, but it's not controlling me and it's not preventing me from producing this podcast.
Speaker 1:So step two, after becoming aware of your emotions, is just to sit with them. To begin with, at this point they are strong emotions. Just find a place by yourself and express them for a while. Give them permission to be expressed with your full awareness. After some practice, you'll find that you are developing a detachment from your emotions. You'll become aware that you are watching your emotions as if from a distance, rather than indulging within them. It even becomes really interesting to see what emotions come up for you in certain situations come up for you in certain situations. You start to recognise a quality of energy without necessarily naming it.
Speaker 1:The next step is learning how to change the emotions, how to transmute them, or to choose which emotions to run and this can be really exciting or to choose which emotions to run, and this can be really exciting. For example, I'm feeling this mild anxiety and many people feel anxiety before an event like public speaking or an interview, for instance. So I'm experiencing a quality of energy with certain physical sensations associated with it, and our mind has labelled it anxiety, an anxiety, I have learnt, comes with nervousness another labelled quality and that it is well known that this can prevent someone from doing something that they want to do, make them show potentially negative behaviours perhaps, and it is all a learned behaviour. So what if I re-labelled what I am experiencing as excitement, what I am experiencing as excitement, and retrain my mind to associate this quality of experience as positive expectation of a good or new event. Now, in this moment, I feel excited, not anxious, and the feelings in my body have shifted as well. Excitement is a bubbling energy in my chest, very different from the tension I had earlier in my solar plexus.
Speaker 1:Again, this takes practice and experimentation. The spiritual path is all about experimentation. You are not your emotions and your emotions are what you choose them to be. Later, you will have renamed and reclassified any emotions that negatively impact you and you can play with evoking different emotions at will. This is the beginning of being able to invoke more soul, consciousness, qualities of energy like joy, divine love, compassion at will. So to recap, at will.
Speaker 1:So to recap 1. Become aware of your emotions. 2. Don't indulge them. 3. If necessary, simply sit with them, acknowledge them and experience them. 4. Develop detachment. Remember you are not your emotions. And five play with renaming them, play with evoking them.
Speaker 1:So now we get to the why. Why is it an important, fundamental spiritual practice to work with your emotions? Because when you start connecting or channeling potentially powerful, very clear spiritual energies. Do you really want them to be coloured or sullied or affected by the emotions that are controlling you? That's like running pure water through a dirty hose. And not only that how are you going to discern these wonderful, pure energies of soul consciousness if you cannot discern your own to start with? There is another reason, however, and it is to do with fundamental health.
Speaker 1:The physical body, the material that makes up your body, is formed upon a blueprint created out of etheric matter. Etheric matter and energies take many forms and have been called life force, chi or prana, but it also forms that magnetic blueprint that attracts physical particles to create and maintain your physical form. Within this etheric form are several vortices or centres of energy. Most people will call these centres chakras, and there are in fact many more than just the seven. But each of these main seven vortices are aligned to physical organs in the body, and in fact the physical organs are a representative of that etheric centre. And the organs they are aligned to are called the endocrine glands. These glands, through the distribution of hormones, maintain and regulate balance within the body. For instance, they are controlling the production of insulin or adrenaline. Then, aligned also with the etheric centres, are the seven vortices within the emotional or astral body. So therefore, whatever emotion is affecting the astral body will exit through those vortices, through the etheric centres, straight into the body and affect the endocrine glands.
Speaker 1:If the astral body is often in a state of anger, this affects the spleen, for instance, and you may develop gastric problems. If you indulge anxiety, it affects the solar plexus, which is connected to the diaphragm and breathing, the stomach and upper digestive tract and you may develop asthmatic problems or stomach ulcers as a result. And if this is your normal state of health and you start potentially powerful spiritual practices channelling energy through these centres, it will escalate and exacerbate any underlying physical health problems that you may have. But the more you become aware of your emotional conditions, the more you come to understand the underlying physical patterns as well. The one is linked inextricably to the other. Work with your emotional health and your physical health will improve also.
Speaker 1:Another association between emotions and the physical body is that of repressed or controlled emotions. They cause blockages within the energy flow of the astral, etheric and therefore the physical body. They can also be stored in the musculature, causing skeletal structures to be pulled out of place. I spent many years as a practising deep body work, masseuse, and worked with deeply trapped emotions. All the time I had fit young men in tears on my table and women finally expressing their anger. Emotions affect people in so many different ways and it is so important to become aware of this within your own life. Another thing to become aware of and to work with are emotional triggers what triggers your deep emotions and why?
Speaker 1:When you find yourself being triggered, try and use the steps described earlier If you can excuse yourself from the situation triggering you, even if it's just for a few minutes, and just sit with the emotion, acknowledge it and try and achieve a level of detachment. And be aware if, for instance, you find yourself angry with someone, it might not be that you are particularly angry with them, but rather something they said, their tone or something they did triggered unconscious behaviours to do with past experiences, and I will be talking about subconscious behavioural patterns and how to work with them in a future podcast. I'll give an example. I recently experienced being triggered at work. I have very strong but loving boundaries about what I will or won't do at work. I was trying to explain calmly my reasons for not working on a particular campaign to my supervisor when, at a certain part in the conversation, I felt incredibly angry which is very unusual for me my mind immediately started coming up with all sorts of explanations and projecting a lot of the blame onto work and my supervisor. So I took the time to simply sit with the emotion and allow it to express itself a little, and it very soon occurred to me that I was triggered because my supervisor had not listened to me and had been dismissive of my explanation. It was as simple as that. This was the trigger for all my life. People, starting with my parents and my family, have not listened to me. I have not been heard. But now, the next time I'm triggered, I'll be able to laugh at myself and say learnt that lesson. And what actually happened in this case was the anger turned to compassion for my supervisor, who was under a lot of pressure and stress at the time. I apologised to her and she ended up apologising to me, and it created a new level of understanding between us.
Speaker 1:The next stage of emotional health is when you become aware of your own emotions. You can begin to discern what are not your own emotions. You develop a level of discernment and, as you progress along a spiritual path, you eventually develop a very strong empathy and start to pick up on the emotions of others. Become aware of suddenly feeling down or angry for no apparent reason, especially when you're with friends or family. If you're anxious or fearful when a company is discussing the news, for instance, you're anxious or fearful when a company is discussing the news, for instance, or overexcited when with a crowd, perhaps at a football match or a music festival. Now I'm not saying don't allow yourself to feel excited. Just become aware of what is your own excitement and what is the emotion of the crowd. Practice discernment, particularly when it comes to manipulation by advertising and by the media. Also, start to become aware of the animal part of the brain and the fight and flight responses to potentially dangerous situations. Fight and flight responses to potentially dangerous situations. Those patterns are still in place, even though we are no longer chased by predators or warring tribes. Again, I will talk about these subconscious behaviours in a future podcast, but just begin to become aware of the emotions related to those behaviours.
Speaker 1:And one last thing I want to share with you is the power of the saying.
Speaker 1:This too will pass. This one phrase, repeated over and over as often as it took, saved my life. When emotions control, you sit with them, remember to breathe, acknowledge them, do not try and ignore or repress them and repeat. This too will pass, because it always does, and slowly over time you will develop detachment and then choice, and then the joy of the expression of the qualities of soul consciousness will come, until those powerful, negative, controlling emotions are a thing of the past and you experience divine love, peace and compassion to agree of so much power as you cannot conceive of it at this time, develop awareness, develop clarity and when it comes, you will be ready for it.
Speaker 1:If you want to find me, I will be doing podcasts on the app Wisdom and Saturday and a Sunday at 7pm at GMT, where you're very happy and welcome to come along and guest on my talks there on that app. You can also find me on various social media sites, including Facebook, and I would love to see you there. This is me signing off. Take care out there. Much love to you all.