Posted by in Inspiration, Inspirational | 0 Comments

Disposing of Emotional Baggage

emotions01

Many people walk through life weighting more and more each year. They don’t look bigger, yet somehow, they walk slowly and stop way too often along the road. They seem tired and unhappy and the load on their shoulders is preventing them from looking up.

The emotional baggage you can get stuck with is full of memories, trauma and fears. You become trapped in a circle of helplessness and limitations and you can’t find your way out. Spinning around the same orbit means that you are losing interest in finding a way out. You don’t know what’s out there, beyond the grasp of your hands, and you prefer the comfort of routine.

There is nothing good about carrying your negative emotions trough life. Some may say that keeping the skeletons of the past near you will prevent future disappointment from occurring. Others may say that fear is our supreme teacher that kept us alive. What life is that where you make a prayer and look around before taking any single step? What good is to create a museum for your negative events and visit it every day?

Negative emotions can be equaled with huge levels of stress that are following you around the day and prevent you from enjoying life. You create limiting beliefs about you and others. You will take the habit of rejecting everything outside those beliefs. You basically lay down the stones for creating a prison. You think you are protecting yourself from any outside danger but what you actually do is isolate yourself with your thoughts. And this is far from being a good solution.

We are gifted with something incredibly useful for this kind of situations – the ability to forget. Reaching for new days, new people, a new love, will generate fresh memories and lay to rest what has become old and distorted. At least once in life you deserve the chance of starting from zero, of forgetting your emotional baggage at the check in and flying to a destination you don’t known. Being in defense mode for most of your life, you probably forgot what it means to lose control and let life be life. It’s all about embracing every opportunity, about risking when chances are slim. If you play the cards only when you have a good hand you could end-up waiting your entire life for the perfect circumstances.

The honest truth can sometimes hurt. Most of your beloved emotional baggage is in fact garbage. It’s messy, bulky and it probably stinks. You don’t want to share that with your new partner or show it to your new friends. It’s your mess and you have to deal with it. The good news is that there are various ways of dealing with garbage. You can use most of them as analogies for your problem. Consulting a therapist and letting him browse through your garbage is a form of recycling. He will make sure to sort things out, each for its right category. You won’t get rid of all the garbage, but it will get compacted to a form more easy to carry around and look at. For some trash there is an even more radical way of dealing it – composting. Basically you let things decay. The beauty behind this dirty job is that the resulting compound is very fertile. The same way you can take your inner and most hurtful feelings from your soul, pull them out and let them decompose.

Making your emotional baggage more compact and easy to carry means you have learned to fully understand the past, accept that things can’t be undone and stop thinking about ways to extract new meanings. The next thing you need to accept is the present. There are no magic red shoes for you to wake up in your dream scenario. Instant change is a myth, but the decision to pursuit change can be something you can anchor in the present. The only thing you don’t want to accept is your future. If a page is unwritten, no force in the universe can direct the pen to articulate certain words and sentences. Once you escaped from your emotional prison and let go to your unwanted baggage, there is no excuse for rejecting a hand reaching to grab yours. Your hands are now free.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>