The Inner-Soul Work That Will Heal Your Negative Triggers
I come to you today with a life lesson about our tender spots.
We allll have them. They’re those trigger points that lie dormant within us as we attempt to go about life as mostly happy and healthy people. That is, until someone accidentally touches one and we FEEEEL it. Like REALLY feel it so, so deeply, to our CORE. Something within us (I imagine it as a rabid dog leashed to a chain) immediately wants to attack. The innocent person who happened to touch that soft spot is then subject to either becoming the victim of our wrath or the victim of our passive aggressive cold shoulder — depending on our personality and state of mind in the moment.
Some of us have more tender spots than others. If we’re on a path to spiritual mastery, as I would say I am, then it’s pretty shocking when one of these inner-demons pops up!
I came face to face with one of my tender spots this week during a seemingly innocent interpersonal exchange and my knee-jerk emotional reaction was anger and a need to defend myself.
You’ll know it’s from a tender spot as opposed to a conscious reaction when you react automatically. Only to look at it in hindsight and go “hmmm. Was that the best reaction?” or if you’re not as in-touch with your higher self you’ll probably go “hmmm… but that other person shouldn’t have done that!” and go on to have 5 of your closest friends validate you.
I personally knew it was an unconscious reaction because, if you know me, you know that I almost NEVER get angry. I’m the epitome of a balanced Libra always seeking harmony in all areas of my life. To avoid the discomfort of confrontation or rocking the boat, I’ll put up with a little more than the average person, I guess. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely get annoyed at things here and there (I’m human after all!), but anger is a very rarely visited emotion.
After reading, The Power of Now (along with all my other spiritually attuned books) and getting super familiar with how the mind works and its love for conflict and separateness, I quickly noticed that I was having an unconscious reaction (after texting two confidants to validate myself of course). I was feeling so defensive and personally attacked in the moment because I was over-identifying with my mind, as Tolle explains it in his book, and the comment triggered my “pain-body” (same thing as what I call a tender spot).
As long as you are unable to access the power of the Now every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body.”
“This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. … It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100% of the time. … anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past.”
– (The Power of Now — Chapter 2: Consciousness: The Way Out of Pain)
How to soothe your tender spots: Re-Parenting
Any negative reaction you have, especially the ones that seem out of your control, is the result of mild to severe trauma experienced during your formative years. As I understand it, while our brains are forming and we’re learning to cope with the world around us, we optimize our behavior in order to ensure that we receive love. We make compromises and learn how to act, in order to gain acceptance from our family and our peers. Any insecurities that were touched on in our youth, tends to stay with us in our unconscious as we age. That is, unless we learn to unprogram that conditioning.
Re-Parenting is one of the ways I’ve recently learned of for unprogramming unconscious fears and limitations. I first became familiar with this term from podcast interviews with Lacy Phillips of Free + Native who is a manifestation master here in LA.
I personally knew little more than the surface level of what re-parenting was or would before this week’s experience. I’ve read things about the little child within us needing us to give it the love that it didn’t receive from our parents when we were younger (and no shade to our parents who can’t give us something they don’t have themselves). I’d heard about the concept before, but not much about how to go about it. Through Jess Lively’s podcast, I’d heard of Marisa Peer’s RTT (Rapid Transformational Therapy) methodology, but that requires hiring a professional to guide you through the process.
My own healing experience
I happen to be a big fan of the Insight Timer app for meditation now-a-days. Using it every morning either just for the timer or using one of its millions of guided meditations. I had used it that morning and, after the emotional shift I used it again to guide myself to healing.
Directly after my unwelcome angry reaction and sub-sequential peer validating, I was determined to find my way back to peace. I did an at-home yoga flow with my favorite yoga YouTuber, Yoga with Adriene, and laid in Savasana extra-long to soak in the cleansing effect of my practice. Since my body was well relaxed and stretched, I skimmed through Insight Timer and perfectly happened upon Joelle Anderson’s “Transform Your Feelings: Inner Child Work” meditation and commenced the 20-minute inner-work session.
The meditation guided me through some cleansing breaths, then a body scan to get a feel for my body. It turns out, the places where we hold tension actually hold our pain Thus the term “pain-body.” I noticed that my right shoulder felt especially heavy as I was in this state of presence with myself. (It was interesting that I chose that location, since the tension above my right eyebrow is the ongoing everyday tension that I notice most obviously.) Either way, I focused on my shoulder as I was guided to describe the feeling as much as possible. It’s texture, its color, its shape, etc. and then I was guided to think of another time when I’d felt this same feeling.
Surprisingly enough, a memory that I hadn’t thought of in a seriously long time came to mind. I was in elementary school at the time and I was sitting on a school bus waiting to go home when my best friend at the time (who lived behind my house) told me she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. Just like that, I’d experienced my first break-up.
Joelle’s voice guided me to give my younger self the love that she needed in that moment and I attempted to provide my younger self with some comforting words as little me sat on that school bus, freshly rejected and abandoned. After that, she guides us to ask ourselves what we need to learn from the experience and tap into our intuitive guidance. I immediately heard from myself that my heavy feeling was the result of wanting so badly to be approved by others and to get love from others.
As I returned to my awake state, I felt inspired to do a rampage of forgiveness in my journal. I forgave myself for holding on to hurt, for perpetuating self-torture, for drinking poison and hoping others suffer, etc. etc.
This process helped me soooo so immensely. I wasn’t exactly ready to lovingly embrace the person who touched on my sore spot, but I was at a place of much more understanding and weirdly enough, I was grateful for the opportunity to heal that deeply-lodged wound. Maybe this process will help you, too!
Here’s to more healing, more growth, and more peace.
Originally posted on my personal blog Brightly Illuminated, where I document my perspective as a millennial post-grad trying to make sense of the “real world” by shedding light as I learn life lessons and spreading upliftment.
