Emotions and Integration

by Christina Pratt

The main reason people get stuck integrating their soul parts is their inexperience in feeling emotions and letting them flow. Most people have learned to reflexively block emotions or over indulge them. As a result, they don't complete their integration process.

The remedy is to cultivate emotional intelligence and self awareness. Emotions are a package deal, not a menu. We need access to them all to be Whole. The only "bad" emotion is a stuck emotion. It's how we deal with emotions that is or is not life affirming. †

How do we learn to deal with emotions well and get unstuck? First we must amend our beliefs to include the belief that an enormous wealth of healing will come from feeling our feelings? Then we must cultivate emotional intelligence, the art of mindful body awareness. Emotional intelligence is comprised of five essential capacities: Sensitivity-the ability to feel the emotion, Literacy-the ability to distinguish between different emotions, Mindfulness-the awareness of the emotion, Flow-the ability to surrender to the experience of the emotion, and Intention-the ability to focus the mind to use the experience for personal transformation.*

Developing these capabilities will take a focused effort over time and a willingness to learn, change, and feel. You can't buy this treasure in a weekend workshop. But, you can begin there, or even in a book. The following is a short list of readings. Developing these skills is a focus of everything offered by the Last Mask Center for Shamanic Healing.

* Miriam Greenspan, Common Boundary (May/June) 1998

† Rachel Naomi Remen, Advances (Spring 1996), and Daniel P. Goleman's, Emotional Intelligence.