Feeling back to the same point?

by Jorge Lara
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Hey there, would you let me tell you a very short story about thouse emotions that keep coming back? :)
Imagine yourself walking on the path of life. You find tall and green trees on the sides, some beautiful flowers which tickle your nose, there is freshness in the weather, you hear the sound of a river, and you feel a sense of joy and aliveness within you.
Suddenly there is something far ahead. Your mind starts to wander, your joyfulness drops, and you experience some contraction in your body. There is something wrong, and you are not new to this; it is a kind of emotion that you have already felt before. Damn it. The closer you go to this place, the stronger you feel the emotion. And once again, you notice you totally dislike the feeling. You sense it starts to become more and more uncomfortable and overwhelming. So you decide that you need a strategy to avoid getting closer to this strong emotion you dislike. Finally, you come out with an excellent alternative that will let you keep walking on your path of life without facing this emotion anymore. However, there still is a sense of contraction, stress and incompleteness from what you have seen, a feeling which will stay with you for a while.

You keep walking on this "new" alternative path, but the same starts to happen after some time. You see it, avoid it, and find a new alternative. Again and again, until you reach the moment where you realize you are living in a loop of emotions. Each of your emotions keeps on coming back. They bring you a sense of heaviness, stress, anxiety, meaninglessness, anguish, and more than you can put in words.
It feels like you are trapped, and you don't know how to change it. So you try new things, new alternatives. You read all the self-help/philosophy/psychology books you can find. You start to have fun. You numb yourself with alcohol. You try to find change by altering your diet. You travel to new places to become a new you. And all those times, you promise yourself that things will change. But they don't, at least not for long. Things do change. But after a while, you constantly find yourself back at the same point; the same emotion, the same stress and the same contraction in your body. So you learn how to take detours to get to the same point of temporary relief. These detours can be long, they can be short, but you'll end up in the same place again and again. And every time you are in that place, you choose avoidance. BUT, What if? What if instead of seeing it as an unwanted emotion, you see it as something that comes back because it NEEDS to be SEEN and NEEDS to be TAKEN CARE of.

Would you like me to walk next to you on that path? Like many of us, you might feel more comfortable and safe when you travel to this place with someone accompanying you. Once we notice that we are getting closer to this emotion, we together learn how you can choose a different approach. We'll be awake to the reality of this and find a way to deal with those emotions in the exact moment when you'd previously have followed the path to escape.