(Running into the tornado — turning toward feeling instead of fleeing)
So I began to ask myself the question, “What is it internally that I don’t want?” More than that, “What is it that I am internally moving away from?” Lo and behold, I discovered that my sense of “desperation” was actually keeping me from feeling despair, from a complete absence of hope. Losing hope is the most intense feeling of powerlessness in the range of human emotions. Some part of me was convinced that slipping into despair meant death, so that part of me had been resisting despair in order to survive.
wanted death. And so I did the opposite of what I had always done. I turned around and I ran straight into the tornado. I committed emotional suicide. I didn’t know what would happen, but I did it anyway. I was in for a surprise. For a moment, I drowned in the misery of heavy anguish. It felt like I was being crushed, bruised, and broken. I took a breath. Instead of pulling away from it, I went deeper; I gave the feeling permission to consume me. I allowed it as if it had a valid reason to be there. And soon, like sunrays penetrating the depths of the ocean, I experienced a lightness of being. I felt relief. The fear of the feeling itself was evaporated by my choice to dive into the feeling instead.
I tried it almost every time I was confronted with an uncomfortable feeling that I was tempted to run away from.
(Emotional inheritance and the inner child)
So many souls in this world need healing, and I had discovered that it all starts with really feeling our emotions. In the womb, we humans felt sensations from the world before we even saw it. When we first come into this life as tiny babies, we experience the world entirely through perception. As we proceed through life, we carry the emotional tone of our childhood into our adulthood. It’s a learned vibrational state that we build upon and add to.
We will spend our lives trying to “fix” ourselves with little to no success.
As we matured, one part of us grew up but the other part stayed a child. This inner child symbolizes our emotional selves. Regardless of your childhood experiences, good or bad, the adult part of you grew up, despite not getting everything it needed as a child. Therefore, your adult self holds the key to healing.
My wish for you is that you experience the kind of joyous life that is available only to those who are willing to courageously journey deep within themselves, resurrecting the aspects of themselves that have been lost.
(Trauma as the common thread; the Completion Process as doorway)
SEEKING THE GREAT RECONCILIATION The Completion Process is the doorway to liberation. It’s a way to put yourself back together again so you are no longer inhibited by the past or terrified of the future.
Others succumb to addiction to try to drown out the pain of emptiness. All of the difficult circumstances that we struggle with have one thing in common: trauma.
A person might not even be consciously aware of the trauma, even when it causes serious grief in day-to-day life.
(Triggers as invitations to re-integrate lost parts)
A trigger is anything that helps you recall or bring to the surface a traumatic memory from your past. It can be a word, a tone of voice, a smell, a sensation, a face, a place, or any situation or thing that causes you to feel unsettled or fearful.
In this way, a trigger is a reminder of a previous wound and it is a signal to address the issue. Triggers are not negative or unwanted in this scenario; rather, they are an invitation for you to re-integrate fractured aspects back into your being.
In nature, the more streams that re-integrate with the river, the more water is available to the river. Since your consciousness is, in fact, a huge stream of energy, each time you re-integrate a lost part of yourself, you will have more energy and enjoy a greater level of consciousness than you had before the re-integration. When you become OK with the fact that you are a masterpiece that’s always a work in progress, you will learn to find peace and also joy in this continual expansion. Rest assured, the better it gets, the better it gets.
Each time you reach a new level of enlightenment, there’s always more expansion on the horizon; there is no such thing as an enlightened retirement.
(Healing as unconditional presence, not forced change)
Even the word “healing” can be a bit misleading. Generally “healing” implies that something is not OK as it is. This, in and of itself, is the primary “wound” that all of us carry: something from our past is not OK. The beauty of the Completion Process is that the very thing doing the healing is the presence of consciousness in the form of attention that you are offering to that wound. By being unconditionally present with an inner wound, you are finally making it OK to feel exactly how you feel.
As we apply the Completion Process, we are not needing or asking our emotions to change. Our emotions change precisely because we are not asking them or forcing them to do anything.
How could I deal with the outside world when my internal world was a living hell? Every day I would wish I could just die. Either something had to drastically change or I was convinced I would die. That is when the Completion Process entered my life.
(The body, mind, and wounded child all need you)
Consider what is rising up within you right now. Your body needs you. Your mind needs you. Your feelings need you. Your painful perceptions need you. The wounded children within you need you. Your suffering needs you. It is time to really be there for all of these parts that have been crying out to you for so long.
This has been happening because you’ve been giving yourself the message that you only want to be present with yourself in the moment if your life is going well and if you are feeling positive emotion. This has made you a fair-weather friend to yourself. More than that, you have set conditions for loving yourself. This is the deepest form of betrayal.
(The subconscious as keeper of suppressed belief and memory)
Your subconscious mind is in control of everything that is not being attended to by your conscious mind. If we had to think about keeping our hearts beating, digesting food, and our beliefs, we couldn’t focus. Focusing is what enables us to create, to learn, and to evolve. Focusing is what the conscious mind does best. The subconscious mind is in charge of your beliefs, all of your previous life experiences, your memories, and the skills you’ve already acquired.
The subconscious mind takes over control of anything that interferes with the conscious mind.
You would then have no conscious awareness of your original thought or belief. You would simply observe that the minute you get too close or intimate with someone, you pull away and end the relationship. As a grown person, you’re only aware of the symptom; the root cause of that symptom remains deeply buried in your subconscious mind.
(Even minor childhood wounds register as survival-level threat)
It’s traumatic to a baby to be weaned from its mother’s milk. It’s traumatic to a three-year-old to lose track of his mother in a grocery store.
And be aware that what might seem like a somewhat minor trauma, such as perhaps a childhood disappointment, does not feel minor when you’re experiencing it.
For example, the mind suppresses the images associated with the memory deeper than the emotions associated with the memory. For this reason, people who recover suppressed memories often perceive them or begin to remember them in fragments, which is why it can be so confusing to go through the process of recovering them.
Now we understand that when dissociation is viewed on a spectrum, on one side you might have a person rejecting her feelings of anger, and on the other side, you might have a person separating from her entire identity in order to escape a horrific event.
What is acceptable or unacceptable depends on the perspective of the family you’re born into.
(Relational survival — suppressing what is disapproved of)
So, because we are relationally dependent, we will do anything in the name of survival to reject (and therefore suppress) those aspects of ourselves that are disapproved of while exaggerating those that are approved of.
So now we know that when we reject (and therefore suppress) something, it doesn’t disappear. It just fades from our awareness.
Self-awareness doesn’t come naturally to those who avoid pain because to become aware of those lost aspects, you must stop trying to escape the emptiness within you where those missing parts should be.
Each person reflects to the other person what is missing within the self.
(Projection — seeing in others what we rejected in ourselves)
The crucial thing to understand is that we can see the things in other people that we are totally unaware of in ourselves. This is the essence of projection. When we see our own negative aspects (those that we ourselves had previously rejected) show up in others, it triggers a response. We have the same reaction to that aspect that we had to it long ago: reject it, hate it, get rid of it, do anything to avoid it! On the other hand, when we see our own positive aspects (that we had previously rejected) show up in another person, we fall in love because it feels like our opportunity to become whole. We want more of it. We become addicted to it. We glorify it, put it on a pedestal, and even idolize it.
The more you hate something in someone else, the more you rejected that same trait within yourself long ago. And the more you love something you see in someone else, the more you rejected it in yourself long ago.
Preparing Yourself For The Completion Process
“Every experience I have while doing the Completion Process is valid, and every experience I have while doing the Completion Process is the right one for me. It’s the exact experience that I need at this time.”
You might be haunted by it or not even remember it, but the circumstance in your current life that you think is the cause of your upset is just a trigger from a prior wound, a wound that needs your attention. Because triggers today help you see the wounds you have tried to suppress, the triggers are beneficial instead of detrimental.
Looking at triggers this way, you can use them to your advantage. You can see each trigger as a wide-open opportunity for integration.
Once you have become familiar with the “feeling flavor” that is being experienced in your body upon waking that day, start to do the rest of the Completion Process. You can use this morning ritual in addition to using the process anytime you are triggered throughout the day.
(The inner enemy illusion — pain is not against you)
When we think that an emotional pain is trying to hurt us, it begins to feel like we are living with an enemy inside our own skin, as if an aspect of ourselves has turned against us and is trying to destroy us. But because it’s inside us, we can’t escape it.
This is one reason why it’s often so difficult for people to consciously recall their traumatic memories. Some years down the line, when we have achieved safety, the old memory, especially the emotions associated with the memory, begin to try to re-integrate it. This is when we start having flashbacks or begin to feel triggers.
(What the inner child actually needs from the adult self)
The child self doesn’t need to grow up and defend himself. The child self needs to be allowed to be a child and to have an adult who parents him in the proper way. The child self needs an adult who cares about him enough to be unconditionally present, to meet his needs, and to alter the circumstance so the child’s experience feels better.
Your child self may not instantly trust you, so you may have to demonstrate your unconditional care for a while before he can come to trust you. This is all good. When you are demonstrating your unconditional care for your inner child, you are demonstrating your unconditional care for yourself. So as an adult, you are also learning to trust yourself again. It may be helpful to tell your inner child what year it actually is and what is going on or why you have chosen to come back in time to interact with him.