Spiritual Telepathy: Ancient Techniques to Access The Wisdom of Your Soul by colleen mauro

Author:colleen mauro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quest Books
Published: 2015-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE EMOTIONAL BODY

From the earliest times, the need to quiet our emotions has been seen as an essential step on the road to spiritual development. To access higher wisdom and guidance, our emotional bodies must be still and calm. In most spiritual disciplines, the emphasis is put on quieting the mental body. When we refine our bodies, it’s best to work from the bottom up. Quieting the mind becomes easier when our emotional bodies are calm.

As Jacob Needleman points out, Socrates and Plato both wrote of a universal intelligence that could awaken in man only when our emotions are mastered. The early Christians called these emotions “passions” and considered them to be a serious impediment to the pursuit of spiritual growth. Needleman has also studied the work of a fourth-century Christian named Evagrius Ponticus, who wrote of apatheia—Greek for “without emotions” or “freedom from emotions,” the root of our word apathy—as the “door to contemplation.” As Ponticus wrote, the practice of apatheia is an essential step in our spiritual journey, one that will eventually lead to a “deep understanding of God and the universe.”13

Refining the emotional body is one of the biggest challenges, and the most important. Emotional turmoil will block our reception of information from the subtle planes. Our goal in purifying the emotional body is to develop a quiet spirit, a feeling of inner serenity and peace. Our emotional patterns—childhood wounds and unresolved conflicts, anger, or grief—can make inner serenity impossible to maintain.

When Jack Kornfield began to teach meditation practices, he discovered that at least half his students were unable to master the basic concentration exercises. Hindered by old wounds and unfinished business from the past, they found it impossible to sit quietly and maintain a focused point of attention. Kornfield, who spent ten years healing the trauma caused by his own painful childhood, has written extensively on the need to incorporate Western psychotherapy into contemplative spiritual practices.14

Most of the people I spoke to went through a similar process of confronting and clearing out old wounds and traumas. For many of us, this is a necessary first step. Letting go of our daily upsets, antagonisms, and envy of others is an ongoing process. Most of us have a trigger—some issue that creates emotional imbalance—be it anger, fear, or worry. My biggest problem is anger, and I’ve struggled with it a lot over the years. I’ve experimented with a variety of practices and found the practices below—harmlessness, forgiveness, compassion, and the nightly review, in addition to the heart-opening practices in chapter 2—to be the most helpful in calming my emotional body.

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