The Six Steps to Less Stress
We have identified six steps for letting go of our stuffed emotional pain. Stuffed emotional pain often shows up in our lives as depression, stress, addiction (some of which on the surface may seem "healthy"), controlling behaviors, strained relationships, manipulation, withdrawal, insomnia, anger and the list goes on.
Consistently using this six step process for letting go of our stuffed emotional pain will allow you to live with less stress and a greater sense of self purpose and self worth.
The six step process will also allow you easily arrive at what we call Inner-Knowing; the capacity to access our deepest wisdom or understanding. Some people call this state of Inner-Knowing intuition, or a gut feeling, it could also be called eureka, or creativity, or excellence.
The six steps of accessing Inner-Knowing are:
Pre-Recognition (denial)
Recognition
Safety
Awareness
Letting Go
Inner-Knowing
We have been teaching this process for many years. It is deeply ingrained in each of us as human beings. Unfortunately, most of us have not been taught by our culture to access it intentionally. In fact, we have actually been taught not to use the process but to stuff our pain and our feelings.
As a child anyone remember hearing “big boys don’t cry”, “I will give you something to cry about”, “have a cupcake”, "sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me", etc? I am sure each of you can also think of catchy phrases you learned as a child that taught you to stuff your feelings.
Again, those stuffed feelings don't just go away. They get stored and color our perception of the world and our behaviors. Not to be overly dramatic but in extreme cases, it’s why we have people go postal or commit suicide or numb themselves with drugs. For most of us, these stuffed feelings show up in less dramatic but still significant ways in our lives.
Over the next several weeks we will be going through each of the steps in more detail. Next week we will start with an example of how the process works.