How our history impacts our current happiness

Hi again Everyone

I’ve been asked to contribute a chapter to a book titled, How to be Happy. It will be published by mid-2022, and will be available in various formats. This is my contributing chapter. Enjoy!

How our history impacts our current happiness

Imagine, that when you were little, you were born into the world carrying an invisible sack. And as you grew bigger, you stored away your memories and experiences into that sack – all your experiences, good and bad, all the knowledge and information that you picked up, everything that happened to you as you grew from childhood into young adulthood, and beyond.

Well, when I think of that, I see the sack as being a part of my subconscious mind, that effectively remembers every second of my life, that stores away everything into the deep recesses of my mind, that never forgets, and that runs automatically in the best ways it knows how to protect me by keeping my lungs breathing, my heart pumping, as well as a myriad other functional things that my subconscious does for me without my conscious awareness – including creating limiting belief systems, negative self-talk and automatic responses that I demonstrate in given situations, based on my experiences.

So far, in my understanding from working with hundreds of people and indeed with myself, I’ve found that the sub-conscious mind ‘hangs onto’ life-shock events and how we responded to them for many years after we, on a conscious level, believe we’ve moved forwards and left past traumas behind. And I think this is because, try as we might, using personal development tools and techniques like positive affirmations such as “I am enough,” we’re working on a conscious mind level and it takes many, many repeats of those affirmations to get right down into the subconscious level and change a limiting belief system.

I have also found that the subconscious is so good at wanting to protect us, that it ‘builds walls’ – energetic walls – around our hearts in order to protect us from feeling further hurt. These are called ‘Heart Walls’, and I first learnt about them through the writings of Dr Bradley Nelson, a teacher and intuitive healer. When – if – we experience overwhelming grief, heartache, vulnerability, the subconscious may step in and create walls around our hearts to protect us. And these walls do protect us – but as well as acting as a filter to filter out more hurt and distress, Heart Walls can limit the amount of love, abundance, joy and happiness coming in.

My experience to date with Heart Walls and the old, trapped emotional baggage from outdated experiences that causes our sub-conscious to build the walls is that people can present with physical symptoms as well as emotional ones. So, for example, I’ve known people to have heart palpitations, that they have gone to their doctor for help with, but no cause has been detected. Some people have pain behind their shoulders, and/or neck pain – again – there is no medical reason detected that seems to be causing this. Some people are breathless – again, no medical reason presents itself. These issues are sometimes regarded as ‘chronic’ because they are ongoing despite no cause being identified.

On an emotional level, people present with many symptoms. Some of these – that I have encountered so far – are

• Anger issues – ‘short fuse’
• Relationship issues – can’t seem to find ‘the right partner’/no interest in dating because of bad experiences
• Being ‘stuck’ in patterns that they can’t break – like, relationships with the ‘wrong people,’ being unable to find the ‘right job or boss,’ procrastination and self-sabotaging behaviours
• Lack of confidence, feelings of being unworthy, not enough, unlovable
• Self-abuse – either physical (alcohol, drugs, self-harming behaviours like cutting) or mental – (negative self-talk).

I’ve found that typically, people with the symptoms listed above are living lives that they’re not terribly happy with.

Ongoing physical pain or discomfort can be debilitating and limiting – people don’t want to get out and do things because their discomfort holds them back, or makes them feel exhausted and restricted. Ongoing emotional pain means that very often, we keep on attracting the things we don’t want, because this is the pattern from our pasts that we’re familiar with, and we don’t know how to change it. This can manifest as more unhappy relationships, more dis-satisfaction in work and careers, more addictive behaviours … and the more we experience any of these, the more inclined we are to regard ourselves as ‘failures’ and probably deserving of nothing better. We convince ourselves that our history determines our future, and so often – it does! It feels like a viscous cycle …

The thing about everything I’ve listed above, is that often people know they have issues – they just don’t know what to do about it, they don’t know how to change their lives and get different outcomes.

Enter intuitive energy healing.

Many people are familiar with the term ‘energy healing.’ Essentially the practitioner channels energy from outside of him/herself for the benefit of the person they are working with. There are many different types of energy healing – probably the most well-known methodology is Reiki, but there are many out there such as Crystal healing, Quantum healing, Body Talk, to name a few.

Intuitive energy healing is healing done by someone who has a deep well of intuition to draw on and identify what is at the root of and causing the illness or unhappiness of the person being treated.

Let’s have a look at the kinds of transformations intuitive energy healing can offer!

Mother of two *Joanne came to me because she felt like she was in a constant state of indecision, she felt blocked and stuck, on autopilot. She was frustrated by her endless self-sabotaging behaviours and procrastination; she just didn’t know how to get ‘past herself.’

When I checked her, I found she had several Trapped Emotions (old, outdated feelings that she was unable to process at the time she felt them and thus had held onto, or ‘trapped’). Some of these were Heart Wall emotions – in my mind’s eye, these are ‘bricks’ or emotions that build a ‘wall’ around the heart. She also had a limiting belief system that her sub-conscious mind had created, saying “I’ve done enough, it’s time to stop now.” She had created this at the end of her university career during her final exams, which she found challenging and overwhelming.

I saw Joanne for two sessions, and during that time cleared the emotional baggage and limiting belief systems she was carrying. After that I didn’t hear from her for a month or so, until she sent me a text message telling me of the surprising turn her life had taken. In it, she said, “I wanted to update you on where I’m at since my sessions with you. We focused on my most important issue which was feeling stuck and unable to move forwards with life and indecision. Well, not long after our last session, I came to a decision about my career which I’ve been unable to decide for more than a decade! I applied to University to study for my Masters degree and have been accepted! I start in September! I’m feeling happier and more excited than I’ve felt for years!”

Our energy healing sessions had facilitated remarkable shifts for her – helping her move from a space of stuck-ness, procrastination and indecision, to a space where she was ready to take a very positive leap forwards towards her, as yet, unrealised dreams.

I did see Joanne again – it was eight months later, when she unexpectedly booked another session with me. The reason she booked it was because she had to, as part of her Masters, give presentations to her peers. She found this enormously difficult to do, and every time it was her turn she felt overwhelmed with fear and anxiety about public speaking. She was so anxious, she had difficulty sleeping the night before.

During her session we cleared Trapped Emotions, a resistance anchor rooted in fear saying “I have to get this right,” as well as some Emotional Resonances which were resonating with a vibration of fear.

The feedback I got from Joanne a few weeks later was positive and excited. She was astonished at how much more confident and happier she was in her studies in general, but specifically she was thrilled that, “ … when I stand up to speak now, I’m feeling excited and eager to give my presentation. Yes, I do continue to practise everything before my talk, but I’m no longer faking it – I’m able to smile confidently at my audience and speak authoritatively about my topic. I’m really happy that I feel this way, I’m happy that I can do what I need to do easily and with so much less effort than before. My lecturer even remarked on how much better my talks are and asked if I have been getting coached on presentation skills!”

This from the woman who previously felt almost crippled with anxiety when called upon to give a presentation! Note that her confidence has soared, as you’d expect given her achievements – and with confidence comes greater self-love and belief, which she’ll build on going forwards. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle, rather she is now in an empowerment cycle.

I met *Fatima because a friend of hers had worked with me on her neuralgic headaches, and referred Fatima to me. I was amused when we had our initial discovery call – Fatima lives in India, so all our sessions were done remotely – she believed energy healing was a load of rubbish. She told me this quite candidly, but because she was at her wit’s end as to what she could do to help herself, she was prepared to give it a go.

Fatima suffered from debilitating fibromyalgia. It was making her miserable, it was extremely limiting and exhausting. She told me that her fibro manifested sometimes as whole-body pain, and as migraines. She found that it came and went in bursts, but that wasn’t necessarily with her, consistently. For the previous two weeks she had experienced pain in her palms and fingers, to the extent that she had been unable to open doors. She mentioned that if she does too much physical work – like cleaning the house, it triggered the pain. She said, “Sometimes it’s just too much and I can’t do anything – which makes me very anxious about possibly not being able to work at all; at some future point.”

We did two sessions – one as a one-to-one, and one as a Healing Circle session.

What came up for her were physical misalignments and imbalances in her ligaments. The imbalances were supported by a Will to Die energy – created at 18 and probably in reaction to the extreme pain she had experienced with her fibro at that age. There were many Trapped Emotions associated with or supporting the Will to Die energy, some of them dating from when she was 8 years old. In my experience so far, this is not uncommon – we are unable to deal with trauma and life-shock events throughout our lives and for her, this inability dated from early on in her life, and the negative energy of her 8-year-old feelings were still impacting her in her forties.

She did send me feedback between her two sessions, telling me how she was getting on as she processed and integrated her healing. She was noticing, along with her physical adjustments, greater happiness and contentment as well as a sudden burst in energy where she was moved to give her house a good going-over and a spring clean!

After her final session, she sent me this text message, “I really can’t thank you enough for carrying me on this healing journey. Apart from a couple of migraines (because I had to do some late nights at work), I have been doing perfectly fine. It feels great to be pain free. Heartiest gratitude for making it happen for me. I have no idea how it worked, as you are well aware of how sceptical I initially was, but it’s magical. I am thrilled. And will recommend to everyone and anyone.”

I laughed out loud about her scepticism comment. Yes, in our discovery call I could feel the disbelief radiating off her. I’m so pleased that she took ownership for her pain, she took ownership for her healing, and she did something about it. She suspended her disbelief, and she got a wonderful result. Comparing her choice of words before our sessions to her final feedback after her sessions, I have to conclude that she’s in a much happier space than she was previously. She seems to be more expansive, excited, positive!

What I know so far about our states of being, of our mindsets, of our life experiences – is that they all contribute to how we are, now. That if we have hurts in our past that we’ve been unable to release, very often what’s happening for us in the now is an echo, or a mirror image of the past, or is triggered and magnified by memories of the past. If our experiences in the past have led us to feel undeserving and unworthy, then how we behave in the now may reflect that. We all seem to manifest old, outdated baggage that we’re carrying, differently. Joanne manifested hers in the form of procrastination and self-sabotaging behaviours. Fatima manifested hers in the form of physical illness and unhappiness.

How have you, manifested yours?

Tips to process and let the emotions go before they get stuck

One of the ways to process what’s happening to you when you notice negative feelings appearing in your body is to choose to acknowledge the emotion by saying out loud; “I am angry. I am disappointed. I am sad.” If you can pinpoint what caused this feeling, then do so, and again out loud say, “I am angry because I felt ignored when I wanted to talk about our relationship. I am disappointed because he was late and that makes me feel like he doesn’t care about me.” Then make another choice by saying, “Even though he didn’t want to talk about our relationship and I felt angry, now I choose to feel neutral about it and get on with something else instead.”

This last bit – about choosing to feel neutral about the incident and getting on with things – is important.  It seems that natural reflection – thinking about things in an introspective analytical way – may cause us some discomfort, but rumination – when we ruminate endlessly after a stressful event – leads to higher blood pressure, elevated heart rate and higher levels of cortisol in the body long after the cause of the stress has disappeared.

It is so much better for our emotional health to recognise emotions than it is to suppress them; and so with that thought, here are some more tips and strategies to cope with them in the moment, or at least soon after:

• Embrace your feelings. Acknowledge them, sit with them, name them correctly.
• Take control of your breath. As you breathe out, imagine that you are letting go of the feeling, much like you’re letting go of the out-breath.
• Do a mind-dump. No structure, no grammar, just stream-of-consciousness stuff. ‘Dump’ onto the page, physically vent your feelings if you feel like doing so. Just don’t wallow in physical venting – vent; move on.
• Tell a friend how you’re feeling, and why you’re feeling it. Talking is a form of processing – it allows your brain to make some sense of what has happened, and it forces you to think about what you want to say about how you feel, why you feel that way.
• Comfort yourself by wrapping-up with a warm woolly blanket, with essential oils in the form of scented candles or rubbed on your skin. Used with a carrier oil they permeate the skin barrier and travel in the bloodstream to your brain where oils like Rose will have a calming effect; Geranium will have an uplifting effect, etc.

Doing any or all of these will help us calm the amygdalae glands in the brain, stop the rush of stress hormones and thus help move us back into rational thought processes where we are able to problem-solve as opposed to reacting. It may also help us process and release the big feelings, the negative emotions – rather than trapping them so they can raise their heads years later, having contributed to physical, mental, or emotional illness.

One thing I’ve learnt about myself from my own healing journey is that my happiness is up to me. I’ve discovered that I am worthy, and that I am worth loving – by me, and by others – and my life has blossomed into previously unknown contentment.

I hope that by reading this chapter, you’ve noticed ways that you can empower yourself into an even greater state of happiness and self-love than you perhaps already are. After all – can there ever be too much love, too much happiness in this world we live in?

*Names changed to protect identities.

Book a session with me, now.