Meditation for Healing Our Emotions

A Meditation for Healing Our Emotions

I had followed a practice of regular meditation for quite some time before I began intensive healing work. Meditation quickly became a crucial aspect of that healing work itself. During all phases of healing, our emotions swirl and tumble like a stream racing over rocks. The daily practice of simply following my breath and letting the emotions come and go, neither fearing nor rejecting whatever came up, became a source of both stability and insight. When we are healing from childhood sexual abuse, we experience many difficult emotions—pain, grief for our lost childhood, anger and rage at the perpetrator or perpetrators and those who enabled them, and the shame, guilt and isolation that are the inevitable legacy of abuse. We need to be able to experience those emotions fully without being engulfed by them. I found that meditation helped me do that. With practice, we can learn to recognize emotions as changing currents that flow through us, rather than identifying with them and remaining stuck in them. See Many Paths Interfaith Ministries