What to do when you're stuck in the muck, Part 2

The Self Salutation Newsletter

Greetings and Salutations!

This week, I’m continuing with my series on how to use the Self Salutation when you’re stuck in a negative feeling state and you want to break free.

In last week’s message, I shared the high-level view of how the Self Salutation process works.

This week, I’ll go through the steps it takes to resolve most negative feelings by alternating between the three core meditations in the Self Salutation.

Next week, I’ll go back over the ground we’re about to cover this week, but with an example of a common scenario in life.

I want to note that there are thorny challenges that require deeper work, but I’ll discuss how to combat those later on.

It begins with the Eagle Meditation

So there you are, with a cloud of negativity that’s dragging down your consciousness.

Maybe it’s a worry over what your future holds. Maybe it’s a burning frustration with someone in your life. Or perhaps you’re not even sure where the feeling comes from, you just know that you’re in a funk.

But on this day you remember that tool for emotional mastery you’ve been reading all about, the Self Salutation.

You start with the Eagle Meditation. In this practice, you raise your consciousness to the highest state possible for you in ten breaths.

This creates a bit of mental distance between yourself and the negativity that’s affecting you.

If you’re in a deep funk, you may need to give the meditation more than one try.

Even with a second round, it likely won’t be possible to lift yourself all the way out of a negative state, but at least the Eagle Meditation can help you break the tight grip of that negative feeling and that is generally enough.

Hey, that’s a great step!

You turned to meditation in a difficult moment. That’s the most productive choice you can make! You can feel good about yourself for that step alone.

Entering the Labyrinth of Repressed Emotions

Whenever a negative state is hard to shake off, that means there’s more going on than meets the eye.

The heart can be a confusing maze of emotions that are often contradictory and hard to understand.

Because of this, it has often been claimed that emotions are simply untrustworthy. But that’s not the real problem.

The real problem is that we have the habit of repressing negative feelings. It’s only when feelings go underground that they become twisted about and difficult to untangle.

Unfortunately, repressed emotions don’t just sit there, buried in the heart. They make life challenging in ways it doesn’t need to be.

Still, there’s far more logic to what’s happening in the underground of your psyche than most people realize.

Once you see the map—once you understand the basic trajectory of how buried emotions work—you can navigate through the tangled maze relatively easily.

You simply have to learn how to make your way through what I call the Labyrinth of Repressed Emotions.

The first step is the Fortress of the Little Emperor

The first step in uncovering what’s happening in your heart is acknowledging a side of yourself that nobody wants to acknowledge.

I didn’t say this would be fun—I just said it would be simple once you understand it. :)

We all have a lower self lurking about. I lovingly call this the Little Emperor or Empress.

The Little Emperor can’t tolerate certain things not going his way. He’s a proud—if tiny—tyrant who gets his feathers ruffled easily.

When he’s not disproportionately angry about something, he’s usually cowering in fear.

Fortunately, there’s more going on with the Little Emperor than it seems. Unfortunately, we rarely take the time to uncover what that more is because we want to be rid of this creature so badly.

We know he’s unhinged and unacceptable and we’re embarrassed to have him wielding power in our heart, so we deny the presence of the Little Emperor.

This denial is the first obstacle we must overcome.

We all have a lot invested in viewing ourselves as good people and because of this, a huge part of the challenge of navigating the labyrinth is cultivating the ability to recognize the presence of your Little Emperor and letting him take the floor.

How to call forth your Little Empress

Two main things are necessary to recognize and call forth your Little Empress: courage and the ability to accept yourself for having this side to you.

The Lion Meditation is a way to summon the courage you need to let your Little Empress come forth. You simply set your intention to surface whatever feelings might be lodged within your heart, to see whatever needs to be seen.

At first, focus simply on the intention itself. After you’ve taken ten breaths, see if you can tap into any anger or fear.

Oftentimes the reason we’re stuck in a negative feeling is that something happened and we convinced ourselves that we wouldn’t let it bother us. But it did. And it’s still there, festering away.

When you do the Lion Meditation, often that emotion will start to emerge.

If the Lion Meditation doesn’t help you surface your negative feelings, you may need to turn to the Moose Meditation, the meditation on self-acceptance.

One reason this is often necessary is that we all judge ourselves harshly for the presence of our Little Empress. We want to be better than that.

It’s only in an atmosphere of acceptance, therefore, that we can allow this part of us to have a moment in the sun.

In the Moose Meditation, you focus on an intention to accept yourself for wherever you are in your journey right now. You accept the reality of your heart’s condition, whatever it is.

You tell yourself that it’s all okay. If you have anger in your heart, that’s a natural thing to contend with. It’s not the moral failure that a part of yourself believes it to be.

If you’re afraid of something happening to you that you don’t want that’s okay too. You’re allowed to be afraid.

The honest expression of emotion

During this process, when you notice a feeling start to emerge, you can stop focusing on your intention and focus instead on allowing the expression of that emotion.

Sometimes, the feelings start like a faint whisper in the distance that you have to help along.

At other times, the emotions sweep over you with great intensity.

Of course, when an emotion surfaces, it can be tempting to get wrapped up in it or even take action based on it. The key here is that you want to process the emotion, not get swept away by it.

To process the feeling you may need to set aside the meditation for a moment.

When anger surfaces, for example, it can help if you allow yourself to throw a little tantrum in your mind—or even externalize it in a safe place, like kicking and punching on your bed and screaming into a pillow.

Or you can write out your rage in a journal. When you do this, give yourself permission to express the anger on paper. Say the things you would never say in person.

This is your moment to get messy. Let your Little Emperor throw himself around. Let him be as ugly as he wants. This will help to discharge the emotion.

Don’t stop with the expression of the Little Emperor, though.

There’s a deeper layer of digging through the labyrinth that’s necessary to resolve this issue.

Getting to the Garden of Vulnerability

Now here’s the key. Remember when I said there is more going on with the Little Emperor than meets the eye?

The more is that your Little Emperor is actually protecting you. He’s protecting you from something he thinks is far too threatening for you.

He’s protecting you from the feelings that dwell in a part of your heart that I call the Garden of Vulnerability.

That’s a place where deep fears reside that we all have. Fears like the fear of failure, inadequacy, or abandonment.

These are miserable things to encounter, no doubt, but they aren’t the challenges our Little Emperor thinks them to be.

After you’ve let your Little Emperor throw himself about, therefore, see if you can move past him to the Garden of Vulnerability.

Return to a meditation space by doing the Eagle Meditation for ten breaths if you need to. Then return to the Lion Meditation and work to summon all your courage to feel the core unwanted feeling that your Little Emperor is fighting so hard to protect you from.

Perhaps it’s not the fears I mentioned. Perhaps it’s a sense of being hurt. Or perhaps you have a bit of shame within you. Often several feelings are tied together.

Now is when the Moose Meditation becomes especially important.

When you encounter these highly fragile emotions, you will often come to a point where you realize that although you’ve understood theoretically that you need to accept yourself, somehow you never imagined that such acceptance could also include this part of you.

What you are now uncovering is a tender place that you may have thought was unacceptable, unlovable, or unhealable.

None of that is true.

When these emotions surface, if you can fill yourself with the felt experience of acceptance and love, you will experience profound healing.

If you can make it this far in your journey, using these simple steps, you will have unlocked a powerful key in personal transformation. You will have the ability to heal the wounds within your heart, and more.

May it be so.

Next week we’ll cover this same ground but with a practical example so that you can have an even better sense of how the process works.

Until then, I wish you peace!

-Simon

P.S. Do you know someone who could benefit from these emails? Click the link below to share them with a friend and I’ll send you a 10-minute guided version of the Eagle, Lion, and Moose meditations that I discussed in this email: