June 2006 | Body & Mind Health
Holding the Truth In Balance
By Julia Mossbridge
For the past month, I’d been planning on writing about the healing properties of anger. As usual, the idea stemmed from personal experience. Lower-back pain that had seemed intractable suddenly cleared up, once I admitted I was angry with a friend and vented my feelings to him.
Fortunately, just as I was sitting down to write, I was invited to a Kabbalistic healing workshop in Chicago. Jumping at the chance to procrastinate, I accepted the invitation. Through the teachings and exercises designed by the workshop creator and facilitator, Carol Stone, Ph.D., I realized that the reason that I felt so good after I had vented my feelings was that I had finally admitted a truth that brought into balance seemingly opposed feelings inside of me.
According to Dr. Stone, a licensed clinical psychologist and Kabbalistic healer, the ancient Kabbalistic teachings of mystical Judaism suggest that healing consists of re-uniting elements that seem to be opposed, but are in fact synergistically related. This concept has been used in recent body-centered therapeutic models, including Hakomi therapy and Internal Family Systems.
She used the example of the feelings we experience while someone close to us is suffering and near death. Most of us in this situation will wish for the person to die, in order to relieve their suffering and ours. Simultaneously, we will also wish for that person to live. The healing is created when we allow ourselves to see that both wishes are valid, and that we are not wrong for having either of them.
“When we are able to hold both, to be in relationship to opposites, we become more whole, more real, and more alive. A space is created — there is a genuine connection with ourselves that gets born into that space,” says Stone.
One way to allow seemingly oppositional truths to surface is to look at what feelings dominate your experience. If you often feel sad, what joy are you not allowing yourself to see? If you often feel victimized, what responsibilities are you not letting yourself own up to?
This Kabbalistic way of thinking gave me a new understanding of how my expression of anger was linked to my healing experience. Before I vented my anger, I had told myself that loving-kindness was the only way to relate to others. I completely ignored the seemingly oppositional experience of strength or courage. Even when someone would do something that was hurtful, I was likely not to mention it and instead try to love them. Unfortunately, this led to resentment and anger that I was unable to acknowledge because it didn’t fit with my image of the feelings that a good person can have.
If, however, I had balanced out loving-kindness with the courage to say, “Hey, this hurt me,” I might not have had the anger, or the lower-back pain, in the first place.
Julia Mossbridge, a Chicago-based writer, is also a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work.
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