When Self-Soothing Isn’t Enough: Transmuting Pain – Part II

In Part I, I shared how I learned to meet myself in emotional upset through presence, acceptance, and re-parenting.

But what about the sadness that lingers? The kind that settles into the body and won’t move?

This piece is about those moments. When presence alone isn’t enough, something more intense is needed.

Here, I write about a time I turned to a transcendent practice to lift the grief in my body and begin to heal from pneumonia.

Stuck in Pneumonia - How to Transmute

After seven weeks of body-racking coughing last winter that no medicine was relieving, I realized that my lungs were drowning in sadness, and I needed to transcend my pneumonia.

I had done plenty of allowing, accepting and being with the sadness, but my body was stuck. The heavy, dense energy of sadness was filling my lungs with fluid - something more dramatic was needed!

My meditation practice had become feeble after weeks of sickness. I was connected to what lay under the illness and was meeting myself with compassion and acceptance, but it wasn’t enough to heal my body.

The wound was too raw and too deep. I needed a powerful transcendent meditation practice that would transmute denser energies like sadness, anger, and fear into lighter energies like joy, love, and gratitude.

Transmuting energies may sound esoteric, but only because it’s not in our everyday vernacular. The process is systematic and replicable by anyone who commits to practicing it.

Can you remember how grief felt in your body if you’ve suffered a loss? It’s like a wave that feels like it can drag you under and does for a while.

Even if you shift your thinking about whatever happened and try to train yourself to be less sad, the mind can’t easily transform the felt experience. That’s not the mind’s job.

Beyond the Mind

In meditation, when you dis-identify with analyzing and planning, you can travel beyond the mind’s domain. But often, relaxing your thinking isn’t enough to transmute illness.

Go deeper by slowing down your brainwaves, from beta to alpha and then to theta waves. Think of it somewhat like learning self-hypnosis.

In this altered state, you can become aware of a field of space and energy that surrounds your body. To me, it feels like the blackness I imagine would be in our galaxies. It’s a vast emptiness of space that’s simultaneously so close and so far and unbelievably supportive.

In that realm of profound slowness, immersed in this blackness of space, you can connect to the field of quantum possibilities. It’s an aspect of collective consciousness that we’re all a part of but can’t access in our regular waking lives.

Once you learn to access this field, you have access to more love, wholeness and joy than the mind can imagine. You can draw on the energy that you want and need in your life.

In my circumstance, I needed to transmute the grief, because it had a density that was preventing my body from healing from pneumonia.

The antidote to the density of the grief was connecting to a level of wholeness that was above my body’s state.

I committed to an intense 75-minute meditation practice twice a day, even though I was tired and coughing. I found a level of commitment greater than my struggle because nothing else was working.

Within about five days of this mega practice, my body responded, and healing began.

Let’s explore the science of how and why.

How Higher Frequencies Regulate Lower Ones

How did bathing in the energy of wholeness help lift my body to a greater level of functioning?

What is a frequency?

What does it mean that higher frequencies regulate lower frequencies?

To help make the concept of frequencies more accessible, think of a melancholy piece of music. Imagine listening to that music and feeling the resonance of those sad notes in your body.

Each note has a frequency, a particular vibration that it creates. When you’re in contact with the music, that vibration moves through your body. It’s even stronger if the music is played live.

We’ve all experienced listening to calming versus energizing music. The difference relates to the frequency of the song.

Similarly, emotions, which are energy in motion, create resonance or vibrations in the body. The related frequency or resonance depends on the type of emotion.

New love creates a flood of joy; in that resonance, everything feels possible because the energy is light and expansive. In contrast, fear creates a dark energy of physical and mental contraction.

The predominant emotions we experience have a huge impact on our body's overall resonance and health.

Humans are robust and resilient and can tolerate a broad range of emotional experiences. However, if we get stuck in denser, lower-frequency emotions for too long, the body will suffer.

The good news is that higher frequencies regulate lower frequencies. If you expose fear to more and more love, eventually, it will subside.

The challenge is overcoming the hold of intense fear, anger, shame or sorrow to be able to feel love, wholeness, joy and gratitude. Understandably, that’s where most people get stuck.

By showing up in meditation and persisting until I could overcome my body’s discomfort and travel into the emptiness of space, I was able to access a level of wholeness that wasn’t present in my physical reality. I was healing by connecting to that possibility in the quantum field and then training my body into the elevated state.

It’s a kind of like remembering something that’s been forgotten because no matter how sick we are, the body holds a blueprint for wholeness. When reminded of it, somatically, through the body, it can recalibrate.

In my example, I was dealing with an acute illness. While pneumonia can be severe, it is generally self-limiting and healing from it has a different trajectory than healing from complex chronic dis-eases.

However, the same principles apply in chronic dis-ease. Modern medicine can manage and mitigate disease, but it can’t heal the underlying lower frequency emotion that lies beneath it. Accessing emotional frequencies like fear and shame, loving yourself with them and then transmuting them, is essential in the healing process.

The next exploration is knowing when to accept what is and when to transcend.

When to Transcend and When to Accept?

For most of my 29-year meditation practice, I’ve been dropping into the present and learning to accept what is. I’ve been tuning to the subtle whispers of my body, meeting myself with compassion and heeding the wisdom of my inner voice.

It’s been a beautiful, deeply-feminine journey, drawing on the earth, the trees and the rivers to support and guide me.

And, there came a point in my life, where I realized that there’s also a place for a more forthright, focused, masculine practice, like the one I used to heal from pneumonia. It boldly carves out a new path and instructs the body to come along.

In many ways, the two practices are diametrically opposite.

The feminine one says, “Come here, let me envelop you with loving acceptance just as you are.” The masculine one says, “There’s a better way, come with me.”

So how do we know how to soothe and help ourselves? There’s no universal recipe.

Ideally, we develop skills in both types of practices. There’s a time and place for both.

I will continue to write about my experiences and perceptions of the tools available to us to live with more ease, joy and trust, no matter where life has taken us.

Thank you for being here with me. If you have specific questions about anything I’ve written or anything you’d like to hear more about, please comment or message me.

With faith in your wholeness,

Alyssa