RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS HEALING STORY
One day I was on a walk. It was the kind of walk with a lot of mental chatter. I was feeling off, maybe a bit anxious, maybe a bit angry and I didn’t really know why. As I was walking, a verse from the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Under The Bridge" popped into my head. It was:
I don't ever wanna feel
Like I did that day
Take me to the place I love
Take me all the way
I don't ever wanna feel
Like I did that day
Take me to the place I love
Take me all the way
Yeah, yeah, yeah
I had received messages through songs before and knew this was a sign—you know when you walk into a store and a song pops on that kind of matches what is going on with you at the moment. As I walked and repeated the lines over and over I had a random memory from my childhood come up. It was a memory which on the surface appeared to be sort of passive and something I had already dealt with. There was a story linked to this memory and it didn't really seem to bother me anymore. In any event, I kept walking and thinking about this event and started feeling that anxiety and anger intensify. It was uncomfortable. I headed home and was feeling worse than when I left for the walk. At this point in my life I was pretty dedicated to healing and so I wasn’t going to let this one go without digging deeper. I pulled out a pen and paper and started writing what I remembered about the event. Then something shifted. I started feeling something different, it wasn’t better, it was actually more painful. I started crying tears of pain. Then I started seeing the event differently and I started writing it down. Then I started crying tears of grief, and I started remembering more and crying tears of guilt and remembering more and this cycle of remembering and feeling continued until I was all cried OUT and I had worked through a number of deep emotions.
What happened? I was able to fully experience this event as if I went back in time. I was able to see it and feel it and not turn away. The emotions shifted from what I would call protective emotions such as anxiety and anger, to deeper emotions such as grief and pain. I felt the emotional energies moving through my system and OUT of my system. I felt it physically, mentally, emotional and spiritually. At one point it became apparent that I was now free from the story surrounding this event. I was healed, well not fully, as there was much more healing to come in my life, but this event was no longer going to influence my state of being.
HOW O.U.T WORKS
I have shared this personal healing example with you because this is a textbook example of how healing works. It is a process of remembering and feeling and feeling and remembering. In my experience the deeper emotions are the doorway to true healing, we just need a way to access them. As a result of this healing experience, I set out to create a way to access these deeper emotions and to replicate the sort of healing experience which I described, but within a simple, effective and systematic framework. I have done that with a process called O.U.T, which stands for:
· Organize the thoughts linked to a specific event or experience from your past.
· Understand the specific emotions linked to the specified event.
· Transmute the deeper emotional energies and re-write the story.
When you HEAL WITH O.U.T you are able to see the full mental and emotional story tied to your event and ultimately allow the blocked/hidden emotions to move OUT of your system. In essence, you are able to break free from the story surrounding past events, you are able to experience life more fully and with less distortion, you are able to move through life making decisions which support the life you want rather than the life you don’t want.
THE TRUTH ABOUT ADDICTION
An interesting anecdote related to that verse from “Under The Bridge” would be that the person the song is about probably experienced something particularly painful, but he is using a drug to numb the pain to avoid dealing with what happened. If you have studied addiction or been an addict yourself, there is almost always a link to some prior life experience which we are unable to deal with and so we choose sex, drugs, alcohol, work, exercise, spirituality, etc. as a coping mechanism. Yes, in my experience many forms of spirituality are ways of avoiding dealing with things, so it is best to be honest with yourself. The true healing path is often very gritty and often requires a great deal of courage. Lastly, the great thing about O.U.T is that it can be used to heal all sorts of things. Some might classify this as macro and micro trauma. Hate to break it to you, but you will have to face your “stuff” at some point, whether it be this life or the next or the next. Why not NOW?