A Crash Course in Emotional Freedom: How to Turn Your Biggest Life Challenges into Opportunities for Healing and Transformation

Copyright © 2019 Liisa Halme.

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Contents

Read this first

Part 1 – Emotions: the dark side

Emotional literacy – emotions 101

From suppressing to owning our emotions

Understand your emotional triggers

What is really making us unhappy?

From victimhood to personal responsibility and freedom

Get to know and love your shadow

Heart-centered living – connecting to the wisdom of the heart

Invitation to a new paradigm: a reality of your choice

Breath and the self-healing body

Part 2 – Relationships

Break through defenses and connect authentically

Three steps to getting your needs met

Creating healthy boundaries

Mastering the art of conscious communication

Breaking codependence

‘Same, same, but different’

Playing by the rules

What is true self-love and what does it look like in action?

Heal the inner child

Creating more love and intimate connection

What are we actually fighting about?

A word on forgiveness

How to heal a broken heart

Part 3 – The mind stuff

Story vs. reality – the stories we tell ourselves

Understand your defenses

Uncover your (negative) core beliefs

Understanding our two minds

Trusting your intuition

How to relax a busy mind

What’s really holding you back?

You are more powerful than you think

The art of manifestation

From stress to bliss

De-mystifying meditation

Let’s wrap it up

Resources

To all my teachers, near and far. Thank you for opening my eyes.

Read this first

What does freedom really mean to you? Does it mean being able to do the

things you love and waking up excited about life every day? Does it mean

freedom from crippling anxiety, or the freedom to be yourself, express your

thoughts and emotions without fear?

You can live in a free country, have a passport that enables you to travel where you like, you may have financial freedom and the means to live the lifestyle you desire. You may be free to choose whom to marry, what to believe in and what to do with your life. You can choose your career and path. But you can still be a prisoner to your own emotional pain, your defenses and unwanted patterns that run your life and determine what kind of relationships you end up in and what levels of success, health and happiness you allow yourself to have – totally unconsciously. You may still not be truly happy or free.

A classic yogic mantra goes: ‘Lokah, samastah, sukhino bhavantu’ – may all beings everywhere be happy and free. This is my desire: to see all beings happy and free. It does not mean the absence of challenges or difficulties in life, or the absence of pain. They are all a part of this human existence and experience. But we can learn to be truly happy and free amongst them (far beyond the ‘stiff upper lip’ or the fake smile we put on for a show of a brave face when all we really want to do is scream).

I did not write this book to help you ‘fix yourself’, or even to help you become a ‘better person’. In fact I live in a paradigm (personal reality) where there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with you, or anyone; there never was and never will be. In my reality you were born lovable and divine, even if your current experience appears or feels contrary. Sometimes we forget that we are enough, and can live our lives in a reality of lack, hardship, stressful relationships, dissatisfaction and emotional struggle. I’ve been there too, and sometimes still pop in for a visit. But if you’d rather live in a different reality of fulfilling relationships, personal peace, connection, joy and abundance, then read on.

In order to shift those areas of your life that are not working for you, you need get to know yourself fully and get real about what it is that isn’t working. Then you can, bit by bit, deconstruct the prison that you have unknowingly built for yourself. This book is written as a manual to help you on that journey and expand from your old reality into a new paradigm where you meet those long lost parts of yourself, learn to get to know, accept and even love them, and thus remember your worthiness, beyond what you could currently imagine. Because that’s what you are: worthy of your heart’s true desires. You are a divine being from a divine source full of spirit and potential, and so it is.

You may already agree with this on a mental level, but often we are riddled with strong unconscious beliefs that speak differently. If your physical reality (= home, job, health, wealth, relationships, etc.) does not match the conscious idea you have about your value, then you can be sure that contrary unconscious thoughts and beliefs are keeping you from fully embodying it and acting accordingly.

Now it is time to embrace all of life’s experience and deepen

intimacy with yourself and life itself, in all its messiness. These chapters and practical exercises will help you choose freedom wherever you

feel stuck.

LET THE EXPLORATION BEGIN!

First of all we need to get clear about where we are not happy and free. There will be some necessary inventory of old piles of dirt – our old beliefs about ourselves and the world that no longer work for us; old defenses and masks that give us a false sense of safety, but deep down keep us feeling alone, misunderstood and unloved. We really need to ‘let that shit go’ before we can enter into our new reality, and, before we can truly and completely let it go, we need to fully own it. I mean really, really own it, down to the dirty, yukky detail.

This can be a challenging process, particularly the part where we become aware of the dysfunctional patterns, beliefs and hidden personalities that keep us stuck, but have not yet changed them. It is probably the most annoying part!

However, the good news is that bringing our unconscious motives and pay-offs into our conscious awareness will eventually help us shift them, with little effort. It is a process that goes well beyond just reading the book: it’s an ongoing practice. I wrote this book for myself too. I also need to keep actively practicing the principles that I know work!

I promise you freedom

A word of warning: You may not like some of the content in this book! I am aware that some, or rather a lot, of this stuff is quite confronting. When you do get triggered by what you read – or anything in life for that matter – I recommend you go through that part again, extra carefully, as there will be something important for you. The moments when we get triggered are always prime opportunities for learning. They are where the treasure is hidden! Who said self-development was always going to be fun?! Well, when you are digging into some of the deepest corners of yourself it isn’t always going to be pretty. But what I can guarantee is that it will be worth it. I promise it will be worth persisting through the momentary resistance and discomfort. I promise you freedom;

nothing less.

What if you’ve already tried it all?

By my early thirties I had read about every self-development book under the sun, done dozens of courses and tried as many healing modalities. I was eating healthily, exercising, meditating, looking after myself, practicing and teaching yoga and doing all the ‘right things’, but something still wasn’t working in my life. I kept having difficult relationships and some persistent health problems, and was in a lot of emotional pain. Then I came across emotional work, including breathwork, body psychotherapy and core energetics, all of which changed my life, health and relationships completely, from the inside out.

I realized that in order to become enlightened / enlighten ourselves

we need to bring light into the darkness that is in us. In other words,

to become conscious we need to bring that which is unconscious into

the light of consciousness.

This is something we have grown very afraid to do; to explore our darkness. We are under the impression that by ignoring it and disowning it we make it disappear – or that by looking at it or exposing it we will make it grow. We are taught that by our positive affirmations and denial of our painful emotions and negative thoughts we turn into creatures of light. We concentrate on the positive and always try to see the upside, and we wonder why we stay stuck, why we still feel in so much pain. It must be the world, then. It must be the others, causing it…?

This is what is different and noteworthy here: I am saying that we have been given the wrong instructions, or perhaps we have misunderstood them. We need to turn toward our pain, not away from it. It actually is vital, crucial and inevitable that we must explore, deeply get to know, accept and even love our darkness; all of that which we are ashamed of and would rather hide away, in order to become unstuck and have the life we desire - that life of freedom that I speak of.

Of course we don’t have to go there if we don’t want to; the choice is ours. But we need to be aware that, the longer we avoid our blind spots or our shadow and ignore its existence, the longer and stronger it keeps running our lives!

This is where a lot of self-development and spiritual practice falls short

• It bypasses the deep emotional work, which means our unprocessed and unconscious emotions keep us stuck, and the progress is tediously slow.

• It teaches us methods of avoiding, numbing or overriding our pain rather than becoming closely intimate and comfortable with it.

• It pushes us to identify with a smaller and smaller part of ourselves (that which is forever positive, loving, forgiving, compassionate, healthy, happy, successful, fill in the blank) – leaving the remaining parts of us disowned, hidden and unconscious.

Eventually we may even start to believe that narrow identification is who we are, and become completely unconscious of all of the rest, which we judge as unacceptable. This is actually pretty dangerous, because it is those unconscious emotions and parts of ourselves that really drive us. When this happens we become more and more intolerant of other people and their darkness. We simply cannot bear to look at it. This makes love very, very difficult – almost impossible – and we wonder why our life just isn’t working out the way we’d like it to!

When I was exposed to some of the concepts I share in this book, they triggered the hell out of me. I had spent my whole life gathering evidence and a story of another kind (you’ll understand what I mean later as I share my experiences and my process) and then I was told to throw it all out the window and take responsibility for everything that happens in my life. What happened was I defended my old shitty story like my life depended on it. It was a crappy reality of betrayal, necessary defense, painful relationships and constant inner battle, and yet, on some level, I didn’t want to let it go. I defended my right to make others wrong and remain a disempowered victim (even if I never would have admitted it). Think about it – that’s insane!

But this is what we do. We hang onto our story – we hang onto our misery – even though it’s not really working for us, because it is familiar. It is what we know and we believe it is the only reality. Of course it is real for us, but in truth it is only one of an infinite number of possible realities. So I am asking you to trust me as a friend, like I trusted my teachers when I was so desperate I had nothing to lose. It will require not just intellectual understanding of these principles, but embodying them in your daily life by constant practice.

HOW TO USE AND READ THIS BOOK

I have avoided too many words and tried to make the messages concise. No matter how short, each chapter is a big bite to swallow and may take some time for you to digest, put into practice and integrate. The chapters work as a whole and support each other. You may read them in any order, but they will make the most sense when read in the order in which they appear.

This is not a guide on how to live your life, or how to manage stress or anger or control your emotions, but on how to know yourself fully. It is not something I have come up with myself, but what I have been taught by various teachers in numerous different ways, then practiced and found effective. I have simply put it into my own words as I have experienced in my own life. There is no theory here that hasn’t been tested over years and years by millions of people around the world in real life, in real relationships, careers, passions and real