Inner Struggle

Integrating Emotional Pain

Enhances Intelligence, Creativity

By Shelley Klammer | Posted 7/20/12 | Updated 11/14/23

Feeling what is arising inside of you, without trying to change it, is the most profoundly courageous thing you can do as human being.

Feeling difficult feelings can become an art form where you exquisitely attend to your inner state with consistent and continual loving attention. As you do, your attention grows more subtle and creative, and you begin to understand that your inner pain is revealing messages to help you step forward in your life.

We grow in power and presence when we are able to feel our emotional pain without spinning off into thinking, doing, blaming and projecting our inner emotions outwards and away from inner inclusion and integration. My experience of not projecting a feeling out of my body is that it starts to seethe and boil in often an intensely uncomfortable way. We can learn how to attend to this intensity of feeling with love before we start creating the outer dramas that we normally engage in.

So many of us think that we have to get a feeling "out" of our body and so we live our lives trying to find ways to be finished with our emotional pain, to get it all out, and be done with it forever, when in truth any kind of drama to "release" feelings is often unnecessary. All your feelings need is to be accepted and integrated within the larger container of your mature, witnessing, unconditionally loving awareness.

Integration and Maturity

Growing ourselves into maturity simply means being able to be strongly present and be available to life as it is showing up right now — no matter how uncomfortable it feels. It is from this arising reality that we maturely create our lives.

After you integrate a repressed or difficult feeling — after you have accepted and loved a disowned part of yourself — life feels newly whole again. When we recover our lost parts of self, we become more intelligent, more alive and more creative. We realize that the feelings we have been using all of our energy to repress and deny have gifts, strengths and new insights hidden inside of them.

When we can stay open and available to life as it is, we have more creative insight. New strengths and gifts are birthed to bring to our everyday living. The best part of loving what arises inside of you is that you learn to love others maturely, deeply and profoundly.

What you accept in yourself, you accept in other people and suddenly your life — as it is — begins to work better. From this place of self-acceptance, love and trust, a spontaneous and flowing creativity abounds that truly contributes to all of life.

Next: The 30 Day Inner Child Challenge