I just spent a wonderful weekend listening to John Gray speak to just a small group of us (around 30) for two days at the gorgeous Mystic Journey Crystal shop in Venice, CA.

I feel a special connection with John since he was on my “Heal the Shadow in Your Relationships” series, and I got to be a practitioner on the Beyond Words Publishing “Love Boat” cruise with him last year. Besides other synchronicities, I also recently discovered his birthday is the day before mine! (different year)

So I wanted to share with you just a sampling from among the plethora of great wisdom he shared with us this weekend.

You know how I’m always saying that if you don’t consciously work on bringing your Shadow beliefs to light, life will bring you the exact experiences you need to bring up those Shadow beliefs so you  can see them and finally clear them?! (If you are conscious that that’s what is happening, of course.)

John went one step further and led us all through a process for clearing the Shadow’s “blocking” energies so you don’t have to have the experiences brought to you over and over again.

I have mentioned the three different parts of the brain before, and John associates each part with a different level of feeling. In order to clear the feelings from the level of our childhood programming / conditioning, he teaches to process these 3 basic emotions: Anger, Sadness, and Fear.

We worked with a partner, and were asked to recall a particular childhood incident that brought us a lot of pain. Our partner was asked to represent the significant person in this painful incident – it could be a parent, a teacher, a friend, or someone else that we needed something from in this painful incident.

I recalled a childhood incident where I was bullied by a group of girls walking home from grammar school. When I got home in tears and told my mom, she told me that I should just shrug it off and not care, and then continued her work.

I asked my partner to represent my mom. John had us imagine that we were the same age as we were at the time of the incident, and then led us through the 3 ways of expressing our feelings to our significant person.

In my case, I was 8 years old. As an 8-year-old, I told my mom what I was Angry about in this incident, then what I was Sad about, and finally what I was Afraid of. Then I told my partner what I needed from my mom at that moment, which was comfort, caring, reassurance, and protection.

I had processed this incident many times before, but was surprised how much emotion came up for me this time around! My partner spoke to me in the words of a loving mother, who was there for me, concerned for me, comforting me, and all that my 8-year-old was wishing for! It was a truly healing experience.

John goes on to say that we should do daily meditations where we process all the basic chakra emotions: Anger, Sadness, Fear, Regret, Frustration, Disappointment, Concern, Embarrassment, Being Mad, Being Hurt, Being Scared, and Shame.

Some of them sound repetitive – like Anger and Being Mad, but he makes the distinction that Anger is on the level of our middle brain that processes our childhood conditioning, and Being Mad is from our primitive Survival brain.

So as a daily practice, after you sit in meditation, ask yourself if there’s anything your Angry about? Sad about? Fearful about? Etc. Let the feeling come up, notice what it’s about, and allow that energy to release and dissipate naturally. It will if you are feeling it fully in your body.

So John Gray’s bottom line is – if you process all your feelings every day, life no longer needs to bring you experiences to bring up these painful, unpleasant feelings to release. You’re already releasing them more and more each day and can keep your vibration clear and your heart pure.

My note: when processing emotions, you always want to have the intention that you are processing in order to RELEASE them. You want to be careful that you are not dwelling on the bad feelings, or exaggerating them, or dramatizing them to give more juice to your negative ego.

Let me know what you think, or if you need clarification, by leaving a comment below or on my Facebook page here. Wishing you clarity and lightness in your emotional body!