From John Ruskan: How I Originated the Emotional Clearing Process and How It Works

It's 1988. I'm at a point in my life of reassessment - of looking at where I am and wondering why I'm there. I've been earnestly "on the path" for a while, so an important part of my self-evaluation concerns what we loosely call the "spiritual." Have I really achieved anything in the way of growth? Am I succeeding in my efforts of self-realization? As I look honestly at myself, I see areas that call out in distress.

I see that I am often angry. I see that I experience much pain in intimate relationships. I see that I am isolated, lonely, and living in anxiety if not downright fear. All this even though I'm trying my best to keep up a dedicated meditation and Yoga practice, trying to be conscious of the Karma I am generating, trying to be a "loving and spiritual" person. One of the few consoling realizations is that I am certainly not alone. As I look at others, I see the same if not exaggerated condition.

What I see is that we are all in emotional turmoil, including, and possibly especially, those of us on the consciousness path, because we are in the process of leaving behind old rigid structures that have served to keep us propped up and feelings held down and suppressed. It seems to me that if we could resolve these feelings, we would be doing something very important.

With regard to my personal path, I now see that resolving feelings is primary. I was taught to aim for higher consciousness, to become a loving and blissful person, but I was never taught how to handle the negative feelings inside as part of my spiritual practice. I finally had to admit that there was work to do on the emotional level, and that my growth will be limited until I do it, and that my particular discipline was not equipped to help me with this, beyond encouraging me to replace negative feelings with love.

Bypassing emotional work is not an option. If we aim for the "spiritual" with no attention to feelings, we are bound to be unstable in our growth. We are likely to end up suppressing feelings in the name of spirituality, and the suppressed negative subconscious will continue to plague us.

In the healing community, another important realization about feelings has been emerging lately. More and more, we hear of the connection between suppressed feelings and poor health. Healing professionals are venturing the idea that in order to resolve health issues, we must resolve the emotional issues behind them. The awareness is growing that the unreleased and trapped negative emotional energy keeps building inside and eventually manifests in the physical.

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However, when I would read these statements in the past, I would usually be confused and disappointed. It was now clear to me that working on the emotional level was something I had neglected and must do, but none of these spokespersons really had anything to offer in the way of actually how this might be accomplished, aside from the vague suggestion that feelings should be expressed and not held in.

What did express mean? Should I be more emotional? Should I lash out, should I hurt people who hurt me, should I yell and attack and get it off my chest? Should I be always out front and discuss all my feelings, or should I just get into therapy? And if so, what kind of therapy? Many of these possible alternatives clashed with higher principles that were now a part of my life. I felt that I was on my own.

Although emotional healing has always been an important goal of Western psychotherapy, this did not seem like an answer for me. While I was sure that therapy could be helpful to certain people at certain times, my situation did not seem urgent enough to warrant a therapist - actually, I felt better than normal.

Therapy was also expensive and could only be undertaken for limited periods, and I was by no means convinced that it was the way to emotional well-being. Many of my friends who were in therapy were still greatly troubled by negative emotions. It's now apparent to me that most talk therapies never really touch feelings, something I have heard over and over in my counseling practice from clients who spent years in therapy.

What I wanted was an approach that I could use all the time, on my own. It was also important for me to integrate my emotional work with my consciousness work and I could not see how to do this in traditional therapy. Seeing no clear direction, I decided that I must break new ground.

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It's still 1988. I'm intently searching for a way to put this together. I come into contact with a teacher who seems to be presenting Eastern philosophy in a new way. I already know a lot about Eastern philosophy, so much that I hadn't read any for years, but all of what I had been exposed to was old school, if I may use that term.

The old school never really recognized negative feelings - just be spiritual, it said. If you felt angry, be loving. In other words, suppress your anger. This new teacher had things to say that I had never heard. Maybe I was just never ready to hear before now, but the revolution was beginning within me.

I started having tremendous insights. I realized that a large part of how I saw the world and how I experienced my interactions with others was based on projection. In projection, it would appear that someone or something was responsible for my experience. In other words, I believed that someone or something was making me angry, lonely, afraid, hateful, depressed and so on.

What I realized was that these feelings were actually coming from my suppressed emotional subconscious and just attaching to people and circumstances outside myself. Taking it a step further, I could see how I attracted difficult people and circumstances to myself that corresponded to the feelings. Why would I do this, I asked? The answer came that it was in order to bring up the suppressed feelings for clearing.

A large light went on.

You mean I attract these difficult people and situations to myself in order to bring up those suppressed, negative feelings from my subconscious for clearing? Yes, the answer came.

And if I don't take advantage of this opportunity to clear the feelings, I'll continue to attract this same type of person and circumstance to myself, over and over? Yes, the answer came.

This is starting to sound something like Karma. Yes, the answer came.

I was stunned.

For the first time, I saw the connection between the Karma of the East and the suppressed emotional subconscious of the West. For the first time, I saw the complete implication and importance of taking responsibility for my emotional experience. And at the same time how I never took responsibility! How I would blame, blame, blame, and unconsciously blame more.

As the fog lifted and what was to become the Emotional Clearing Process started to come together in my mind, I saw that the first step to working on my emotional self was the meditative state or Deep Relaxation. I naturally started to use breath and body techniques that I had learned in my Yoga practice to facilitate Deep Relaxation, even incorporating Binaural Beat Technology to help induce Alpha.

1. Deep Relaxation

In Deep Relaxation, brainwaves slow down to the Alpha level (8-13 cps) or deeper. This corresponds to a quieting of left-brain, ego-based activity: Thinking, reasoning, planning, judging, worrying, and above all, doing, diminish. Consciousness starts to shift to the right-brain, the seat of authentic feeling.

The right-brain Alpha state is essential for emotional healing. The quieting of the left-brain mind allows you to operate on the feeling level, accessing and releasing the deep, hidden, core feelings that are behind the painful events you draw to yourself.

2. Awareness

After Relaxation, the next step is Awareness. This consists of several parts:

1. Become aware of the feeling behind the event.

2. Acknowledge how the feeling is coming from the suppressed, unconscious reservoir within, and is only being triggered by and projected onto the event, even attracting it to you.

3. Take responsibility for the feeling.

At this point, I saw my experience in a completely new way, but I still didn't know how to go about handling feelings so they did not become suppressed, or how to release already suppressed feelings as they came up for clearing.

Gradually, the light grew brighter. I saw that all we need to do is to experience feelings fully as they occur in order to clear them.

We think we are experiencing our feelings, but the problem is that we don't allow full feeling to occur; in fact, it is not unreasonable to assert that in today's world, most of us have actually lost the capacity for authentic feeling.

Rebuilding the capacity for authentic feeling

If full feeling occurs, the feeling energy is exhausted, and no suppression takes place. Feelings that have been suppressed must be brought into awareness and experienced to clear, but there are ways to do this that make it peaceful, even joyful, and not something to be dreaded.

It's our unconscious inner resistance to the feeling that blocks it from coming fully into consciousness so it can release spontaneously. We resist painful feelings instinctively, but we must learn that resistance is not always in our best interest.

Resistance itself constitutes most of the pain associated with any distressful emotional event.

If we can drop resistance, and open completely to the feeling, pain immediately lessens and clearing occurs, and we regain our feeling capacity.

3. Acceptance

I saw that the next step would be Acceptance. Acceptance means opening to your feelings - dropping the inner resistance. Acceptance does not necessarily mean accepting negative people or circumstances. It refers primarily to your feelings, as they are, relative to the negative people or circumstances.

The inner resistance that blocks full feeling occurs on a mental level but it can take a certain behavioral form, which may need to be adjusted. For example, we can turn from the experience of pain by immersing ourselves in activity. We can use food, drugs, sex, entertainment as diversions from feelings. As we act out feelings, i.e., as we are motivated by feelings into taking action to change circumstances in order to change the feeling, we essentially close down to the full experience of the feeling.

More subtle forms of emotional avoidance are worrying, controlling, living in the past or future, living according to rigid concepts, judging self and others, even constantly seeking the answer or talking about the feelings instead of feeling them. And, of course, last but most popular, relationship dependencies. All these are addictions; ways of unconsciously but deliberately avoiding the feelings.

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I realized that I had to train myself to weed out resistance and develop my capacity for feeling;  and that in my quest for the past 20 years, I had been doing the exact opposite - pushing away feelings as I chased after happiness, wholeness, and "enlightenment."

4. Direct Experience

The next step is to move into what I call Direct Experience of the feeling. We have softened our resistances and now can access feelings more deeply. As I explored exactly how to do this, it came most naturally to me to use meditation as a format for exploring and experiencing feelings. Indeed, at this point, I regard the metaphysical tools of the East, such as meditation, breathwork, and bodywork to be essential in this approach to clearing feelings. When used with emotional clearing as an intent, these tools greatly aid in both bringing up suppressed feelings and in the eventual clearing.

In Direct Experience, you sit quietly and allow the conscious mind to come to rest. You can use any technique you may know to enter the stillness. You don't even have to think of it as meditation if you happen to be allergic to that word - just think of it as sitting quietly, doing nothing. As you sit, feelings begin to emerge into your awareness. This is the releasing starting. The feelings are coming from the subconscious into conscious awareness for clearing. Any negative feeling can come up, such as anxiety, fear, anger, sadness, rejection, heartbreak, humiliation, loneliness, hatred, inadequacy, frustrations or abuse of any sort including sexual, even depression, etc.

If you sit and anger keeps jumping up from something that happened yesterday or ten years ago it means this feeling is coming up to be cleared. Allow the feeling to be, allow it to exist on its own. Try to see if it has a place it your body. Breathe into it. Just watch and experience the feeling. Look at the feeling from the perspective of the first two steps if you haven't already: Take responsibility for the feeling - stop blaming and own it; look within for the subtle inner resistance to the feeling that keeps the feeling blocked and replace the resistance with acceptance, to whatever extent possible for you now.

Allow the feeling to come forward fully. Don't be afraid of it. Keep working with the breath - breathing easily and smoothly with a sense of breathing into the feeling and the body location to further loosen the congested energy of the feeling. As you sit and open to and experience the feeling, it is clearing. Don't be alarmed if the feeling becomes intense. Allow yourself to go through it. The experience will naturally wind down and you will feel a shift - you will have released the feeling energy. It is likely you will have to repeat this at other times to completely release the suppressed feeling, and important life "clearing missions" may take years. But don't be dismayed. It is enough to know and feel that you are moving in the right direction.

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As I worked with truly experiencing my feelings instead of ignorantly avoiding them as I previously had, I began to feel that I was starting to come alive. It became apparent that the blocking of the negative feelings due my unconscious resistance also blocked my positive experience and expression of life. I felt myself really growing. Difficult situations changed magically because I no longer needed to attract them.

5. Witnessing

As I shared these insights with others, I was overjoyed to see them respond the same way. As I kept working, however, it seemed that one more step was needed. This last step is Witnessing. It is a deliberate move to invoke transcendental healing energies, and takes place on the spiritual level. Using this power greatly aids in the clearing process.

Witnessing refers to a powerful shift of consciousness that awakens the transcendental spiritual energy in us, brings us into an Alpha healing state, and allows processing of difficult feelings to proceed easily. It means breaking the inner identification with the feeling; owning the feeling, but seeing it in a detached manner. It's a concrete, tangible experience of shifting from lower-self consciousness to higher-self consciousness.

When you're in the witness, you feel genuinely serene, peaceful, and accepting, no matter what's going on in your lower-self emotions. Therefore, establishing yourself in the witness is a preliminary to working with negative feelings. You'll feel safe and confident as you approach feelings. If you ever feel yourself getting too much negative feeling, you just go back and reactivate the witness.

I have found the best way to awaken the witness and invoke transcendental healing energies in emotional processing is by utilizing the ancient Third Eye technique. At the very start of an Emotional Clearing Process, we contact the two Yin/Yang healing energies of the universe. Then we contact the transcendental witness by activating the Third Eye (on the forehead).

Activating the Third Eye achieves the same result as any of the Rapid Eye Movement therapies you may have heard about, except that it is more effective, and is the ancient, original technique. These other techniques were discovered accidentally and used because they worked. Activating the Third Eye chakra brings about an integration of left and right brains, and so reduces resistance to emotional experience, releasing the feelings, and you can do this without the help of a therapist if you want.

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As we take any feeling through these five steps, Deep Relaxation, Awareness, Acceptance, Direct Experience, and Witnessing, we are taking the feeling to a place where clearing can and will occur. Trying to apply any of the steps without the others does not give quite the same results.

If you are interested in learning more about the Emotional Clearing Process, I would urge you to read one of my books as a first step. It may be all you need. I suggest you start with my latest, DEEP CLEARING. Thousands of people have emailed me and told me of their success using only the book! It greatly expands on the basic concepts that I have discussed here, clarifies the important subtleties of each part of the process, deepens your theoretical understanding of the process, and guides you step-by-step in how to successfully apply the process and avoid the common stumbling blocks along the way. I would say it's essential if you are going to go for it with Emotional Clearing.

• You'll feel excited about life. • You no longer attract negative situations because you no longer need to pull that particular kind of negativity to yourself. • You are naturally creative and find a high sense of fulfillment in applying your creativity, no matter where life has placed you.

If you want to be inspired, be sure to take a look at the 100 testimonials I have reprinted on this website of the 1000's I have received. These stories are truly heart-moving.