Why symbolic language is the key to healing as sensitive beings and how it can help us become deeply empowered.
Emotions are all symbolic expressions of the deeper world within us, and therefore, we need to learn a language that is rooted in the body.
Symbolic language can be found in poetry, art, dream, song, nature, meditation, dance, and creativity - unbound by the literal.
When you use your heart to create, you speak to the spirit and therefore open up a dialogue between the seen and unseen worlds. That is why as a creative, intuitive, empath, and/or highly sensitive being, you are closer to understanding this symbolic language of emotion because you live within your body.
Everything in nature carries a symbolic message for us to use and heal from.
The natural world carries the metaphoric remedy for every soul-sickness we suffer from and in the absence of our local wise-woman and story-bearer, we must remember ourselves through an inner pilgrimage that takes us home to the truth of our belonging; which lies in our symbolic life.
An example of this is when we are told that "a plant can only blossom from last year’s debris" - our emotional body intuitively understands that our suffering will nourish the person we are to become. It then sees this pain as vital to enriching our strength and vitality and then understands that this pain is cyclical and just in a process of shedding.
In the literal world, we would have simply said that in evolutionary terms, "we learn from our mistakes" - but this would take us into the mind – and our emotions do not take root at that level. We would suffer until in hindsight, we would see that we were being engendered by this painful experience, but oftentimes still feel the trauma within us.
If you identify with being a sensitive soul, an empath and a creative, then you will understand that your emotions speak their own language - but what you may not know is that they are rooted, and therefore healed, through the power of symbolism.
Emotions resonate with metaphor and symbolic language because that is what they are themselves; energetic expressions of deep longings that call from the very center of your spirit...
We suffer most from living literal lives. These are the one-dimensional and singular storied lives that have no space for what is most sacred and unseen. Taking our pain literally, or our suffering literally, or our environments literally, leads us to medicate what is symptomatic of a deeper dis-ease within our souls.
We medicate our energic expressions (emotions) to conform to what has mostly become a compulsively positive society and cover up the essential messages of spirit that call us from within our pain.
If we could learn to spend time with what hurts without identifying too literally with it, we would come to see that our hurt contains its anti-venom; its own profoundly nourishing remedy that can only be made from understanding what our emotions are symbolically calling us towards.
Hindsight is much less empowering than symbolic sight - which allows you to go through painful experiences with your eyes open, learning along the way the necessary lessons for the spirit to thrive.
In this literal world, we could also say that we have become depressed because "our lives have lost purpose" – or that there is a chemical imbalance within our body that causes us to release limited amounts of dopamine.
But in the greater and more evolved symbolic world, we would need to seek the deeper meaning of why your spirit has been submerged (the origin of the word 'depressed' coming from the French translation "to have your spirit sunk") Depression can be seen symbolically as a form of soul-sickness, a loss of one’s sea-bearing vessel. And therefore the journey back to oneself would not be literal (medication/avoidance/numbing) but symbolic of the path one must sail oneself home upon.
This path would be to immerse oneself in the symbolic journey home- meaning to make changes to The Story one is telling themself, dream interpretation, creativity, shadow work (Jungian psychology), affirmation, silence, plant medicine (allies), visualization, music, movement...
The symbolic healing of our souls are deeply foundational acts that ripple out into all parts of our lives, and never just mask issues that would always repeat themselves consistently throughout our lives.
Our challenges in life are symbolic of what we are being called to learn from – and therefore heal from.
I can help you change your perspective of pain through symbolic language and offer you symbolic journeys back to the home of your true belonging.
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