There are many possible obstacles in life: poverty, race, our limited intelligence, our size, our gender.
However, I believe someone who simply possessed the right attitude has overcome all of them before. A healthy emotional disposition is a remarkably powerful resource. As many have stated before: “Imagine what you would do if you weren’t afraid”. Perhaps even all obstacles could be conquered over time with weapons such as faith, courage, happiness, self-acceptance and all other forms of emotional well-being. “Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end, you are sure to succeed” -Abraham Lincoln
Conversely, the emotional obstacles within us, self-doubt, insecurity, shame, anger, and others, may be our greatest obstacles. It is these invisible forces that hold us back from expressing our potential. We may have the voice and the lungs to sing beautifully, but lack the emotional liberty to let it out. These powerful feelings don’t have to make sense and are not easily overcome with simple and obvious rational intervention. Feelings can override reason leaving us in an embarrassing, inexplicable state of stuckness.
Where do these invisible forces come from? What is it that holds us back and urges us to sit down be quiet and not make a scene? How is it that a brilliant inspirational speaker can pump us up to go out there and live our lives with integrity and confidence, then, as their voice fades with the passing days, another voice takes the stage and so routinely talks us back into our “senses”. The familiar is then what follows, not the new, the unusual, or the genuine.
Your personal emotional software program
I propose to you that these invisible forces, these emotional obstacles are nothing more than our active memory, our history of subjective experiences logged in our minds and running like our own personal emotional software program. However, the shocking but obvious fact is that the author of your original emotional software program was a child. At least for the first 18 or 20 years of our lives, in our most vulnerable stage, it is a child interpreting and filing away all of what he or she experiences. Of course, this can leave a pretty big mess. As children and adolescents, we do not clear things up, we sweep it under the rug. We suppress bad experiences that we can’t resolve and this leads to a lot of emotional backlog. As time goes by, the backlog builds and more powerful means of suppression are required. Rationalization, alcohol abuse, emotional eating, spending, dependent relationships, and any combination of what we commonly call our bad habits. These quick, easy, and short-term strategies actually bring temporary relief with long-term problems. However, by the time the problems start, we are already programmed to trust the short-term fix. This craving is a secondary layer of our emotional software program compelling us to continue to practice these self-destructive defenses long after our rational mind has urged us to stop.
Therapy? Medication?
Even as full-blown adults with a fully developed brain and a therapist helping us weekly, our feelings get the best of us. Sometimes we try medication and we often times feel better and act better. However, too often when we take the medication away the emotional forces come back. We behave much like a modern-day ship at sea with all sorts of abilities to self-navigate, sound alarms, regulate temperatures and much more, but instead of forging ahead, the ship is going in circles. Why?… because the ship’s computer program has a virus. This subtle reality of energy and information is communicating an error and the fact that everything else works fine does not matter, information is King. Fortunately, this massive complex vessel can be healed of this behavior. A single computer programmer tapping lightly on a keyboard for a relatively brief period of time will provide the quick fix.
This is how our invisible forces of emotional obstacles can be resolved as well, i.e., in our computer-like mind. Every file of misleading emotional experience can be pulled up and corrected by a single computer operator who knows what files to pull and what keys to tap. This cleaning evens the playing field once again and now the rational mind is no longer overwhelmed by a backlog of emotional experiences. Enlight is that emotional antivirus program. It is relatively quick, painless and permanent. The only difference from an actual computer is that your thoughts navigate your mind like a mouse navigates a computer. Instead of tapping a computer keyboard, you tap on acupressure points along the energy system of the body.