Now that you have a basic sense of why we struggle emotionally, and why you start the training phase by learning how to practice emotional release work, I now want to introduce on-the-ground work by addressing its fundamental underlying principle within the core healing process. This principle states that core emotion drives and shapes our behavior when we’re put under pressure. This means that, when you’re grounded in an experience of core debilitation that you’ve learned to suppress, ignore, and cover over, it will end up driving your behavior, especially when you’re being pressured in situations that are hard for you. But because you’ve disconnected yourself from the debilitation, you won’t tend to be able to connect the dots between your negative emotions and their negative behaviors, let alone being able to change the behavior.
The core healing process begins with release work because you need to wake up to and help your core emotions heal before you can do anything about how they respond to pressure. Why does pressure and challenge have to be a part of the process of core emotion expressing itself behaviorally? It’s simple. If you have a torn-up knee, and you’re sitting on the couch with no pressure on the knee, then it’s a lot easier to ignore the way it effects how you move. But get moving and put some weight on your shoulders, and then you’ll notice the limp and the stumbles that come with the pressure that’s being exerted on your debilitation.
Back when I was really debilitated, when I would step into challenges that would grind on my core, my fears would kick up and drive me to push too hard and fast because I ‘knew’ at a bone deep level that I was going to fail with them. This would drive me to miss things, to cause conflict with whatever I was engaging with, and to nurture failure—the thing I was so scared of—instead of success with my challenges.
One time I was replacing the sparkplugs on my motorcycle, which is a very simple thing to do. But I was using a torque wrench that was new and that worked differently than others I had used. I was already wound up in my core fear because I was always worried about messing up my bike when I worked on it. I kept on tightening and tightening the spark plug waiting for the wrench to tell me when I had torqued it enough, but I didn’t understand how the wrench worked because I hadn’t tested the wrench and gotten to know it before using it on my plugs. I ended up torquing the plug until it broke in half, and all of a sudden I had a worst case scenario in front of me that spiked my worthlessness and fear because I had pushed too hard and fast into a situation that demanded delicacy.
A debilitated core that’s put under pressure nurtures conflict and distance within union whether it wants to or not. I ran right past a need to slow down and to get to know my new wrench because I was scared about really messing up and disabling my motorcycle. This led me to create my worst case scenario, and it could have easily been avoided if I would have been able to work through my emotional challenge first so I could diffuse the charge that was driving me.
Not only does conflict and distance nurture failure within union, it also ends up reinforcing a debilitated core by generating more negative emotion to add to your backlog just as the motorcycle example demonstrates. This is why we end up creating the same basic results in the face of certain challenges over and over again. Our debilitation struggles under certain types of pressure, it drives us to act in ways that nurtures failure, this generates more negative emotion that reinforces the core, and you’re then primed to repeat the same experience again with the next version of the same challenge. This creates a frustrating feedback loop many of us find ourselves in with certain challenges in our lives.
The way to change the organic response to orient towards conflict, distance, and failure under pressure is to heal the knee, not to try to somehow override the limping response. But, when you either don’t know that your core emotions are driving your behavior, or you have no way of helping your negative emotional drivers heal at a core level, then trying to change behavior is the only thing you have left to focus on. This is when you are taught to breath, to try to be mindful, to try to focus on the positive side of things, etc. But none of these approaches deal with the heart of the problem, so they don’t tend to be very effective, especially when you’re placed in the challenges your core is the most vulnerable with.
On-the-ground work is grounded in the understanding that you need to heal at a core level first so you can start to build some tangible emotional strength and skill. This healing-oriented approach to on-the-ground challenge allows you to put the horse before the cart. You might expect to just need to heal at a core level and then your negative behaviors will then change automatically. To an extent, this does happen, but in general, it does not. Instead, the healing potentiates change, and then we need to step into our on-the-ground challenges with the intent of struggling to find new ways of engaging with them. This allows us to pull ourselves out of our old ruts so we can blaze new trails behaviorally.
For me to be able to deal with my emotional struggle with the spark plug challenge I shared above, I would have needed to know how to do fear release work, which doesn’t come until Phase II. We strive to start your Phase I on-the-ground work in session with me so you can learn to use your anger and sadness release work as you struggle to build into healthy relationship with both me and your emotional system.