The 'Heal Your Life Workbook' teaches three self-help techniques for releasing emotional trauma, anxiety and depression. The author, Sharon Whitewood, has developed an integrated process for this inner work and articulates this in a structured and organised way while also providing extensive resources for self-understanding and reflection. Journaling, Focusing and Meridian Tapping techniques are demonstrated, reliable techniques in their own right for resolving emotional baggage but together in an integrated process they are highly effective and fast for the individual working on their own or with an experienced therapist. This is a self-help workbook which enables to reader to identify, tune into and release painful and debilitating experiences that prevent them from living fully and achieving their desires. Heal Your Life Workbook Resources and Tools for Clearing Emotional Baggage so You Can Love Your Life By Sharon Whitewood Balboa Press Copyright © 2014 Sharon Whitewood All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4525-2556-3 Contents Acknowledgements, vii, Introduction, ix, Chapter 1 Setting the Context, 1, Chapter 2 Beginning to Learn Techniques, 7, Chapter 3 Journaling, 8, Chapter 4 Focusing, 14, Chapter 5 Emotional Freedom Technique, 26, Chapter 6 Integration, 36, Chapter 7 Maps and Models, 45, Reading List, 59, References, 61, CHAPTER 1 Setting the Context Over the last couple of decades, through my own need for healing, I have found several tools and skills that I have used consistently to heal emotionally from childhood trauma and inadequate care. These techniques and processes, have helped me become aware of who I am, and to make better choices for myself. This is the knowledge I want to share with you. You may have come to this book with a clear purpose in mind or as a result of confusion and distress. However your reaching for this material has come about, it was most likely driven by an inner prompting, a need or pain, that so disturbs you that you must find a way to feel better. There are two key ideas that can enable us even in that distress; the first is that pain is a driver and without it most of us would not shift in our behaviour and attitudes. The second is that our feelings are vital signals to action and living our truth. That may seem self-evident. However, our society, family and workplace cultures often encourage us to deny our feelings, and work only with analysis and decisions. We are pushed to do and act rather than reflect and feel. Yet painful feelings, denied experiences have to go somewhere in our systems, and so often end up as pain, and finally even disease in our physical bodies, which we endeavour to medicate away. Paying attention to our feelings takes time, becoming aware of intuitions and insights takes reflection, and allowing images and feelings to come into our awareness, takes openness and trust. We have to go more slowly and tune into ourselves constantly. Awareness takes time and discipline, a willingness to `not know' and allowing the knowing to arise in us. Our technological and city-based living encourages us to go faster and do more and more; yet we often gain limited satisfaction in this, but end up feeling more and more disconnected from ourselves, our families and mates. We may also feel disconnected from our communities and from nature. Not surprisingly our happiness arises from inside of us. It is a naturally occurring feeling that also gets suppressed, when we deny our other feelings. When we do this the painful feelings build up and often burst forth, sometimes inappropriately. A key message is this. Your feelings are real and important and need to be fully felt and experienced to experience life and move on. We often spend lots of time and money trying to understand why we feel as we do, but understanding rarely resolves and releases pain. A Unique Time in Human Evolution We human beings are unusual in the animal world, in that we are born with a limited number of instinctive behaviours, such as the flight or fight mechanism. Instead, we have a huge capacity for learning behaviour, skills and tools, and the way we learn these, is through watching others do things successfully and through making mistakes. Mistakes create emotional pain which is a deterrent to doing a 'wrong' thing again. The term 'wrong' becomes emotionally loaded with feelings of judgement, guilt and shame. Many parents in their efforts to teach children and young adults how to live in the world use fear and guilt and shame as penalties. When this happens constantly, the mistakes that we make in order to learn, can become deep wounds, loaded with these feelings. These wounds are formative and often transformative in our lives. However, the down side is that we often carry these wounds with all of their pain, as if they were all that we are and can be; often we don't learn the real lesson. Let me make explore that further with you.