It has been said “You are afraid to feel. Your feelings are vast and all powerful, yet for many of you they are crosses of shame. However, it is through your feelings that you can ascertain what you value" [Marciniak]

We discern our world through our feelings. They are an unsourced tool for discovering more about ourselves and the world about us. Yet, as the quote so rightly says, we are afraid, nay terrified, of feeling. We block our feelings and hide from them, and as a result we overload our cellular memory with our emotional baggage.

Our bodies are perfect records, holding every nuance of our lives. They hold all our memories of the things we have done to others and how we felt about it at the time, the judgements we have made since. Besides all this, there is what others have done to us and our emotions surrounding these things. We also hold shocking or traumatic memories from our lives which can appear to come 'out of the blue.' There are no accidents or coincidences, the universe works and everything is a part of the rich tapestry, even though we may be unaware and cannot see it at the time.

To illustrate this, I recently had an opportunity to clear a very painful memory from my birth canal. I have shoulder pain and so I went to see my colleague who specialises in "un-winding" the tissues. She found that the primary site was not my shoulder, but my birth canal. As she said the words, the memory of the birth of my eldest daughter eighteen years ago surfaced, along with all of my feelings about it at the time. As I began to cry, my colleague felt a sudden 'whoosh' as the birth canal released the tension and 'unwound', I was at that moment of release, able to feel the feelings, acknowledge them and let them go. Just imagine, for eighteen years this memory had been sitting in my tissues.

Emotional energy such as this can cause vibrational damage to the cells and eventually pathology. One of the feelings that came up for me was shock. As I am like a terrier when I know I have something to clear, (I “worry” at it until I achieve my intention) I took some Bach “Star of Bethlehem” flower essence which is for shock held in the cellular memory.

Five days later at a Reiki Share, some more shock came up for me. It was a fourteen year old memory this time - my next door neighbour had hung herself and her husband came around to ask us to see if she was dead. Two sets of memories from fourteen and eighteen years ago, all filed away and stored in my body as I had held onto them.

I am very self-aware, continually working on myself and watching for signs, feeling the feelings as they come up for me so that I can acknowledge them, embrace (accept) them and then let them go. However, previous to becoming a Reiki Master and taking part in P'taah workshops as well as reading the P'taah books, I had never heard of any of these concepts. Fortunately, there are now many self help books and people like myself who wish to teach and inform. As a physiotherapist, I realise how many people come with pain and that there is an emotional component to the problem.

Robina Hearle