Are You Making Peace?
Written by: Sabine Roggermeier; Gluecklich Im Sein
If you’ve lived long enough on this planet you have felt this way too: overpowered by your thoughts or emotions, burdened beyond what you feel you can handle, stressed out to the extreme. Overwhelm often makes you feel out of control. Everything and anything seems too much.
I remember a time in my life when overwhelm was a daily occurrence. The funny thing was that I didn’t even see it. I remember a friend commenting that I was overwhelmed. Only then did it really register as such. Before, I was simply too busy. I kept on doing, kept trying hard in order to keep my head above water—anything so I wouldn’t drown completely. At the same time, I was frustrated that life didn’t seem to change. It didn’t seem to improve at all. It was only when I acknowledged my overwhelm and took a step back, and with the help of others began looking at everything from a different perspective that I was able to move out of it.
As a Body Code practitioner, I can see the feeling of being overburdened coming from two different “sources”. For one, it is our own, meaning we have accumulated enough emotional baggage to feel overwhelmed by a certain situation or simply that the situation is “too big” for us to handle with everything else we carry. The other source I find quite interesting. Did you ever think about having inherited more from your ancestors (including your parents and grandparents) than just your hair and eye color, as well as your preference for certain things? Believe it or not, our ancestors passed other things their subconscious deemed important enough for our survival on to us: their emotional experience. For example, your great-great-grandfather might have had a hard time in his life, perhaps experiencing worry, failure, despair or any other “negative” emotions that felt too much for him to handle or express. He wasn’t able to let go, so this emotional energy got stuck in him. He might have passed this valuable “information” on at the conception of his child and then it was passed on from generation to generation until it came to you. You might carry your ancestors’ negative emotions meaning these old emotions are influencing your current life experience. I find this to be a fitting as well as a relieving idea.
I have had moments where I felt that my emotional reaction to certain things wasn’t truly coherent with who I really am, or that the reaction might have been too strong for what was going on. It felt that I was reacting like a different person. When I look at such a situation through the Body Code, lo and behold—the trapped emotions I find are at least in part inherited from, if not completely belonging to my ancestors. Releasing all of them with this method makes it possible for me to react free from this old baggage, whether it was my own or ancestral. I am clearer to make good choices, to create the life I want to have. This is not the only effect though. When I do this kind of work I have a new appreciation and love for the people who went before me, the ones who made it possible for me to have this life, overwhelm and all.
And yet, I still have moments of overwhelm. I notice it by my mind jumping all over the place and not stopping. I feel the inner panic and the fear of not being able to cope. It is this crazy mess that tells me overwhelm has hit again. Those moments are rarer now though, and briefer too. I think that has to do with something a friend of mine said this week. She commented that she looks at problems in life through the lens of “The solution is already there, I just have to see it.” I loved that! I think that’s the benefit of having had periods of overwhelm in my life: I have experience surviving overwhelm. I know I can get the help I require and find the solutions I need. I know that everyone feels overwhelmed at times and that it is not a sign of personal incapacity. In fact, I learned that I am much stronger than overwhelm makes me think and that I can rely on that strength! Oh, that sounds quite like making peace with overwhelm, doesn’t it?
