When you’re feeling stuck in old emotional, mental or physical patterns, Polarity Processing is a simple & powerful tool ~ based firmly in yogic principles ~ that can help you get un-stuck. The technique has been given to the world through the contemporary Teacher Leslie Temple-Thurston, who is based, with her organization CoreLight, in South Africa and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
So here’s how it works: When you notice yourself being “stuck” (e.g. in patterns of emotional reactivity, or in a physical illness you can’t quite shake, or in mental negativity, or in a life-situation (financial, relationship) which just seems to keep repeating itself, in a way that’s not useful or enjoyable), the first thing to do is stop and acknowledge your “stuck-ness.” Simply being willing to see it (to access that part of yourself that’s a neutral “witness” to whatever drama is unfolding) creates the space for this technique to work.
Next, take out a piece of paper and a pen, sit down, and write ~ for ten or fifteen minutes ~ about the situation. Let yourself describe it fully, with a focus on saying/writing how you’re feeling about the whole thing. You’ll probably generate a page or two of writing. (It should be no more than this.)
When you’ve completed this step, go back and underline (in what you’ve just written) all of the “emotionally-charged” words or phrases. (Words like: hopeless, sad, frustrated, shame, rage, …) This is any word or phrase which somehow points to how the situation is making you feel. If the situation is unpleasant to you, these words will probably be mostly “negative,” but don’t exclude, in this underlining part of the process, the “positive” ones.
Once you’ve done this, get a new piece of paper, and re-write these words/phrases you’ve just underlined in a column down the left-hand side of this new piece paper. And now for the most important step: for each word you’ve written down, ask yourself: “What would be, in this particular situation, the opposite of this word or phrase.” As you get these “opposites,” write them down in a column facing the first column … so each of your initial words or phrases is now directly across from its opposite word or phrase. For example: if one of your underlined words was “sadness,” you might choose “happiness” as its opposite; if one of your underlined words was “shame,” you might choose “blame” as your opposite, and so forth.
After you’ve written down an opposite for every one of your underlined words/phrases, go back and read the list of words/opposites again. And then (and here’s the yogic part!) acknowledge to yourself (and the universe) that all of these states of mind actually exist within you. That some have been conscious (the ones you initially wrote about), and others have been unconscious (their “opposites”), but now you’re choosing to become conscious of both pairs of opposites. When you do this, you “liberate” the energy that has been bound in the emotional or mental or physical pattern defined by these pairs of opposites … you allow unconscious “stuck-ness” to begin again to flow …
To end, sit quietly for a few minutes, and invoke the guidance of the invisible realms, in whatever way you’re comfortable doing this. Ask for the support of your angels or guides or God or Buddha or Whoever … in releasing this old pattern, and opening to receive the shifts of body, mind & spirit that will be forthcoming. Notice how you feel.
[If a pattern is a long-term one, you may have to repeat this process, again and again, for weeks or months or years … But each time you do it, the “stuck-ness” will be unraveled a bit, until finally you’re completely free of it. For less-entrenched patterns, you’ll notice a strong shift after just one or two rounds!]
Once you’re comfortable with the Polarity Processing technique, you can deepen this work by learning a couple of more advanced practices ~ call “Squares” and “Triangles” ~ which build on the Polarity Processing work, and are focused in a more specific way on the physical and emotional bodies. Learn more about these techniques at the CoreLight.org website.
Blessings!
Elizabeth Reninger, M.S. (Oriental Medicine) has been exploring Yoga/Qigong – in its Daoist, Buddhist and Hindu varieties – for upwards of twenty-five years. She maintains a private acupuncture practice in Boulder, Colorado, and is a published poet. For more of Elizabeth’s writing, on related topics, please visit http://taoism.about.com
