To live a beautiful and courageous life is to live with an open heart. I truly believe that living with an open heart is the key to life – even if it means we get hurt sometimes.

Human emotions

As humans, we have the ability to feel a whole range of emotions. However, we are habitual creatures, and so we tend to feel only around 12 different emotions. Have you ever been around someone that always seems to get angry? Or the person that tends to cry all the time? We generally resort back to the same emotions that we have grown up feeling, as they are familiar, and then become a habit.

Love vs Fear

No emotion is necessarily good or bad; emotions are just energy-in-motion. However all ‘positive’ emotions come from a vibration of love, just as all ‘negative’ emotions come from a vibration of fear. Both are normal to feel! However if we get stuck in a negative emotional cycle, it can be hard to break. This can also lead to us locking these emotions in our body. These can then manifest into physical pain or mental health problems if we don’t clear them out.

Stress and anxiety

Many of my Reiki clients come to me feeling stressed, anxious and stuck. They are feeling a host of negative emotions over and over, which is keeping them in a downward cycle. Negative emotions come from fear, which comes from our ego. Our ego is an important tool we need for survival, however sometimes it can get in the way of us leading the life we want to live!

Ego and fear

Humans are automatically are driven to survive. Our ego is always on the lookout for us, and whenever it perceives a threat, it kicks into gear in order to protect us. It can be very useful, for example if we spy a scary person we might choose to walk another way home. Ego also works with painful emotions. If there is an emotion that is painful to feel, we have a tendency to change our behaviour to avoid feeling that pain. For example, we might turn to alcohol to avoid the emotional pain of a break up.

Love in the drivers seat

The question we need to ask ourselves is, are we living from a place of fear (ego), or love? We can never get rid of our ego, it is a part of us. However, there is a huge difference between whether love or fear is in the drivers seat!