If we allowed ourselves to feel the feelings beneath it all, we’d realize our innate okayness — our feelings are okay, we’re okay, all is okay — and depression, addiction, and violence would fall away. And if we went further and really gave ourselves over to feeling, we’d realize the freedom that lies within the feelings themselves – that which we were running away from was our bliss all along.

Where Other Approaches Fall Short

Approaches like therapy, religion, and cathartic release are capable of getting to the root. But many forms of these approaches avoid the root and so freedom eludes those who walk their path. 

Approach #1: Therapy

Your Therapist Fears Emotion - Your therapist themself might be scared of raw emotion — unfamiliar with the terrain (having not walked it themselves) and terrified of the possibility of raw emotion rearing its face. The best they can offer is a set coping strategies that leave a whole world of feeling untouched, sectioned off behind a wall of fear. It is not uncommon for people to say that they’ve spent 20 years in therapy and never gotten to the root.

Healing Stays in the Head - You get good at psychoanalysis. You’re an expert at dredging up the stories of your past and are on the hunt for more. You have a mental framework that organizes your neuroses into neat, logical boxes. You know the lingo and have medical names for all your conditions. You can tell people all about the mechanics of your neuroses. Your pursuit of healing has become an endless mental exercise. Your therapy only goes as far as the neck, nothing below. At the end of the day, you still feel like shit.

Approach #2: Religion and Spirituality

Dissociative Ascent  - Heaven, nirvana, and moksha are seen as a journey of ascent and transcendence. You want out of this world or at least to circumvent the half you don’t like. You use religion as a denial of your life in favor of a perfection that exists elsewhere. You use spirituality to dissociate and justify it because this is what it means to be “enlightened.” 

Spiritual Bypassing - “It’s all one.” “Love your neighbor.” “Be in the now.” You jump to spiritual platitudes without experiencing the place where those truths arose. You shove spiritual platitudes down people’s throats even if their experience is crying out, “I don’t feel one. I hate my neighbor. I’m stuck in the past and future.” If these words don’t meet people where they’re at, they don’t amount to much on the benign end, while being harmful and dismissive at its worst. 

Approach #3: Cathartic Release (yoga, breathwork, plant medicines, art) 

No Integration - "A lot moved through me, but I don't know what changed." After your breakthrough experience, if you can’t bring it into your life of chopping wood and washing dishes, does it really matter? Cathartic release without wisdom isn’t worth much. True feeling should come with wisdom – the kind of wisdom that gets into your bones and is something you carry with you long after the experience fades. Stop at nothing short of the realization that freedom and wisdom is as present in the ordinary as the non-ordinary.  

Dependence On Non-Ordinary States - Cathartic releases like yoga, breathwork, plant medicines, and art can take you to potent non-ordinary states. The problem is when you think that your freedom depends on those states. If you find yourself chasing non-ordinary states, you’re still on the run from feeling in your ordinary life. What good is freedom if you can only find it on the yoga mat, in an ayahuasca ceremony, or with your guitar? Be wary of this trap, true freedom can be found no matter your state.