When love is applied to hurt, we heal. This is the slogan of Spiritual Psychology. Though simple to read but to put this into practice can be challenging. How do we apply love to hurt? What if all I feel is anger, anxiety, hurt, and shame? Because we cannot get angry enough to heal. We cannot shame ourselves enough to make the situation better. We cannot drink ourselves into oblivion enough, and we cannot think our way out of an emotional trauma. We need to feel our way through it.

Logically speaking, the mental route can get too complex. There are so many paths to anticipate, preplan, and rationalize a situation, that it can shut us down and panic! A mind that is constantly brimming with ideas and solutions may be bogging us down. Where the emotional level is more simple.

When you take a current emotional reaction (anger, hurt, shame) and ride it back in time to where this reaction began, you get to the core wound. When you apply love to that younger part of you that went through that problem – you heal – and sometimes heal it for good. This is unique to psychology, thus the birth of the Spiritual Psychology movement.

If you have found yourself frustrated with therapy, your medication doesn’t touch what lays underneath all of your turmoil, you owe it to yourself to apply love to your inner pain. To do so, use an empty chair work or use opposite hand writing where you write out a conversation on paper where your dominant hand represents you – the loving adult and allow you opposite hand to represent your younger self. This is called re-parenting. This is called applying love to hurt. If you don’t want to write, place a chair in front of you and imagine your younger self is sitting there – now talk to them, when they are done, switch chairs and let them talk back to you. What does the younger part inside of you need? Ask it.

Opposite hand play work stems from this. My inner child felt like going on the swings – so I went on the swings, imagining he was in my lap and I kept talking to him. “I’m here for you now because I love you. I love you because you are beautiful, creative, caring, and love to have fun. What would you like to do after we leave the park?” This type of work defies logic because our emotional level operates on a different set of principles – it is through the language of love.

Spiritual Psychology uses all the tools of other approaches, though a bit differently – it emphasizes love toward self. Selfish / Narcissistic – I’ve heard it all. If it is or is not doesn’t matter to me – healing does. It feels good to bowl with the opposite hand and laugh within yourself. Eat with the other hand and go miniature golfing the other way. While doing these activities praising the efforts of the opposite hand or foot is all it takes. Shoot, drawing a picture with your opposite hand can be a great activity to do with your kids. Have them draw with their opposite hand too. You are the new mom and dad to yourself and have the opportunity to re-grow up in a loving environment where there is unconditional love.

“How will this help me in my marriage? How will this help my work stress?” It is important to realize that with a spirituality lens – everything outside of us is just an illusion. In fact, to take this to a deeper step, Sigmund Freud said that everything outside of us is a mirror to ourselves. “When you point your finger at someone, three fingers are pointing back to you.” In practice, as you judge your partner, guess who they remind you of? That’s right – you. Humbling isn’t it? To take it to the next step, set intentions to live life differently. “My intention is to be in my loving heart with myself and others.”

The only reality is within you. What you think colors your world. The interesting thing is that how you view the world gives you a clue about what is going on deep inside of you. But look at all the wars going on. Look at what the government is doing. Granted but how does the exterior world remind you of the war going on inside of yourself? Do you have rage? Panic? Doubts? Guess what – that is you on the inside. What is your intention? Do you want to be right or do you want to live a healthy life that is filled with peace?

It is interesting the way we take everything going on around us to heart. We’ve learned to do this – take things personally, but bottom line if we truly want to be at peace, then make the effort to be at peace. A little advise, Mother Theresa said, “If you judge people, you don’t have time to love them.”

Combining psychology and spirituality gives us a framework for all the hardships of life, and especially the injustices. Do you realize that you are so powerful that you attract both positivity and negativity to you? We attract these things to us out of habit. The family system you grew up in has a major impact on your entire life. You may want to believe you are nothing like your mother, but think again, down deep you know the truth, especially when you tell people the same thing she told you. Until you process through all the conditioning you can them become your own person – living from your own desires and truth.