Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscara.

In today's episode, I'm going to talk about why you don't need to open up the floodgates.

More to come on that in a moment, first let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so one thing I tend to notice for folks on their healing and growth journey is we can go in with an overly zealous attitude toward our healing.

It sort of has this feeling of show me everything.

Show me all the pain that's there beneath the surface.

I give it to me now.

I want to have an experience, I want to get through it, and I want to grow.

And I'm basically talking to myself here because that has always been my orientation with most things in my life instead of just meditating.

An hour a day, let's go to the monastery and meditate 15 hours a day.

So if you find yourself in this camp, I hear you.

Also, there can be a fear around this.

Maybe in your own journey, it feels like, well, there's a lot beneath the surface.

And you might be getting some sort of pressure from other people, or maybe interpretations of what you should be doing.

Based on personal growth channels that sort of suggests, like, wow, I have to go into all of this.

Then it can just have this orientation of, like, I need to open up the floodgates, feel everything in order to do the work.

And I want to tell you, you do not need to open up the floodgates and feel everything that's been lingering in the background.

Not only is this not necessary, it is often destructive.

And in an almost ironic way, it is very similar to its opposite, which is full on suppression.

So if we go into this impulsively, this, like, show me everything, open up the floodgates, it does have the same energy as don't show me anything.

They're both extreme forms of relating to your internal experience, even though they're on opposite sides of the spectrum.

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