Can Feelings Stick to a Place?: Radical Joy Revealed

Radical Joy Revealed is a weekly message of inspiration about finding and making beauty in wounded places. We hope you'll enjoy these doorways into places that are both familiar and surprising, and we welcome your suggestions, stories, and photos. Click here to subscribe.

Can Feelings Stick to a Place?

Mandala of nasturtium flowers by Sasha Daucus

Can the emotions we feel in a physical place actually affect how we later come to feel about that place? Sasha Daucus of the Golden Light Center in Doniphan, Missouri believes it's possible. Here's a practice she created to release that "stuckness."

I noticed yesterday that a few places on my land have become a bit heavy to me, as they are places I especially go when I am hurting and to find relief. Someone I love died a few weeks ago, so I have been visiting those places in feelings of grief and finding relief there. But as those feelings began to lift I noticed I felt a little aversion to visiting the places, as though my grief had left an unpleasant residue that I could somehow pick up by revisiting! Obviously this was something I wanted to change!

So this morning, during my morning meditation, I began to send blessings to these places on my land, using the mantra that I use every morning, but adapted to the circumstances: "May this place be happy and well. May this place be free of suffering and the root of all suffering. May this place feel and be love." I kept an image and feeling of the place in my mind and heart and repeated the mantra several times. As I repeated it, I felt the "stuck energy" dissolve away and my feelings about the place return to neutral. When I visited the places later this morning, in fact there was a feeling of clarity and greater space in them. I was very happy with these results! It seems that our attention returns to the memory of the wound and may actually deepen the groove of unhappiness, even after the wounding incident is in the past.

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Radical Joy for Hard Times is a global community of people dedicated to finding and making beauty in wounded places. Reconnecting with these places, sharing our stories of loss, and making acts of beauty there, we transform the land, reconnect people and the places that nourish them, and empower ourselves to make a difference in the way we live on Earth.

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