The following is excerpted from Gift of the Body, published by the Essential Light Institute. 

Light is real, more real in its being eternal than the temporary structures it shines down upon. If you want to live an authentically spiritualized life, you need to see and feel the need for the light so badly that it becomes the only thing that you can’t live without. With the light, everything is possible. Without it, nothing really matters. When you are living in the awareness of being constantly bathed in light, you will see that up until that point you had been living your life looking through a cloud. The cloud is composed of the energetic material of your mistaken belief that light is merely a metaphor, a poetic spiritual image or that if it really exists, Light is reserved only for saints or the tiny fraction of humanity that can be called enlightened. Or perhaps that He/She—the Divine Intelligence, God, the Numinous, the Great Spirit or whatever term you give to that ultimate power—is the owner of the Light, parcels it out sparingly, and that you with all your faults are an eternally unworthy supplicant of it. All lies.

In terms of our discussion on the emotional body, what is useful to know is that, when you connect directly with Divine Light, anything in your HEV which does not match the vibration of that light has two choices. It can raise itself up, or it can leave.

Energetic congestion is dense and slow without being calm. Light is fast and high without being shrill. When the two meet in your emotional body, the interface of the long-held denseness with the light will shake the emotional body. It can feel like a battle, when really it is just a serious conversation. One part is holding on. Depending on how enamored you are with your stubbornness, it will hold on more or less tightly. The light is calling, cajoling, demanding that stuck material to, “Come on, let’s go.” The dance between these two energies can throw you around for a while. You might feel worse for a time. You certainly will feel more emotional turbulence than you are used to. You might even get sick. It is like a stream that becomes temporarily dirtier than it usually is because the stuck garbage that was hidden along its banks is getting peeled away by a speeding up of the flow of the water. Soon the debris will be swirled away, leaving the stream clean.

When the interaction of the Light that you invited to do its thing in you meets your congestion (which for many years has been used to the homeostasis)—when that Light starts to bend its way into the hidden places of your pain, stuff starts to move for real. You cry more, you shake, you dream intensely, you cleanse in lots of ways, on lots of levels. (Remember that the emotional body is the drain for all the bodies.) This clearing process can last a while, which is why it’s best to do it with the help of people who are ahead of you in their own healing process, preferably professionals. But your friends, your family, and community all have a part in helping you to move through what can look and feel like dying.

What will in fact happen if you go through it, is that you will be re-born as a free person. But in the short run, you can doubt that you will get through and question whatever possessed you to make that prayer for light to come and free you. For a while, you need folks to tell you it’s going to be all right, to keep you calm and feeling safe, while you feel naked and unprotected, because the boulder of emotional material that you’ve carried was ballast and shield for you. After a while, you will start to feel way better.

Is it a strange process? You betcha. Is it worth it? Guaranteed. The process is necessary because everything that you are carrying in your emotional body that is causing you pain is from the past, and mostly the distant past. You have been an energetic sponge—or a vault with emotion locked inside, or a sponge locked inside a vault—full to bursting, but with nowhere to burst. You have collected, and then held on to, emotional forms that have kept you living in the past, and that have been making you sick. Because you want to make room for light, because you love truth, and because you seek pleasure, you come to see that what you may need to undergo in order to get free is ultimately worth it, and that the only way out is through.

The key to authentic healing is to love freedom with its risks more than convention with its safety, and to demand and cultivate the love of the sensation of freedom in your bodies. Freedom is not just a concept, and not just the absence of rules. It is a palpable force.

Congestion in the emotional body feels like being in solitary confinement. We have to break out of prison with the key of light. But light doesn’t just open the door to the cell. It also cleans the prisoner of what got him isolated in the first place. Getting out of prison is a huge step. Refusing the habits that would put us back behind the familiar bars, and creating new habits that serve us to stay clean and present, is called “walking the path”. We need protection, but not the protection that comes from being emotionally loaded.

Emotional cleansing, that is motivated by the desire for freedom and held in Light, is almost always accompanied by the release of spiritual attachments. These are energetic hangers-on, thoughts and emotions and entities that have actual energetic, non-physical form, that need to be gently but firmly conducted from your HEV into that Light, which will in turn take them to a type of cosmic recycling station where they can be transformed away from you. Again, this is not metaphorical, nor is it actually “woo-woo.” Every- body on earth that lives in open contact with nature, or who relaxes their death grip on materialism, understands that the non-material population of our planet far exceeds that in any kind of material bodies. There are worlds within worlds. There are such things as spirits, angels, helpers, guides, nature spirits, and tricksters. These all have what we can recognize as consciousness, even if most of us can’t see them. They interact with this material world within strict rules of engagement. They are the small voice that whispers a warning (that you may or may not listen to) when you are about to do some- thing particularly stupid. They are the inspiration out of nowhere that gives you the creative idea you’ve been waiting for that resolves the seemingly impossible problem you are facing. They are the radiation that comes through a healer’s hands. They are the celestial voice that comes from a singer’s mouth. They are the non-material protectors and advisors that stand by you, as you choose to do the things that you came to earth to do. And they are the ones that will trip you up time and time again, until you learn to pay attention—and to recognize what comes with love and what comes with fakery. They are the ones reported on by every religion or spiritual path of every stripe—usually rendered with ideological interpretations that turn them into something cartoonish—yet still manage to convey a pure truth concealed underneath for those whose inner eyes have been opened and whose powers of discernment have been sharpened.

The fact that some of these energies are attached to you and exaggerate your pain is not really a stretch to comprehend, unless you have narrowed your vision to such an extent that you believe that all there is to reality is what you can access with your most rudimentary senses. That limited, materialistic attitude puts you in a tiny category, in terms of the totality of people who have lived on earth through the ages in deep relationship with the natural world and the layers of energetic reality that compose it. Discounting what is the major part of reality might make you imagine that you are sophisticated and intelligent according to a narrow definition of what is rational, but the exclusive reliance on physical senses and scientific inquiry to define reality isolates you, cuts you off from your true connection to the natural world, from your own life force, and your own wonder-filled spiritual being.

In our modern, present-day world, this attitude is understandable given the lack of actual spiritual education available to most of us. But as my teacher, José Rosa, once said to me, “It’s a good thing reality doesn’t depend on your opinion.” It is my hope and intention that your vistas are being broadened a bit as you read this book. Don’t believe it because I say it. Those days are past. Check it out for yourself. To do that, you need to allow the unfamiliar, humble thought that what you know is tiny and narrow, and reality is huge and wide and deep. Then get quiet, inside and out. Wait for an internal space where you don’t care one way or the other what the answer is to your questions. You just want the truth, as much of it as you are ready to handle. And then ask whomever, whatever, whichever you relate to, to show you, tell you, intuit you the truth of the matter. Be patient, and don’t let the possibility of being surprised out of cherished notions deter you from the truth.

What I learned through that experience is that we all have guides, or whatever you choose to call the unseen presences that assist us and may possibly disturb us, or both. It may be your great-grandmother that you never met who comes to you in the twilight world between sleeping and waking; the almost-seen person who is there in every dream that you wake from knowing that this was more than just a dream. Or the voice that comes from the right or the left side of your head, that you know somehow is male or female, young or old, that is always there to test you, challenge you, maybe even to try and drive you crazy so you come to know yourself. These protectors, guides, entities, whatever you choose to call them, are each hooked into you somewhere. They literally (although not materially) live somewhere in your HEV. What they are there for is for you to discover through meditation, prayer, and the gradual process of awakening awareness called dis-identification. There is, in you, both “you” and “not-you.” By learning the discernment to know who is who, you learn who is you.

Some of these consciousnesses are there permanently as your companions on your life walk. They have been there all along. When you are done with this vehicle, they will be sitting in the seat next to you on the new conveyance that will bear you back home. Some are there because, when you were one or five or twelve years old, you had a need to survive a life situation that felt overwhelmingly threatening. You called out to the inner planes for help, and along came help in the form of a protector being. Along with keeping you from saying/doing/feeling what was dangerous for you to experience or express in that setting, they gave you a necessary “bonus”; they kept emotional material in your energy body from being naturally processed and released. So when you get to that stage of being ready to be free, and you call the light to free you, the light comes to clean and transform that material. And then those no longer useful functionaries of your past internal program get challenged with the opportunity to get a new job. Your savior has become a prison guard, habitually holding in the prisoner who has realized their parole is up to them. They are functionaries doing their job long after the job has become obsolete. Some of them just need to be gently directed to look up. They go happily with a wave good-bye. Some others grip on and make every excuse as to why you are making the biggest mistake of your life to let them go. You will learn a lot about who you are in the process of re-negotiating the contract you made with them.

And when they leave, there is a lot of emotional material that they have been holding back that will swirl out. Knowing it is just part of the process allows us to, so to speak, step aside and hold the door open for the releasing to proceed without too much of our involvement. It goes much faster that way. It is, after all, just e-nergy that has been put into motion. The flowing energy of emotion is meant to enliven and connect us with our environment and with each other. It is not intended to run the show, or to be a show. Constant indulgence of emotion, living one’s life only according to how the winds of feeling blow, acting out emotion under the excuse of freedom, is not fundamentally different than repressing it and acting that out. Those who make a huge deal out of emotion in their reaction to imposed repression, both familial and societal, are giving emotion a prominence that it was not intended to have.

The information that we receive from accessing what we want, what we desire, is not the same as accessing accurate intuition. Intuition tells us what is best for all beings, including ourselves. That is oftentimes at odds with what our lower self wants, in its pursuit of what will satisfy its hunger. Intuition has to feel right, but in the short run, sometimes it doesn’t feel good. Desire and intuition come from entirely different places in our bodies. One is not better than the other, but they have different agendas and will guide us to different ends. It’s useful to know who and what we are following, both externally and internally. This discernment is absolutely necessary for living a useful spiritualized life, guided by something other than ideology.

We can learn the art of literally transforming our emotional material— from being painfully stuck into vitally moving. Then we become enlivened, and a tiny but real portion of the energetic atmosphere of the planet is eased. When we join with others doing the same, we become examples of joyful aliveness and community healing, however that is expressed. People who love freedom in their own bodies also support freedom for others in theirs. And complementarily, people who really inhabit their bodies, who embrace their emotional body as the alive-making mechanism that it is, without blowing its importance out of proportion, are also respectful of boundaries, both personal and societal. This doesn’t mean that we accept boundaries without question, or that we don’t choose to push through them at times, or even bust them once in awhile. Living freely demands a constant re-evaluation, in order to overcome the tendency of matter to stagnate and institutions to become self-preserving parodies of their original intent. To be grounded in the reality of our true emotions takes us simultaneously into inner contact with ourselves, and makes us better able to see other people without distortion, as not just an extension of ourselves.

As such, the world is not just a stage for your emotional expression or repression. We see that everyone is swimming in the vast sea of energy; we see the need to help each other to avoid the rocks, to care for each other when we flounder or become hurt. The boundaries are seen and acknowledged and respected, even as they are questioned and stretched.

People who love Light, and come to recognize it and cherish it as the liberating force for themselves, as that which heals and guides them, also come to recognize where it is absent both inside them and out in the world, and where it is only pretending to be present. When we are aligned with Light, with what is real, we are less likely to be fooled by pretty words covering empty promises. If we are temporarily fooled by the mist of unresolved emotion rising up, or by the mind’s attachment to a particular storyline, our inviolable link to Light will shortly remind us (through our intuition) of what is true. By our connection to Light, we become healers in our families and communities, and better citizens, even as we continue our own healing in our own bodies. We live out the truth that Light is everywhere, that Light is free and freeing, and that abundance is the truth of the universe. How far beyond our individual lives and our small groups can that commitment to Light reach? The answer depends on how many of us link-up, what we create when we follow that Light, where it wants us to go and what it guides us to do.

from:    http://realitysandwich.com/268472/light-is-not-a-metaphor/