When youre feeling stuck in old emotional, mental or physical patterns, Polarity Processing is a simple & powerful tool ~ based firmly in yogic principles ~ that can help you get un-stuck. The technique has been given to the world through the contemporary Teacher Leslie Temple-Thurston, who is based, with her organization CoreLight, in South Africa and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

So heres how it works: When you notice yourself being stuck (e.g. in patterns of emotional reactivity, or in a physical illness you cant quite shake, or in mental negativity, or in a life-situation (financial, relationship) which just seems to keep repeating itself, in a way thats not useful or enjoyable), the first thing to do is stop and acknowledge your stuck-ness. Simply being willing to see it (to access that part of yourself thats a neutral witness to whatever drama is unfolding) creates the space for this technique to work.

Next, take out a piece of paper and a pen, sit down, and write ~ for ten or fifteen minutes ~ about the situation. Let yourself describe it fully, with a focus on saying/writing how youre feeling about the whole thing. Youll probably generate a page or two of writing. (It should be no more than this.)

When youve completed this step, go back and underline (in what youve just written) all of the emotionally-charged words or phrases. (Words like: hopeless, sad, frustrated, shame, rage, ) This is any word or phrase which somehow points to how the situation is making you feel. If the situation is unpleasant to you, these words will probably be mostly negative, but dont exclude, in this underlining part of the process, the positive ones.

Once youve done this, get a new piece of paper, and re-write these words/phrases youve just underlined in a column down the left-hand side of this new piece paper. And now for the most important step: for each word youve written down, ask yourself: What would be, in this particular situation, the opposite of this word or phrase. As you get these opposites, write them down in a column facing the first column so each of your initial words or phrases is now directly across from its opposite word or phrase. For example: if one of your underlined words was sadness, you might choose happiness as its opposite; if one of your underlined words was shame, you might choose blame as your opposite, and so forth.

After youve written down an opposite for every one of your underlined words/phrases, go back and read the list of words/opposites again. And then (and heres the yogic part!) acknowledge to yourself (and the universe) that all of these states of mind actually exist within you. That some have been conscious (the ones you initially wrote about), and others have been unconscious (their opposites), but now youre choosing to become conscious of both pairs of opposites. When you do this, you liberate the energy that has been bound in the emotional or mental or physical pattern defined by these pairs of opposites you allow unconscious stuck-ness to begin again to flow

To end, sit quietly for a few minutes, and invoke the guidance of the invisible realms, in whatever way youre comfortable doing this. Ask for the support of your angels or guides or God or Buddha or Whoever in releasing this old pattern, and opening to receive the shifts of body, mind & spirit that will be forthcoming. Notice how you feel.

[If a pattern is a long-term one, you may have to repeat this process, again and again, for weeks or months or years But each time you do it, the stuck-ness will be unraveled a bit, until finally youre completely free of it. For less-entrenched patterns, youll notice a strong shift after just one or two rounds!]

Once youre comfortable with the Polarity Processing technique, you can deepen this work by learning a couple of more advanced practices ~ call Squares and Triangles ~ which build on the Polarity Processing work, and are focused in a more specific way on the physical and emotional bodies. Learn more about these techniques at the CoreLight.org website.

Blessings!