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Freedom From Emotional Triggers: How to Heal What Hurts

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Foreword

This is the book that would have made my own understanding and healing of my emotional triggers easier and faster. It is the sum total of what I have absorbed and applied from many different spiritual teachers along my path that began in the late '80s in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

The steps in this book are not as linear of a path as "Steps 1-8" would indicate. In fact, all the steps apply all the time, but we have to start somewhere. These steps have proven to be a reliable way into the level of consciousness necessary to bypass the defensive ego's unwillingness to enter into the places that hurt. 

Before I recognized that what I was feeling in my body was the activation of emotional triggers, or samskaras in Sanskrit,  I would lash out or numb out whenever I was in a situation that triggered me and I healed nothing. 

As long as I allowed the samskara-driven outbound reactivity to play out, again and again, my body tightened the defensive mechanisms around the very samskaric knot that needed my Loving Presence to heal. My reactivity got worse and worse, and my health and relationships suffered. 

A Course in Emotional Freedom is a unique approach to healing emotional triggers born directly out of my decades of studying, practicing, and teaching Buddhism, esoteric Christianity, and the 8-limbed path of yoga. I am not a therapist or healer. The only true healer I have come across is All-Loving Divine Presence, or in yogic terminology, Purusha, within each of us. 

Purusha is Love. 

Purusha is deep and complete Presence: Life, Prana, Chi itself, unblocked, radiant, electric, vibrant, illuminated. The Source. The Divine. God. Love. 

Every culture, lineage, tribe has its preferred name for the Oneness behind it all. I use these names interchangeably because I have taught and learned from so many different lineages and cultures and teach in such a multi-cultural setting. You pick which name for Oneness works for you. 

The path to emotional freedom is one of removing the energetic contractions within ourselves that prevent Source from flowing through. These contractions, triggered by our reaction to external events, often cause us to check out so as not to feel the awful vibration of fear, sadness, and loneliness. Even the bravest among us is reduced to a trembling child when a samskara is activated.  The story that is replayed during a triggering episode is usually some version of:  I am not loved! I am not safe!  I do not belong to the tribe! I don’t have a place by the fire, no one to protect me or keep me safe, all alone in the world.   This story is life-threatening.

We find our way back to The Divine by entering into, feeling, and being with, the places within us that have forgotten The Divine. 

This course will teach you to master the art of checking in, coming home, being there for yourself in your darkest hour of need.  You will open up the experience of Being in Love with every part of yourself. 

We cannot heal ourselves—and much less the world—unless we all stop being at the mercy of our samskaras. They lay hidden like landmines within, waiting to erupt in the form of emotional reactivity, drama, or numbing. Millions of unhealed samskaras cause the ailing of our world in the human population across the globe. If we don’t start taking responsibility for our inner healing, we cannot heal the perceived outside world. 

My Story

I was born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark, and moved to the United States in 1998 when I was 28 years old. I became involved in Tibetan meditation and Iyengar yoga in 1989, shortly after my father died unexpectedly. The mind and body benefits of these practices were miraculous to me.

But I wish someone would have explained what was going on when my gut would still constrict, and my breathing got tight, just because my boyfriend didn’t show up on time. 

I was embarrassed by my inability to stay peaceful. 

I thought it meant I was not practicing quite enough. Or that he was a jerk and I should find a new boyfriend. Or both. I thought that more meditation, yoga, crystals, or herbs would fix the pit in my stomach and the lump in my throat. And I did give all that an earnest try, and there is no doubt that much of what I learned from both the ancient yogic practices and Tibetan Buddhism helped me in my search for healing. 

But it would take me nearly three decades to arrive at these much more concrete steps for lasting healing that I want to share with you. 

Healing that does not depend upon anyone else changing in order for you to feel a deep sense of love, safety, and belonging. By this, I don’t mean that we do not work forever greater equity and harmony in our relationships or the world. But I mean that our inner state and sense of balance are not dependent upon anyone else granting us permission to exist. 

One of my earliest Buddhist teachers explained it this way: think of a movie projector; you are the light bulb, the Source is the electricity that illuminates your individual light bulb. Your mind’s content is the film that is projected by the light onto/into the world. 

What appears before you on the silver screen is what you perceive as “your life coming toward you, rather than being projected from you.”

We are largely lost in the illusion that life is happening to us and not emanating from us. Whatever is programmed into the mind from lifetimes of experiences, traumas, memories, as well as our talents and expectations is all projected out into what we perceive as the “real world.” He went on to say, “your job is to clear the knots in the energy field of your mind, which shows up as bodily signals at all times.”

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the foundational document for modern-day Hatha Yoga, makes a similar assertion:

“Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah”, which means “Yoga is stilling the fluctuations of the mind,” or literally translated as: “Chitta: mind, consciousness Vritti: waves, fluctuations Nirodhah: to control, to quiet.”

When all the individual mind content calms down, we can experience our Divinity, our eternal, infinite light as who we really are. That is what becoming enlightened means. That is why we meditate. It is not becoming anything; it is uncovering who we already are when all the dust that covers the light falls away and ceases to be part of the movie we are projecting. It is releasing all the tension that prevents us from experiencing our true nature. The Christian tradition says the same thing: Be still and know that I AM. 

This is not what we learn to do when we are born into modern society. We quickly learn to grasp outside of ourselves for gratification. This is akin to walking up to the silver screen and hoping to find something shiny that will make us feel better and, more often than not, attempting to change someone else’s behavior to soothe our reactions to what they are doing. 

The Yogic Method for finding freedom is an inside job. 

It examines all the mind programming, the more superficial vrittis (fluctuations), and the deeper, harder to let go of samskaras. 

The program you are about to embark on will address your mind content and help you become very clear on how it plays out. But first, it will put you more deeply into alignment with and/or remind you that you are the Light that illuminates the whole drama that you call your life. 

When you practice the eight steps that I will lay out for you, your life will change and your relationships shift. Instead of resisting the vibrational experience of an emotional trigger, they will become opportunities for growth and healing both within yourself and between you and other people. 

This is my take on the authentic yoga practice as explained by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras and Tibetan Buddhist practice as explained to me in my early years in the Kagyu Lineage. True yoga is akin to stopping the movie from being projected and just being still with the light bulb of you. Illuminated, ‘enlightened’, radiant, bliss. If you have meditated for a while, you will likely have had glimpses or maybe even extended experiences of this state, but your movie starts playing again sooner or later. As long as your samskaras are present in the energy field of your body, they will be mirrored back to you as actual life experiences.

What if your life here on earth is to clear the film of all the energetic knots? The contracted places within that play out as painful experiences again and again.

I will share with you my personal experience of the healing power of the yogic path as a means to healing deep-seated emotional triggers. 

I am sharing how I applied the yogic and Buddhist teachings specifically to my emotional life. The eight steps that gradually emerged for me over my years of practicing yoga and leading yoga teacher training programs have profoundly changed my life and those of hundreds of my students and private coaching clients. 

Am I now a healed and enlightened being?

No, I am not. I get triggered, and I suffer. But it’s a very, very different level of experience and intensity than it used to be. I no longer feel flooded by the painful stories that are activated in certain situations. A more significant portion of my consciousness now remains in clear sight and solidly connected to my Higher Self. From my current vantage point, I can gently guide my wounded self into the Light, back into Love. 

You can do this too. Because at heart, you are a magnificent, radiant, deeply empathic, and compassionate, Loving Divine presence. 

If you find yourself getting emotionally triggered and reactive, this practice will show you how to create unshakable ground within. 

Your true eternal self is a powerful, radiant, essential being completely capable of holding and healing the place in you that still believes the external world must change for you to be happy. The pain within that believes someone else must be different for you to stay peaceful inside will lessen.

Use the form below to request the first chapter of How to Heal Your Emotional Triggers by Maria Toso.