Bottled-Up Emotions and Icky Fungus

Sometimes memories are trapped in jars with the lids on tight. Without any air being able to get in to release the emotions those memories hold, they remain just as vivid. Some jars really hurt to open them. Some lids are very difficult to remove. Sometimes we try to empty the jars but find the contents are viscous, black, heavy, stuck within the small openings - nearly impossible to pry out. Some of the lids have come a bit unscrewed through the years, a small stream of oxygen has gotten in, but instead of clearing out the mess what has happened instead is that a fungus has grown. That fungus rots the original memory, overtakes it, and the fungus spreads - and even escapes the confines of the jar - infesting and affecting all the other memories it touches. It seeks out new breeding grounds, memories like the original one, where it can grow and spread further. It turns the many, unconnected, random memories and creates a story around those events - making them seems like they are all the same, because they are all covered by the same mold that came from the first memory jar. This is a very tenacious fungus, it spreads without us even realizing it. It is nearly impossible to completely eradicate. The spores hang in the aetherial air that is our emotional consciousness, catching onto any surface that can nourish it into maturity. Bottling up these spores does nothing to stop them - they cannot die from suffocation - though parts of us, can. Nothing can remain bottled forever - and once the lid is opened, or the glass breaks from strain, those fungus spores are freed again to wreak havoc across the delicate ecosystem that is our emotional biome. What, then, can be done to treat this moldy affliction? In the physical realm, one of the biggest fungus-eradicators is sunlight, and this is true on an emotional level as well. Beyond sunlight, also letting other forms of light in to our emotional sphere is vital to healing our emotions. Bathing those memories in clarity, acceptance, allowance, and love opens them up to being cleared by the "light" and oxygenating effects. Self-criticisms and judgments close us off, pull us in on ourselves, narrow our emotional pathways, and create the sort of environment that is a breeding ground for these negative emotional fungi. When we learn to treat our emotional afflictions with the same sort of attitude we treat our physical ones, we can discover many correlations between those two realms and how they affect and interact with each other. Everything in the physical realm can be used as a metaphor for the emotional realm - and vice versa - which is a beautiful thing. Perhaps it is time to do a bit of "spring-cleaning" and air out our attics, let some sunlight in, and clear out those dusty corners we like to pretend aren't there.