RELEASE YOUR EMOTIONAL PAIN: WHY RELIGION, MEDITATION AND YOGA ARE NOT ENOUGH!

DEAR FRIENDS- Practices such as yoga, meditation, prayer, and positive thinking have proven their value for thousands of years. They relax our bodies and minds, free our life-force, improve our attitudes and help us relate to ourselves and others more positively. We who use them regularly benefit tremendously. I have practiced all of these techniques, on a daily basis, for the past 30 years.
And yet, I have discovered that these practices alone- and their associated spiritual or religious belief systems-  cannot completely heal our suffering or restore our full aliveness and joy. This is because virtually all of us harbor deeply unconscious emotional blocks. These restrictive and numbing blocks primarily originate from emotional traumas, and the dysfunctional handling of our human/developmental needs during our vulnerable, formative years- childhood and adolescence.   They function to keep stored-up pain - powerful feelings of fear, anger, sadness, guilt and shame-  trapped in our bodies and unconscious minds.
As proof of this, I ask you to observe young children. Have you ever wondered why they are so much more expressive, lively and joyful than the average adult? This is because young children have not yet developed the deadening emotional blocks- the "inner prison"-  that inhibit we "grownups" from happily being ourselves. Their inner feelings and spontaneous self-expression are still free. Therefore, they are more alive and excited than the so-called "normal" adult of the 21st Century.
Now consider this- our stored-up emotional pain sets a very real limit on how happy and free we can be. It powerfully impacts our daily mood and highly influences the way we see life, ourselves and each other. And because the pain is kept unconscious by our blocks - we don't recognize that this is happening!
It is my profound personal experience- and the experience of hundreds of my students and clients, many of whom were/are long-term meditators and yogis- that their buried unconscious feelings and pain were almost totally untouched by their practices of yoga, meditation, prayer, affirmations, etc. Every single one of them was astonished by how unaware they had been! They came to understand, as I did, that re-connecting to themselves, becoming free of their pain and coming fully alive requires a new kind of spiritual practice. One which provides the cleansing emotional release that is so necessary for the full liberation of body, mind and spirit.
Think of your emotional blocks- and the stress and pain they trap within you- as a hole in the bottom of a boat. Water is always flowing in. The "water" of stored pain, blocked breathing and stuck energy darkens your mood and creates an ongoing sense of unfreedom, of suffering. Our various spiritual and religious traditions offer explanations about what is causing our suffering, but the actual cause remains hidden.
We do things to feel better- yoga, meditation,  affirmations, prayer. This is like bailing the water from our boat, so we stay afloat. But the water- the stored-up anger/fear/sadness- flows back in, because the emotional pain hasn't been made conscious and released. The hole is still letting in water!
So we do yoga again, we meditate again, we practice prayer and positive thoughts - hopefully, on a daily basis!  But the pain, the darkness to our mood, our emotional "hot buttons" (which re-occur most of all in our relationships!) - always return. Perhaps in lessened form, due to the positive benefits benefits of our practices. But still, the hole hasn't been closed, the pain keeps leaking back into our mood, our feeling of life - the boat keeps taking on water.
The only sure and permanent solution is to see the real situation - that there is a hole in the bottom of your boat, that you are carrying a load of unexpressed emotional pain - and fix the hole!
No spiritual practice or belief system of the past has adequately addressed this fundamental problem. Neither has any prior awakening seen deeply enough to locate the origin of people's lifelong pain in childhood/adolescent traumas and stresses. Quite honestly, no religion or spiritual approach has even recognized these things- at all! Nor developed transformational practices that can heal the pain and blocks at their primal roots.
For example, stored-up sadness requires deep crying to permanently release the pain.  Simply becoming aware of your sadness, and in the stillness of your meditation or yogic posture letting it go, will never be a complete release. Neither will shifting how you think about your sadness, or asking for its release via prayer. Your fully-felt and passionate tears, and full-bodied sobbing, are necessary for permanently freeing your body and spirit.
Or again, contemplate a lifetime of unexpressed and stored-up anger..... Simply recognizing it's presence in your body and spirit, and letting go in your meditative practice, or yoga posture, to return your mind to this present moment- cannot and will never release the anger from your system. The body, mind and spirit require the type of self-expression and release that Nature intended- yelling, hitting, striking out, etc.. All of this, of course, needs to occur in a constructive, healing environment and manner.
Can we ever recover our birthright of excitement, spontaneity and joyful self-expressiveness? The answer is a resounding "yes"! However, this cannot be accomplished through the practices and belief systems of yoga, meditation, conventional religion- or by the "New Age Religion" of working with and transforming your thoughts. As I have said above, these are all valuable but clearly limited in their ability to heal the pain you carry and re-connect you to the love, creativity, joy and aliveness in your core. 
I propose that the recent emergence of awareness about our emotional blocks and stored pain- key aspects of human existence unknown to ALL prior religions and spiritual/philosophical disciplines- is a breakthrough as significant and liberating as all of humanity's spiritual revolutions that have come before it. We cannot become fully free and alive- as individuals, and as a species- without it! Incorporating this new awareness into our understanding and practice is the next step in our spiritual evolution. 
My friends- humanity, individually and collectively, is struggling under a heartbreaking burden of buried pain and lost aliveness. Our deadening emotional blocks separate us from ourselves, each other and the Universe. Out of love and our sacred instinct for freedom, let us not cling to the doctrines and practices of the past as final truth and sufficient medicine for our liberation. With heroic courage and infinite compassion, let us break through the prison walls inside us- and set our love and aliveness free. For our own sake- and for the sake of the generations to come. ALL MY LOVE- BRYAN