Unattended Baggage

 I recently flew to a conference and had a long (ish) layover at the airport.  Every few minutes, an announcement would remind travelers that TSA regulations prohibited unattended baggage.  I found myself thinking that this would be a great general rule for life as well.

How often do we leave our "baggage" lying around?  We have issues we refuse to look at.  We have blind spots we're unaware of.  We have trauma we don't address.  We carry it all around with us until we are able to work through whatever it is.  Sometimes, some of us, never manage to work through any of it.  Wikipedia calls emotional baggage "unresolved issues of an emotional nature".  Everybody has some emotional baggage.  If you're particularly enlightened (ie: you have done lots of messy, uncomfortable inner work) you may have been able to jettison some of your baggage but I guarantee everybody has at least a little bit.

Why do we lug trauma, shame, anger, rejection and a host of other "baggage" around with us?  It's heavy.  It weighs us down.  So, why don't we just be like Anna in Frozen and let it go?  Sometimes we identify with our issues.  We feel they define us, even when they're hurtful.  An example?  If you always got picked last for the team in school, maybe you're hanging onto the idea that you're just an unathletic fat person anyway, so why bother?  There's not always a difference between self perception and self sabotage.

Sometimes we refuse to see our issues.  We feel that if we look at certain things head on, the emotions evoked will be too intense.  Surely the looking will destroy us.  Better to only see certain things from the periphery or better yet, don't look at them at all.  Yet the more intense the feeling, the better we are in actually confronting it.  Our negative emotions have a way of lodging themselves in out bodies.  What's more, they don't go away.  The old joke says that the only problems which go away if you ignore them long enough are teenagers and snow.  Not looking not only requires an enormous amount of energy but it allows issues to fester and worsen. Other times we don't have the wisdom or experience to even realize we have baggage.  We may not be willfully not looking, but we might not have gone out of our way to look closely either.

Yet if we don't address our issues they can cause us harm.  A physical issue like a heart problem can be like a ticking time bomb.  But if that particular bomb explodes, it is only going to physically hurt you.  If you refuse to address your baggage and leave that hanging around it can explode into your relationships, your job and even your sense of purpose, harming not only you, but people you care about as well.  Nothing exists in a vacuum.  Our baggage affects how we show up in the world.  It colors our experience and informs our choices.  You can never act 100% independently from your thoughts, experiences, perceptions and memories.  When those are issues we haven't worked through, the results can be disastrous.

From an energetic perspective, we think we may have these things tamped down tightly, never to be freed from our brains and our hearts.  But there is no containment system.  Even if you never tell a soul, this baggage goes rampaging through your interactions like dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.  

What sort of baggage are you carrying around?  What sort of baggage are you leaving around, unattended?  You can attend to it by dealing with it.  Dealing with your baggage can look like therapy or forgiveness or acceptance or apologies.  It can look like reframing or releasing or deep breaths or asking for help.  There's no one way to deal with your baggage because there's no one type of baggage.  If you go to the airport you will see suitcases and backpacks and purses and duffel bags and tote bags and even cardboard boxes.  In the same way, the emotional baggage we carry comes in all shapes in sizes.  

Please don't leave it "unattended".