VIPASSANA MEDITATION AND THE EMOTIONAL CLEANSING TOOL NEMO 

by Ienke Keijzer

What do Vipassana Meditation and the Emotional Cleansing tool NEMO have in common ?

By Ienke Keijzer

What do Vipassana meditation and the emotional cleansing tool NEMO have to do with each other ? Well, it all comes down to three little words sung by John Lennon : "LET IT BE".

I am a therapist and trainer of therapists and one of my key tools is the emotional cleansing tool NEMO, a therapeutic tool which is easy to use and at the same time extremely efficient. It is based on what is most basic in life, the letting be of the physical sensations. And to those practising the Vipassana meditation, this should definitely ring a bell. Therefore we could say, the Vipassana Meditation is at the basics of the emotional cleansing tool NEMO. Let me explain a bit more in detail!

LET IT BE

If we take a close look at what forms the basics of the NEMO emotional cleansing technique, we find what is most basic in life, the "let it be".

Small children, when we look at them closely, are very skilled in letting be. Then, as we grow older and advance in life, we lose this habit, more importantly here in the Western world. Our education still aims at the repression of emotions and feelings to fit the standards, to not disturb, to not take too much place. When we are sad and cry, we often hears things like "but no, don't cry, everything will be OK, please stop crying", and when we are angry, most of the time we are not really allowed to express it. Because it is "not done" to show our real emotions, we hold ourselves together, refrain ourselves, don't get upset or at least dont show it.

This repression of emotions, this capacity to deny them, this keeping it all in, has for most of us become a habit, an automatism. It has become normal. We often make out that a problem doesn't exist, and we repress the emotions and feelings that would help us suffer so much less if they could develop freely.

Listening and welcoming our emotions by letting our feelings be is difficult for many of us, almost as if it were something unnatural. Yet, it is the basis of all well-being. I am happy to see that slowly, slowly things seem to be changing these days. Personal development is starting to take off and Mindfulness is being more and more integrated in school programs as well as in the daily life of many people.

With the emotional cleansing tool NEMO, we are going to focus on the physical expression of our feelings (thus not on the feelings themselves!). We are going to welcome them and allow them to express themselves, in complete freedom, until the end, the very end.

VIPASSANA MEDITATION

This letting be of the physical expression of our feelings without selfintervention is found in different types of meditation practises and in particular in the Vipassana meditation. This form of meditation is over 2500 years old and is the meditation practised and taught by Buddha Siddhârta Gautama, the best-known buddha and founder of Buddhism.

Vipassana means seeing things the way they really are and the Vipassana meditation was, and still is, taught as a universal remedy of universal discomforts, as a way of life.

During a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat, the main objective is to focus on the objective sensations in the body, on their coming and going, without intervening. It is about observing what is going on in the body, without judging, without trying to change anything, without trying to repress anything.

It is all about welcoming and letting the sensations be. It may sound easy, but it can be a rather hard and painful experience. And believe me, ten days is long when you are not used to this kind of practice. Nonetheless, the work in itself is worth the pain and the trouble. Participants of the retreats often notice that, after a retreat, certain excessive emotional reactivities they used to suffer from, have fundamentally changed or disappeared. An emotional hyperreactivity, a phobia and/or a physical pain (psychosomatic pain) have disappeared.

GET RID OF YOUR EMOTIONAL OVERREACTING

The main "disadvantage" of doing a Vipassana retreat, except for the fact that a ten-day-retreat is not always easy to organise and to experience, and therefore not accessible to all, is that the work during the retreat does not aim to solve a problem in particular. We do not know in advance what we will be working on in Vipassana. Something will happen, there will be clear results, but we do not know beforehand what these results will be, what problem is going to be solved, what is going to change for us. This makes it difficult to get rid of a specific excessive emotional reactivity or phobia.

And this is where the emotional cleansing NEMO comes in :-)

EMOTIONAL CLEANSING NEMO "A CHAUD"

If we know what we want to work on, all it takes is to act the very moment an excessive emotional reactivity or phobia is annoying us. If we act at this precise moment, if we let the physical sensations be and if we go until the very end of the process, we will for once and for all get rid of the phobia or this specific emotional overreacting. This is what we call doing an emotional cleansing NEMO "à chaud".

"A chaud" means we do the technique when we are undergoing our emotional hyperreactivity, the moment we are reacting in an excessive, disproportionate way to a trigger situation that doesn't necessarily require such an emotinal overreaction. It means doing the technique the moment we are "freaking out", when we are losing it when we see that spider on the wall, when we have to enter that elevator, when we start sweating and shaking when sitting in that plance, when the nurse gets out that needle, etc.

NEMO "à chaud" comes down to the instruction "observe the sensations and let them be" of the Vipassana meditation. By retaining just this "let the sensations be", we have in hand the technique of NEMO "à chaud" and the basics of NEMO in general.

So you see, it all comes down to using an emotional cleansing technique that has been used since the dawn of time. If you feel like trying the emotional cleansing "à chaud", also read this article about how to get rid of your phobias and excessive emotional reactivities with the emotional cleansing tool NEMO.

THERAPEUTIC EMOTIONAL CLEANSING TOOL

The easiest way to do the emotional cleansing is "à chaud", whether it is when you do a self-NEMO or a session with a client in your practice.  But if you want to do the emotional cleansing NEMO "à froid", when the emotional negative charge has not been triggered when you want to work on an emotional hyperreactivity or phobie, we have to add a few steps to the NEMO protocole. This is what usually happens when a client comes to a therapist's practice. These extra steps help us to intentionally launch the natural cleansing process. It therefore takes a little longer than a NEMO "à chaud", but as the negative emotional charge is not triggered it is definitely less disturbing and stressful for experience. The emotional cleansing "à froid" starts with some pre-work to get to the same point of the emotional cleansing process as when we do a NEMO "à chaud" where the cleansing process is automatically launched by the trigger situation.

We can now chose what phobia or emotional overreactivity we want to work on. Normally,  an emotional cleansing is a one-shot if you do it well. So one problem, one session. Exceptionally it can be two sessions to solve a problem, but if you master the tool well that will be really rare. And ... be careful, doing the emotional cleansing and get rid of all emotional overreactivities you might suffer from can be really addictive! Each NEMO session will bring you closer to the real you, to the you you really want to be. I have clients coming back session after session to work on a different problem each time. Others want to learn how to do it themselves and continue the work independently from the therapist. All is fine, as long as people work on themselves and get rid of what is avoiding them from being their real selves!

So remember, by letting the physical sensations linked to an excessive emotional reactivity be, you are doing what is most basic in life, Buddha Siddhârta Gautama said so ;-)

I hope this article has been of use for you. Feel free to share your experience(s) with the NEMO emotional cleansing technique, whether you are a client or a therapist. It is always a pleasure to hear from you!

Ienke Keijzer

Neuro Psycho Practitioner - Trainer of therapists and coaches - Author
Grandis Ose