
I am going to get straight to the point here, many of us are completely out of touch with our emotions, for many different reasons, mainly because they are still seen as taboo, which is understandable seeing as a lot of us would have been told to 'stop crying' when we were younger or disciplined for showing anger. Without realising it, we take this stance on emotion in to adulthood, believing that some emotions are good and acceptable and some emotions are bad and should not be felt or expressed.
I am speaking very generally here but what do we tend to do when we are sad? We try to make ourselves feel better, we keep ourselves busy, we try to use logic to talk ourselves out of it 'I'm just being silly', we tend to suffer in silence because we don't want to seem weak or burden others with our emotion. What do we do when we are angry? We can often suppress it because anger is 'bad', we push it away because we associate more with our happy emotions and naturally want nothing to do with the ones that do not make us feel good.
By doing this we then add another layer to the emotion, so as well as feeling the 'bad' emotion we also feel a layer of shame or guilt for feeling said emotion in the first place, causing our emotions to feel even more intense and allowing them to subconsciously control our behaviour even further.
But where does that emotion go if we don't express it? On an energetic level, its charge sits within our bodies, leaving us feeling heavy, trying to come out, and every now and again you may get a glimpse of it, but then soon enough you push it away again. This could go on for a lifetime, and I personally believe it manifests itself in to illness over time. The 'bad' emotion does not feel good so you don't want to feel it, understandably. But it won't go anywhere, your emotion is as much a part of your being as your limbs are, you can't just disown them.
Trust me when I say that I know, how very deeply painful emotion can be, but we need to realise that resistance to the pain will ultimately lead to suffering. The only way we can begin to let go of these emotions is to feel them. Now I am not saying, for example, next time you are angry to act on impulse and throw a fit of rage. You do not have to act on emotions. I am talking about the art of feeling, allow yourself to really feel the emotion in your body, dive in to it as far as you are able to go, experience it and then in time, allow it to naturally pass.
If you do feel like your emotions are too painful to experience, there is help out there, friends, mentors, therapists... Get someone to be present with you and hold your hand whilst you experience the temporary darkness.
The reason I feel so very strongly about this is because I want you to realise that we cannot be selective about the emotions we feel and do not feel. If you switch yourself off from fully feeling pain, anger, sadness or depression etc you will also switch yourself off from fully feeling joy, happiness, love and creativity.
Emotions are ours to be felt, they are our compass in life, they show us which direction to go in, they allow us to establish what we like and what we don't like, they direct us to our joy, they tell us if we need to make a change in life. They are the substance of our self expression and creativity. To not allow yourself to feel your emotion is to live in oblivion of your own needs.
If you would like to begin to get more in touch with your emotion, a good exercise to do would be to keep a small notebook, each time something creates an emotion in you, whether negative or positive, write down exactly how it feels, where you can feel it in your body, is it a soft and light feeling or is a heavy and dark feeling or something else? Which area of your body does it feel like it is in? What label would you give this particular emotion? e.g joy, sadness, grief?
Do this for a while until you become familiar with your emotions, this is a great stepping stone to help release the heavy energy of emotions and direct you to your true joy.
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