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Emotion? or Emotional Reaction



The single best tool I know for healing and personal growth is learning how to work with your emotional body.  Stuck or unprocessed emotions exert an incredible drag on your energy body.  When we try to stop the movement of energy through our emotional bodies, we're shutting down a key aspect of a healthy system. The emotional body is designed to move.  It’s designed to express.  When we try to stop it, we not only stop or distort our emotional expression, but our creative and sexual expression, as well.  Stopping the flow of emotions is like trying to stop the flow of blood through your veins. 


Emotions are also the language of your soul.  Your soul is deep and ancient.  It has a well of memories that your conscious brain can only imagine.  This part of you is always speaking to you through your emotions.  How you feel tells you something about yourself.  It offers a glimpse of your forgotten history.  When we start paying attention to how we feel rather than denying it, we quickly learn a lot about who we are.  The more you’re willing to feel, the more self-aware you become. 


Connecting with your emotions can be as simple as pausing frequently throughout the day to ask yourself how you feel.  This can also be done as a dedicated practice each morning or evening, where you breathe for a few minutes with an intention to notice how you feel in that moment.  At the end of the day, you can also run through the events of your day, pausing now and then to question how you felt in each moment or how you feel now, looking back. 


If your emotions feel particularly shut down, and you find it hard to feel anything at all, simply breathe and notice how your body feels.  Your physical body and your emotional body are inseparably connected. If you feel really stuck emotionally, move your body vigorously for a few minutes and then check in to see how you feel.


There isn’t necessarily anything to be done with the emotions you find.  Simply breathe and feel.  This allows the energy of the emotion to move through your emotional body.  The expression of an emotion follows a pattern.  Like a bell curve, the emotion will start, grow quickly, peak, and then fall away.  The emotional body is designed to run energy in precisely this way. 


The “work” is in just allowing the emotion to run its course.  There’s nothing we need to “do” with our emotions.  They are a phenomenon, like clouds moving across the sky.  They take us on a journey.  When we pay attention, we begin to see shapes or patterns in the clouds of our emotions.  Our emotions are messages from a deeper part of ourselves.  When we’re willing to take the ride, we’re tapping into a place of deeper wisdom, that can only speak to us through the language of our emotions.  Oftentimes, we’ll know something new on the other side of the journey.

 

Emotional Reactions


Because the value of emotions has been so denied, this flowing process is oftentimes stopped.  That’s why most people have a backlog of emotion.  For years, they’ve been denying how they feel or pushing their emotions down.  When we refuse to allow an emotion to flow, the energy of the emotion gets stuck.  Instead of growing, peaking and fading away, the emotion is stopped, and the energy of the emotion forms a small block in the energy body.  Each time another emotion is stopped, a new block is created or an existing one is strengthened. 


These blocks then alter the way the emotional body can move energy.  As blocks are expanded or strengthened, it becomes increasingly difficult to flow through the grow-peak-fade cycle of an emotion.  Instead, whenever a new emotion begins to flow, it hits against the blocks.  Then, instead of having an emotion, there’s the potential for an emotional reaction


Emotional reactions are usually bigger and messier than in-the-moment emotions because of the backlog of energy attached to them.  Whenever we’re experiencing something in the present moment that has a similar feeling tone to a challenging experience, there’s a potential a block will get activated.  Emotional reactions can feel overblown because all the history trapped in the block is being activated.  We then have a more charged experience.  What might elicit a slightly angry response in the present moment may activate rage in an emotional reaction.  A present experience of loss might elicit an overwhelming grief rather than a few moments of real sadness.


Sometimes, emotional reactions seem to come out of nowhere.  We find ourselves feeling a whole lot all at once.  We “overreact.”  This can be very confusing and uncomfortable.  But these moments are an incredible gift!  During an emotional reaction, blocks in the emotional body are being activated.  That means there’s the potential to learn about what’s held there and release it. 


An emotional reaction offers an opportunity to unpack something you’ve been holding onto.  It’s an opportunity to complete a process from your history that got stuck.  Every time you’re willing to process an emotional reaction by looking at what’s underneath it, you free up some of the energy trapped in the block.  As the block is dismantled, you reclaim the energy that was held there.  You’ll likely learn something about yourself and your history and grow your consciousness in the process.  You’ll also be less likely to have a similar emotional reaction in the future.



For a technique for working with your emotional reactions, see, "Clearing Blocks in Your Emotional Body."

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