Emotions are a part of daily life and usually we don’t have a problem with the positive ones like joy and love.
The lower emotions are a different story. It’s common to want to avoid them, to suppress them, rather than go through the pain they cause us.
People develop different ways of coping with them – things like retail therapy, comfort-eating, maybe using alcohol or drugs to numb the pain.
But that only masks the emotions, and they’re still there under the surface.
Even if you don’t use any of those coping mechanisms, you can still push the emotions down and refuse to acknowledge them.
The problem with not processing them is that they get stuck in our bodies. It’s a bit like a jack in the box toy – you push the toy in the box and close the lid, but at some point that lid is going to burst open and the toy will pop right back up. With our emotions, we never know when they’re going to pop back up but they always will.
Have you ever had that situation where you think you’re fine then someone asks out of the blue how you’re feeling and you burst into tears? That bit of kindness from someone else is the trigger for your body to remind you that those emotions are still there, just under the surface.
If we let old emotions stay stuck within us for a long time, our bodies will keep drawing our attention to them. We’ll keep being presented with situations which cause the same emotion to try to get us to deal with it. Louise Hay said that long-standing guilt can ultimately lead to physical pain, because guilt looks for punishment and punishment creates pain. So we need to let go of guilt before we get to that stage.
If you haven’t grieved properly over the end of a relationship or the death of someone, you could find that some apparently smaller sadness years later provokes a disproportionate response. The break-up of a short relationship could cause a reaction that seems off the scale. If you find yourself sobbing for hours or even days over something seemingly insignificant, don’t dismiss it. That circumstance has served as the trigger for you to let go of all the other grief and sadness you’ve been carrying in your body for so long. If you allow the emotion to run through you, you’ll feel much lighter afterwards.
Other emotions we often try to ignore are anger and frustration. If you feel angry about something, a great way to process it is to punch it out. You can punch pillows or you can stand and punch hard into the air in front of you as if you’re a boxer. Keep going until you feel the anger subsiding.
If there’s any emotion you’ve stopped yourself from expressing out loud, a great way to release it is to scream and shout. Not at someone, but just to get it out of your body.
If you don’t want to disturb other people find a remote spot like an empty field, or down a long beach, and shout or scream as loud as you can. If you can’t find somewhere outside, get into your car with all the windows closed and shout as loud as you want to in there. You might have to do this a few times until all that suppressed emotion has been dealt with.
If you’re holding on to old emotions, it’s like dragging a heavy weight behind you everywhere you go. Once you release the emotions, you let go of that weight and you can move much more freely through the world.
If you struggle with releasing old emotions, reiki can help. It works on a physical, mental and emotional level so it can help to unlock the emotions which have become stuck in our bodies.
You can book a reiki session with me by clicking here.
