Emotions are the Key to Healing and Manifesting (how to overcome the bias against feeling them!)
Let’s talk about feeling emotions and why this is the #1 mind-body practice you need for yourself and your clients if you want to create physical and emotional well-being, connection to inner wisdom, and powerful manifesting.
I completely disagree with many self-help practices around emotions, and that’s because they can easily be misinterpreted or actually give instructions that lead to emotional suppression, which is a ticket to constant stress and a stress-induced illness.
Let me explain.
Sometimes I get clients who are coming to me for help applying mind-body tools to their own health or for their clients, and they have extensive experience with mind-body practices like yoga, mindfulness, meditation, or breathwork.
We get to work to start feeling emotions in a way that will allow the whole mind-body system to heal, and they are often confused.
They tell me that they are already “too emotional” and therefore don’t need to be feeling any more emotions to heal.
Or, they tell me they’re already feeling their emotions every day.
Or, they tell me they have no idea how to feel an emotion even though they’ve been doing yoga, mindfulness, or more.
When we start coaching, it turns out that they aren’t really feeling emotions - they’re analyzing them instead - even if they think they’re too emotional or have all that mind-body experience!
Emotions are actually the crux of the mind-body connection. They create a bridge of information between the body, mind, and inner wisdom.
So why are they either left out, ignored, or not handled properly in so many self-care systems, even ones that are mind-body based?
Because there’s an unconscious bias in our minds that tricks us away from feeling emotions.
This is because our unconscious minds perceive emotions as dangerous. They are uncomfortable, painful, vulnerable, often socially unacceptable (how many times have you apologized for having a feeling?!), and bring old traumatic or stressful events into our awareness when we feel them.
No wonder we want to avoid them, even if unconsciously!
Any system that you’re learning for self-care or mind-body connection and alignment has the potential to fall prey to that bias, simply because it is an unconscious bias. We can’t know we’re avoiding our emotions until we discover we’re avoiding our emotions.
Sometimes it’s user error of the system, because we hold that bias, and sometimes the bias is in the presentation of the system, because others hold that bias.
Plus, the lure of the spiritual connection is very strong. It’s more enticing to think of experiencing some sort of spiritual bliss through meditative practices, spiritual practices, or yoga than it is to think of trudging through the basement of our unconscious emotional goop and feeling very uncomfortable.
I first discovered my impressive emotional suppression abilities in my early twenties. I was suffering from several different chronic pain syndromes, all with no clear medical solution, when I stumbled across the work of Dr. John Sarno.
In reading his work, I discovered that he considered emotional suppression to be at the root of all mysterious chronic pain syndromes. This was at once liberating and terrifying.
However, about six months into applying his concepts to my healing process, I was out of pain.
This was so intriguing to me that I ended up helping others figure out how to feel emotions and heal for a living. Now, I’ve done this work with hundreds and hundreds of clients, so I can truly attest to the importance of feeling emotions.
When we feel them, we can’t just feel them mentally. Our minds want to analyze our emotions. This is a safer practice than feeling them in our bodies, according to our minds.
For example, we might think, “Hmmmmm, I wonder why I’m mad? Maybe it’s that thing so and so said yesterday. Probably. That was so unfair.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t be upset about this. It’s not that big of a deal. I need to just move on. I don’t want to be a drama queen.”
The only problem with all of this mental activity is that it takes us right out of any kind of awareness of our bodies and the sensory experience of the emotion.
Does it feel like hot lava in the chest area? A heaviness in the stomach? Is it like a fog, spreading through the whole body?
Or is it more like a solid lump, sitting in the throat?
These are the sensations our minds very much want to avoid.
The problem with not feeling the emotion as a sensory experience is that it will then stay in our bodies as energy. The body stores emotional energy in the nervous system, kicking in the fight or flight response.
The fight or flight response, in turn, kicks in our natural guarding tendencies in our body. We are now tense and ready for anything. Our shoulders hike up and forward.
We tuck our pelvis under and hunch over our abdomen. We clench our jaw. We unconsciously hold the pelvic muscles up and tight.
Hold those positions for too long on a regular basis and you’ve got yourself a chronic pain syndrome!
Interestingly, there’s also a psychological problem that comes from avoiding feeling our emotions.
If we don’t feel them, we don’t know what they’re trying to tell us. If we analyze them and say “Oh, I’m overreacting,” for example, then we never know our own truth.
What if that truth is that we really feel uncomfortable with a situation and we find that our truth is telling us to speak up, set a boundary, make a change, or take care of ourselves in some way?
Our emotions are the true path to actual self care, because they’re how we know what we need.
If I’m angry at my partner because he didn’t take out the garbage (or any such small thing) and then I suppress that emotion, two things happen.
- I might get snippy and grumpy because I’m trying not to have the emotion, my nervous system is in fight or flight, and now I’m edgy about everything.
- I have no idea that I’m actually feeling scared because I’m not sure I can handle all the tasks on my to-do list this week, and I really actually need two hours of downtime and some support with offloading some of that list.
This is a huge bummer, because now my body is suffering, I’m suffering, and there’s no clear avenue out of the issue that will address the real problem. It’s hard to solve it if I don’t know what it is.
On the other hand, if I feel the anger, allow myself to notice it as a sensory experience, and then discover that I’m actually scared, I can then solve the problem. I can go schedule my down time and ask for/create the help I need.
Maybe it’s getting my assistant at work to do extra projects so I have less on my plate, or hiring childcare, or trading with a fellow parent, or asking my partner if he can do one of the household things I usually do, or ordering in dinner.
It’s also much easier to manifest what I want if I actually know what I want. Feeling my emotions shows me what I really want to manifest. (What if I thought I wanted to manifest a new relationship when actually I just wanted more downtime?!)
I’ve noticed that if I feel the emotion and find out what I need, I usually feel better very quickly. What might have been days of me being irritable and edgy ends up being twenty minutes or less of me feeling an emotion and creating a plan.
Plus, I don’t store the emotion and end up in pain.
However, because of the unconscious bias against feeling emotions, it’s often hard to remember all of this. That’s why I created my set of mind-body tools, back in my twenties, for my own use; I found that the bias kept tricking me out of doing my own emotional awareness work.
Helping you implement mind-body practices that keep you aware of your emotions and needs is the main focus of my Mind-Body Magic Method (my complete set of somatic mind-body tools) that I teach in my group program. You can implement this for yourself and your clients to both heal and prevent stress, anxiety, and pain.
I’ll also show you how to consistently tap into the inner wisdom the emotions are helping you access and start to actually trust this instead of pressuring yourself to “not be emotional.” This is so helpful for your clients, too, if they’re judging themselves for their emotions.
You can see that even the person who is calling themselves emotional is likely just analyzing and suppressing the emotions, and that’s often why they can’t shake the chronic pain or the stress they’re facing. I’ll show you exactly how to work with you and your clients to offload nervous system activation and get into that place of grounded, clear, mind-body connection alignment.
This will create the stress, anxiety, and pain relief you or your clients are seeking. And, I’ll show you how to feel emotions in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming, scary, or stressful in and of itself. (You might even start looking forward to feeling emotions!)
You can learn more about this program and others here.