Why are we walking through life afraid to feel and express our emotions?
Repressing and avoiding our emotions can cause severe and debilitating physical and emotional ailments.
Learning to express and process our emotions can lead to a healthy and enjoyable life of peace and well being.
We often find ourselves doing everything we can to avoid our feelings - emotional eating, drinking, shopping, having sex, staying busy, burying ourselves in work and even spending hours scrolling through tv and social media.
To experience a full and happy life we must learn to acknowledge, name and experience our emotions so we can process them and move forward in our lives otherwise they will come back to bite us in the ass.
All emotions serve a purpose and if we allow ourselves to experience them we can learn from the message they are sending and start creating the life we want to experience.
Yes society and the world want us to avoid our emotions - it makes us better consumers and keeps us indulging in spending money on things we don't need to try and make ourselves feel better. Yet all we really want is to feel.
If I was to ask you to name some negative emotions, I'm sure you could come up with a full list of compelling emotions and with plenty of stories to back them up. And that's ok. As long as they are your stories.
Your experience is your experience - don't allow someone else's experience to dictate your emotions.
Yet, if I asked you to make a list of positive emotions - how many could you come up with? And how many of those would you be experiencing on a daily basis?
We are what we practice. So what percentage of your day would you be experiencing positive emotion compared to negative? How could you go about cultivating more positive emotion in your day?
All emotions are neutral until we label them.
So how do we process emotion?
Firstly, we must allow it to be. Acknowledge that it is there and name the emotion we are feeling and why.
Be aware of the emotion, name it accurately, without the drama and allow the healing to take place.
Ways to allow the process of healing:
- Acknowledge it, name it, FEEL IT, Ask for the message
- Release writing/thought download - spend 10-15minutes (or more if you need) and write down everything you are feeling and why. You don't need to re-read it or keep it, just get it out and then throw it out.
- Exercise - process the emotion through physical movement
- Meditate - spend some time meditating on the emotion and ask for the message to come through so you can move through it.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode, here's to a week of feeling and processing.
Have an amazing week!
