In this BodyTalk 4 Life newsletter, I give you some very beneficial insights into the nature of your emotions. Read on to learn how to most effectively manage your emotional state!
Vyara
Manage your emotions effectively
We experience a wide spectrum of emotions. Commonly, we label joy as a good emotion, whereas sadness and anger are bad. This often leads to guilt every time we experience a “bad” emotion. How many times have you thought “I should change my state”, “I should know better”, “There is no reason why I should feel angry”, etc.? This type of thinking is not empowering. On the contrary, it actually creates more stress in your body than the emotion itself.
Emotions are not good or bad, they just are! Moreover, emotions that are widely labelled as “negative”, are actually necessary for life to take place in an orderly fashion! Worry makes us think. Fear keeps us alive. Anger is a catalyst for activity – it motivates us to get out of bed and start moving. Grief dissolves habits that no longer serve us.
When an emotion arises, the best way to “deal” with it is to acknowledge it for what it is by giving it a low-key descriptor word and leave it at that. For instance, if you feel sadness, simply say “I feel sad” and allow sadness to be without elaborating on it. Do not justify or explain its origin, do not look for what or who is responsible for how you feel, and certainly don’t try to change your state! Experimental data convincingly show that as long as you acknowledge the feeling without rationalizing about it, your limbic response starts to calm down and the emotion dissipates. A large number of experiments also show that if you spend too much time thinking about the emotion by analyzing where it came from, who made you feel that way, what’s to blame, etc., the brain goes into a loop and the stress sky-rockets.
The best way to stop feeling is to start thinking! Every time we start rationalizing about why we feel a certain way, we shut down our sensory system and the emotions cannot be experienced in a healthy way. As a result, rather than dissipating, the emotions get stuck in the body and create stiff neck, back problems, lung infections, kidney failure, diabetes, heart problems, depression, and the list goes on and on.
When an emotion becomes pathology (because it has been suppressed), it tends to produce more of the same – stuck anger generates more anger, stuck fear recreates fear, etc. Moreover, suppressed emotions create a cascade of emotional imbalances on a larger scale because of their interconnectedness. Joy and sadness control grief, grief controls anger, anger controls worry, worry controls fear. If there is an imbalance in one of these main emotions, it will lead to an imbalance in the other emotions as well. This is all the more reason to learn how to be with your emotions and express them in a healthy way.
In BodyTalk, we have a number of emotional release techniques that work very effectively in treating pathological states in the body as a result of “stuck” emotions. But BodyTalk does much more than that! It allows for self-acceptance so that when emotions arise in the future, our clients are able to be with them in a way that is less harmful to their bodies. Self-acceptance allows for accepting others and is the key to living in peace and harmony.
