Today I would like to talk to you about how to encounter and release your emotions. Let’s start with what is an emotion? Emotion is energy in motion. I already told you that we have one source, there is one source – the source of absolutely everything. So where is the emotion coming from? That energy that is moving within us is actually coming from a source? Why then, doesn’t it live in a free way? The thing is that often we don’t allow our emotion to move within us in the way that they are meant to be, which is flowing…just coming through letting it be, feeling it, and letting it go. That is the natural course of emotion. When we don’t allow that, what happens is they get stuck somewhere again – stuck in the body. We hold on to something in the mind. We hold on to not fully feeling it, resisting it, wanting it to be different, or we think it’s too intense. That’s just happening unconsciously, the subconscious actually blocks it because maybe we don’t have the capacity to feel it fully.
So what’s happening in these moments is that the emotion gets stuck somewhere. We’re going to make meaning of it, we’re going to maybe interpret it, we’re going to make meaning for ourselves about that. And the emotion may have been there for 40 years, and it’s still playing out somewhere in your life just because it has not finished the course of its life. You can even imagine it’s a bit like the emotion will start coming from the source – it’s an energy coming from the source – it comes through you in a specific moment, based on the specific situation, a specific time, a specific person or a specific moment.
There’s going to be something that is going to come through us. It seems very personal. It seems like it’s about us in our story. It will be related to our conditioning to where we’re coming from, to what is happening at that moment, but this emotion – if it’s too much for our system – like in an electrical circuit, there is a break. So that break will actually stop the motion. You don’t do it intentionally, it’s happening unconsciously. So it will actually stop the system, the feeling will stop. And maybe that’s when you’re going to start talking. Or maybe you’re going to go into judgment of yourself or other interpretations of the situation, something that the energy when it’s stuck and it stopped is not going to keep being able to pursue its course. So what is it going to do? Often it comes up in the head, and then we make a story about the emotion or a story about what’s happening. While we are doing that the emotion cannot follow its natural course. So we often have to deal with them later in life, because as we get older we become aware of these stuck emotions. One of them can be that we just cycle in the same repeating emotion, in the same repeating pattern or situation, or in the same repeating suffering or encounter with some people over and over.
And so, these outer expressions of someone saying something, an accident happening, or even a symptom in the body would be ways that these emotions that have been repressed would call on our attention so that we can release them. We can encounter them again and we can let them flow and finish the new course of its life.
So, how do we do that? How do you release what’s been stuck and repressed? So that you can stop cycling in the same thing and you can stop suffering from the same stuff over and over? What I would invite you into is not necessarily when the emotion is coming up again, because it can sometimes be very, very intense… and sometimes you still don’t have the capacity to meet that level of intensity in the moment where it’s brought up. Sometimes in that moment, the only thing you’re going to be able to do is actually react because it’s an unconscious movement. It’s not you wanting something, it’s the emotion and thought that is actually leading the way. So, two things: if you start to become aware of recurrent emotion, a recurrent pattern, what you can do is start pausing when that happens. You pause. And in that pausing, you can start breathing – and in that moment realize, ‘Oh, I’m just doing the same thing again.’ That is that same old emotion that’s coming back again. So what do you want to do about it? Well, when you realize that that’s what’s happening, you have a choice. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to make the choice at that very moment, to not go for it. Sometimes the emotion is too strong for that, and you’re still going to react the same old way, and that’s OKAY. It’s all about becoming aware. It’s not about necessarily being perfect from scratch. It’s about learning and becoming more and more aware of what’s going on. So when you start to feel that emotion, you just pause and you breathe, and the more you can bring your breathing and your breath into the emotion, the more the emotion will be allowed to move again. Then it will be allowed to follow its course. It’s not always going to be easy to do that in the moment that the emotion is brought up – in the moment of the reaction.
So what I would invite you to do is to take some time for yourself, to take a moment where you know you will have maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour for yourself…where you take the time to really notice what is the most recurrent emotion that is going on in my life?
Where do I dwell the most in my emotional state?
Then you take that one emotion, and you call it back into your body…and you just look, where is it occurring in your body? Where are you feeling it? And maybe you lay down or you sit in meditation, at least put yourself in a position that feels comfortable. Maybe you say to everyone around ‘I just need 30 minutes by myself, please can I not be disturbed,’ and you put yourself in the most comfortable position. You then call on the emotion, you become aware of where it’s at in your body – and you just put your attention there. You rest your attention and your awareness in that very place in the body. And you start breathing. Start breathing deeply in, inhaling by your nose and exhaling by your mouth — and just have very deep breaths, inhaling by the nose — and exhaling by the mouth. I invite you to do that for the whole time that you have given yourself.
What is going to happen is that maybe the emotion will start to feel stronger. Maybe the emotion will start to move. Maybe if you started with sadness, for example, maybe you’re not necessarily going to feel the sadness right away, maybe it’s going to move somewhere else in the body, maybe it’s going to turn into another kind of emotion or energy in your body.
Remember, emotion is energy in motion. So when you start to give it space, when you start to give it awareness and attention, what’s happening is that energy might move somewhere else. What you do is that you don’t try to make it be a certain way you don’t try to control the experience. You just follow the energy. So if you start for example, in your chest and there is sadness and you start to breathe into it. After some time of breathing, maybe it starts to move into your belly…and you don’t even know if it’s sadness. There’s just an energy that’s there. You keep just breathing. It’s exactly the same place in the belly where it’s happening and you just allow the flow and where this energy is leading you. You don’t have to control it. You don’t even have to know where it’s coming from or why it’s there. You don’t have to question that. If it’s a very strong emotion, and it’s difficult for you to be without, what I would also invite you to do is actually to tell the emotion: “I welcome you here. I know I haven’t been allowing you to be processed. Now, I am here to be present with you. I am here to feel you. I want to give you the space that I didn’t give you until now because I wasn’t ready.”
And just keep breathing and keep breathing.
And just keep the breathing going on during the whole time that you’ve given yourself and keep breathing, inhaling by your nose, exhaling by your mouth and allow that to be as long as it feels good.
What you might think is that maybe after just 5 or 10 breaths that the emotion won’t go away – it won’t dissolve. The thing that is very important is that you are not looking for the disappearing of the emotion or the energy. That’s not what we’re doing. All we are doing here is not having any expectations, not having any expected outcome for the process. We’re not trying to make it go away. The only reason we are doing what we are doing is actually to encounter the emotion, give it space, and breathe into it. All that is going to do is bring presence and awareness to it. And by doing all of that, what is going to happen is that the emotion that was once stuck in the body is going to start moving again. Then there’s going to be movement and breathing and space – we will bring more awareness and therefore more space. So the emotion is not going to be stopped in the way that it was before, and that’s why the energy is moving. Do that as long as you feel that it’s good for you, which will allow the energy to go back to its source.
Now that is one layer of that emotion that will be freed. You will see that you are more at peace. When you do that exercise with your emotions, you feel more connected to yourself. You also are far less scared of feeling your emotions because now you’ve been given a way to be with them. You also now have a tool that is amazing to know how to control your emotions, how to not repress them, and how to actually release whatever has been stuck from the past already. So with this, you can empower yourself to be able to deal with whatever is going on. Still, sometimes it might be very strong and very intense because of the intensity and nature of the emotion. Sometimes you might want to ask someone, can you just be there with me while I try to process this? Can you just help me and be present with me while I do that? Trust yourself, and listen to what feels right to you. Ask for what you feel you need. And just know that you’re doing it wonderfully. It’s absolutely beautiful.
Why is it important to actually encounter your emotions? Well, as I’m speaking about waking up to who you are and becoming alive, it’s all about that. Have you ever realized that when you repress emotion, when you don’t allow the flow of emotion to actually flow through you, what happens is that you lose energy? You’re going to lose energy in repressing and in trying to keep things a certain way. You’re most likely going to try to control everything because you’re afraid of feeling. What I’m doing here by inviting you into this is actually giving you the means to encounter all that, and therefore feel empowered by whatever can emerge in you. Not feeling overwhelmed by it, but more feeling like ‘oh, yeah, I can do that.’ You will see that there will be more and more peace in your life. It’s also going to be easier and easier to bring awareness to your past patterns or behaviors or conditioning and be able to become aware of them and release them. The change always starts with awareness.
So I hope that you will try this. And I have no doubt that if you do, you will see changes and you will feel much more peaceful. What will also happen is that you’re going to connect with the source. You’re going to connect with consciousness or the divine, however you want to call it. As the emotion is coming from the source when you release it, it’s going back to the source, and you are going back to the source too. So here in this connection, you’re going to feel strengthened and you’ll start to live more from that place and trust that there’s always something greater and bigger that is there within you. I hope this was super helpful for you. Please don’t hesitate to comment and let me know how it goes. And please, if you have any questions or topics you would like me to speak about, or you would like clarity in something I said in one episode or the other, you can always reach out at askarmelle.com – I would be more than happy to make an episode about it, or to answer you. I look forward to seeing you next week. Until then, life is precious, so live it to its fullest.
