We are often not even aware that we have stored emotions and feelings deep inside our bodies. These come from childhood traumas and feelings that have upset us throughout life, and we have buried these hurts without our knowledge. Since our physical existence is really energy, these stored hurts become blocks to our energy flow. We cannot reach the deeper states of meditation, nor can we really enter that desired flow state without releasing all of this stored energy. And this is an enormous amount of wasted energy that we can access for greater purposes, once released.
When someone dedicates him or herself to a serious meditation practice of about thirty minutes twice a day, over time, it will be a normal part of the process to release these emotions. In the state of stillness and centering, the universe offers us its healing in the way it knows best for us to accomplish this release. Father Keating explained this process nicely when he described centering prayer. He explains that in psychotherapy, a patient goes through the process of re-experiencing the early hurts in order to release them, but in meditation a stream of thoughts and images and energies are released without being attached to a specific event. We need to have faith in the process and accept it as a necessary step so that we may live more fully. During the phase in which meditation accomplishes this important process, we may become depressed or hit a low point. Again, we must have faith and trust in the process.
Because joy and pain come in the same door, if you are self protecting, you are blocking off both happy and sad emotions. During meditation, ask the higher source to protect the heart, so that job which we had formerly tasked ourselves with becomes surrendered. Then, and only then, can we allow ourselves to run emotional risks.
What are emotions? They include sadness, frustration, anger, hurt, despair, fear, guilt, joyfulness, happiness, disgust, contempt, self-hostility, shame, shyness, surprise, and interest, to name a few. Most of us have certain emotional issues that keep resurfacing in our lives. Some of us store more of these than others, and some of this is learned from our parenting, but all of us do it to one degree or another.
Where are emotions stored? Often they are stored in the upper back and neck as tension, the heart area, or, in the stomach area. Suppressing our emotions is related to closing our hearts to protect them from being hurt. So we, over time, create an energetic heart wall. We can actually feel pain in our heart area if we focus on the area and ask ourselves whether our heart is open or not. The remedy is surrender. Surrender the job of protecting your heart to the higher power. When we hold tension in our shoulders, our shoulders clench inwards and are rounded instead of being open and straight. Tension can shorten our necks in contraction. Releasing all of this tension is visible to everyone who sees us. A calm, relaxed body is inviting and attractive.
The hollowness felt inside from abandonment issues and emotional abuse for control by caretakers is difficult to express by nature of the void that is created. It is likely they get stored within tissues as a mixture of hurt, loneliness, lack of love, anger, fear, guilt, pain, sadness or depression, and lack of self-confidence. The person may become shy and lack an ability to communicate. People can live for years not knowing they are harboring these feelings inside and this can cause deep seated anxieties and later manifest as illness or physical ailments. The antidote is awareness of the fact that they are being stored in the body and the work of releasing them over time. The other important antidote is self-love. This, too, takes time and effort. Those who lack self-love are often unaware of it because their ego is over-compensating for it. With introspection, the person who lacks self-love may recognize self-sabotage habits such as over-eating or alienating friends.
If we go to the root of the stored emotions problem, it is related to making judgments about our experiences or the actions of others which have affected us. Judging leads to unpleasant emotions. As we learn to live in the moment and go with the flow we can end having expectations, over-analyzing, and feeling disappointed about our experiences, all things that are associated with our ego mind.
Alas, but we are only human. It is difficult to be in the flow of one moment into the next. Consider when you look back at what upset you ten or twenty years ago. You may see that it wasn’t such a big deal after all. Learn from that. The fretting of today isn’t so important, either. We are given exactly that which we need to grow and do our spiritual work.
Experiencing the negative emotions helps us feel the positive ones more deeply, too. We can be more joyful, happier, and feel more grateful. So, in a sense, we owe our highs to our lows. The yin yang explains everything…
Here is a great prayer or meditation to help with this… “God I ask you to be the protector of my heart, to allow myself to run emotional risks.”
Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Allow yourself to make a fool out of yourself in front of one special person, or in front of others and don’t give it another thought. Be true to yourself. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable shows that you trust the one or ones around you to love you anyway and no matter what. A vulnerable person is endearing to us all. It shows who they are at a deeper level that is unedited and true. The person who lets their feelings run is fearless. Be generous with forgiveness of self while maintaining respect and kindness to other persons who may be involved. Don’t use the victim excuse or take a guilt trip, just let the emotions flow in and out with non attachment. No one is to blame or at fault, including you. We are all here just experiencing life’s unfolding as it is. But respect yourself and love yourself in the process. Be compassionate with yourself and gentle with yourself. Until we heal ourselves, we cannot heal our relationships and our world around us. And, don’t get so caught up in this whole thing that you become a self absorbed narcissist. Accept the process of releasing your emotions so that you can experience life more fully, reach deeper states of meditation, and enter the flow of life.
If you have made a habit of suppressing emotions all of your life, and accomplish releasing them, this is freedom.
In addition to a dedicated meditation practice of 30 minutes twice a day, the following guided meditations may help you begin the process of releasing your emotions.
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FOUR MEDITATIONS FOR RELEASING EMOTIONS:
Understand and Explore Your Emotions: A Mindfulness Meditation for Healing. Kernel of Wisdom – Mental Health & Mindfulness. Feelings – we all feel them, but we don’t always know what to with them and we often have a lot of reactions to our feelings, good or bad. This mediation is designed to help you just BE with your feelings, so you can fully feel from them and actually learn from them (rather than just react to them).
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Feeling What You Feel Guided Meditation for Relief, Processing, Clearing, Healing & Transformation. Dexter and Alessandrina. This guided meditation will help you process energy, emotions, thoughts, and feelings that may have been stuck in your body without blocking or intellectualizing the process.
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#28 Intuitive Self-Healing Meditation by Mary Maddux
[Link] (go to #28)
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Emotional Mastery – Website: https://lettinggocoaching.weebly.com/ (Ideas taken from: The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer; Healing and Recovery, David Hawkins)
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