Have you had enough of being sick? Time to connect with your emotions! Part 3

 So what do you think? Would you say that you are connected to all your emotions? Do they flow freely through you? Do you let them go? If so you are a rarity, for most of us have one or more core emotions that we may spend a lifetime releasing, and over the years they are responsible for most of our illnesses.

 It would be fair to say that to resolve such suppressed emotions we need to re-experience painful events in our lives, whereby we are confronted, again and again, to release such emotions. Unfortunately, our minds work even harder to suppress the now escalating intensity of such held-in emotions.

As with all animals, emotions are part of the fight /flight reaction to our environment that keeps us safe, hence there is no such thing as a good or bad emotion, they just are.

Emotions come in many flavours, but the root of ALL emotions is fear, and its purpose is the survival of the organism.

In our dystopian and sick culture, we are so disconnected from ourselves that we regularly speak of feelings when in reality we are talking about emotions.  (I will do a separate article on feelings and Love a bit later on). So for now, please accept that emotions are of the ego, but feelings are expressed when all aspects of ourselves (however temporary) are integrated.

Mechanics of emotions

So how come we are in such a pickle?  Emotions are always activated when the organism senses a threat. Young children, like other creatures in the animal kingdom, have emotional antennae that are highly tuned to their environment for threats to their survival. An anxious and otherwise loving parent will send subtle signals to the baby/child that will activate their fear response, even more so if they are angry/loud. If this happens excessively, then as with an adult when the fear/flight response is not switched off, it will generate great anxiety and possibly health issues in the child.

We need to appreciate that the automatic adrenalin-based fear response of fight/flight is only meant to last for a short time until the danger is past. When our body is fighting for survival, we do not want the damaged knee to inflame and stop us from running away. Many body processes are suppressed hormonally so that we may survive the scrape. Unfortunately, life has not been idyllic for the majority of the world for many, many thousands of years. And many of us spend prolonged periods in this fight/flight response, which is commonly known as “stress”.

For a long time there have been, and still are, those that would control, dictate, and take the fruit of our labour, quite apart from the ordinary struggles for survival that we face. Then there are the ongoing emotional conflicts of relationships and conformity to the group for fear of being shunned.

Emotions and hormonal body effects go hand in hand. Emotions will hormonally generate responses in the muscles. When the trigger that leads to the emotion does not abate, it can get stuck in the fight/flight response. Muscles will continue to contract into spasms., blood vessels may constrict, and the immune system will be nobbled and work inefficiently.- The body’s engine will be over-revving and, increasingly, burn through resources leading to nutritional deficiencies.

So what could lead to ongoing triggers that leave the body over-revving? To discover that, we need to go back to the beginning.

Once upon a time

When we come into this world, our hearts are open and pure. Who hasn’t noticed the innocence of babies? Isn’t their joyful spontaneity endearing? A few years go by, and by the time they are eight years old, a cloud has come over most children and that wonderful spontaneity has mostly evaporated into self-consciousness/censoring.  Our society has a variety of methods to get the child, to conform, to obey, belief systems are drummed into them, and daydreaming is curtailed.

There will be times when they are abused, bullied and shunned. They learn that the love they have previously spontaneously shared is sucked out of them by grown-up emotional vampires, who are desperate and needy to be loved, but themselves are incapable of truly giving that love without conditions.

Children learn by osmosis how to hold on to emotions rather than express them, for the world can be a scary place. Intense emotions that have no place in a child’s life are suppressed in their bodies by their mind (will discuss this more fully in the next article of the series).

In the previous article on the body I shared how we use breathing to disassociate from the intensity of emotions, however, these newly suppressed emotions don’t go away. The muscular reactions that would coincide with such emotions may become spasms, that over time may distort the physical structure as a precursor to future illnesses.

When the intensity of emotions is ‘perceived’ to be large enough to overwhelm the nervous system, the body will contain and block the intensity at the nerve nodes near the spine, which will coincide with the chakras.

Human beings do NOT exist in isolation from the Universe, we are all connected and affected by the vibrations, frequencies and oscillations that are emitted by all bodies, with the larger ones having a disproportionate resonating effect on the smaller ones i.e. planets and Moon to humans, and our body /mind respond in kind, either healthily or not, depending on internal blockages and damage. The repeated process of suppressed emotions over time could be likened to the pearl within an oyster shell, where a small grain of grit that is irritating it, is gradually covered in layer upon layer of phlegm that solidifies and insulates it from itself.

We then encounter the pearl and think oh how pretty! And we look at a person, and we say he /she has got such character! – that character is the layers of compensation and rigidity to contain that unexpressed emotional piece of grit.

Previous lifetimes send ripples into the present life like a pearl’s bit of grit, they set up an informational template of issues, and experiences to be resolved. In this lifetime we will encounter experiences in conjunction with others that will heighten certain emotions, our suppression and struggle to experience them can lead to pain and physical sickness.

All of our suffering and illness have a purpose, namely, to help us move beyond the confines and identification of ourselves with our ego fears towards one with our true fragment of soul. This is easier said than done.

In the last article I wrote about learning to experience physical pain, In this one, I am going to encourage you to experience emotional hurt, for there is no other route to health than to build up our capacity for conscious emotional intensity.

The core of emotional pain for most people is our Mental protection (more in the next article) that guards us against the possibility that we might blow a fuse were we to experience such emotional intensity. We are caught in a loop, for every time circumstances get us close to reliving of the suppressed emotion, we react, often in rage, and rather than releasing and dissolving that initial bit of grit, we add another layer of metaphorical phlegm around the pearl.

Most Humans are stuck in experiences from the past, whereby we blame and hold others responsible for the pain and circumstances of our present life. We see ourselves as victims, justified in our perception of those who, in our eyes, have wronged us and therefore, entitled us to the righteous anger simmering beneath the surface.

Emotions have a great deal of power to create reality, though admittedly, nowhere near as much as Feelings do, but then, so few people are capable of true feelings that what we are left with is a nightmarish collective reality of fear, suspicion, bullying, avarice, addictions and the ensuing theft (and taking advantage for slaving purposes) of all those who have been emotionally and mentally crippled by the modus operand of what we call “our culture”.

You have read this far, let me share with you how to help yourself with releasing past emotions

• We need to increase our capacity and stamina to experience intense emotions. This requires practice as well as truthfulness with yourself. Say someone does or says something, and you are embarrassed. Own the emotion, experience it within your body, and tell the person, “I feel embarrassed now.”

• From now on, when emotionally touched, allow your tears to flow. Be wary of those that would attempt to stop you from your experience just because they are uncomfortable.

• I suggest listening to classical music, watching a tear-jerker film, writing about your distress, grief anger, etc.,

• Sitting in a cemetery whilst contemplating other people’s loss as you gaze at the surrounding tombstones and their flowers and contemplating your death and that of your loved ones.

Because our individual experiences are different, I cannot give concrete examples for every circumstance, however, the way to release is as follows:

• We are overwhelmed by an emotion that has caught us unawares, we focus internally and do our best to name the emotion -grief, sadness, poor me, etc.  At times, we won’t have a name just intensity, but if we focus our attention, we can identify the location of the emotion in our bodies, for there is always a source of knotted tension somewhere along the mid-line. We then give ourselves permission to explore and build the intensity, let the tears flow, and let the body express itself with sobs, sounds and or shaking, so as not to suppress the emotion but rather to amplify it. Ask yourself, when have I experienced this before? Allow your subconscious, via your imagination to provide information and keep building up the intensity of the emotion until such time as it naturally abates, and the knotted physical tension has subsided.

• Caveats – an intense emotion that is disconnected from the physical tensions it produces will re-traumatise and make the emotion harder to release at a future date. Do not clean/ tidy yourself up, i.e., nose, eyes whilst in the midst of the emotional release, as this can be a tactic by your mind to disassociate you from the emotional intensity rather than fully experiencing it. There are times when it is OK to be messy.

• Humanity is sick and part of the reason is internal rigidity, our inflexibility will be the early death of us. To be emotionally stuck is to be inflexible, our inability/unwillingness to forgive leads to illness

• Forgiveness is a prerequisite to true health. And to forgive, we need to let go of our anger and resentments, which we will never do until we can let go of our imaginary grievances and see the world from the other person’s point of view.

• This is where writing is an indispensable tool, for it affords us the time to reflect, and when we do, we will realize that other people are not evil. Rather, just like us, they have been damaged and indoctrinated as much or more than we have.

Each of the articles in the series is a piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and so only has partial answers to our self-help on how to be healthy. We will gradually bring all the articles together to form a whole self-help picture. In the next article when we will focus on feelings and love.

Next : Have you had enough of being sick? Time to connect with your mind! Part 4

previous articles in the series:

Have you had enough of being sick? Part 1

Have you had enough of being sick? Time to connect with your body! Part 2