While the modern world has embraced speed, performance, efficiency, and material success, there’s no escaping emotions.
Truly, as humans, we are meant to experience all the range of emotions.
While our intentions may be to acknowledge and accept our emotions, it’s not always straightforward or simple. That’s because a lot of our emotions, especially those closely wrapped up with stress, may have become imprinted in our bodies. When triggered, they cause physiological responses that, at first, may seem beyond our control.
Our palms get sweaty.
Our heart begins to pound like a beating drum.
Our breath shortens and grows increasingly shallow.
However, the more we understand stress and befriend our emotions, the more we restore a sense of calm in our bodies, allowing us to reclaim our inner wisdom and resilience.
Understanding Stress and Suppressed Emotions
Stress.
Just mentioning the word is enough to make most of us want to curl up and hide in a dark cave.
So, let’s talk about stress. After all, stress is all around us in the world.
It’s in natural disasters.
It’s in man-made disasters.
It’s in our professional lives, our personal lives, our social lives.
It creates an experience of unpleasant emotions within us and our instinctive response when we begin to notice that we are stressed is to …. Well, curl up and hide in a dark cave!
The truth is, not all stress is “bad”.
In fact, some stressors are good for us, such as in the case of stress experienced as our deadline approaches or when we decide to run our first workshop online. This type of stress, or healthy stress, invites us to be more mindful and present in the moment.
Healthy stress encourages us to ask questions like:
- Am I ready?
- Have I done enough preparation?
- Do I have everything I need?
Healthy stress empowers us to be prepared and ready.
However, when the stress paralyzes us, causes us to freeze, or gets in the way of our day-to-day functioning, it is disempowering.
Unhealthy stress is usually long-term stress that has been suppressed. It’s the culmination of experiences and emotions from the past that we bury deep within us instead of processing them. Once buried, they become memories that are stored within physical cells in our body.
On the surface, it may feel like we have moved on. Yet the moment we see, hear, smell, think, or even perceive an event in our environment that is somehow linked to our suppressed stress, the memory stored within our bodies is triggered. This, in turn, activates the sympathetic nervous system which immediately initiates the fight-flight-freeze response.
When we are under the influence of our sympathetic nervous system, our system is hijacked. Here is where we begin to experience stress and unpleasant emotions as first as physical reactions in the body. Our heart clenches, our gut tightens, and our whole system begins to feel like it’s sinking into chaos.
Quite intense, and also necessary, as it alerts us that we need to reconnect with our bodies and to come back home to ourselves.
When we reconnect with our bodies, we engage parts of ourselves so that we can activate the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for restoring a state of calmness and balance.
Befriending Emotions with F.A.W
Think of a time that you have felt super stressed.
Odds are, your first response was either to suppress or distract.
You may have chosen to stop thinking about it entirely and to stow it away in a mental box labeled “storage”.
Or you hopped onto Netflix and mindlessly began watching a series in the hopes that, with just the right amount of fantasy, you may be able to escape your reality.
Both, suppressing emotions or distracting ourselves from acknowledging them leave us feeling disassociated, empty, and drained of energy.
Rationalizing our emotions and rushing to make sense of our experience through our thinking mind also does not serve us. This is because the language of the body is F.A.W.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE BODY IS F.A.W.:
1. Feeling
Feeling the emotion is the act of bringing your attention to the sensations that are arising in your body in response to the trigger.
It helps capitalize on the mind-body connection, whereby connecting with the body and even physically comforting your body results in the brain also experiencing calm and comfort.
You can feel your emotions in the body by noticing where in the body you are feeling the sensation and going on to describe the feeling in the most vivid way you can.
And yes, you are invited to tap into your creativity and describe the sensation in the body using imagery, sound, colour, and more!
This is what feeling your emotions may sound like:
“Oh. This is my body. This area near my heart, it feels like something is happening there. It feels like a clenching feeling like there is a tightness in my chest. It sounds like a heavy thunderstorm with loud crackles of thunder. It looks like the colour brown, dark and murky like a swamp.”
Remember to feel your emotions, not become your emotions.
2. Allowing
Allowing is the act of giving yourself permission to feel the sensations and their movement without judgment, criticism, blame, and attachment.
It’s acknowledging that in this present moment you are indeed experiencing unpleasant sensations, and that is ok!
We openly give ourselves permission to feel great. So, it’s only fair that we allow the less glamorous parts of us their time and space during our lifetime.
When we allow ourselves to experience the sensations in our bodies with curiosity, we are more connected to ourselves in the here and now.
The act of allowing is an act of compassion. All that we need at that moment is to remember that.
Allowing may sound like this:
“I allow myself to feel this way. It doesn’t feel so good right now, and that is absolutely ok. I accept that I feel this way in this moment. I allow myself to feel this tightness in my chest. I’m aware.”
3. Witnessing
Witnessing is the act of connecting with and observing the entire experience as you watch it unfold naturally.
As you feel the sensations and allow yourself to experience them, you also choose to be the observer that is witnessing the inner experience unfolding.
This can be through placing a hand on the part of the body where the sensations are moving and just being present.
It can be through observing the breath and allowing the breath to gently go back to a more natural, rhythmic breathing.
After all, emotions are energy in motion. As you continue to witness your experience, you’ll find that the emotions will shift and you’ll arrive at a place where your mind is calmer and clearer.
Truly, there is much to gain from taking a pause and going within.
You see, all our experiences and emotions, regardless of whether we perceive them as positive or not, are our teachers.
They are here to tell us something, to give us a head’s up, to keep us growing, and to encourage us to live out our higher purpose.
We are being guided to learn to sit with our emotions without rushing to label them and judge them.
We are being urged to embrace all facets of our human experience without discrimination between “good” and “bad” emotions, sensations, or experiences.
We are being lovingly led towards accepting all parts of ourselves: the good, the bad, and the curious.
By opening our hearts and minds to our experiences with emotions, we discover how to transmute our emotions and channel them into creative, abundant energies that fuel our growth and success.
Remember this, what we resist, persists.
Once we feel, allow, and witness our emotions, they shift and transform.
In this way, we rise.