This article is part 3
of a 3 part series on emotions
Emotions
1
Emotions
2
Emotions
3
Emotions Pt3 - How To Release Emotions
Don’t be afraid of your
emotions. Don’t fight them, run away from them, and
block them out. Welcome them, be with them, regardless of
what they are. We were born with all emotions. They are neither
good or bad, they just are. Emotions dissipate and slowly
disappear if you feel them, and are present with them. Just
close your eyes and feel them as deeply as you can.
Deciding How To Respond To
Your Emotions: Once you have identified a certain emotion
you will at times need to decide how to proceed in dealing
with it. There are many options that need to be considered
carefully. Certain approaches can have very serious effects.
You could lose your job, or you could lose your marriage.
It’s very important to consider your options carefully
before saying or doing something that cannot be taken back.
The following are a few questions
you can ask yourself when deciding what response would suit
a particular situation best – and each emotion, each
situation is different. *Am I reacting to this situation or
is this reaction partially a reaction to a past situation
as well? *Am I able to discuss the issues with the person
without venting anger? *Will I be able to talk about how I
feel to the person? *Is a direct approach the best way to
proceed? *What are the consequences of dealing directly with
the person/ situation? *What do I expect from this discussion?
*Are my expectations realistic? *Should I discuss this with
someone before doing anything?
By asking these questions
you will be deciding whether a direct approach is the best
approach, and if so if you are ready do this at the present
time. If your anger is at a “rage” stage, you
need to release some of this anger before proceeding to discuss
this with anyone.
The Physical Part of Releasing
Your Emotions: There are a number of ways you can begin to
release your emotions, especially those relating to anger
and hurt. 1) Go into an empty room, or go for a drives alone,
and scream, scream as loudly as you can. Scream the words
“I hate”. So many people have never screamed out
their hurt, their rage. Continue to do this as long as it
feels right inside. Cry, allow yourself to cry your feeling.
2) If you cannot scream aloud, imagine you are screaming your
rage, hurt, and pain. Imagine it and imagine it. See it, and
hear it, and especially, feel it as deeply as you can. 3)
If you are a physical person, take a pillow and keep hitting
a chair, your bed, something, feeling your hurt every time
you hit that object with the pillow. Every time you hit that
pillow say the words “I hate”; 4) Get yourself
a punching bag and hang it in your basement. Then take time
to keep hitting that punching bag, releasing your rage. 5)
Take your fists and keep pounding a table saying, “I
hate” and just keep doing it. 6) If you like to write,
write about your anger; write about your hate; write about
how hurt you are; write about how afraid you really are. Journal
about what happened and how it is affecting you today. Write
about what you have lost, or what you have never had that
has hurt you so deeply.
Feel the feeling! Don’t
be afraid of it!
Under all the anger, rage,
hate, and hurt is one emotion – FEAR!
It’s essential to whatever
method you choose to realize that you are hating, that you
are full of rage and anger, and that this is a safe way to
begin to accept your anger, your hate, and to own your anger
and hate as your own. So often we are too afraid to lose control
or just afraid of the intensity of our rage, that we run away
from it and ignore it. The more you ignore it, the bigger
it gets.
One of the most important
things about releasing an emotion is to concentrate on the
emotion rather than on what caused the emotion. Forget who
did what that caused the emotion, forget about the person
who did something to you, concentrate on the “I hate”
or “I am angry” or “I am so hurt”.
It’s the emotion you need to release. Don’t be
afraid to feel your feelings. Feeling them means owning them.
Speaking Your Truth –
To release emotions you need to tell one human being one time
only about the situation that caused the feeling buried within
you. You need to explain in detail what happened, your feelings
around this experience, and how this experience is affecting
your life today. So often we hide situations and life’s
happenings because we are ashamed and somehow feel things
happen to us because we are “bad people”. It’s
important to tell your complete story in detail to one person.
This will help you to gain a healthier perspective on the
situation. However, if you keep repeating the story to different
people, talking about it repeatedly, thinking about it over
and over again, this becomes a resentment (a recurring negative
thought). The resentment then becomes another problem rather
than part of the solution.
Secrets are shame-based and
incidents kept secret or feelings hidden from others will
make these feelings deeper and longer lasting. Emotional secrets
lead to emotional and mental illness.
Transmuting Emotions: Sit
in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, put your head back,
and relax as best you can. Do the following exercise for 10
deep breaths. Concentrating on your breathing, inhale on the
count of six, hold this breath to the count of six, exhale
to the count of six, and rest to the count of six, then begin
again. If the count of six is too difficult try the count
of four or five. Concentrate fully on your process of breathing
only. Keep doing this exercise until you feel more relaxed
and your head noises have gone away.
Then slowly look for the emotion,
find where it is buried in your body. All repressed emotions
rest in your body and at times in the aura as well. Anger
rests around your belly button area but it can also be seen
as a black thread-like substance all through the body. Sadness
sits in the midriff area. Emotions can rest anywhere in your
body including the muscles, ligaments, in bone joints. Take
your time, find your emotion.
Then take time to really see
what this emotion looks like. I had a huge amount of sadness
and when I finally found it I saw that it was the shape of
a large mass of clouds, clouds so dense and thick that you
couldn’t begin to even dent them. These clouds were
a very dark grey colour.
Once you have found your emotion,
and described it to yourself, stay with it, hold it, be with
it. Do not try to do anything to it – VERY IMPORTANT
- just be with it. By being with it you begin to integrate
this emotion into your very consciousness and this is the
next step in releasing your emotion. As you go back to visit
your buried emotion week after week you will find the shape
getting smaller and smaller, until eventually it just disappears.
It takes many months to transmute an emotion in this way,
but it is a powerful manner to release emotions. This is what
is meant by “transmuting emotions”.
Releasing Resentments: A resentment
is a recurring anger where, on a recurring basis, we keep
thinking about something someone has done to us, reliving
all the particulars around this situation, with ongoing anger,
hate, hurt, or whatever the emotion might be.
Pray for the person you are
resenting. Wish for this person every wonderful thing you
would want to have in your most perfect life. Wish them blessing
and good fortune in all things. In time, this type of a prayer
will release you from your resentment. This is difficult.
You can also write about this
person. Write all the negative qualities you see in this person.
Then write about all the positive qualities you see in this
person. Eventually, by writing about the different qualities,
a shift will occur within you, bringing you peace of mind.
You can write about the situation,
what the person did to you and how it affected you, how it
made you feel. Write about how you reacted to this situation,
what you said and what you did. When we accept responsibility
for our own behaviour, the resentment often disappears.
The Power of Prayer: Certain
emotions just hang on, regardless what you do. When human
effort fails to produce the desired change, then it’s
time to hand this over to the God of your understanding or
the Divine Spirit of the Universe. Ask in prayer, that the
emotion be lifted from you. My own personal experience has
proved to me that this works, when all human effort has failed.
There is one thing that I
have included in my prayers for many years, asking for a grateful
heart. In my late 20s, I was in deep emotional pain and did
not believe life was worth living. I was taught to look for
things in my life that I could be grateful for, regardless
of the difficulty. It was hard to do this when I was in such
emotional pain, but it was essential to my healing. This prayer
for a grateful heart has stayed with me for the past 30 years.
And today I do have a grateful heart. Being very human, it
disappears at times, but it returns when my energy goes there.
A Meditation With the Heart
of the Universe: Close your eyes, sitting in a relaxed and
comfortable position with both feet on the ground, your hands
sitting gently on your thighs. Begin to breathe deeply, inhaling
and exhaling slowly and gently, concentrating on your breathing.
Do this deep breathing at least 10 – 15 times, concentrating
on only your breathing. This will help you relax at all levels
and clear the noises from you mind. You will have to practice
this relaxation a number of times before proceeding with the
full meditation.
Once you have relaxed, feel
your heart, be with your heart. Then go out into the Universe,
and visit the stars and the spaces between the stars, until
you find that sacred place, the Heart of the Universe. Approach
it slowly, respectfully and with humility. Then ask that the
love of the Universal Heart be more deeply connected with
your heart, and that your heart be filled with the love of
the Universe. Stay with this for as long as you can. Feel
the love of this Universal Heart. Once you feel your heart
has received the love it needs at this time, thank the Universal
Heart for sharing its love with you and slowly open your eyes
and come back into the present moment.
We need to ask!
Over time, this meditation
will expand your ability to love more deeply, shifting out
the negative emotions. It’s a powerful meditation.
Shifting Your Perspective:
Life brings injustice, abuse, bad luck, and emotions of hurt,
anger, self-pity, and depression. It’s quite easy to
look at what others have done that you consider to be wrong,
and these wrongs are very real. It’s not as easy to
look at your response to the real wrong or injustice done
to you. Someone might have demeaned you and degraded you.
Did you punish them in some manner for their behaviour? Was
your response to the situation a healthy and loving response?
Emotions around injustice of any kind are complex. Once we
accept personal responsibility for our responses, the emotions
around a given situation tend to lose their hold over us.
It’s important to honour that an injustice has occurred.
But it’s equally important to be ready to release that
from your life, which involves looking at your own behaviour,
and accepting responsibility for your own actions.
Detach Yourself: When your
emotions are running high and you are having difficult reducing
the intensity, try to detach yourself from the situation and
the emotion. Try to imagine the same situation happening to
someone else. Try to see if the behaviour would be the same
if someone else were in your situation. If the answer is yes
then you can begin to see that the experience is not necessarily
being focused at you. The other person is probably acting
unconsciously, and you just happen to be the individual “in
their way”. Detaching yourself in this manner can help
you move through very difficult situations without taking
the abuse personally. You might need to terminate the situation
causing the emotions, but your detachment allows you to look
at things more rationally and quietly.
Knowing Your Fears: What are
the fears underlying your emotions? You will need to know
and understand your fears. To do this you will have to swallow
some pride and admit and accept that you have many fears that
are affecting what you do each day. These fears are often
not at the conscious level. Are you afraid of being alone;
abandonment; the unknown; adventure; losing face; ridicule;
not having enough money; loneliness; death; suffering; losing
prestige; not being honoured for your work and effort; losing
your wife or husband – the list is endless?
Fears are tricky things. There
are some that you need to ignore and just act as if you were
not afraid. Fore example, if you’re afraid to say no,
your fear will leave as you begin to say no when you need
to say no. At times it’s like exercising a muscle. The
more you use it the easier it gets. Other fears are a healthy
warning that something is very wrong. For example, a person
might be afraid of another person. This fear might be the
signal to avoid that person, to leave the relationship.
As you become aware of your
fears and own them to be truly yours, a day will come when
you will notice that one of them has somehow disappeared.
That’s the way it is with fear. As you live a life in
tune with your emotions, a life focused on coming from that
place of love, you will find that many of your fears will
just disappear.
Accepting Responsibility For
Your Emotions: Taking care of ourselves is the greatest way
we can love ourselves in a wholesome and healthy manner. And
this means accepting responsibility for our emotions. Remember,
emotions are not good or bad. They just are. But be careful
and don’t punish yourself or be too hard on yourself.
Balance is the key work. Each human being is very human, and
that means each one of us is born with a full range of emotions.
Conclusion
Living In Peace: Once you
have completed the looking, the understanding, the releasing
of your buried emotions, you may find you have become accustomed
to being in a more intense emotional state. The exercises
above will heighten your overall emotionality. If you are
relatively certain you have done what can be done, make a
decision to live in peace, at peace with yourself, and at
peace with others. You can decide this. Avoid those situations
that you know will create conflict and upsets. You cannot
change others, you can only change yourself. There are times
where it’s important to stand and fight. It takes a
lot of wisdom to “accept the things you cannot change,
and change the things you can”. Wisdom to know the difference
brings peace of mind.
More Information On Emotions
(Your Emotions)
(Enlightenment)
|
