For the last few years I’ve offered Yoga & Mindfulness courses to support the embodying of the wisdom of our emotions. I’ve come to refer to this as Emotional Wholeness. Where we understand not just with our minds, but in the visceral experience of our body that emotions are a natural, healthy, important part of our human experience. And we learn how to relate to ourselves and each other emotionally.
In an ideal world we would have all grown up in homes with parents or providers that could meet us emotionally. Parents who were grounded in their own emotional wholeness and could attune to our emotions and provide us with healthy strong boundaries while also being emotionally embodied. And we would have grown up in schools where emotional intelligence and wholeness were practiced and skills taught to our developing brains. But the truth is many of us did not.
Particularly for those who have a sensitivity, empathy or depth of processing the emotional world is a rich and diverse playground, and an incredible inbuilt intuitive guidance system. But this lack of emotional attunement and encouragement can have a long lasting effect. And without healthy emotional examples when we’re growing up (and our emotional brain is developing), we can be left with a very young and limited understanding of the richness of emotions and a sense that what on one hand feels so innate and natural – on the other hand something that needs to be fixed or gotten rid of.
As a child if we were told our emotions were wrong, don’t cry, don’t be angry, don’t be so sensitive, don’t be so loud and playful (just for example) – we learn that in order to be loved we need to place parts of ourselves away in hiding. Creating a fragmented sense of Self. A part that once felt so natural – now relegated to the shadows.
From what I’ve witnessed and experienced in my life, emotions are so often labelled as negative. In some environments we’re happy to experience and encourage the emotions like joy and love and gratitude and appreciation. But when it comes to more challenging emotions like anger, fear, sadness and rage they are often relegated to the shadows, to the darkness. Just because we’ve put them into the shadows and into the darkness it doesn’t mean that they’ve gone away, it doesn’t mean they’ve magically disappeared and we no longer experience them. What it means is that these emotions – this energy in motion – still needs to find safe passage, otherwise they get stored in the cells of our body.
In eastern traditions, like Chinese Medicine and Taoism they understand that this energy when it becomes stagnant in the body creates disease and disharmony in our organs. So there’s a wisdom there that if we don’t allow this emotion, which is a naturally part of being human, if we don’t find ways for safe passage this energy can make us sick and stagnant. And just because we try to hide it in the dark – our emotions will still try to find ways to heal. And without our conscious acceptance of them their expression often comes out in reactive and maladaptive ways. We experience things like road rage and people exploding at seemingly innocent or minor issues, because they’ve got a whole lot of other experiences where they felt angry, or sad or whatever the emotion is but weren’t allowed to express that emotion or didn’t know how to healthily channel it into some aspect of life.
The other side affect of not allowing our emotions to move is that in order to shut them down it takes quite a lot of energy, a lot of energy to suppress our emotional experiences. And when we try to suppress one particular emotion we actually can’t isolate them – so in our attempt to suppress anger or sadness we also suppress our capacity for joy. Because all of this energy, this emotion is our life force, our Shakti, our erotic presence here in this existence.
So in the work I often share in ceremony and circles we talk about different emotions and their underlying gifts and wisdom. that the journey to wholeness and self love doesn’t mean that we look at ourselves in the mirror and go heyy you’re so sexy, you’re handsome I really like you – on a superficial level. Self Love is the journey to loving the whole Self. To loving every single part of you that is present and in existence, which includes these emotions that we don’t want to feel like anger, and fear and disgust. We need to find ways to love them and to bring them back to wholeness. To find union within ourselves. Only through that experience will we actually find there is a sense of safety within our being, that we’re able to be present, and ironically enough this is when we often find we’re no longer caught by reactivity or dramatic outbursts. Our emotions no longer need to fight for their right to exist and instead can be used in life affirming ways.
This emotional wholeness is the journey to feeling at home within ourselves.
I’ve written several other blogs about particular emotions and their gifts…and how to find our centre in amidst the chaos. So I thought I’d gather them all in one place for you 🙂
And if you’d like some support to navigate the magical but sometimes wild world of emotional wholeness book in for a 1:1 Nurture Session or check out my Emotional Balance online course.
Much Love
Lani
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