Having Emotions,
Without Letting Them Have You

Along the course of spiritual growth and evolution is a myriad of challenges that center on the issue of managing your emotions. 

Managing your emotions is an issue that is often misunderstood, or becomes misdirected, often by well-meaning people.  This seems to stem from some basic glamor’s and illusions about what it means to be spiritual.

Teachings of the Buddha, particularly those about desire and attachment can be converted and perverted into an artificial state of manufactured calm.

However, as I have journeyed along the path to enlightened awareness and as I have worked for many years counseling people, I have found this misinterpretation of the Buddha’s teaching to be potentially harmful. 

As I ponder the nature of the misunderstanding and what is important about learning to understand the role of emotions in a spiritual life and spiritual evolution, I realize that it is important to have your emotions, without letting them have control or mastery over you.  This leads me to explore more about the nature of emotions.

Repressing your emotions in an attempt to reach a state of manufactured calm, just does not work.

The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.

        – Nicholas Sparks, At First Sight

Emotions blocked end up doing all sorts of harm in ways that are in direct opposition to reaching the state of peace and detachment the Buddha recommended.  Repression is not detachment.  In fact, emotions, especially strong emotions and those judged as negative emotions, will work their way to release, in spite of every effort to contain them.

Moreover, blocking and denying emotions, especially powerful and strong emotions, seem to be the genesis of both stresses and dis-ease.

In my many years of counseling and especially when I worked in the field of chronic pain management, I concluded that when someone is experiencing pain, that pain is always real.  Often medical practitioners would be frustrated when they could not find on their scientific tests a reason or cause for someone’s pain and that would lead them to make the judgement that the pain was not “real.”

However, as I worked with the individuals to heal and resolve the pain, I came to a very different conclusion.  The pain was real.  It may come from their physical body, or it may come from their emotional body, but it was always real.

As I worked to unlock and release the pain, old emotions, judged negative emotions were often a causative factor.

Many in the field of chronic pain management have observed certain patterns about those who suffer chronic pain, and that is that many were victims of sexual or other forms of abuse.  The damage of abuse seemed to lie in wait for a life incident to express the pain of the abuse.  This is especially true when the anger and pain of betrayal that accompanied the abuse was denied and blocked.

The physical damage of the abuse had healed long ago, but the emotional damage lingered, still needing healing.  This led me to consider ways that emotions heal and how they are different from the way the body heals.  What was amazing to me was that no matter how much time had passed from the incident that created the emotional pain, healing was possible.  And the primary component of that healing was what I would call, for want of better words, emotional honesty.

Lessons Learned About Emotions

How emotions heal is a lesson I learned in my personal journey because, like so many young women, I was sexually abused in my youth.  Also, like most that have been through that experience, I suffered a great deal of shame and doubt related to that experience.  I must admit I never understood how or why that could happen at the time.

For me, it was compounded by being a man who was a ”father figure,” a man who was dating my mother after my father had died and eventually became my step-father.  The emotions of anger and ultimately betrayal when my mother became aware of the situation and failed to protect me and stop it was very strong.

Great harm was done to me by many well-meaning people who were spiritual guides and teachers at the time.  They counseled forgiveness and learned to forgive I did.  They counseled return love, and I did that too.  My anger and my hurts became firmly contained.

However, in my own psychological and spiritual journey it was only when my spiritual mentor and psychologist concluded that in my attempts to be a good person and follow great spiritual teachings, I had developed what he called “premature transcendence.”  He taught me that transcending an emotion without transmuting and releasing it was not the way to healing.

The honesty of the emotions that these events and circumstances created had to be expressed and honored.  It was not enough to practice forgiveness.  It was only by letting myself acknowledge the anger and rage I felt and the hurt and betrayal I felt, was I able to heal and move on, and no longer linger in the thrall of those emotions.

When I finally let go of the past, the release and the healing were powerful.  The transformation that releasing these old hurts allowed, was truly life changing.  I become open to the many blessings and joys that life could bring my way.

Emotions Are an Intricate Part of Our Being

This led me to a revelation and realization about the nature of emotions.  Emotions are an intricate part of our being.  They are both wonderful and terrible parts of the human experience.

Learning to experience emotions, and understand and express them, are a major part of both life’s journey and the quest for spiritual understanding.

It helps to understand the nature of the wholeness of your being, your spiritual anatomy.  We all know and understand that we have a physical body.  We can touch it and feel it.  We also have an emotional body.

Our physical and emotional bodies produce a wide and diverse range of emotions, from those we judge as good, to those we avoid as bad.  However, what I have come to understand is that emotions are only emotions.

Emotions are not who you are, and they are not what you are.  They are experiences you simply have.  They are feelings, not truth.  Although they are very powerful, their very nature is temporary and transitory.  They are a natural and spontaneous expression of a particular situation and event.  Ultimately, emotions are healthy in their natural expression. 

Emotions emerge naturally in the moment, and unless you deny them, dismiss them or judge them, they release just as naturally and spontaneously as they came.  Clinging to them, harboring them and letting them fester can cause significant harm.  The toxicity created by the unexpressed, and unreleased emotions is the fuel for countless dis-eases.

Experienced, expressed and then released, especially when transmuted transcended and transformed, emotions are a harmless part of life.  There is, however, a danger to your whole being when you let an emotion have you.

I gave myself permission to feel and experience all of my emotions. To do that, I had to stop being afraid to feel. In order to do that, I taught myself to believe that no matter what I felt or what happened when I felt it, I would be okay.

        – Iyanla Vanzant

Emotional Transformation Technique

In my “Feeling Free” guided meditation, I give an in-depth explanation of a very powerful technique to move your energy from feeling to resolution.

It is a technique that once learned can be practiced anytime and anywhere to gain mastery over your most troublesome and limiting emotions.

It is a technique that earlier in my journey I used many times in a day.  It is a technique that I frequently use in my life now.  To use awareness to move, transcend, transmute and transform the strong emotions of fear and anger, gives you freedom in your life.

 

This technique is one I have found to be so important in empowering people that I created a simpler and shorter version “I Am Feeing Free.” 

 

To be able to experience your emotions without letting them take over your life is a key to mastering whatever challenges come your way. It is a strength that frees you to become all that you are meant to be.

 

These tips and techniques help you be in the NOW and embrace the new possibilities and opportunities that life brings before you without the burden of your fears, or limiting beliefs that have entrenched themselves from old feelings that can be released and resolved

To be able to experience your emotions without letting them take over your life is one of the keys to mastering whatever challenges come your way. It is a strength that frees you to become all that you are meant to be.

You can have your emotions, freely, without them creating problems and limitations that linger beyond their moment of time.

By letting yourself experience the natural flow of emotion without judgement and then trust yourself to handle your life as it happens, by not fearing that experience in the future, you begin to have emotions without letting them impact your life.

Namaste,

    Genevieve Gerard

The Blessing of Love on All That You Do!

 

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Last updated 8-31-2018

 

Copyright © 2015-2018 Genevieve Gerard and Touch of the Soul LLC, All Rights Reserved.