At Ease With Your Emotions

To feel free, at home in our body, in our mind… we all long for this. And what does it actually involve? These days we often hear or read that it’s important to welcome our emotions… but what does that really mean? And why does it matter? And also, why do we end up feeling disconnected from ourselves?

Few of us were raised to let our emotions live within us, opening ourselves to their true essence

We all feel emotions; it is something natural and healthy. Our soul communicates through our body, offering information about a given situation. In this way it points to what may need to be done. By the very nature of our human condition — the cycle of birth, ageing, illness and death, and because we live in society — we experience these feelings. And these emotions can be healthy… or not.

When is an emotion healthy… and when is it unhealthy?

An emotion is healthy when it expresses itself in the present moment. For example, if someone comes too close to you and oversteps your boundaries, the anger within you will dissolve once that person moves back to a greater distance. If the anger lingers anyway, it means that it has, in fact, no connection to the present moment, but rather to the past. At that earlier time it was unable to complete its natural cycle — to arise, to be, and to pass — and so it returns, often more and more intensely. An emotion is unhealthy when it belongs to the past, and not to the present.

It falls to us to develop a certain emotional competence, as Dr. Gabor Maté invites us to do. This means that we must not only be able to feel our emotions, but also to express them effectively. And we must also learn to tell apart the psychological reactions that are relevant in the present moment from those that are remnants of the past.

This happens when we manage to recognize that an emotion has no connection to the present moment when something is stirred within us. So at times it is a residual emotion from the past that never completed its natural cycle and is now rising up. From there, we can recognize this phenomenon and not project it onto others.

At ease with our emotions?

We all have emotions we feel at ease with, and others we don’t. And they’re different for everyone! For years, for instance, I was very familiar with sadness. Anger, on the other hand, was something I had no access to at all. A problem arises here, because when we close ourselves off to one emotion, we close ourselves off to all the others. When we block anger, we also shut down joy. What’s more, we now know that blocking or stifling anger can have an impact on our immune system. Indeed, the two share the very same function: that of protecting us.

The more open we are to our own emotions, the more we allow those around us to be open as well. This is very visible in children. When a child feels an intense emotion and expresses it, this can of course trigger a reaction in their parent. And, potentially, push that parent past their limits. Take the example of a parent who grew up in a violent home, where anger meant aggression. This parent may be afraid of anger within themselves and in others… and in particular in their own child. Consciously or not, they will then tend to suppress this emotion of anger in their child, and the child, in turn, will stifle it within themselves to preserve the vital bond with their parent.

This is how, over the course of a lifetime, we close ourselves off to the healthy energy of our emotions, and we disconnect from our deepest self. Sometimes we no longer even know who we are.

Losing touch with our essence is the greatest of all calamities

Your environment was not supportive, was not loving, did not respond to you… The fundamental thing that happened, and the greatest calamity, is not that there was no love or support. The greatest calamity, which is caused by the first calamity, is that you lost touch with your essence. That is far more significant than whether your mother or your father loved you or not. »

— A.H. Almaas

And so the work of healing is to reconnect with our essence. As children, there were certain emotions that were never received, never processed. We then closed ourselves off to those emotions, and we do everything we can to avoid some of them, or else we have learned to manipulate them.

Emotions and physical health

Emotional shutdown can have an impact on our physical health. In the United States, the Center for Disease Control found that 85% of illnesses are emotional in origin. Dr. Gabor Maté, in his book When the Body Says No, mentions among other things the studies that drew a parallel between stress and asthma.

And as Hans Selye revealed, for human beings the stress-inducing stimuli (stressors) are very largely emotional.

The good news that follows from A.H. Almaas’s conclusions is that we can heal ourselves by reconnecting with our essence. This depends solely on us — and not on our parents or anyone else. As human beings, our journey toward Healing and Freedom will be to learn to welcome all of our emotions, and in particular the ones we had previously blocked or fled from. We will awaken within ourselves the emotional courage of true intimacy… with ourselves, and embody our true humanity.

Reconnecting with our essence is an experience that can be approached in many different ways, and the world is rich with methods for doing so: whether through meditation, yoga, or many other approaches. I am convinced that our body already knows what it needs in order to heal. We simply have to listen to it and act.

Emotional health and well-being

In light of all that has been mentioned above, it is important to rediscover a healthy relationship with our emotions. This means feeling them in the present: letting them arise, be, and dissolve, without identifying with them. And also integrating the fragmented parts of our past that had not yet been processed.

It is wise, just as we do for our body, to give ourselves an emotional detox from time to time. This allows us to reset the counter back to zero by releasing all the emotional surplus. You can do this during an individual session, or a workshop or retreat.