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Articles
What's The Real Deal With Emotions Anyway?
by Rusty Stewart, Ph.D.
I originally thought this would be an easy topic to write about given that I am a psychotherapist and specialize in feelings and emotions. However, there are so many paradoxes when describing emotions. For example, we have to fully feel our emotions in order to release them. But we are not our emotions and do not want to our emotions to become our identity. This balancing act is difficult to fully comprehend. We must experience being mindful of the energy of our emotions and the useful information that accompanies them, without losing ourselves in the process. Emotions are feeling states of being and the bridge to higher states of consciousness. Some feel good some feel bad. It doesn't matter. Many of us resist them either way. We have to fully feel them to open the door to inner peace and our true innocent higher selves. As I said, this is not as cut and dry as I had earlier thought.
First and foremost we must release any fear associated with feeling our emotions, past and present. It is not really the emotions we fear, but what the emotions are attached to (our past or our baggage). Or to put it more succinctly, we fear the fear of feeling the emotion. Fear comes from our past. There is no fear in the present moment. Now, since the past is no longer, it is not real even though it may feel real in our body's cellular memory. And if fear comes from our past and the past is not real then fear is not real either. In order to really get and experience this, we need to feel and create new and healthier experiences. There is no other way to do it except to walk through the veil of fear. The more we do this and have new experiences, the more we create a positive biofeedback mechanism in our minds and bodies. We come to the conclusion that things do not have to be like they were our past.
Many times we have to do our inner child and/or past lives work in order to purge the illusion of fear associated with allowing ourselves to fully feel. Once again this can include both positive and negative emotions. Otherwise we can get caught up in projecting our emotions inward and outward but not at the original past event that has caused the illusion of fear. Michael Picucci in The Journey Toward Complete Recovery: Reclaiming Your Emotional, Spiritual & Sexual Wholeness says, "When we act out on a feeling such as anger, we project it at someone or the world around us. Sometimes when we act out on the anger we malign ourselves and cause depression and isolation. Instead of acting anger out or acting it in, we can simply express it where it is safe to do so. Remember that feelings want to be expressed – they live themselves out through expression. If we do not find an appropriate channel to express the anger, it will go elsewhere within our internal systems and cause disease and stress" (Picucci, 1998). The projecting emotion does not necessarily have to be anger. If projected dysfunctionally, guilt, fear, shame, and loneliness can do a job on us too.
There are many processes we can engage in to help build the feeling and emotional bridge to the experience of wholeness, inner peace, and higher consciousness states. These are topics for another article. What is important to realize here is that the more we can genuinely feel our emotions and express ourselves openly and honestly without the energy of our past being projected, the more free we will feel to experience life in the moment. Free of fear, free of judgment, and free of guilt. This freedom opens up the door for us to experience more joy, laughter, play, love, compassion, and forgiveness. This lightness that comes from freely expressing our emotions is the reclaiming of our innocence. Thus we can live our lives as a fully responsible healthy adult while being in the wonder and play of a pure and innocent child. Now this is wholeness we all can celebrate! And that my brothers and sisters, is the real deal with emotions.
Yoga Living, March/April 2004
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