An Emotional Awakening

An Emotional Awakening – The experience of allowing the pure emotions that have been suppressed to rise up and come into our awareness and be processed in order to awaken to the truth about who we are and what we want.

Feeling our emotions is essential to both our mental and physical health. If we don’t have free access to our emotions, then we are without awareness of the truth of our experiences. And without that, all of our internal systems, psychological and physical, are compromised. Who among us has ever found peace in light of the crises that life throws our way by rationalizing what happened. What’s the problem with rationalizing our experiences? Well, neuroscience has determined that we can not make good decisions without access to and information from our feeling brain. (Footnote “The Feeling Brain) And I will be very specific in this book about what constitutes pure emotion as opposed to the “feelings”, which we call emotion but unlike pure emotion get us nowhere and are actually the result of our faulty rationalizations. We can not live well or love well without access to the pure, uncomfortable emotions known as fear, anger, sadness and need. And we can’t enjoy excitement, desire, want, comfort, relief and love if we deny our fear, anger, sadness and need. If we avoid those valuable, uncomfortable emotions, it’s because our parents didn’t acknowledge them either. And that’s because they were forced to deny them because of their parents’ denial and so forth and so on. 

Our emotions are part of a natural system that keeps us healthy, when they are suppressed, it weakens us and wreaks havoc in our minds and our bodies. Emotions are the tools that provide us with the means to survive the challenges that life presents. To know and process our emotions, is to know our truth. That truth really does set us free, and it does so in ways we never could have believed possible.

Everything I have learned has proven to me beyond a doubt that our emotions make it possible for us to overcome anything and live life to the fullest. It is my hope that this book will put an end to the many misconceptions and prejudices that continue to exist about what it means to be “emotional”. These stories are about how our emotions work to keep our minds and bodies in sync and how that synchronicity greatly enhances our ability to navigate life, in spite of all of its challenges. Life will forever be full of obstacles, but with access to all of our emotions, we can thrive in spite of them.

Not everything we feel is an emotion. Some things we feel, like frustration, guilt, shame and resentment, to name a few, are feelings that prevent us from understanding ourselves and connecting to others. Emotions on the other hand, help us to form and maintain meaningful human connection. Feelings like frustration are disruptive to our lives because they are the result of our own internal conflicts. Emotions on the other hand, can be unpleasant to experience, but ultimately they are very satisfying because they end our internal conflicts, restore harmony between our feeling bodies and our thinking brains and put us back in charge of our lives. Resolving our problems is as simple, and as challenging, as allowing our emotions to flow freely. Not to necessarily always express them, but to not ever deny them to ourselves. We must allow our emotions to be the tools they were meant to be. They are the energetic tools that give us power over our minds and bodies because they are the only way we can truly understand ourselves and the world around us.

So what keeps us from allowing our emotions to flow?  The problem can always be found in the past. We all have experienced events that left us with unprocessed emotions. If you’ve ever witnessed a little child after someone has grabbed something out of their hands, you know what I’m talking about. For an instant you see the child struggle with what he feels. He will look to someone in charge to validate the fact that something is wrong. He feels sad, and perhaps angry, then, if he is fortunate, the adult will confirm that this action of grabbing indeed evoked sadness and possibly anger. A hurt and anger that could be felt and then quickly validated and resolved, or, and to the child’s detriment, a moment in time where he is told that “it’s ok”, “nothing to get upset about”, disturbing his mind’s ability to make sense of what he felt. His mind is left to grapple with what he was told he should feel. Each one of us has had at least one incident of this kind. An incident that caused confusion to our system , many of us have had serious incidents that have caused great disturbance. These events caused our emotional pathways to jam up and denied us access to the emotions we would need down the road in order to fully experience both the positive, and challenging aspects of life. Unfortunately, these buried emotions are the reason we find ourselves in many of our present day problematic situations. And they not only cause problems in our lives, they also take a toll on our physical and mental well-being. Irreconcilable issues cause stress, which in turn negatively affects our health and wellbeing. Emotions are pure energy. Free flowing emotions, or one could say, allowing ourselves to feel the truth of a moment, is the process that keeps our vital energies flowing. Eastern medicine has dealt with the body’s energy for centuries, western culture, although behind in accepting this, has begun to face the fact that mental and physical ills are the result of a body and mind out of sync. The energies that correlate with our pure emotions keep our minds and bodies in sync and in doing so, keep us in optimum health. Some of the stories in this book will illustrate this phenomenon, giving the reader a way to examine and understand how their own blocked emotions may be taking a toll on them. The reader will be able to apply the lessons in these stories to their own lives. Releasing and processing buried emotion awakens us to our truth, awakening us to our true selves. This is an emotional awakening. Forming gratifying connections with others and living a fulfilling life is impossible without full access to our emotions. Emotional Awakenings, restore full access is the key to ending conflicts and confusion in our world. 

Emotional Pain = Physical Pain

I have devoted my entire adult life to understanding what I feel, and how those feelings affect how I deal with my problems. It didn’t matter if it was the pain of heartache, or excruciating back pain, I was always searching for the meaning in the pain. I always wanted to understand why I was going through, whatever it was that I was going through. I wanted to gain control over my life. Forty years of unrelenting, self-examination, have taught me a lot about the meaning of the word HEAL, but above all, that search brought me to one, indisputable conclusion; We are first and foremost emotional beings. We cannot, and should not, be trying to heal anything without taking into account our emotional life. Our emotions play a crucial role in our health and our potential for true happiness. What I know for sure, is that above all, our potential to live life well, requires a clear understanding of the organic nature of our emotions. Our emotions are not a luxury, they are part of a neurological, processing system that keeps both our bodies and our minds healthy, and there is a lot of scientific evidence supporting this fact.  Our emotions have the power to maintain and if necessary, restore the harmony between our feeling bodies and our thinking minds; a harmony that is essential to our health and happiness. If there is no harmony between what our bodies feel, and what our brains think, then there is no peace in us. Our mental and physical wellbeing are dependent upon that peace. In a nutshell, the mind/body relationship is everything.  And no matter what our brains are thinking, our bodies will determine how we feel. If we want to feel good, we absolutely, must, listen to our bodies, and the only means our bodies have of speaking to us, is through our fear, our anger and our sadness. The reward for listening is relief, comfort and love. Telling ourselves, “it’s all going to be ok”, in an effort to feel better, has never, and will never work. The intellectual mind will never overcome the emotional and physical pain of the body. We will never cure anything by sheer, intellectual will. The body always wins! Basically, we are feeling beings, struggling with our intellect’s need to make sense of our lives. Most of us are still unaware of the crucial part our emotions play in informing our intellect. That’s where this book and these stories come in. My life experiences and work have provided me with these informative and inspirational stories, and they explain a lot of what we need to know about our emotions..

Our suppressed emotions create mind/body conflicts, how those conflicts cause problems, and how accessing those suppressed emotions is the key to resolving everything. Having someone to talk to about our troubles does provide a certain amount of relief, but without access to our blocked emotions, those upsetting moments that imprint themselves into our bodies, beyond the reach of our intellectual brains will continue to wreak havoc in our lives. In order to locate the source of our problems, we must connect to our bodies where those emotions reside in waiting. When we bury any emotion, we drive a wedge between the feeling body and the thinking brains, and that conflict causes many, I would dare say all, of the problems in our lives.

Our emotions are how our bodies communicate with our reasoning brains. They provide us with invaluable information. Information we need to understand our world and how we fit into that world. They make it possible for us to hone our perceptions and to make good decisions. They make it possible to survive our emotional pain and give us the necessary clues so that we may find the roots of our physical pain. Our bodies are home to all of our buried emotions and those buried emotions will never be completely silenced. As Freud himself wrote, Unexpressed emotions will never die, they are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”