Our emotions are not just feelings; they are the four fundamental energies of physics—electromagnetism, gravity, nuclear force, and weak force—flowing through our bodies and brains. When we have full, unhindered access to these energies, we become fully human. And that is the prerequisite for evolving and deepening our connection to spirit.
Pure emotions—fear/excitement, anger/desire, sadness/comfort, love/need—are the bridge between our physical existence and our spiritual selves. They work in tandem. As we open ourselves to these energies, we open ourselves to spirit. The soul’s journey aligns directly with the work of accessing and balancing these forces. We are, in essence, the evolving energy of existence—God, physics, and humanity intertwined.
Our evolution accelerates when we confront the inner conflicts that block the flow of these energies. And we all have them. As we resolve these conflicts, we release the natural forces of the universe within us, allowing us to grow.
This healing isn’t just for us—it’s for future generations. No matter how much we try to do things differently for our children, the unresolved energies within us will affect them. Children are pure energy; they sense everything beneath the surface. The best gift we can give them is our own healing.
What if we loved not to get something back—but simply for the sake of loving? Just to love, as fully and freely as we are able?
So why do we often feel stressed, disappointed, even heartbroken in our efforts to love?
Because most of us are still loving for results. Hoping, unconsciously, to receive something we didn’t get as children. The child within us is still searching—longing to be seen, to be chosen, to feel safe, valued, or enough.
What allows us to love without needing something in return?
It begins with working through the very places where love once failed us. Each time we feel disappointment, frustration, or pain in our career, relationships, parenting, or friendships, an old wound is being touched. As we begin to recognize and heal these echoes of the past, we slowly become capable of loving without clinging. Without needing a particular outcome.
And from this place, we show up differently. We become more present. More generous. We give to others—and to our work—not from ego, but from something deeper. From pure love.
And here’s the paradox: this kind of love is not weak. It does not abandon itself. It does not need to shut down, lash out, or flee. Because love in its pure form is strong. It knows how to say no. Not out of fear or reactivity, but from clarity.
When a “no” comes from love, it is neither aggressive nor punishing. It’s firm, grounded, and honest. And while it doesn’t always cause others to become more loving, it creates the conditions where true connection becomes possible.
Life is full of paradoxes. We need to make mistakes in order to get better. We need to fail in order to succeed. We need to be lost in order to be found. No pain, no gain. No comfort without sadness. I could go on and on. The two that are most important for our happiness and therefore the most profound are as follows:
1. We need to have clear boundaries if we want to have functioning, intimate relationships.
2. We need to be strong in order to be vulnerable.
Let’s look at the first one. We can very often mistake real intimacy with merging in a way that actually fosters co-dependency over self-fulfillment. This is all part of the plan. We are destined to attract into our lives, the friends and lovers that fit ever so perfectly the missing curves and angles of our particular puzzle piece. This is the beauty of the design of the universe. The universe is always searching for balance. This attraction of what we lack is the energetic universe’s call to heal. Or as Joseph Campbell named it “The Hero’s Journey”. The human ready to keep searching for the answers within his or her own self, knowing that no one can save them except their own quest for truth and love.
We also need to full embrace our pain in order to have the capacity for compassion for ourselves and others, i.e,, pain creates caring – another paradox.
The second is the idea that in order to be truly open and vulnerable we need to be strong. Only the resilient can afford to keep their hearts open. Without the strength that comes along with trust of self, we cannot afford the risk of potential pain that being open and vulnerable might bring to us.
Why is it that these paradoxes exist? Is it the yin/yang energy of life that requires it? As my friend says, “the bigger the front, the bigger the back”. No light without darkness etc. ?
Healing Starts Within: How Inner Work Can Heal the World
We live in a world full of division, judgment, and disconnection. In the face of so much suffering—globally and personally—it’s easy to feel powerless. But here’s a truth I’ve come to know deeply through years of inner work and guiding others: the most powerful thing we can do for the world is to heal ourselves.
Real healing isn’t about erasing the past or pretending pain didn’t happen. It’s about facing what we’ve buried—our anger, our grief, our shame—and giving ourselves permission to feel it fully. Only then can we begin to understand the pain we carry, forgive ourselves, and access the compassion that’s been waiting beneath the surface.
This process doesn’t just change us. It changes how we show up in the world.
Without our own suffering, we would never truly understand compassion. When we deny our pain, we also deny ourselves the chance to become more loving, more present, more whole. And when we stay disconnected from our pain, we remain disconnected from others.
This disconnection plays out everywhere—from our personal relationships to our political systems. It’s often those who haven’t processed their own wounds who become the most judgmental, the most hardened, or the most indifferent. When we witness cruelty or alienation and ask, “How could someone do that?”—the answer often lies in unacknowledged suffering.
But healing is possible. And it begins one heart at a time.
We all have the power to be a healing force. Each of us influences a small circle of people—our families, friends, coworkers, neighbors. When we choose to live with integrity, to protect our own hearts, and to see the pain in others, we become a source of compassion and change. If everyone did this, love and understanding would ripple out into the world.
This isn’t idealism—it’s responsibility.
In today’s United States, where political division runs deep and antagonism seems to define our national tone, we must remember: change doesn’t start in Washington. It starts in your living room. In your relationships. In your willingness to understand your own pain so you can meet others with empathy instead of judgment.
You don’t need to change the whole world. You just need to heal yourself—and let that healing expand outward. That is how we become part of the solution. That is how we find connection in the face of division. That is how we create a world that operates from love, not fear.
Know this: your acts of compassion, your commitment to inner healing, and your choice to love in spite of it all… these things matter. They are how we heal the world.
Frustrated. Sad. Annoyed. Jealous. Worried. Depressed.
We feel so much, so often—and it can get overwhelming. But here’s something that can change everything: not all feelings are the same. And if you want to start feeling better, it helps to understand the difference between feelings and emotions.
Emotions aren’t a luxury or a weakness. They’re part of your body’s built-in healing system. They’re signals from deep inside you, meant to help you process life, stay healthy, and grow.
Over the years, through study and hands-on work with clients, I’ve discovered that there are only eight experiences that truly qualify as emotions. They come in four pairs: one pleasant, one unpleasant in each.
Excitement and Fear Desire and Anger Comfort and Sadness Love and Need
These are what I call pure emotions. They rise up in response to real-life events, and even when they’re painful, they carry meaning and momentum. They help you move through experiences and come out stronger, wiser, and more at peace.
But feelings like frustration, guilt, resentment, and anxiety? Those aren’t pure emotions. They’re signs of internal conflict—of parts of you pulling in different directions. They don’t move you forward. In fact, they often keep you stuck, circling around the same unresolved thoughts and patterns.
Pure emotions may be uncomfortable at times, but they’re healing. They bring your body and mind back into alignment after life’s big and small traumas. That’s why learning to recognize and work with your real emotions—rather than getting lost in feelings—is such a powerful step toward real, lasting change
In her book, “Prenatal Development and Parents’ Lived Experiences, Ann Diamond Weinstein points to a quote by McCarty and Glenn, leaders in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology. McCarty and Glenn, devoted their research to proving that the prenatal and perinatal states of life are, in their words, “a time in which vital foundations are established at every level of being, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and relational”. It seems preposterous not to acknowledge that this phase of life has a profound effect on us both, emotionally and physically.” We inherit not only eye and hair color, we inherit all of the unresolved emotional issues of our ancestry. Think of it this way. Cells have sensory receptivity from the very beginning. According to perinatologists, Verny & Weintraub state, “We do not need fully developed central nervous systems or brains, to receive, store, and process information. Our earliest memories are not conscious, nor even unconscious in the standard sense…we record the experience and the history of our lives, in our cells”. Since as babies, females are born with all of their eggs, the egg that made us, was in our mother’s prenatal body, therefore, we had, not only a firsthand experience, in the womb of our mother; we also had a psychophysiological experience of our grandmother’s womb. This is a crucial fact that can not be ignored, when we consider the healing of our maternal side. The cell that became us, directly experienced the dynamics of the emotional relationship that transpired between our maternal grandmothers and our mothers. A fact that connects us emotionally to our entire maternal lineage.
Emotions play a crucial role in our development. There is a universal acceptance of the fact that babies who receive love through care and touch grow robustly, and babies who don’t, are at risk of severe neurological disturbances or even death. We all accept that the emotion of love is vital to our physical health. Love is also vital to our psychological health. Love is an emotion, and it plays an enormous role in our emotional health from the very beginning of our existence. We need to become much more sensitive to and accepting of the fact that our mother’s emotional state has a profound influence on the quality of our life. We need to consider more than just the extremes; total capacity to want and love a baby, versus negative feelings about pregnancy, harsh treatment or neglect. There are many shades of and levels to a mother’s capability to love. We must acknowledge a mother’s monumental power to affect her children from their very beginnings. It is important to acknowledge the unique range of emotional experiences one has with their mother and their benefits and consequences. Somatic experiencing has the capacity to awaken us fully to our experience of our mothers and in doing so, it allows us to understand our intimate relationships. Once we feel the truth of our early experiences with our mother and our maternal ancestry, we can gain an understanding that allows us to participate more effectively in all of our intimate relationships. Healthy relationships and our ability to find them and maintain them, has everything to do with the emotional relationship we had with our mothers and the maternal line from which we have descended. Our first experience of being wanted, of making our presence known, of belonging, of worthiness, are all based on our relationship to and with our mothers.
When the original, loving, symbiotic attachment of ‘baby to mother’ is carefully and gradually transformed into the loving, autonomous relationship of ‘adult to mother’, the result is a person capable of balancing good boundaries with the need for connection. The initiation of our love relationships and our ability to function well within them, will be a repeat of the emotional dynamics we experienced with our mothers during the initial and early developmental stages of our lives. The skills that we continue to develop and employ within our intimate relationships, will be born out of a combination of what we experienced with our mothers and our continuing efforts to know ourselves and therefore others on a deeper and deeper level.
When my son was about 3 years old, we were visiting my in laws, seated on the patio talking, my son was coloring in his coloring book. As you can imagine, how a 3 year old might color, the crayon colors were free-flowing crazily outside the lines provided by the book, but my son was enjoying the experience and when he was done he turned to my father-in-law proudly, and said “look grandpa”, to which my father-in-law replied, “oh, did you make that mess?” My heart dropped down to my belly, and my heart started to pound as I opened my mouth to say. “Oh my God, that was so hurtful, you should say you’re sorry”. My innocent, 3 year old’s reaction to my father-in-law was a look of complete bewilderment, because he had no point of reference for such mean-spiritedness; but I did, and I knew that I had to do something because I was smack dab right back in my childhood. You see our children are extensions of us when it comes to our generational, unresolved past. What does this mean? It means that our unresolved past, from our childhood, will bring about events in their lives that mimic that fear, anger and pain that we endured but never processed; another opportunity for us to make things right.
So on that summer day, on that patio, I had the opportunity to correct my history. My son was vulnerable, as I once was, but I was no longer vulnerable and I had a choice to have the courage to stand up for what was right. To speak out as the only adult willing to feel exactly what was happening. So, instead of having to suppress my fear and anger at this ‘adult’ behavior, I had a choice to do something, and I did.
My father-in-law turned into the bully that he always was, because he finally was confronted with a person willing to speak their truth. It was literally like a scene from fabled emperor and his new clothes. My husband’s family always pretended that his ways were not hurtful but I was the child in the crowd who had not been regimented into silence. My husband’s family always stayed true to their roles which entailed remaining intimidated by him, but I hadn’t signed that constrainment contract.
He rose from his seat and pointed his figure right in my face and yelled “It was a mess, it was a mess!” The rest of the family, unaccustomed to anyone standing up to the bully, flew out of the room like cockroaches; when my truth shone some light upon the situation. I was left dealing with the situation. My actions did not alter any of their awareness, nor did it prompt them to admit anything. No matter, the thing that mattered that day was that I was changed. That day I reconciled, what had up until that moment, been a big unresolved childhood wound of mine. I was able to use my voice. I was able to express my fear of my child being hurt. I was able to feel my anger at the cruelty that was being allowed without challenge. I had not comfort or love from anyone there on that day, but I received comfort and love when I recounted the story to my friends and my therapist at the time.
That day I resolved one, big, internal conflicts by allowing my emotions to flow. This event led to many discoveries about my emotional health. It was my first realization of how correcting the past, by walking into it, in the present with full awareness, rewires our nerves, making our bodies healthier and putting our minds at ease.
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.”
The other day I signed up for a class called “Yoga For Moms”. I thought to myself, “I’m a mom, and I like practicing yoga.”. So I went. When I arrived I realized that I had signed up for a pre-natal yoga class. Feeling just a little silly, I decided to stay. I wanted a relaxing, non-aggressive class and now I was sure that was exactly what I’d signed up for.
The teacher asked us each to introduce ourselves and state if there was anything specific we had in mind to work on in terms of the practice that day. When my turn came, I stated my name, and I immediately revealed that I was in fact not pregnant, but that I was in fact a “mom” and I was looking for a relaxing class, and hence, here I was. The other ladies with their bountiful and beautiful bellies, smiled and were welcoming . The class commenced.
Being a yoga teacher myself, and having taught my share of pregnant women, I was so happy to be in the room with the angels. Babies are completely connected to the source and because of this, they are full of power and grace. That’s why what happened next was not a surprise.
As someone who has worked through my body to heal and has released so much tension caused by so many buried emotions, I was in my usual space of communing completely with my physical self. I was in child’s pose and I felt a beautiful release of my muscles that allowed for some space that I had never known before. I also realized in that moment that the space opening up to me had been missing since infancy. Of course child’s pose, coupled with the energy of these ethereal beings was the perfect formula for this magical healing. On the mat, the memory of being an infant, and being upset came over me, and then the beautiful release that I know these angels afforded me. In that moment, I was allowed to confront the fact that although my mother tried to comfort me, her body was so full of tension that my body could not relax. Once I knew something was bubbling up, I pictured my mother exhaling and calming herself. I imagined her body releasing the tension she was unaware of as she held and tried to comfort me as a baby and young child. I imagined her breathing out, and in doing so, I then was for the first time, able to imagine her body relaxing so that I too could relax. Some sadness released in me that day, and some anger. The anger of not fully knowing comfort. It was profound, as all emotional breakthroughs are, and I was able to find a new openness and a new way of being.
We never imagine that our bodies are holding the memory of our mother’s bodies, but it makes perfect sense. Those angels and the power of yoga, provided me with the perfect environment to take another step towards the comfort and relaxation that allows for love.
I am grateful and continue to be amazed by the power of the universe to lay down the unexpected moments that always holds the exact opportunity I need to move forward. Yoga allows us to bypass the intellect and discover what our bodies know. Without this information, we can never fully heal.
We’ve all thought it. “Why is this happening?” When things go wrong in our life, whether it’s a simple conflict or a gut wrenching heartbreak, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the answer to that question? It’s a question that I have been determined to try and answer. What I have found out, is that although we can’t stop bad things from happening, we can stop feeling like there is nothing we can do about it. I know this sounds incredulous, but hang on. The thing is, what I’ve discovered is this; if we can find out what we are suppose to learn from these awful occurrences, then enduring them won’t have been without value. Sure, bad things will happen to all of us. We can try to just accept that fact. The question is, “why are we able to walk away from some of these things, upset yes, but basically ok, while others leave us uneasy for days, and still others make us feel as though we may never recover? As we discover the answers, we also realize that the formula for discovering our beauty and our uniqueness was always there, hidden within all of our problems. Every single unwelcome occurrence is happening for a reason, and that reason, is to make us understand something important about ourselves and the world around us. Our problems are custom made for us.
Our problems can absolutely be explained, but only if we are willing to open ourselves up to looking to our past experiences. If in the past, our minds and bodies experienced any kind of crisis, big or small, it created a struggle within us. If we experienced emotional or physical abandonment, or any kind of psychological drama, the dynamics of those unresolved occurrences will be repeated again and again in the present until we work through them and resolve them. It is the major and minor traumas of our childhood, that create the problem, and that problem is the “mind/body conflict”. Any conflict between the mind and the body will continue to find new ways of expressing itself until we awaken to it, realize it and resolve it. Of course in our present life, these conflicts don’t show up in the exact, same way. However, they are always made up of the exact, same, uncomfortable dynamics, that brought on the original crisis. Decades of success in healing have proven to me that many of our present problems come from some, past, unresolved situation. Once we have located the original situation, we can ease our bodies and minds by dealing with the emotions we were previously forced to deny. We must somehow coax the uncomfortable, raw emotions to the surface, which is difficult because science tells us that our brains are wired to protect us from feeling them. We need therapies that can override our brains’ good intentions. Resolving past incidents, not only begins to make our present life better, it also begins to restore our original ability to access all of our emotions and move forward with more effectiveness, success and peace. When we understand the healing power of our emotions and when we have access to all of those emotions, life becomes everything it was meant to be. Without them, we are only partially living. The more fully we feel pure emotion, the more fully we live.
This Emotional Life 