Do you openly process your emotions when they are triggered every day? Each one of us functions like a tuning fork, resonating with the energy field that surrounds us. Each time we engage in a relationship with another individual, whether that’s a parent, sibling, child, intimate partner, friend, acquaintance, co-worker, client, teacher, patient, mentor, teammate, or colleague, or interact with a creature of the natural world such as a domesticated pet or wild animal, we emit energetic emotional signals back and forth to one another. This is the language of the energy field within which you and I live.
Our Body as a Tuning Fork
Our body is the instrument used to pick up and send out these emotional signals. You have heard of the expression reading someone’s body language. We have a long way to go to really understand the power of this form of communication we have with one another.
We are meant to draw in or pick up stimulus from our external environment, then process it and store the information that will be useful to our wellbeing and survival, and then let the rest go. Many of us fall into the trap of storing, rather than processing, emotion responses. If you take the time to notice, the human body has a trunk and legs that even look like a tuning fork.
Although these parts of our body have many functions, they hold our emotional energy as “human beings.” In contrast, the human head is involved in planning, organizing, analyzing, rationalizing, intellectualizing, and memorizing. If you stay in your head, you can generally stay away from your emotions. The arms also store emotions, however, they also provide us with a way of “doing” the choices we consciously and unconsciously make for ourselves.
Human Being or Human Doing
Are you in touch with the emotional aspect of yourself as a “human being,” or do you avoid the emotional dynamic of who you are and become a “human doing.” So many people don’t recognize themselves as human doers. They turn themselves into machines that don’t connect with their emotions. They forget they are spiritual beings on a journey to explore human being. Human beings engage with the whole spectrum of emotions. That’s why we have all the duality that surrounds us. At one end of the spectrum we find the powerful positive emotions of love, joy, happiness, abundance, peace, and passion, and at the other end of the spectrum there is the heavier emotions of anger, resentment, sorrow, rage, hate, guilt, sadness, or grief. We are meant to explore all of these emotions and then find our healthy place on the spectrum.
Being busy has become a socially acceptable way to cruise through life avoiding encounters with your emotions. The problem with being too busy is that you avoid engaging with your deep core authentic self. At the same time you avoid developing deep intimate relationships with others. Being too busy is workaholism.
Addictive Behaviours
As you may know, workaholism is one of many types of addictive behaviour you can engage in to avoid addressing your inner suppressed and unresolved emotional wounds and traumas. Addictive behaviours are forms of escape. Drinking alcohol; abusing prescription or recreational drugs; extreme exercise regimes; unhealthy sexual behaviours; unhealthy shopping habits; unhealthy eating regimes and fears; living on your computer, cell phone, or other technological devices; obsessive compulsive behaviours, or keeping extreme work or busy-ness schedules are all ways to avoid engaging with your emotions.
Emotional Baggage
Many individuals disengage from their emotional body because it’s filled with painful experiences and it creates discomfort to hang out inside for long. For many, the body is filled with conscious or unconscious unprocessed pain, sorrow, grief, anger, resentment, hurt, guilt, rage, shame, or a general feeling of emptiness. Our behaviours in life will reflect whether we engage with our emotions or avoid them. The longer we go through life avoiding our childhood, current life, or ancestral emotional wounds and traumas, the more prominent our avoidance behaviours become. Addictive behaviours, physical and psychological symptoms, repetitive patterns, and chronic conditions and illnesses will settle into a body that feels emotionally vacant. In reality, the body isn’t emotionally vacant but cluttered up with emotional garbage. Who wants to hang out there?
The Body’s Response to Being Ignored
When we let these emotions build up inside without processing them openly, we clog up the cells of our body with un-wellness. These heavy unresolved emotions are energy deadening to the cells of the body and when the body has taken on an overload of unexpressed emotions it will eventually get tired of this abuse and take action. The body starts to send you messages to clean up the emotional baggage lying around. You will have a symptom set in that sends the message: PAY ATTENTION!! The longer you ignore the body’s messages, the more pervasive or insistent the messages will become.
One way or another the human emotional body will get your attention, even if it has to bring on physical death to get you there. Death can result in situations where the human being is completely in denial of their existence. This frequently happens to those lost in addictive behaviours. That’s why many people today suddenly have heart attacks or strokes, even at young ages. Many people think these conditions are genetic at the cellular level, but they are epigenetic in the expression of the genes. The suppression of emotion flows transgenerationally down through the family system. Your grandparents didn’t show their emotions as a means of surviving some major life issues, your parents didn’t or don’t express their emotions or process them in a healthy way, and you continue the family journey and don’t engage with your emotions.
Stop These Behaviours
The emotional body is an amazing instrument that can circumvent the conscious rational functions of the human head and engage the brain pathways toward healing activity.
If you are stuck in your head defending and rationalizing everything you do in life,
If you keep yourself trapped in pain or grief or victimhood or martyrdom,
If you rationalize away your body symptoms as entirely genetic, or,
If you continue to avoid engaging with your deep emotional healing work,
Then your emotional body will begin to shut you down or stop you in your tracks until you change your ways.
This is the survival mechanism of the unconscious mind – your emotional body – just doing what it is meant to do. It will push you onto a healing journey. If you are too stubborn or too fearful and resist all the warning messages of the emotional body, then don’t be surprised if you suffer a sudden radical symptom physically, psychologically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, financially, or relationally. It’s just your unconscious mind saying “HELLO IN THERE.”
Stayed tuned to my next post on how relationships are meant to serve as a forum for triggering and expressing emotions.