Emotions as Energy; using the mind-body connection to guide your transformation
Emotion is energy in motion, derived from the latin word for emotion, ‘emotere’, literally meaning energy in motion. What we feel as emotion is the experience of energy moving through the body felt as physiological responses of contraction or expansion such as muscle tension or relaxing.
Emotional energy on its own is neutral; it is how we perceive the physiological responses that give a specific meaning to an emotion. What we consider a feeling, such as joy, happiness, fear or anger, are interpretations trained in our subconscious mind from memory. When we are children feeling something for the first time, we look to our caregivers, the people around us and our external environment to determine how to perceive what we are feeling. With your subconscious mind being actively programmed through the ages of 2-7, much of the meaning we place to the emotions we feel through the rest of our lives stem from how we were taught to experience the world in these formative years.
The emotional brain is considered to have executive function in the brain with its most important role being survival. Our emotional brain responds quicker than our analytical brain to incoming information and stimuli, with a hierarchy prioritizing the contracting feelings like worry, fear or anger that signal threat or danger. With our emotional brain having executive function, it heavily influences all decision making, thought processes, memories, and present experiences. In turn, your emotional intelligence - how you understand, deal with and use your emotional energy - is vital to your happiness and fulfillment in life.
Awareness and Embodiment of our Emotional Responses
Although our subconscious brain is developed in these formative years, we are capable of accessing and reprogramming those belief patterns at any point in our lives. The first step in doing so is awareness which begins with relearning to feel these sensations. Your body gives an ongoing flow of information about your experience in the form of a sensation that is then sent to your brain for interpretation. It is a database of information about who you are on the deepest level, from your past experiences to the things you dream and desire for your life. Being able to tune in and embody these sensations is the key to transforming your life.
For ease of communication, we use shortened language to explain our physiological responses. In doing so, we also shorten or limit our experience by perceiving the feeling from memory. Over time we forget to feel them at all. Let me explain with a non-emotion - Say you are visiting someone’s house and in the first few minutes of being there you perceive that you are cold. Cold is not a feeling or sensation, it is a word we use to articulate a collective group of sensations. What does that cold feel like in your body?
Think as if you were reading the scene in a novel. A bad writer would write the perception, “You walked in the house and felt immediately cold.” A good writer would write about the external conditions, “You walked in the house expecting, but not feeling, a reprieve from the cold winter air. You could see the ice crystals formed around the outer edges of the window pane and knew you were in for a chilly night.” A great writer makes you feel the sensations as you read, “You walked in the house shirking off your warm winter coat, immediately wishing you didn’t. The cool air touching first your finger tips, dances up the skin of your arm leaving your hair standing on end. As you take in the rest of the room seeking a warm reprieve, the chill hits the base of your spine, working its way up, sending your body into a shuddering shiver.”
The difference between the first and the last is embodiment. Reading the first and the second keeps you in your mind, Reading the third puts you squarely in your body, feeling the sensations as you read. Through the process of relearning to feel emotions through their sensations, we can process and release stored emotional energy in the body and audit the origins or beliefs behind them so we may transform how we perceive our experience of life towards joy and happiness.
Experiencing the full Spectrum of Emotion
An understanding of emotions as energy also implies that emotions are dynamic and flowing, meant to be felt and released rather than suppressed and ignored. When we suppress emotions, that energy is stored in our bodies to be felt later. If we are intentional about feeling what we need to feel, whether in the moment they come up or in a time and space we consider safe to do so, we naturally release these stored energies. When we continue to suppress this energy, it will find its way out somehow, either in a boiling over of emotion or by manifesting in our bodies as disease or dysfunction. When emotional suppression becomes our default, it results in low emotional intelligence and an overall numbing. As with all energy, emotions exist on a spectrum; when we numb ourselves to the difficult emotions, we also numb ourselves to the beautiful ones. Suppressing any emotions results in a shortening of the spectrum of emotions we can feel. In turn, if you want to feel Joy, you need to feel, process and release the fear, shame and unworthiness you may be feeling.
Our body’s natural inclination is to move this emotional energy to process and release as our nervous system is in constant pursuit of homeostasis. The two branches of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, work together to create homeostasis by responding and adapting to changes, often from emotional triggers. The sympathetic nervous system plays a primary role in our stress response or fight or flight response, stimulating blood to move from our vital organs to our extremities for added energy in the need to fight or run. When we live in a state of stress, this becomes our natural state of being. Our parasympathetic nervous system has the opposite effect on the body, demonstrating a state of relaxation, drawing blood and vital energy back into the vital organs where it maintains health and homeostasis.
What you feel is not Truth, but Perception
There is an emphasis in the spiritual and self-help communities to feel grateful and find joy. They are beautiful ideals, but for many people, it is nothing more than a frustrating, unattainable notion. As much as you may reach for gratitude if your subconscious mind has you consistently responding to your external reality with a stress response, gratitude can feel like a very far reach. There are tools to overcome this in the moment which I will introduce in the next part of the series, but the thing to understand first is that our experience is not truth, but perception. How we experience our reality is not cut and dry, it is not “this happened and this didn’t”, it is subject to our subconscious programming and how we experience life through that filter, and so is everyone else’s. Having a conversation with 5 friends results in 5 dynamic perceptions and one real truth.
Imagine a 3-year-old girl, an only child, at the park with her mother. There are other kids her age there, so she looks to her mother for the signal that she can go play with them. When she approaches, she notices their relationship is close, probably siblings. Her nervous system sends a signal of caution as her analytical brain realizes she is the outsider, making her feel reserved. The other kids, 2 older boys and a girl her age, invite you to play. Excitement brews and she joins in. As she’s playing, the kids seem fearless doing things she’s never done like climbing effortlessly to the top of the play structure. Unsure, she looks to her mother for the signal and her mother says “Be careful!”. Although to the mother this means she can do it, to the little girl it lacks the affirmation she needs to take the risk, now feeling the sense of danger that looms in front of her. Instead of the potential excitement around trying something new, she feels stress and fear around trying something new, a pattern that will be remembered.
The difference between these two girls of the same age is subtle at the time, but profound in life. Children rely on the attention and direction of their parents in their ongoing experiment of testing boundaries, but often we stop our children from really pushing those boundaries, a learned behaviour that sticks through life. Now more than ever we tend to bubblewrap our children, in turn teaching them the world is a dangerous place and they need to be protected. Considering these are the years their subconscious mind is developed, this formulates their trust in taking risks through the rest of their lives.
When it comes to our feelings and emotions, without auditing Why we feel the way we feel, we might as well be asking our childhood self to respond to our reality. That conversation between 5 friends with 5 perceptions might as well be 5 - 5 year olds responding to each other. For this reason, it takes feeling your emotions and questioning the origins and beliefs behind them to transform your life. To learn why we respond the way we respond leads to controlling how we respond. We can still be hit with the same storms, but we are hit as a different version of ourselves, equipped to handle the storm.
Through the rest of this series, I will be going through tools you can use to tune into your emotional energy, process and release it. In the next post, I will be introducing the Emotional Guidance Scale by Abraham Hicks and the Map of Consciousness by David Hawkins, powerful tools for awareness and shifts in our emotional and vibrational wellness. We will explore what these tools are, why they matter, and how to leverage the emotional guidance scale to shift your vibrational state and your state of consciousness.