Love Your Negative Emotions

Emotions are the most present, pressing and sometimes painful force in our lives. It dictates our thoughts, intentions and actions with superior authority to our rational minds. They can grow like weeds, slowly conditioning our minds to function on the detrimental feelings we have and dominating our daily life. Our ability to regulate emotions affects how we are perceived by the people around us.

When emotions failed to be under proper control, sudden responses that triggered may be disruptive or inappropriate, causing outbursts where rapid changes in expression such as strong or exaggerated feelings occur.

If you've had tendencies toward denial, withdrawal, and self-isolation, chances are there are some deeply buried emotions inside that are holding you back in your life.

Emotions help us survive, thrive and avoid danger. They serve as an adaptive role in our lives by motivating us to act quickly and take action. As it is true that our feelings can shield us, they can hurt us too. We need to identify healthy ways to manage them.

Sure, nobody likes negative emotions. They can dampen our enthusiasm for life, depending on how long we are willing to cling onto and allow them to affect us. They stop us from thinking and behaving rationally and seeing situations in their true perspective. We find it hard to cope when we experience them, so naturally, we would do everything in our power to avoid having to deal with them. But what if avoiding these feelings altogether could hasten a costly outcome?

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

– Roger Ebert

When you intentionally push distressing thoughts away in an attempt to ignore it, the emotions that are linked to those thoughts are suppressed and hidden away. While we can use the label negative, with what we know about those emotions, it’s important to acknowledge that all emotions are completely normal to experience. They are a normal part of the human experience. Understanding when and why negative emotions arise enable us to honestly look for and develop behaviors that may positively address them.

Emotions are energy. Understanding this implies that they are fluid, moving resources meant to be felt and released vs. suppressed and ignored. They exist everywhere inside our bodies. The nature of chronic stress often results in a buildup of energy that gets suppressed in the body. The unprocessed emotional energy is stored in our organs, muscles and tissues. It leads to inflammation and chronic health problems, and it undermines our overall well-being.

So many people carry trapped emotions within multiple areas of the body, without even knowing it. It is possible to go for years, even decades and be completely oblivious to the blocked energy our muscles are holding on to. The unresolved emotions get trapped inside our body where they build and fester, draining our energy, leading to burnout, emotional imbalance, and eventually disease. When we chronically repress emotions, we create toxicity in our body, mind, and heart.

In order to experience healing, these trapped emotional distresses need to be processed and move through and out of our bodies in a healthy way. The drive to move your emotional energy is present every moment because your body is in constant pursuit of wholeness. In order to successfully express the emotion, you have to move your emotional energy by identifying the sensations and releasing states of contraction. As you move from contraction to expansion you will typically feel lighter, calmer or relieved while opening the door to lasting happiness.

Suppressing emotions, or attempting to push uncomfortable thoughts and feelings down, is an emotion regulation strategy that many people use to prevent from being over-driven by their behavior. Repression however, means those uncomfortable emotions have been hidden deep down into the unconscious to the point that you are no longer aware of it. These are often connected to difficult experiences that are undealt with in the past. In such cases, a sound or a smell can trigger those negative feelings. If these thought patterns are not dealt with properly, they continue to exist within and will resurface at the next trigger.

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are burried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

– Sigmund Freud

Trapped emotions take up a tremendous amount of energy. When the pressure escalates, it may burst out and sometimes out of proportion. Left unchecked and unexamined, it leads to destroyed relationships, causes misery and suffering, and could result in serious physical dis-ease. Studies have shown that most chronic health problems stem from underlying emotional issues and not just obvious physical condition.

People continue to bury their negative feelings, erroneously believing, that they have them under control. This approach may seem to work in the short-term, allowing us to ignore or deny its existence. You might believe that the pain is long gone, but it had only moved from the conscious to the unconscious mind where it gained more power and control over your behavior.

Your ego self knows all about your negative emotions and uses them against you. Every time you ignore them and refuse to deal with them, you allow the ego to project your hurts into the present reality through false and unloving beliefs.

Emotional pain lingers when it isn't given a voice. It’s important to listen to your emotions and deal with them with compassion and curiosity and then taking the necessary steps to let them go. Bring mindful focus to the sensations and allow your thought stream to flow freely through the channels of your mind. Ride on the emotional wave of these sensations with an open mind and an air of curiosity. Don't judge or criticize even if you don’t believe that they are true about you.

Stop persevering the details of what had happened and the relentless justification of your righteous protection over it. Feel your way through and grow past your current state to access healing and greater happiness. Your mind-body doesn’t care about the details. It only cares about releasing negative baggage that will eliminate any future triggers.

Accept that negative emotions are a natural part of our human nature. If you view it as something you shouldn’t have to experience, you will naturally resist them. We are not our emotions, but they reside in us. They cycle repeatedly through our nervous systems and eventually starts to leak out in the strangest of ways. The feelings we don’t process are spread onto those around us.

We either accept or resist those emotions. Resistance makes the feeling grow stronger while acceptance puts us on a path of resolution. Expressing these emotions in a healthy way is necessary and will demonstrate that you are aware of them and have the courage to be genuine in giving them a voice. Remember that any emotion has to eventually be transformed into light energy and be released or transmuted. Liberating yourself from negative emotions can result in a positive life leading to greater freedom and feeling good.

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