Fighting Your Own Emotional State

Yesterday I was speaking with one of my students, and we were talking about what it means to actually feel our emotions, what it means to actually be present with our feelings and emotions in the body.

It's interesting, because over the last eight or nine years I've been involved with an organization that helps people work with their traumas and their emotions. One of the things I've observed in those years is that there's a growing number of people who understand that emotions are important, and need to be felt.

There's this idea that we need to release our emotions.

For a lot of people there seems to be some kind of tension around it. There's seems to be a convinction that if we don't release the emotions, it will lead to detrimental consequence to our health or our energy. I think there's some truth to that. But one of the things I've observed is that this tension, this feeling that we need to release our emotions, creates a sense of urgency for a lot of people.

Over the years I've been involved in this field, so to say, I've encountered many different modalities and techniques to work with emotions, and to release them—or at least that is the intention behind it. But for a lot of people, what I've noticed is that it becomes very forceful. They try, on a subconscious level, to force the emotions out of their system. There seems to be this misconception that there's something we can actually do to release emotions from our system.

It's my opinion there's nothing we can actively do to release an emotion.

The emotion needs to be felt.

And feeling has nothing to do with doing. Most of the time when we go into doing—when we have a clear intention of changing something—we're actually not present with the current reality. So if that's the case with your emotions, where you feel something coming up and you give it a certain expression because you think that's the way to release it, you're not actually releasing it. In fact, in my perspective, you're blocking the emotion from having the possibility to be integrated into your system, because on a subtle level, you're fighting with your own emotional state.

The only thing, in my perspective, that can truly release an emotion—I prefer the term integrate—is pure presence: being aware, staying with the emotion, and giving it space internally to move in whatever way it needs to move.

I think a lot of people don't recognize that the expression of an emotion is the feeling on the inside that it evokes. And yes, I do believe it's important to allow those emotions to stream externally too, if that's what naturally happens. But if it becomes a way of trying to force those emotions out—by creating certain sounds, or doing something with the body—I don't think that's necessarily helpful.

It's interesting, because this relates to some of the practices I personally do, and it feels to me like a similar thing is happening with this kind of emotional processing people are trying to do. There's this aspect, in a lot of the arts I'm practicing, where what is supposed to be internal has become external. A lot of these arts were meant to be practiced by connecting internally, to the center of our being, and from there the expression would come outward—not done from the external, then trying to move inward.

I feel like the same thing is happening here with emotional processing.

The emotion needs to be activated internally, and then, if the emotion is mature enough, the expression will come on the outside without us needing to do or force anything for that. Sometimes that expression will be crying, sometimes it will be anger and a need to shout. But it will all be without any agenda of needing to get rid of the emotion, or of needing to manage the system.

So I think a lot of people, over the years, because of this importance that's been placed on emotional processing, have become convinced, or conditioned, into this idea that something needs to be done—that there's a big responsibility for them to do something, because if they don't, it will lead to negative consequences.

Now, I do believe there's an aspect of that which is true.

If there are emotions we're not aware of, that we're unconsciously suppressing and pushing away, in the long run, life will give us stronger and stronger signals. But that doesn't mean we have to proactively try to get those emotions out, especially when it's not fully clear what emotions are moving within us.

So I'm much more a fan of learning to observe your system, constantly bringing your mind back into the body, and keeping the mind, as much as possible, in the body, also when emotions come up. And then, in the moment, feeling what is supportive for actually feeling this emotion even more, without any agenda, without trying to push it away, or trying to get it out of me necessarily. Just staying present with it, watching it, observing it, feeling it.

Over time, what will start to happen is that there's more space within the system, because you're not fighting, you're not contracting—so the emotion gets space to move through the system. And then what we generally start to experience is that the emotion gets integrated into the system, and transforms back into what it originally was: energy that got stuck because of some reason, some experience in the past.

This difference between doing and actually being receptive—allowing the emotion to take over the system, and surrendering to that without making it bigger or smaller—I think that's very important. The doing aspect of our being is the more Yang aspect of our system, and the Yin aspect is more related to the quality of our inner life, our emotions.

Those are opposed to each other.

Neither is better than the other, but it means that if we go into a mode of doing, we're disconnecting from the mode of feeling.

Down the road, when we get really stable in that ability to stay present, things change again, the processing of emotions starts to happen more in the background, while we're still able to maintain our activities. There's no real need to take time out of the day to process it; it happens simultaneously. But again, not because we're actively trying to do anything—it's the awareness that needs to be connected to the feeling.

That is at least the aim I have: to get to a state where I'm pretty much a hundred percent of the time inside the body. Having my awareness inside the body, aware of what I'm feeling, aware of what is moving without trying to manage that, or make it bigger, or get rid of it. Everything needs to be welcome in our experience. I think that is the way to emotional maturity—the way toward embracing the emotions, integrating them, and becoming more stable in that sense.