When emotions become intense or they intensify with time, they start showing themselves to you as autoimmune disease, anxiety, IBS, chronic eczema, inflammation or weak organs; manifesting in your body in one way or another. What unfelt emotions are you embodying, and how can you become aware of them?
To not understand the impact that our emotions have on our body, and on our life as a whole, is a faulty understanding of the body and life. In our society it is the norm to get labeled and to then identify with a condition; to search for answers in diagnosis and medication, rather than facing your emotions and giving them space when they come up. There is a lack of understanding of what your emotions are, how to deal with them, and how they impact the body. It is as if diagnosis are easier to understand than the wisdom we embody.
Your emotions need to be acknowledged. They are your compass, navigation system, your way of knowing right from wrong and yes from no. When you ignore them, they find other ways of expressing themselves, which are detrimental unless you learn to understand them for their complexity.
1. Commit to healing your emotions
Further onwards I will share with you my own journey and how I healed my symptoms and my diagnosis and prognosis with the help of commitment, compassion and a daily embodiment practice. When I learned how much my physical chronic suffering had to do with my emotions, I opened up to a new way of being; being present in my body and processing my emotions and my traumas, giving them space and meeting myself with compassion. It wasn’t achieved in a short period of time; it demanded years of daily commitment.
Committing to a daily practice of embodying health and healing might sound challenging, but I know from experience that healing is easier than being unwell and identifying with a disease. Ultimately your commitment to your healing helps you grow and evolve, which is what we are all here to do after all.
2. Become aware of your emotional loop
How we are in our bodies impacts our thinking mind, and our state of thinking and being impacts how we feel, which again impacts how we are in our bodies. Transformation can only begin when we become aware of our state of being, and our wish to transform something. Transformation begins when we allow for our needs to be felt, and when we can allow ourselves to speak from our hearts.
As we pause our emotional loop and meet ourselves with compassion, we break the cycle we are in. Are you aware of the loop you are in now? Personally, I became aware of how I was focusing my efforts into managing my symptoms and the limited energy I had in a day, rather than focusing my intentions and my efforts on healing the underlying cause of my symptoms, and moving the energy of that cause that made me fatigued and in pain. When I changed my perspective and put effort into opening my heart for all that it wanted to feel and process, change started to happen like magic, little by little. And it continues.
3. What needs to be felt?
What are your thoughts telling you? One could say that what your mind keeps replaying is what your heart wants to heal, and when you have an overthinking or anxious mind that keeps you from listening to your heart, it quiets the desires and needs of your heart energy. Let your heart have the space to support your thoughts with great desires.
The more you try to control your feelings the more you suffer, because you disconnect from their complexity and depth. Sometimes, if we rely on problem solving and analyzing, we can feel like an observer of the body and its symptoms, forgetting to connect to our body, as the mind gets louder and louder. If you focus on managing symptoms and avoiding external factors (be it people, foods, pollen, or chemicals) your fearful perspective limits your existence. Personally, my world became smaller and smaller after each visit to the doctor’s office. It is an easy mistake when you don’t know the power that your heart and your emotional body has.
4. Trauma is causing distress
Problem solving from a limited space of fear and insecurity makes your world smaller. Once you learn to open up your world from a sense of safety, trust and hope, you allow your body to start letting go of the tension it is holding on to. That tension and trauma might have been creating emotional distress and physical symptoms for decades.
What emotions or fears from the past are you holding onto in the present? What if you set the intention to connect to those emotions and let them go little by little? As you start feeling a sense of safety, your body can start to relax, trust, and to let go of what it is holding onto so tightly.
5. Intention to heal creates change within you
Grounding in the natural system that your body is, can release stress or agitation and increase a sense of wellbeing and connection to yourself and your surroundings. Holding that grounding intention prolongs an uplifting, positive, trusting and ultimately healing emotional state. Practicing this intention daily starts to impact the body and create change from within. In this way, your devotion to your embodiment practice allows the energy flow to impact your body emotionally and physically.
If you are focusing on negative emotions, fears and traumatic memories they manifest in the body, and if you focus on desires, hopes and dreams, these transformational emotions manifest as change in your emotional body. I recommend watching and reading Dr Joe Dispenza’s research on this topic, which inspired me back when I was running out of hope. Consciously connecting to a state of health and healing that is in your system creates transformation. Consciously disconnecting from a state of fear, hopelessness, and disease opens up your system for healing.
6. Don’t identify with a disease
Do not identify with your past, any heavy emotions you are holding on to, or with a mistake or failure. Do not identify with a disease that a doctor has given you, or a prognosis they promised you. You are so much more than that. You embody so much wisdom that will help you be someone greater than that limited view of who you are.
If we identify with our past, and the pain or shame or chronic disease that comes with it, the emotional weight of it will limit your outlook of what your present moment and your future can be. If we identify with past or current failures or mistakes it holds us back from living in a state of hope. When we set the intention to change something in ourselves, or about ourselves, we grow as people. Recreating ourselves out of self-compassion and understanding of our previous experiences or actions, opens up a safe space in your body for change and for improved energy flow. This self-compassion and self-growth keeps you going, keeps you connected to your dreams and desires, and balances the stress in your system.
Personally, being given a diagnosis and a term for my experiences was a relief at the time, and gave me a to do list, or rather a list of what not to do. It gave me direction, medication and a set of rules, but it was not what I needed. I didn’t need for my small world to become smaller. I needed to connect to a greater wisdom within, a wisdom that would have told me that I will be fine as soon as I give myself a break and allow myself to look at some very old emotions, some very old traumas, and some very recent triggers. And that wisdom within would have assured me that even if it gets very messy in the beginning, expressing emotion and creating clarity around the connection between trauma and disease, means that I take my power back, and heal.
7. Unfelt emotions get messy before making sense
When you allow your old emotions to be expressed you start to create clarity around them. As that energy moves through your body, the emotions become lighter, and so does your connection to your past and your present. With that you have come up for air, and your system can relax. In this window of safety your body can start to heal inflammation and disease. The process of healing any disease or diagnosis takes time and commitment, it takes hope and intention. And in the process you will meet a new you, a new power, a new belief system, and your new practice will calm your nervous system, ultimately holding a balanced space for that system so that it can focus on what it wants to do; to heal and thrive.
My personal commitment led me to changing my doctor and to only seek help from practitioners who had a holistic understanding of the body and mental health. As I made that decision my new doctor and every other health professional turned out to also be highly intuitive and holistic in their understanding around the body, trauma, and emotions. I realized how opening up for greater help to come in allowed for my healing to be supported by these amazing powers who so clearly were sent to me, to help me. I asked for magic and magic had arrived, from within myself, but also from my surroundings.
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In my coaching I neither strive to heal anyone or any condition, but rather hold a safe space for my clients for transformation to occur in its own time. I support people to come back to their body, with a trauma-informed approach, so that they can find a safe space to connect to their emotions, needs and desires, so that the heart and the mind can coexist. I offer empathic support during crisis and stressful life chapters. I know from personal experience that healing emotions and stress related conditions can only begin when a person finds a sense of safety and calm in the body, from within their own system.
