Emotions are amazing. They allow us to experience life in full depth, whether they be ups or downs – much of the joy and pleasure we perceive is experienced through our emotions. On the other side of pleasure is suffering – and yes, there are plenty of emotions that allow us to experience suffering, pain and despair.
I know from seeing hundreds of clients during my career, that emotions can be terrifying. When we feel a negative emotion, our response ranges from mild discomfort to grave despair. One of the most common requests I receive is ‘How can I deal with these bad feelings I am having? I don’t want to feel this way, but the feelings just won’t go away’.
Each client is different and each deserves their own attention and space to explore what is occurring. What I want to share in this blog is why many of my clients stay with their emotions.
The first thing to say is that you cannot remove or eliminate negative or painful emotions. It is not possible. But that does not mean that you cannot experience a joyful or pleasant life. It also does not mean that you cannot navigate difficult emotions.
Your body knows best – listen to what your nervous system is communicating to you. Depending on your past experiences and the degree of trauma you have undergone, you may not be ready to sit with the intense emotions you experience. Sometimes the trauma can be so intense, that you may disassociate or faint in order to escape the pain that you have experienced.You know your body best, so listen to what it is telling you.
In order to listen to your body, it helps to quieten the mind. Spend time in nature, have some time for yourself where there is silence in your environment and assess how ready you feel to sit with your emotions. Sitting with your emotions is as much physical as it is mental. Being conscious of your body, the tension you carry, how you move around your space, the positing of your shoulders and head – all these things communicate just how you sit with your inner world.
So let’s get into it – if you are ready to. When you experience an emotion that feels unpleasant or even scary, it can be difficult to do nothing. The very nature of emotions mean that they drive us to action, particularly negative emotions. Think of an emotion that feels unpleasant for you and remember how it feels when you experience it – what is your first thought when it arrives? Does it make you want to take a particular action?
Ok. Now, imagine if you did nothing. What would happen? Would things get worse for you? Would the world around you start getting scary or more intense? The likelihood is nothing would change, other than you experiencing the negative emotion for a longer period. Yet, despite feeling the emotion for longer, you are still the same person. Nothing is happening to you. Negative emotions commonly tell us that something bad is going to happen unless we do something – yet that is often not true. Nothing will happen.
Imagine being able to stay with a negative emotion for long enough that you do not give in to how the negative emotion wants you to act. You have just learned that you do not need to be an emotional prisoner. That you have the strength and autonomy to act as you wish, independent from the emotion you are experiencing. This is what it means to stay with your emotions.
The longer you stay with your emotions, the more you realise that you have choice. You can choose to react in any way you wish to, whether you react to the emotion or not. In my experience, you are best served by not reacting to the emotion immediately. Because by staying with the emotion, you learn that you have more options available to you and often, the best reaction comes when you sit with the emotion for longer and experience how the emotion feels.
In order to effectively sit with an emotion, you want to feel it in your body. Where does it sit, how does it feel? By doing this, you build a different kind of relationship and understanding with the emotion, meaning that you can catch it next time and are more familiar with how it feels. You can then make a different choice in how you respond and you also build resilience to the negative emotion.
Emotional freedom happens when you learn how emotions impact you and what they feel like, so that you can stay with the emotion and understand that nothing will change if you wait and stay with the emotion. By doing this, you take the power away from the emotion and learn that you do not need to let it impact you or force you into anything. You can act independently from the emotion and see it for what it is – a learned and conditioned sensation to stimuli. It seems like more, but when you stay with your emotions for long enough, you will see it for what it is.