Try as we might, we will miss opportunities. Like the opportunity to smile at a stranger, new to town. Or, to call a friend on a hunch when, beyond our conscious awareness, he’s having a restless and uncertain time. When we miss multiple opportunities we can end up carrying a burden of a life not fully expressed. Paradoxically, this is when the time becomes potent for healing and transformation.
Our bodies speak in symbols
I recently talked with a woman who’s voice faltered and broke when she spoke. She told me she felt as though she was being strangled. When I asked how long she had experienced this, she began to weep softly.
Her second child had been knocked off his bicycle on his way to school, and died. Her most painful memory was that she didn’t tell him she loved him when he left the house that morning, because she was angry at him for not doing his homework.
She’d been unable to feel her emotions fully, or say what she really felt, ever-since. She was carrying a burden of self blame and grief. The constriction she felt in her neck was her body’s way of letting her know that she was blocking the flow of life.
Fortunately, she was open to let go her suffering. With a little guidance, she became fully present to all the unexpressed emotions she’d been carrying, and moved into a deep feeling of relief. What remained was only love for her son.
We rarely receive education about how to flow emotions consciously.
Most of us have been conditioned into thinking that emotions such as joy, happiness and enthusiasm are acceptable and desirable, while other emotions such as anger, sadness and disappointment are not.
When we deny, or turn away from the full range of our emotional experience, we begin to cut ourselves off from our heart. From our ability to be present and love fully. Emotional energy that goes acknowledged remains unresolved, creating an emotional life that becomes either stale and flat, or reactive.
For our emotions to be appropriate to the moment, we need to resolve our emotions.
Our emotional body is like a pond. It can be clear and fresh, well drained and constantly refreshed. Or, it can be stagnant, murky and over grown with weeds.
How often in a day do you bring awareness to your emotions?
Do you practice feeling what you feel, when you feel it? Do you meet your emotions with friendliness? Or, do you:
- Turn away from emotions by switching on the TV?
- Eat, drink or smoke, to numb yourself out?
- Weigh emotions down with self judgment?
By feeling what you feel in the moment, your emotional body is kept fresh and clear.
When your emotional body is clear it becomes a sensor which detects the emotional state of others. Your ability to empathize grows. Your intuition becomes sharper, and your ability to know what emotional expression is needed and appropriate in the moment increases.
By learning to make friends with your emotions, you live in the present moment.
Which means that you respond to each moment a-fresh. Not weighed down by unresolved emotional energy from the past, or driven by old, habitual reactions.
Attuned to the present moment, your emotional responses, and outward actions become congruent, unified and healing. You simply know what’s needed, and say what’s needed, now.
Take a moment every day to feel into your emotional life. Meet your emotions as you would a friend returning home. The more you open to the flow of your emotional life, the more you mature into the presence of love. Able to feel, express love in every moment.
