Did you know that suppressed emotions could adversely affect your health, well-being and relationships? Suppressed emotions can be dangerous, as I found out through my own life journey and experiences. It is what led me to explore therapies and practices that can return us back to wellness and to become an energy healing practitioner, helping others balance their health, relationships and well-being.
When I was 30 years old, I moved from my native Russia to Northern Europe. People there seemed so perfect, never upset or angry; they seemed to always be in control. I really wanted to be like them. But, somehow, I couldn’t. Being a single mother in a foreign country, working hard to make ends meet, I found myself in a state where even daily routines turned into unbearable stress.
This got worse as my body went into a hormonal imbalance. I was feeling really bad physically, had no energy to go about my day, my head was so foggy that I could not continue to do my work, which required processing a great deal of information. Worse still was the fear that took over completely. I saw my life tumbling down. I didn’t know why or what I could do. This was the darkest time in my life.
Since I couldn’t function any longer I took a leave and went back to my home base. There I found a brilliant old-school psychiatrist, who at that time was working in a tiny, shabby room behind the police office, talking apprehended alcoholics out of their addiction.
When I entered his room, I said, “Doctor, I think I’m going crazy,” and tears started streaming down. I had three one-hour sessions with him, with no medication involved, just talking. He told me, “You are a very emotional person and you spend too much energy trying to be ‘perfect.'”
This was the first time I was told about emotions. But I didn’t become fully aware of them until a few years later, when I was finally ready to accept myself as I was.
Emotional growth
Through all that struggle, I have learned that emotions are as important as our body or mind. However, while we are growing up, hardly any support is provided for our emotional growth. As children, we are punished for expressing emotions, and many of them make us feel really uncomfortable. So we learn not to feel, hoping that they would just go away.
However, as we all know, nothing that is energy ever goes away — it only changes form. Emotions that we suppress become toxic or explosive. They start affecting our relationships, health and the way we feel about ourselves.
Maybe this is not what you like to hear, but the only way to let emotional growth happen is by feeling through the emotions that are rising up. (Feeling the emotions, by the way, is very different from acting them out, which normally happens uncontrollably and does not add to our awareness.)
The most difficult part is to push through the initial discomfort of acknowledging what we are feeling. In most cases, it is not pretty at all but we have to own up to it. Once we are able to accept our emotions without guilt or shame, we are bound to see that each one of them serves a purpose.
We will be able to find something beautiful behind every “negative” emotion: a strength and a will to progress on our path behind anger, an effort to keep us safe behind fear, striving for unity behind hurt and hate. This is what allows us to make peace with our emotions.
Working with emotions
To help you reach this point quicker, I’d like to share with you a list of techniques that are very effective in clearing blocked emotions:
- Reiki — a very gentle energy healing technique that helps the body and mind to flip from fight or flight into healing and replenishment mode. Great to use if emotional struggles leave you exhausted and depleted of energy.
- Osho’s Dynamic Meditation — a very deep, cathartic clearing that brings you back to stillness of your innermost being. You can do it in a group or alone, simply following instructions on YouTube.
- TRE (Tension, Stress and Trauma Release Exercise) — a simple, but powerful, technique that helps you quickly and easily release the stresses of the day, creating more space for love, compassion and acceptance.
- BodyTalk — great for bringing emotional blocks into your awareness, synthesizing whatever we were meant to learn from them and helping the body to release emotional holdings in a natural way.
Many more great methods are available. The most important thing is that none of us has to struggle alone. All you have to do is reach out and ask for help and take charge of your emotional well-being that affects all areas of your life.
