LEARN HOW TO HANDLE NEGATIVE EMOTIONS STEP BY STEP
We all want to feel good and avoid negative feelings. We all want to feel in control of our emotional state. But perceiving emotions is a holistic ability - you’re either all in or all out.
If we suppress basic emotions such as fear, sadness, shame, and anger, we can become emotionally numb. This means we can no longer fully feel positive emotions like love or joy.
Without emotional intensity and emotional connection, our relationships and love life lose their depth and meaning. Our lives become flatter, duller, and maybe even depressing.
With full emotional connection our lives have depth and meaning.
But it's not only that we personally want to feel good, our social norms make feeling bad even worse, as they often link it to mental illness: if you don't feel happy, there must be something wrong with you. That's why we typically end up beating ourselves up for not being happy, which in turns make us feel even worse.
But forced positive thinking is not the best way out of the situation. It only worsens our nonacceptance of ourselves and drives us deeper into a downward spiral. We lose our vitality and joy for life, and we also lose access to our intuition, the internal system that tells us what we really want and what we don’t want. So in short: trying to avoid unpleasant feelings is actually harming our mental health.
So what can we do?
In this article, I’ll be sharing a technique that you can follow step by step to learn how to handle all emotions, so you will be able to deal with what ever life throws at you. I’ll also introduce you to an underused sense that is vital for emotional regulation - interoception, and some short but effective emotional meditations you can try today.
Interoception plays an important role in emotional regulation.
WHY WE NEED BAD EMOTIONS
Negative feelings are human nature, they play an essential role in our survival. They are emotional responses to our circumstances and our inner world, they act as catalysts that show us what we don’t like. They reveal, for example, that we don’t want to be treated in a certain way, or that we don’t trust a particular person, or that we’re not satisfied with the life decisions we’ve made so far. All of these are important insights on our way to a fulfilling life.
Only when we learn to handle unpleasant emotions by giving them space and letting them flow through us, we can grow beyond ourselves. When we experience that we can in fact handle all these different emotions, we lose our fear of them. This gives us an emotional freedom that allows us to make the right, courageous decisions in our lives despite uncomfortable emotions such as fear, anger, or shame.
OUR EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE HAPPENS IN OUR BODY AND IS STORED IN OUR TISSUE
How do you experience emotion? Where do you feel loneliness, disappointment, or pride? Emotions are not just mental states, most people experience them as bodily changes. We perceive them with the sense we call interoception. You might know interoception from my book Pussy Yoga or the Sensuous Dance Workout as it’s one of the core principles we work with to strengthen our mind-body connection to get to know ourselves from the inside out.
The interoception techniques I teach can help you get more familiar with your inner world and your emotions. If you get more intimate with your body, especially with your pelvis and pelvic floor, you’ll notice that the old emotions stored up in your body can be freed as you move through layers of tension. Everything you have ever experienced has also been experienced by your body, and the stronger the emotion that accompanied the experience, the clearer the stored memory.
These memories can arise like flashes of thought, visions, or different kinds of emotion.
Stored emotions greatly influence our perception of the world around us.
What is interoception?
Interoception is the sense which helps you to feel and understand what’s happening inside your body. Basic examples of interoception are knowing whether you’re hungry, cold or tired from how your body is feeling. But these body responses can be associated with more complex emotions and needs. If we’re not able to interpret them through interoception we lose connection with our own experiences and stored emotions. This can greatly influence our perception of the world.
By training your sense of interoception through body-mind connection techniques, you literally access a ‘sixth sense’ of self-awareness. You learn how to experience, interpret and accept everything that you are feeling.
More good news is that when you practice interoception, your body will not present you with emotions in harmful ways. Recent evidence shows that it only reveals what it deems to be safe for you now, therefore it's a healthy and direct way to process old emotions that were too much for you at a certain time in your past.
So when you first try these techniques, allow everything to happen, don’t hold on to it, and try not to analyze it. Your body has its own wisdom and healing power, which you can safely discover further through work like Pussy Yoga or the Sensuous Dance Workout.
I explore how to access your own body’s wisdom in my bestselling book, Pussy Yoga.
HOW TO USE THE EMOTIONAL FREEDOM EXERCISE
The following exercise will help you deal with emotions in general and the new emotions that can surface through your Pussy Yoga practice. It will also help you work with unpleasant emotions that hold you back in life. Remember that whenever we try to suppress our emotions, when we’re afraid of feeling them, they actually start to run our lives.
If we try to avoid feeling fear, for example, the avoidance can keep us from stepping out of our comfort zone, getting to know great people, making important life decisions, or opening up during sex. Meanwhile, daring to actually feel the fear, getting to know it and doing whatever we were fearing, would expand our comfort zone and give us the thrilling feeling of uncertainty, excitement, growth, and mastery.
Whether you have strong emotions or just want to listen to yourself to become more emotionally alive, the following process from Russ Harris is a wonderful way to get in touch with yourself. This process may transform negative emotions - it can be that the emotion shifts for you, but remember it doesn’t have to. Our goal is not to get rid of unwanted emotions, but to learn to live an exciting, fulfilling life with all of our emotions.
Our goal is emotionl freedom - a fulfilling life with all of our emotions.
EXERCISE: EMOTIONAL FREEDOM WiTH INTEROCEPTION
You don't need a lot of time, start with 5-15 minutes and see how it goes.
Sit or lay down comfortably and take a deep breath. Stay in a conscious state and observe what you can feel in your body. Scan yourself from head to toe. Can you spot anything particular - maybe unpleasant? Concentrate on what bothers you the most. For example, it could be a sluggish feeling in your chest. Observe it with curiosity, like a scientist. See where it begins and ends. Where exactly are the outlines of the sensation? What form does it take in your body? Does it have a pulse or a vibration? Is it light or heavy? Warm or cold?
Breathe into this sensation. Breathe deeply and slowly, and then exhale completely. Slow breathing helps reduce the tension in your body. It can be like an anchor in the storm that centers you.
Now open up to the feeling, and let it expand in your body. Give it more and more space.
Allow this feeling to be there. Welcome it, even if it isn’t easy for you. Remember, we aren’t trying to change our emotions. The goal is to make peace with them. Fighting emotions is a painful waste of energy. It’s exhausting. Only acceptance brings you peace, and the feeling will have less power over you.
Once you’re at peace with this emotion, you can look for more sensations until you feel satisfied. Or you could just relax and let it be.
You can do this exercise with me and learn more emotional meditation techniques following along with these short videos:
1. My somatic meditation for emotional healing
2. How to overcome fear, anger and sadness - a video of further techniques you can use
EMOTIONAL HEALING AS AN EVERYDAY PRACTICE
These exercises are healthy ways for dealing with painful situations and difficult feelings, be it primary emotions like anger or fear or complex emotions that you don't really understand. But you don't need to wait until your emotions put you under extreme stress - see this practice as studying your own emotions.
Practicing the conscious experience of emotions and observing your own physiological reactions like a rise in your heart rate increases your emotional intelligence. It helps you to maintain emotional freedom in different situations of your daily life.
I love to do the interoception practice anytime and anywhere, especially if I get wrapped up in thoughts and lose connection to the moment. It works for conscious feelings but can also help you uncover and resolve emotions that are hiding within your body, maybe even expressing themselves in physical pain. Try playing with this exercise while meditating, riding a bike, standing in line, walking in nature, or falling asleep in bed.
Walking in nature is an ideal place to practice these techniques for emotional healing
WHAT NEXT?
If you want to learn more about how to access emotional freedom through your body and even learn how to facilitate it for others, I recommend my ESSENCE OF BELLYDANCE™ Teacher Training. It's not only an education, it's an embodied transformational experience which explores the latest techniques in interoception, somatic healing and holistic movement.
