Why Emotions Matter
Emotions are an inescapable part of our human experience. Yet we are provided with few tools to navigate or understand our emotional worlds. “Mental health” is a commonly spoken phrase, but emotional health, and spiritual health are rarely discussed.
Many of us believe that we are at the mercy of our emotions, so we try to run from them, suppress them, and condemn ourselves for feeling negative ones.
It is rare to encounter someone who has learned to fully nurture their emotional and spiritual growth, because most of use were not shown how to as children. This is an endemic issue in the modern western world. Our emotionally suppressed lifestyle is normalised, while our authentic selves go missing from our daily life.
Emotional energy can uplift your life. Understanding emotions is critical for healing depression, anxiety treatment, working with childhood abuse, and simply getting rid of the negativity that you don’t want to feel and can’t shake.
Emotional life is precious; it is the spark of creativity, passion, and fulfilment.
My aim is to provide you with the tools and information to navigate and master your emotional life. To avoid years of therapy for depression, anxiety treatment, and to live an authentic and naturally happy life – you will need an understanding of your emotions, their purpose, and how to work with them well.
Psychotherapy, Inner Child Work, and energy healing can help you to connect with your emotions in a healthy way, so that you can resolve depression and treat anxiety, and shake off those chronic negative emotional states
Introduction to Emotion
Emotion is a powerful and universal human experience. Emotions sabotage us and they serve us. They block our creativity and they energise it. They can damage our bodies and heal them. They create the atmosphere of war, and support communal well being. We are uplifted by our emotions, and pulled down by them.
Our embodiment give us the ability to feel emotions. Without the body, there is no emotion. This leaves us no choice but to master them. Emotions are not a scary thing. We simply never learned what an emotion is or how to feel one.
You had to learn how to drive a car, but nobody ever sent you for a feeling license. The sooner you master the flow of your emotions (instead of avoiding, suppressing, or denying them!) the sooner you can use their energy to empower your life, your health, and your soul.
It is fatiguing to resist emotions and isolating to hide them from others. The trapped energy of emotions disturbs the health of our bodies because emotions use the same pathways of communication as our organs do.
You need tools to discharge negative emotions, tools to integrate the positive ones, and tools to keep the inner balance. Rachel provides psychotherapy in Sydney that can help you to master your emotional life, and use your emotional energy to create the life you want to live.
Why It’s Important to Feel Your Emotions
No Tools, No Voice, No Thunder
When we do not give voice to our emotions, we find ourselves feeling stuck. If you think of the flow of your life as a river; blocked emotions are like a dam that stops the flow. Suppressing or avoiding emotions traps us in the very states that we want to avoid and causes life to stagnate.
When we actively suppress emotions, or take actions to avoid emotions – we are handling our emotions indirectly. I want you to have all the tools you need to experience emotions actively and directly. This puts you in charge.
Although we can dissociate from our bodies to avoid emotions, or distract ourselves from them by becoming busy, shut them down with will power, or replace them temporarily with activities…. the energy of emotions does not leave the body until we allow it to leave the body. Some things you might notice about avoiding emotions:
- We get busy. The more time we spend working, attending social functions, and re-organising our closets the less time we spend consciously feeling. In other words – distraction until bed time.
- Alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. These substances alter our moods and can be a form of self-medication. Until we heal the past emotional pain, and master the emotions that come up day to day, we will look for external relief.
- Seek pleasure. This corresponds to the point above. We can only handle feeling bad for so long, and will find ways to experience good feelings if we struggle to self-generate them (there are good reasons for this too, and you are not to blame). Sex, food, and Netflix binges come to mind.
- Caffeine. Caffeine is often a solution for sleep deprivation and is linked in with the ‘being busy’ strategy – we even avoid rest to avoid ourselves!
- Rationalise. We can get pretty good at telling reasonable stories about why we will not go to certain places, see certain people, or do certain things. It can be valid, and you should respect your personal boundaries, but it is important to take a good look to see if you are avoiding opportunities in order to avoid the emotions that would come up.
- Criticise. We get busy fixing everything and everyone else. This is a form of projection.
- Dive into fantasy, movies, video games, internet etc. You can tell if you are using this instead of feeling emotions if you experience relief while doing it and stress once you stop.
EMOTIONS THAT TAKE OVER…
You are not condemned to act out every emotion that you feel, this leaves you feeling out of control. “Acting it out” means that the emotional energy takes over your actions. This tends to happen when we don’t realise that we are feeling an emotion, are overwhelmed by it, or don’t know how to express it in a healthy way – either because we were not taught, because it’s been suppressed for a long time, or because there is too much pain still associated with the emotion.
When you are aware of what you feel you can use be in control of how they come out, use it to your benefit, and make the choices that serve your greatest good.
Counselling for emotional mastery can help you to recognise how you are acting out your emotions, and learn how to release them in a healthy way. You may have already experienced how they eventually come out in surprising ways when you resist them!
BASIC PRINCIPLES OF EMOTION
Emotional self-awareness creates the foundation for self-confidence, healthy boundaries, creativity, and generally good emotional hygiene. Emotions are important signals. Therapy can help you get in touch with your emotional life, get it more organised, and get it working for you. Here are some basics:
- Emotions are bound to the body.
- Emotions are observable. This means that an emotion is not who you are, but rather an experience that you have.
- An emotion never lasts forever, it gives rise to the next one.
- Emotions are positive or negative (valence).
- Emotions are strong or soft (intensity).
- Emotional life can be rigid, balanced, or chaotic.
- We have conscious and subconscious emotions. They go subconscious when they are linked to unhealed trauma or when we believe they are not acceptable.
Emotions can be locked into the body with traumatic memories. They are released in the process of healing the associated trauma. Trauma treatment is recommended when you have a hard time staying present with your emotions, go numb, get out of balance, or dissociate. When a negative emotional experience is persistent beyond the basic practices, deeper healing work may be of value.
THE ANATOMY OF EMOTION
Emotion is Energy
Emotions are energy patterns. Each emotion has its own specific energy pattern, like archetypes. Anger, joy, shame, and gratitude all have a pattern of movement, have a unique effect, and they all feel different to experience.
The effect that these each energy pattern has on the body, minds, and actions is different as well. For example, the way that you breathe, think, behave breathe relative to a situation when you feel fear is different as compared to when you feel enthusiastic, guilty, or joyful.
Emotions have an energetic quality to them. The energy has an effect on your body, your mind, and your spirit. The basic polarity of emotion is that its energy can be vitalising (creation oriented) or depleting (destruction oriented).
The energy of each emotion has a corresponding physiology (energy) and mindset (consciousness). The energy of emotion is felt in the body as physical sensation. The body signals with neurotransmitters, hormones, and electrical impulses (coordinated physiological and neurological processes) which become the states that we call emotions. Prolonged states of gratitude can counter feelings of depression and anxiety, promote acts of generosity, and change the shape of the brain.
Shame is possibly the most painful emotional experience and often suppressed. Counseling or trauma treatment is often required to work out and heal shame. The energy of shame is very depressive, and sometimes can express as strong anger or reactivity to feeling criticised, judged, or rejected.
Intense fear can be immobilising or scattering (you can find yourself completely frozen or totally flustered), and is also often rooted in early life fears that the body still remembers. This is also often well suited to heal with a trained trauma therapist.
Anger is a natural reaction to a boundary violation. In anger the nervous system will activate the body into ‘fight or flight’ settings to take defensive action. Over time unresolved anger can cause increased inflammation in the body. This means that we must value our anger, but also learn how to process.
Unresolved anger is sometimes linked with boundary violations in childhood. We might forget the memory but still have anger in the body. It’s energy is useful as protection, but can cause problems when the anger is out of proportion. This is a strong sign of developmental trauma.
At the Freedom Healing Centre in Sydney, Brookvale, Rachel can help you to master the energy of your emotions with psychotherapy. Whether you are struggling with anger, shame, fear, anxiety or depression, therapy can put you back in the driver’s seat of your inner life.
The Scale of Emotion
Understanding that emotions represent certain states of being, will help you to travel them. You can think of emotions as notes on a musical scale.
Emotional experiences are relative to one another. For example if you feel guilty, then anger feels positive. If you feel joyful, anger will be experienced as negative relative to the joy.
The lower notes of the piano represent the lower frequency emotions, like shame, fear, and guilt. The higher notes on the scale represent the highest frequency emotions like love, trust, and gratitude.
These states can be actively transformed up the scale and down the scale. The emotion can feel negative (low notes) or positive (high notes). It can be intense (loudly played) or subtle (softly played). Rachel is a psychotherapist in Sydney who at the Freedom Healing Centre in Brookvale, can give you the tools and insight to work with your emotions therapeutically.
THE BODY-MIND-BRAIN CONNECTION OF EMOTION
Your emotional life is influenced by your body, brain, and mind. This means that not only can you actively work with the energy of arising emotions to your benefit, and deliberately create the ones that you want to feel; you can transform your brain, body, and mind so that they are primed for a balanced emotional life. At the Freedom Healing Centre Rachel coaches you through your emotions, and provides therapy in Brookvale to treat anxiety, heal depression, childhood abuse, and other conditions that can throw your emotional life out of wack.
Emotions Happen in the Body
How do you know what you are feeling? We experience emotions as sensations and visceral states, so your body lets you know. Is your heart rate slow or fast? What about your breathing rate? Do you notice a pressure on the chest, or an open feeling? Do you experience any sensations anywhere else on the body? What kind of sensations? (eg: tingling, itching, stinging, bubbles, tickling, fuzziness). Your brain and body hold the record.
Your diet is also part of a balanced emotional life. You may have heard that gut health has a direct impact on your mood. Maintaining stable blood sugar can help reduce anxiety and keep good adrenal health which is protective against stress. Vitamin B is also protective against stress.
If you feel that your mood could be connected with your diet your should seek the advice of a functional nutritionist. Toxicity in the body can lead to irritability, invite unwanted guests (like worms), and just make it harder to feel vibrant. Research some cleanses, get loads of fibre, and get hydrated! Every piece of the puzzle is important because all the pieces are inter-connected.
Exercise is also a great way to get your body to cooperate with your mood. Physical stability and strength will translate into emotional stability and strength. Find something active that you enjoy doing where exercise is a joyful side benefit!
Emotions Happen in the Mind
We have names for our emotions. We recognise the signals of the body, and label them according to the names we have learned. When we felt happy as toddlers, our parents could say ‘you are happy!’ (this is called mirroring) and we learned the word for that emotion. If our caregivers were not able to mirror properly, we can experience confusion about what we are feeling, have a hard time identifying what others are feeling, and even feel chronic emptiness.
If we learned that it is wrong to feel angry or fearful, we might pretend that we do not feel those things. This denial makes it impossible to work with the emotions because we benefit temporarily by avoiding them and they get stuck inside.
Your emotional experience is always accurate. What is not always accurate is perception. We can come to conclusions that are based on inaccurate or incomplete information. The way that you focus your mind, and the meaning that you assign to experiences can also create certain emotional experiences. These conclusions will still make us feel a certain way. Like the time you thought that your friend was ignoring your calls, but really forgot her phone at home that day. Or how your Uncle believes that anger is bad so he pushes it down.
(By the way, the process of naming the emotion you are feeling can calm you down because naming what you are feeling puts you in the position of an observer and corresponds with the activity of cortical brain. Labelling your emotion is kind of like watching the train go by vs feeling railroaded by it).
Emotions Happen in the Brain
Our emotional life can be based on out of date information. This information is often rooted in past trauma. When we have a bad experience, the emotions of that experience are coded in the brain and body. The emotion acts like coloured glasses, where the trapped/encoded emotion is projected onto present life. When emotional energy is locked in with trauma experiences, it can be good to have the facilitation of a trauma healer in order to release them.
The brain grows in stages. Different parts of the brain develop at different points in life. From birth to 6 years of age, the brain is developing its ability to regulate your emotions. This is why talking therapy alone sometimes does not work. When we are working with early life traumas, therapies can be targeted to heal the area of the brain that were stressed under development.
Therapies like EMDR, rhythmic movements, certain energy healing, and drumming for example can teach the brain get your body calm, when it did not get the chance to do so during the first stage of your growth.
HEALING THE BRAIN TO TRAIN EMOTION
When you experience an emotion regularly, the brain will grow neural connections, neurotransmitter receptors, and increase the activity of brain regions that correspond with that emotion.
The brain scans of long term practitioners of mindfulness meditators have shown increased activity and size of the brain regions that correspond to love, self-confidence, and processing emotions.
When you make a daily practice of gratitude the mind will perceive situations more positively. You will be able to see the positive opportunities and snatch them up! When we are in the habit of feeling cynical, we often do not even see these opportunities and they pass us by.
You can change the shape of your brain with other practices as well. Breathe work, trauma release therapies, spiritual psychotherapy, time in nature and with animals, and nurturing activities give us experiences that develop the brain to our benefit.
We can create emotions deliberately by focusing the mind specifically. We can teach our minds, brains, and bodies to have a positive emotional bias. This means that if we practice gratitude on a daily basis, our brains and our behaviours will change accirtuording to gratitude. This practice can resolve feelings of depression and anxiety (that are not based in unconscious wounds), and will create emotional strength to heal the unconscious wounds when you are ready.
It is important to note that negative emotions can also be connected to negative experiences. This is why simple affirmations can be harmful when it comes to creating positive moods. We need to be mindful that our memories cannot be bulldozed – we need to heal the painful emotions, as well as create positive ones.
Trauma treatment to heal developmental trauma and childhood abuse can be an important part of your emotional mastery. Rachel offers trauma therapy in Sydney and e-counselling to support your healing and emotional master.
Heart-Brain
Heart-Brain coherence is when the frequencies emitted by the neurons of the brain are coherent with those emitted by the heart. This state of coherence corresponds with mental clarity, emotional balance, and better physical health.
Heart-Brain coherence can occur spontaneously in sleep, and also be induced by intentionally generating positive emotional states (for example in states of gratitude, compassion, and good will).
Healing developmental trauma, healing childhood abuse, discharging the negative emotions and thoughts, mindfulness meditation, and completing the instinctive response of trauma can enable consistent and accessible heart-brain coherence.
Cover Emotions
A cover emotion is a kind of emotional protection. It is like a suit of armour, designed to protect the feeler from an underlying, sometimes unconscious, and always painful, emotion. The “real” emotion is like the person inside the suit.
A person who feels grief and wants to feel better may instantly choose anger in its place. Anger masks the grief, and provides the energy needed to accomplish daily tasks. This can work for some time, however the anger will not go away until the grief is healed.
Over time, anger can damage the body, and also pushes people away causing social isolation and feelings of loneliness. This is a particularly difficult pattern to endure because grief requires connection in order to complete itself. Until the underlying grief is healed, the anger may continue to act as its champion, causing damage to health or relationships in the process.
A trained counsellor can help you to identify and heal cover emotions. Rachel is a psychotherapist in Brookvale who provides coaching and psychotherapy to help you master your emotions, (aka self-regulation), identify and resolve cover emotions, and heal the underlying emotional wounds.
THE BASIC TOOLS OF EMOTIONAL MASTERY
Here is a little compendium of tools for emotional navigation. Try these out and choose the ones that you like best. If you are unsure about which ones suit your needs, or how to implement them you can seek the support of a counsellor in your area. These techniques may also help you to treat anxiety, heal depression, and create a foundation for trauma treatment. At Freedom Healing Centre in Sydney, Rachel provides psychotherapy in Brookvale to support your emotional management skills and healing emotional wounds.
The Three Keys of Emotional Mastery
Imagine a crying 1 month old. The baby is fed, clean, rested and will not stop crying. You can treat an emotion as if it is this baby. This baby cannot stop crying on its own because its brain is still growing and learning how to calm down. The different areas of the brain have yet to make connections with each other so that the brain can relax the body.
To discharge the emotional energy and restore inner balance, this baby needs an adult who can do three things. These are the same three things that you must do when you address your own emotions:
- Be Grounded (Body-Centered)
- Be Present (Aware)
- Be Unconditional (Allowing)
Grounding Techniques
Your body is the container of your emotions. Here are some techniques that you can use to ground your body, and establish a calm body-centredness.
Breathing: Breathing in special ways changes your brain waves, relaxes your nervous system, and expands and contracts your torso which allows you to sense the boundary of your body, and feel contained in that.
Basic Diaphragmatic (Abdominal) Breathing
Diaphragmatic breathing stimulates very important cranial nerve called the vagus nerve. This breathing cues your nervous system to relax.
Place your right hand on your belly and your left hand on the centre of your chest. Inhale through the nose. As you inhale, feel the belly rise. Count to 4 as you inhale. Exhale through the nose. As you exhale, feel the belly fall. Count to 4 as you exhale. Eventually extend the exhalation to be longer than the inhalation.
Breathe. Allow your full presence, your whole consciousness, to melt into the breathe. Feel your body relaxing into the breathe. Inhale expand the belly, exhale allow the belly to fall Feel the support of the chair or the ground beneath you as you relax into it. Strong spine. Soft muscles.
Think of your skin as the boundary between your inner life and the outer world. You are safely contained in your body. Inhale and notice the boundary expand. Exhale and notice the boundary contract. Continue to breathe.
Breathing for Emotional Healing and Alpha State
Place your right hand on your belly and your left hand on the centre of your chest. Inhale through the nose. As you inhale, feel the belly rise. Exhale through the mouth. As you exhale, feel the belly fall. Repeat 10 times. On the 10th inhale, hold your breath until your body lets go of the breathe spontaneously.
Grounding Techniques for Emotional Regulation:
The grounding techniques can help you to get settled in your body, which will make it easier to contain emotions.
Squeezing: In a sitting position, place your hands on the outside of your knees. Press your hands into your knees, and your knees into your hands. Press hard so that you feel the resistance. After 8 seconds, release. You will notice a sensation of relief. (Good for fear)
Palms: Take a seat. Place you hands on your lap with your palms facing up. Breathe. (Good for anger)
Bilateral stimulation: Hug yourself: One hand across your chest and under the armpit, the other hand across your chest and on the shoulder. Experiment with which hand feels best to have on your shoulder. Hold. Or, Cross Your legs.
Energy Currents: Join your thumb, middle finger, and ring finger at the tip. Do this with both hands and rest the back of your hands on your lap. (Good for stress or anxiety)
Heart Hands: While standing, sitting, or lying down, place your left hand on your thymus gland and your right hand on your heart. Allow the pinky of your left hand to touch and align with the index finger of your right hand. Focus gently on your heart and breathe.
Mindfulness Meditation Practice
Mindfulness meditation is like medicine for the mind, brain and heart. The brain structures of long term mindfulness meditators are different from the average brain. The areas associated with compassion and emotional stability are bigger.
Mindfulness is the practice of unconditional presence – sort of similar to pure love – just approval, no judgement or expectations.
This practice is not for the faint of heart! It can feel very uncomfortable to do a mindfulness process on your emotions, because what you are doing is allowing yourself to experience the sensations of the emotion. This is not recommended for those who have difficult memories from childhood, PTSD, or experience dissociation – try this questionnaire if you are not sure (https://counsellingresource.com/quizzes/misc-tests/des/) unless guided by a trauma release practitioner.
Not all emotions feel good in the body, which is part of why we started to avoid them in the first place. Mindfulness practice will help you to observe the passing emotions, without getting caught up in their energies. It’s also a loving way to receive your emotions.
**Make sure that you have a good grounding practice before graduating to mindfulness. If you are seeking trauma treatment, this is especially important. Reconnecting with emotional states can be triggering, especially if your trauma causes you to dissociate. Mindfulness should then be practised with supportive guidance.
Preparation
Imagine yourself standing on a small bridge over a flowing creek. The water in this case represents your emotions. You are not going to jump into the water and be taken by the current of water. You are going to stand on the bridge and observe the flow. Mindfulness is the practice of standing on the bridge as a witness to the flow of water, in this case, the flow of your emotions.
The Practice
- Close your eyes and bring your attention inward. Inhale. Notice the expansion of your body. Exhale. Notice the contraction of your body. Think of your skin as the boundary between your inner life and the outer world. You are safely contained in your body. Inhale and notice the boundary expand. Exhale and notice the boundary contract. Continue to breathe. Strong Spine. Soft muscles.
- When a thought arises notice the thought. See that when you notice the thought, it is there. You have no job with that thought except to notice it. This is called ‘witnessing.’ Practice by resisting the urge to respond to the arising thought with more thoughts. Breathe. Return your focus to your breathe when you can.
- Emotions can arise spontaneously, or in response to a thought. When an emotion arises, notice this as well. Respond to the emotion in the same way that you would respond to the emotion of a child. Unconditional presence. Give it your attention without judgement. It is there. You have recognized it. Just observe and notice the sensation. Practice resisting the urge to add new thoughts (analysis) or emotions (more energy) to the event. Return your focus to your breathe when you can and continue to practice non-reactivity and kind receptivity to your inner stirrings.
When it comes to feeling emotions, resistance is unhelpful in the long run. A judged emotion is a trapped emotion!
Remember, an emotion is not a permanent state. This is physiologically impossible. Your emotions are passing energies.
Unconditional presence means acknowledging your emotion, and not requiring it to change while you stay fully present to it. The emotion will change spontaneously when the energy is discharged. Your job is to allow the energy to pass, by watching it unconditionally – in other words, without judgement or reaction to the emotion itself.
Practising feeling your emotions without judgement can be very healing. Mindfulness has been shown to improve your ability to stay calm when circumstances are challenging, and get better control over your emotions in general. Counseling can help you to get in touch with your emotional life and learn techniques to get control over your emotions.
Therapy for childhood abuse can help you heal the root causes of emotional imbalance. Rachel offers psychotherapy in Sydney, Brookvale for you to get control over emotional life, treat anxiety, heal childhood trauma, and get back in touch with the real you.
BUILDING POSITIVE EMOTIONAL RESOURCES
Emotional Presence Technique
You may have a specific experience that is causing some emotions to stir up, or you may simply want to do this technique as a daily practice. The goal is to practice presence with your emotion by feeling the sensations of it, instead of telling a story about it. This will show you that emotions pass when you allow them to, and help you to take pause between “Emotion” and “Action” in your day to day life.
This is not recommended for those who have difficult memories from childhood, PTSD, or experience dissociation – try this questionnaire if you are not sure (https://counsellingresource.com/quizzes/misc-tests/des/) unless guided by a trauma release practitioner.
We have many emotional experiences throughout a day, and have had many more throughout our childhoods. When these emotional experiences are rejected, judged, or suppressed – we get stuck. We treat ourselves the way that we were treated as children, and so treat our emotions the way they were treated when we were children. We can get into the habit of ignoring our emotional lives – when the most healing and resolving things to do, is simply to be present with them until their energy extinguishes. This is called completion. The basics of the technique is described below. For guided support, the Freedom Healing Centre offers therapy in Brookvale to coach you through it.
- Close your eyes and bring your attention internally. As you inhale notice the expansion of your body. As you exhale notice the contraction of your body. Think of your skin as the boundary of your inner life. You are safely contained in your body. Inhale and notice the boundary expand. Exhale and notice the boundary contract. Continue to breathe. Strong Spine. Soft muscles.
- With your internal focus still on, notice and name the emotion that you feeling. How does it feel in your body? Let go of the story, and allow your attention to fall on the place in your body where you feel sensation.
- Allow the sensations to occur. Notice them. Name them. Is it a stinging? Is it a tingling? It is a pressure?
- Observe the sensation and surrender to it. Do not try to change it. Just watch it. Breathe. Witness it. Where on the body do you feel the sensation? What kind of sensation? Simply observe it. Do not judge it. Avoid telling stories. Allow yourself to surrender to the sensation and observe it. It will transform.
- You will notice that the more allowing and surrendering to the sensations you are, the faster they will change. However your goal is not to change the sensation. Your goal is to give it unconditional presence. Once one sensation passes, you will feel the next one arising. Continue as above until you are happy with the sensation that you feel.
GENERATING POSITIVE STATES
Anchoring Practice
Think of a time that you felt most alive, vital, happy. Close your eyes. Remember: What were you seeing? Hearing? Doing? Touching? Smelling? Get in tune with the sensations of these moments.
What colour is the happiness, the vitality, the joy? Where in the body is that colour? What shape does it have? See the colour intensifying. As the colour intensifies, feel the positive emotions amplifying as well. See the colour brighten and the shape expand and surround your body. Feel the positive feeling getting even stronger. Feel the happiness, the aliveness, the vitality. See the colour. Saturate yourself with the saturate yourself with the colour and the feeling. Breathe it.
Gratitude Practices
The key to all gratitude practices is genuineness. For it to work, You need to feel the gratitude in your body for it to have an effect. It is important that you consider only what you truly feel grateful for.
- Write a letter to someone you feel grateful to.
- Gratitude journal. Every morning, lunch, and evening, write down in your journal what you feel genuinely grateful for. You can repeat things, they can be simple, or big. The soft feel of your sweater, the puffiness of the clouds, the stranger who held the door…
- Place your hands on your heart. Close your eyes and connect with your heart. Breathe into your heart and recognize its unconditional power and service to you. Deep breathes.
- Write lists of things that you feel grateful for, write gratitude notes and post them around the house, put a gratitude note in your pocket, your wallet – any place that you look often.
Compassion Practice
In a seated or supine position, use the abdominal breathing technique. When you feel relaxed, place your hands on your heart (Heart Hands, Prayer Hands, or one hand as you wish). Wish wellness upon yourself, upon another person, upon a pet, upon a group of people. What you feel will always come through you first, and so you will benefit from the compassion that you feel for others.
Simple Energy Work for Emotions
An emotion is an energy pattern. After your experience an emotion, it’s energy pattern exists within your field. Use this practice to erase the negative energies of superficial emotional pollution that is generated through day to day emotional experiences..
- Sit down with eyes closed and bring your attention to your breathe. Notice the perimeter of your body as it expands with your inhalations and contracts with your exhalations.
- Establish your boundary. Relax your awareness and bring the centre of your attention to the centre of your heart. Gather yourself gently and firmly. Make the internal statement “I am the sovereign of my total being.”
- Envision a white and gold ball of light in the centre of your heart. See it grow around you and enclose your body in a egg shape ball of bright golden-white light. With your love infused will – you make the statement: “Without harm to myself or surroundings, I am erasing and transmuting all negative emotional energy patterns within me and surrounding me.”
- You allow the coding of this statement to work on your energy system and fields as it clears out and cleans up the emotional pollution.
- To close your practice (you will experience a sense of release and relief when you are finished) seal yourself with the golden-white light and the energy of gratitude.
Humans are naturally happy beings. Happiness, Joy, Gratitude are natural states of being that we deviate from when painful memories stay stuck in the body. To build positive emotional resources that feel as natural as your innate happiness, requires a good healing practice. Negative experiences becomes associated in our body, and with our identity and therefore suppress our natural happiness. Clearing these uplifts the naturally you to the surface.
HEART CENTRED LIVING
Many of us believe unconsciously that love is limited and conditional. We associate love with “approval”, believe that we come up short unless deemed otherwise, and become invested in proving self-worth through productivity.
We learn to dislike ourselves, and compete with each other. This competition is based on the confusion of wealth, status, and power for love and personal worthiness. Part of trauma therapy is to identify and heal these unconscious beliefs and the emotional wounds connected to them.
Straining against the fear of worthlessness is exhausting. This is a sharp contrast to living for your heart. The challenges that are encountered on the way to achieving the heart’s goals build strength, infuse the struggle with meaning, and never put your personal worth into question.
A Note About Trauma Release Therapies
Emotions can be entwined with traumatic memories. These are often the persistent, negative emotions that we just cannot shake off. We can be unaware that our emotions are linked to trauma because the subconscious mind has stored the traumatic memory separately from the emotion that we feel.
We can feel it, but we are not in touch with the story of that emotion. These memories can be pre-verbal (i.e. before you learned to speak language) and may even go back to past lives. Trauma release therapies should be guided by a practitioner of trauma healing or trauma treatment.
Your Freedom Reality
Fear is an instinctive response. It is one of the most challenging human experiences. The energy of fear scatters our minds, stresses our bodies, and disconnects us from the unique power of the heart. In the state of fear we act and think in ways that we would not do from a higher state of consciousness.
The practices provided in this guide can support your body, mind and heart to resolve the energy of fear. Trauma treatment, healing childhood abuse, and generally healing through trauma release therapies will further liberate the body from states of fear that are encoded in the nervous system and brain. You are the master and commander. Not fear.
Your inner life is precious. It is the space of your soul and the fertile grounds of your creative life. The free expression of your inner life (aka authenticity) is one of the pillars of a free world. Emotional self-awareness and mastery will enable you be authentic. Authenticity will allow you to create the life you want to live and are meant to live. It also paves the way for others to do the same.
Your emotional healing and liberation is the key to your purpose and the vehicle to a free society. Your freedom begins with your connection to your inner life. The mark of courage is authenticity in the face of fear – To speak and act your heart-based truth to all faces, including to the face of fear.
Rachel’s goal is to provide you with the tools, insight, and skills to heal your emotional life, your inner world, and re-establish your connection with the inner most core you. Who do you want to become? At the Freedom Healing Centre in Brookvale, Rachel can facilitate your healing so that you can feel naturally happy.
The Art of Fulfilment
Whether we believe it consciously or not, we are trained to believe that the greatest success in life is marked by what we have obtained. We associate material wealth and social power with fulfilment, but in fact, the happiest people value the inner gems of generosity, compassion, and integrity. To love others is to love yourself. To love yourself is to love others. There is however no fulfilment in giving when we feel deprived, neglected, unseen.
We can meet desire after desire after desire, and by becoming efficient in doing so, may finally recognise that the emptiness remains. Many of these desires spring from a false self. They would cease to exist if the wounds of abandonment, oppression, and conditional love were healed. We have not learned to live meaningfully as an expression of happiness, but rather to chase after happiness as an expression of a wounded heart.
When you cut yourself, you tend to the wound in order to heal it. Once the healing is complete, you can focus elsewhere. When we do not self-care our inner lives, we create inner states of disease and cause a kind of self-involvement that is not to our benefit. This state even disables our ability to contribute responsibly to the benefit of others.
Therapy for childhood abuse can help you to resolve the “sticking points” and the resistance that keep fear anger, and shame locked in place. Rachel offers trauma therapy in Brookvale, counseling for anxiety, and psychotherapy for deeper self-understanding. You matter!
Authenticity Can Save Your Life
Many emotional traumas from childhood are caused when our caregivers snap at us, shame us, and ignore us when we are having an emotional experience. This is a kind of emotional abandonment. When as children our emotional life is not accurately received, we can feel abandoned, shamed, unworthy, confused, empty, and angry.
These experiences of emotional neglect teach us to devalue our emotions, and reject the authentic aspects of our personality linked to that emotion. As a result, we do not know what to do with our emotions when they arise, and resort to the strategy we came up with as children.
Ultimately we emotionally abandon ourselves and get cut off from the heart. Counselling and therapy for depression and anxiety treatment should include an understanding of emotional wounds, how to heal emotional wounds, and how to recover the authentic self.
You have valid reasons for feeling negative emotions. The experiences of the past can colour our present life, and the unresolved pain can filter up and through. Healing is a process of restoring your inner balance and order. You have a right to inner peace and to your creative potential. Emotional healing and emotional mastery are one of the keys to unlocking your full potential.
As children, our emotional lives are so open. We are ready to create and state things as they are! This authentic life becomes suppressed through a life of “mini” traumas (called developmental trauma).
Trauma treatment for developmental trauma is different from PTSD treatment. Trauma therapy for developmental trauma often centres around getting you back in touch with your emotions in s healthy way, and supporting you to reconnect with your authentic self.
Poverty of Soul
Little time and opportunity are given to nurture the soul. Our social lives are designed according to obedience rather than creativity. The result is self-suppression. To be loved, to feel worthy, to feel safe – we had to adapt. In this process, we gave up little parts of who we are naturally in order to maintain the basic needs of every human being.
Why should you be a doctor when your optimal growth and maximum contribution come from your natural talent as a horticulturalist? Why should you work from 9-5 when your natural physical rhythm makes you a night owl or an early bird? Your preferences are actually indications of the optimal conditions for your personal growth. Progress makes us happy.
Self-suppression is normalised and we scratch our heads about the increasing rates of depression and anxiety. We were not given the chance to lock into our abilities, and therefore believe that we have nothing to give.
We agree to the routine because we have forgotten that we have an important task in this life – self-actualisation! We can reclaim the self-exploration that we missed out on, access our innate gifts, and genuine self-worth by working with emotions.
It is likely that you do not even know what your innate talents are because you were pulled into a trained routine before you could figure that out. Emotions guide you there. Counseling in Brookvale with Rachel can help you to access your authentic emotions. You can learn how to decode your inner life so that it works for you, instead of against you – leading to feelings of depression, anxiety, and existential pain.
Natural Rhythms & Authentic Living
Most social structures do not accommodate individual internal rhythms. There is a natural order to your individual life. This order is as unique as you are. We all need food, shelter, and love. However, different people require different foods, prefer different kinds of shelter, and feel loved when it is shown in different ways.
We have many reasons to bull doze our individual needs, including; survival needs, temporary circumstances, belief that there is no other way, soothing emotional wounds, and managing internal conflict. Different people have different thresholds for how far they can push.
Do not expect yourself to get it perfectly right, and do not underestimate the power of subconscious beliefs that seize your emotions, and push you to deny your own needs. Living by a daily schedule that has been pre-arranged may not be in the best interest of your body or soul, and this includes your parents and your boss!
Psychotherapy in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Brookvale with Rachel can help you to honour your emotional life. This can often be a big challenge, because many of us had our personal boundaries consistently devalued when we were children, and the urge to bulldoze our needs can be very strong when its attached to survival.
It can be challenging to be emotionally, spiritually, and physically well when you disagree with your personal boundaries. We repeat patterns until they are broken, and psychotherapy is a great tool for making the negative unconscious patterns into conscious ones – so that they can be cleared for good.
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Rachel Anenberg, BA (Psyc), BSW, MSW (Master of Social Work) is a psychotherapist and spiritual coach providing integrative therapy. Her expertise as a psychotherapist come from a combined background and education in psychology, social work, and energy healing.
Psychotherapy with Rachel can help you to heal depression, treat anxiety, recover from childhood abuse, adult abuse & narcissistic abuse. Genuine happiness is often out of reach because of unhealed past experiences. Psychotherapy can help you to get in control and feel naturally happy.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended as a replacement for facilitated psychotherapy. The principles and techniques taught in this article are based on the personal and professional experience of the authour as a intuitive healer and psychotherapist, trained in Psychology (BA) and Social Work (MSW). Rachel Anenberg does not claim to be a doctor or provider of medical advice. The reader takes full responsibility for the way they utilise and exercise the information in this article.