Emotions enrich our lives, but they are meant to come and go, always ebbing and flowing in a natural rhythm. Gibran wrote “Together joy and sorrow come and when one sits alone with you at your board remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”
Sometimes emotions get stuck, and we have trouble letting them go. For so many reasons, we hang on to our emotions: nostalgia, fear of change, enjoyment of secondary benefits (eg- sympathy, assistance, attention…) Sometimes getting stuck in an emotion saves us from looking at what’s under it. Or what’s next.
Emotions are meant to pass through us. When they get stuck, it is usually in an organ or chakra. Generally, smokers are sad; drinkers are angry. That’s because sadness and grief get stuck in the lungs. Anger mostly gets stuck in the liver and the bladder (pissed off), but some anger settles into the digestive system. Anger shows up in the root chakra when it’s about money.
I remove betrayal and despair from hearts quite often. Worry and overthinking tend to build up in the spleen. Fear finds a home in the kidneys. I once removed fear from the third eye of a person who had lost touch with their intuition.
Examples:
Removed paranoia from the kidneys re: covid and lockdown
Removed betrayal from the heart re: past partner & trepidation about a new love.
Removed fury from the liver of an alcoholic re: childhood abuse
Removed anger from root chakra of a client with hemorrhoids re: divorce & finances
Removed grief from smoker’s lungs re: wife’s death
Removed anxiety from stomach re: conflict
Removed fear from the kidneys re: job search.
Removed self-doubt from the solar chakra re: finding her path
The problem with emotions getting stuck is that they then resonate with similar emotions in the future making them seem more intense. We call these our “triggers”, right? If a supervisor criticizes and your reaction is to feel like a 4-year-old, the experience is resonating with old emotions. If your only response is tears or paralysis, well, those old emotions are really interfering with your ability to keep the boss’s criticism in perspective.
When your children leave the nest or you go through a break-up, does it resonate with every other time in your life that you felt abandoned? Are you coping better each time it happens? Or worse?
And so we’re back to that old image of the full glass. If your energy is chock-full of anxiety, the next visit to the dentist is going to put you over the top. If some of that old anxiety is removed, the dentist becomes much more manageable.
A woman who I worked on telephoned to say, “I don’t yell at cars on the Queensway anymore. And I’m not holding anything back. It’s just not there. I just don’t feel angry.”
Another client sent this email: “We had a session a year ago… I really have had positive life changes since then. Thank you for that. I don’t have night terrors anymore. I quit all drugs successfully.”
There are many ways to remove emotions from our bodies. I do it energetically. You can do it by letting emotions flow through at the time they happen. This is a conscious choice. Joy moves and so does despair. Don’t let emotions stagnate in the body. They can cause illness. (How well do organs fight cancer when they’re burdened with emotion?)
Emotion, especially when it’s flowing, is truly musical, adding a dimension to our lives that can be exquisite: the deepest love, the sweetest empathy… awe, inspiration… even the gulping tragedy of loss is exquisite when we allow ourselves to feel it, fully feel it, and then move on.
_________________________________________
Laurie Fraser is a writer and certified BOS practitioner. $90.00/session. Email: thewordnotspoken@gmail.com