Understanding & Working With Emotion: A User’s Guide

For the first six months of my yoga practice, every time I would hold the yoga pose Wheel I would cry. Tears would just well up and seep out and I had no idea why. There was no accompanying memory, no feeling of physical pain, just emotional sadness and a spontaneous release of tears.

The first time it happened I thought something must be wrong with me. One day I asked my teacher about it, and to my surprise, he said it was quite normal and not to worry about it at all.

THE BODY-MIND CONNECTION

This was my first glimpse into how body and mind are linked together. All of us have feelings, whether anger, joy, sadness or any other feeling that is natural to the human experience. What’s unique to humans, however, is we often place the feeling and it’s accompanying experience in the scrapbooks of our memories.

When our feelings move from the present moment into the space of memory, emotion is born. Instead of living in the moment, and letting the experience and the feeling move through us, we constantly (and usually unconsciously) reference the tattered old scrapbook “images” from our pasts. The person who hurt us is gone, the experience is long over, but we imprison ourselves by living from it as if it were still reality.

This record of our emotions lives not only in memory, but in what’s called the energy body, the pranamaya kosha in sanskrit, and it’s the meeting place of mind and body. We have feelings generated by the experiences of the body, the mind stores the feelings, then emotion is born and lives in the energetic body.

BREATH & EMOTION

Every time we stuff our feelings, rather than letting them flow, we create emotional residue. A part of ourselves splinters off and lives in the past, connected to that unresolved emotion.

Sometimes, say growing up in an abusive home, we have no choice but to push our feelings aside. But once that situation is over, and we have the necessary support to process what happened, we no longer need to cut ourselves into pieces to survive. Healing and happiness come from living mindfully in the now, as a whole being.

Breathing is one of the best tools to help us integrate into wholeness. Prana is the vital energy that permeates all of the universe. Through the breath we consciously bring it into our bodies and utilize it as the vitality that it is. In breathing practices (pranayama)we move the prana with our consciousness to integrate the connection of body and mind an to release stuck stress, held emotion and unhealthy patterns.

YOGA & THE SCRAPBOOK

When we bend and stretch our bodies and breathe consciously and deeply, we confront our emotions and revisit our scrapbook memories. The actual memories may or may not arise. Sometimes the emotion is obvious, and other times it simply leaves us feeling nauseous or uncomfortable.

During yoga, the physical body, known as the anamaya kosha, and the energy body realign. In that moment of wholeness, we have the choice to move forward by living in the present. If, instead, we hold onto the past, the different levels of our body (i.e. physical and energetic) can’t line up and we create disharmony, stress and, ultimately, disease. Only when our emotions no longer control us and we are free from pain will we find lasting happiness.

OBSERVING AS WITNESS

When emotions arise out of the past, or feelings are present in the now, the best thing we can do is allow them to flow freely through us. I call witnessing whatever arises “Holding Space.”

With emotion and it’s associated memories and fears, we can easily become critical, judgmental and hateful towards ourselves when they resurface. We feel uncomfortable, we feel helpless, we hate seeing our ugly shadows. So we push away the experience, or we numb it by shopping or drinking, or we try to stop it by doing some activity to “fix” it.

This only proves to keep us in separation, and stuck in the same old track. Our protective shells survive on this separation and making an identity out of our old scrapbook. It’s as if they say, “See. I told you this would happen again! You’re not good enough.” They will lie to us, tell us bad things will happen and try to re-create the past to prove it, because their survival depends on it. In the grip of it, we will hold our breath and try anything to turn away from how excruciating it can be.

But we can make change, and we can heal from the past. The key is to work with our emotions and not avoid, stuff or numb them. The crux of this re-wiring and learning to re-align all the levels of our being, is to be patient and compassionate with ourselves. Then to practice presence and breathe through whatever comes up.

In a safe place, or with a safe friend or professional, we can learn to hold space for the wildfire of our emotions. The longer it’s been since we’ve faced them, often the scarier it is to witness and hold space for ourselves. But let those feelings bubble up and watch as a witness.

Once the bag of past emotions has been unpacked, those splintered off pieces of ourselves will come back home and we find a new wholeness. When we get triggered, the emotion won’t throw us to the ground as easily or for as long, because we recognize and hold space for it —for ourselves. Feeling out of sorts is normal, and we will get stirred up. We will feel tremendous waves of response to this incredible life.

The more we can honor and allow those experiences and feelings, the more we hold space for and witness them, the easier it is for us to find happiness and freedom. This is when we can better roll with the flow of life and no longer splinter off into pieces when things get challenging.