How do emotions affect the body?
Emotions are normal, healthy responses to events or things that we perceive in our reality. But they’re also a cause of stress and disease in the body. The question is why?
We’ve all got them, but we don’t all know how to have a healthy relationship to them.
Fear, Anger, Worry, Grief, Joy are the five main emotions. All of them healthy responses.
What are emotions?
Emotions are a combination of two things:
physical sensations in the body: it may feel like tightness, heaviness, density, warmth, cold, burning, lightness, tingles. It may feel unpleasant or pleasant but it’s just sensation.
associated thoughts or mental images:
That’s it-every emotion you’ve ever felt is just a combination of these two experiences. This is normal and natural.
How do emotions cause disease?
If emotions are natural and healthy responses-why do they make us sick? There are some cases-like shock or trauma where the intensity of what we feel is too overwhelming for our system to process.
Many of us simply haven’t been shown how to feel and process our emotions. Without being shown in childhood how to feel, we instinctively suppress, ignore, or distract ourselves from what we are feeling. The result-disconnection from our body, and ultimately ourselves. If you can’t feel yourself, you can’t know yourself.
And if you don’t feel the physical sensations of emotions they stay in the body. In TCM these sensations are referred to as qi or energy-sensations that are meant to move and flow through the body to be processed. If they get stuck they lead to tension, tightness, hardening of tissue.
Because emotions are being ignored, we become reactive and stressed. If it’s not safe to feel, then the nervous system views emotions as threats and so develops a chronic stress pattern where we don’t feel, and we get more stressed, and being more stressed brings up more uncomfortable feelings, that cause more stress and so on. Over months, years this starts to impact on the gut, hormones, sleep, energy levels. It affects our spirit, our shen.
How to process emotions in a healthy way
By feeling them. Just meeting them with mindfulness. Non-judgmental and loving awareness. This is learning how to bring compassion to yourself. You’re human. Life has unavoidable pain and discomfort. Embrace it.
The next time you find yourself stressed and feeling discomfort-just check in. Ask these questions:
What are you feeling in the body?
Where do you feel it?
What does it feel like?
Are you trying to resist or get rid of this feeling?
Then, embrace the feeling. Breathe and allow your body to soften. Know that with time, this feeling will pass. Allow any thoughts or mental images to simply come and go. They too will pass.
