E Is For: Expand Your Beliefs With Emotion Energy
Emotions are energetic information in motion rooted in years of evolution to guide us to act in response to experience. Therefore, when they arise they present an invitation to move through your experience and return to harmony. One definition of trauma is stuck or trapped emotion memories in the body. When the nervous system is overwhelmed and cannot process the emotions showing up, it reacts with defenses that escape the feelings. This is a survival mechanism. Additionally, beliefs take shape about who you are, who others are, and what the world is based on these challenging experiences. You may come to see yourself as unworthy, others as deceitful, and the world as frightening and unfair. As a result, emotions are created and held within the body as traumatic memories of the experience that match the beliefs. There are countless stories of individuals carrying physical pain or stress in a particular area of the body that was involved in a traumatic incident. One way to understand the relationship between emotions and beliefs is that emotions represent the energetic communication or manifestation of a belief you are carrying. The belief may have been shaped by a particular incident or relationship in your lifetime or may have been transmitted intergenerationally. The extent of the emotions and beliefs you are carrying goes beyond your own experience and includes your ancestry. In other words, you do not come into this world as a blank slate, but already carrying certain beliefs on a cellular level related to the experiences of those who came before you. In the western world, this burdgeoning field of study is known as intergenerational trauma and still much is unknown, but I believe it will continue to prove these ideas over time.
The trapped emotion energy produces stress and decreases immune functioning within the body, which produces the optimal environment for disease. The pain you feel, particularly if it is perceived as chronic, is a communication of the emotional blockage and is meant to signal you that attention is needed. There are many modalities and many healers across the spectrum of mind, body, and spirit work who can facilitate the energetic release of emotional blockages. For the purpose of this blog and the practice of self-healing, I will speak only to the power of cultivating the emotion energy you want to experience in meditation paired with visualization, which upgrades your nervous system, rewires your brain, and facilitates the process of transformation in body, mind, and spirit to meet the truth of who you are becoming. As you sit in this cultivated energy in meditation and visualization, you rewire your brain to produce the emotions you are meant for rather than the reactive ones you have been carrying. As you practice moving toward the light, inevitably the blockages in your way arise and show you the darkness you are meant to be with and release. Fear, doubt, hesitation, shame, guilt, anger, etc. may show up and seem to derail your journey, but really they are invitations to release these energies you have been carrying all along. You may not understand where they come from, if they are even yours to begin with, or what beliefs they are associated with. Do not despair. All you need to do is create space within you to be with the energy and allow it to move through. Do not blame yourself for the emergence of such emotion energy, recognize it for what it is - the opportunity to transform. The emotion and belief energy that has been keeping you stuck all this time is the same energy that can propel you into the life you were meant to live. I invite you to choose, for the moment, the path of expansion in spite of any perceived stuckness.
Most of us do not take the invitation to transform until we are desperate enough. I was always an emotion-driven person, but I considered them largely out of my control since this is the belief I held from my early life. It was not until I became debilitatingly sick that I took drastic steps to understand and release the emotion energy I was carrying, and to rewire the patterns of fear and doubt in my brain. Without this physical manifestation, I may not have done what was necessary to break the cycle of entrenched negative patterns of thinking and belief matched with the intensity of negative emotions, which pervaded my view and dictated my personal reality. When you live within this feedback loop, you attract people and situations into your life that align with this lower vibrational state and you remain unable to see the gifts life is offering you to transform. The combination of psychoeducation, brain rewiring practices, and emotion regulation techniques gave me the power to begin healing, releasing stuck emotion energy, and expanding my beliefs about myself. The foundational belief that allowed me to chart this path of healing was that my emotional sensitivity was not bad, negative, or unworthy. In fact, it was a powerful strength that just needed to be harnessed correctly.
We all carry this energetic information known as emotion within our bodies, but rarely are we taught how to understand it, how to process it, and, more importantly, how to use it to transform. As the educational system upgrades to recognize the importance of emotion in child development, there will inevitably be a lot less chronic pain and suffering in the world. From a biological perspective, the substrates of emotion are known as neuropeptides that live in the heart, gut, and immune system as much as the brain. This proves that emotions live throughout the body, and research now shows that the body communicates more with the brain than vice versa. Modern mind body research is catching up to the notion that intelligence lives as much within the gut and the heart as the brain due to the plethora of neuronal connections that live in these areas. More than energetic representations of your beliefs, emotions are a powerful source of information or intelligence beyond the brain. However, in order to listen clearly to their knowledge, you must practice being with, moving through, and releasing the limited and layered (traumatic) form of this energy that no longer serves you.
Your core beliefs about yourself, others, and the world are what shape your mind body experience. From your beliefs flow your personal reality. Therefore, consider that your emotions are the energetic response to these beliefs and the powerful messenger to your brain. If you acknowledge that the food you put into your body is energy, visualize the emotions you carry as an energy source feeding your brain from the inside every moment of every day. So if that energy source is comparable to McDonalds, it might seem tasty and familiar, but it is actually a stew of toxins your brain is feeding on making you sluggish and depressed. When you reflect on the sources of energy manifesting your sickness and disease, look no further – or no deeper – than the emotions you carry. To release your trapped emotions is to expand your limited beliefs about yourself that shape the filter you see the world through. The hardest question you may ask in the process of healing is how you come to believe something when you don’t. This, in my humble opinion, is the core therapeutic process - how to expand your belief system. The answer lies in the practice of releasing and transforming your emotion energy. Learn to release the emotions you have been carrying and with them you release the illusions that have been dictating your experience, sending messages to your brain, and manifesting your suffering.
The healing process is not a linear journey to the “core” of your being, but more like an interconnected dance between the parts of your mind, body, and spirit. You must learn to respect and honor yourself on each of these levels, and the level that is most overlooked is the one that deserves your attention the most - your beliefs in the form of emotion energy. Once you gain conviction in your beliefs that you are powerful enough to heal, you can believe you are powerful enough to live up to your highest intention and the true purpose of your soul on this planet. Your emotions are the energetic tools on your path to conviction. As you learn to use these tools to your advantage, what was once a source of great suffering can now be a source of great joy, inspiration, and freedom. You are not your emotions or do you have to live victimized by them. You have the choice to release the stuck emotional energy you have been carrying in order to harness the positive, life-affirming beliefs that align with your truth.