Emotions are stored in the body, not the brain. TRY THIS TO SEE.
An illustration of what a post emotional catharsis can feel like
Let’s get right to the goodies.
First, sit somewhere you can focus and recall a point in time where someone upset you. Take a moment to let it settle in your mind and activate your connected emotions.
Once the emotions activate, you will feel a sensation of some kind somewhere in the body.
You may feel warmth, or light coldness and numbness. Possibly intense heat or what we call ‘searing pain’. You may experience a subtle buzz, a prickliness, a throb, pulse, tense stiffness or tightness as character of motion. These characterizations of motion may come fast or slow at various levels of intensity.
If you sit with what you see as “pain” and observe it in a way a wine taster might attempt to experience the qualities of a wine – more savoring and experiencing over judgement – you’ll see that what you regard as pain is more of an aggregate of intense sensations hitting you at once.
Whine Tasting
Here’s an illustration of a typical flow of emotional events that activate anger…
Catalyst : Someone recalls a person or some event that brings up anger.
Sensations Arise : The body presents a sensation of heat, with a rapid, deep, stabbing pulse of low to high intensity, on the left side of the chest. It’s not a heart attack; though it could be what we would describe as ‘searing pain’.
Reflex : Immediately, a person would seek to avoid or numb themselves from it. This can occur through distracting themselves elsewhere, mentally or practically, and/or numbing themselves from its existence. “Tickle” and “itch” sensations are the most popular sensation aggregates that inspire one to have a “get rid of it” reflex through scratching it, or applying a cream of some sort.
Ready to De-bug the Process? : If a person chooses chooses to observe the sensations as if sampling a wine, chocolate or otherwise — meaning they experience the intensity and qualities as-is, without resistance being allowing to label the sensations as ‘bad’ or ‘problematic’, ‘evil’, ‘painful’… the sensations lose their sense of threat, and oftentimes, will move to another part of the body or change in place.
Energetic Releases / “Energy Pooping” : When these changes manifest, one may typically experience a range of energy release manifestations, including but not limited to…
Burping, coughing, yawning, half-yawning, phlegm, vomiting, crying, screaming… or that strange defensive laugh that happens in awkward situations.
This is the body’s method of freeing energy in material form. This is the Emotional Digestive System (tm) working for you.
De-layering Stored Emotions : Often, an expression of deep emotion leads to a mental realization, and/or a full cathartic release. Later, the cycle can repeat at a different layer of the issue, or associated issue tied to the source of the problem. Sometimes this is mis-interpreted as a failing to do the work correctly. The truth? You are likely doing the work and as your emotional awareness increases, you are brought to return to the energy to examine it with senses that can feel it deeper.
Ayurveda, Buddhism, and other shamanic systems all over the world know these ideas well. If you’ve experienced an energy healing of any kind, it’s likely you can recall either having endlessly yawned, cried, vomited, resisted or felt a euphoric buzz as if you took a drug.
Every one of these systems I’ve encountered has a common thread that emotional healing is at the core of all physical healing, and that succeeding emotional healing will expedite or heal an ailment, injury or chronic pain.
What does this lead to? A person’s eventual personal and environmental evolution, with the reward seeming to naturally propel someone toward becoming the authentic self.