Permission to Feel - Emotional Integration

*WHAT IS AN EMOTION?*

First of all: THERE ARE NO GOOD OR BAD EMOTIONS.
Yes, you read that right. The only thing potentially "good" or "bad" is what you choose to do with them.

But then, WHAT ARE EMOTIONS?

The word emotion originates from the Latin emovere, which means "movement", "impulse".

In other words, emotions are ENERGY IN MOTION. Every time a triggering event occurs, a certain amount of energy is set in motion through our nervous system, which generates a chemical and hormonal reaction, and we can see the effect in our body (sweaty palms, shortness of breath, tension in the stomach, etc.).

Why do they happen? They are MESSAGES FROM OUR SOUL, indicating that there is something I need to observe. For example, if someone does something that makes me angry, it may be a message that one of my boundaries has been crossed, and I need to do something about it. Or if something scares me, it may be because I might be in physical danger.

And the soul is quite insistent! If I don't listen to the message, it's going to repeat it over and over again until I do.

So emotions are neither good nor bad, they are just messages, and it is important that we listen to them. It is like receiving letters from the bank claiming a debt, and deciding to ignore them or hide them because "they are bad letters"... eventually the problem would become worse and worse, wouldn't it?

Yes, some are very uncomfortable, and this is because they are "designed" to push us to make a change. The message would be SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT HERE, WE MUST MAKE A CHANGE. In other words, emotions are a GPS that tells me if I am on the right path or not. Every time I lose my way, my soul is going to send me an emotion to let me know.

And if I don't, I will keep walking indefinitely on the wrong path!

Have you ever thought about why we feel emotions?
I am listening!

NO ONE TEACHES US HOW TO FEEL. In fact, we’re born as fully emotional beings, but very soon we’re taught to forget it.

Why? For various reasons, the first being that our parents were also never taught how to observe and feel their emotions, the same as their parents before them, and probably most of our ancestors, and society in general. So our emotions (specially the sad or angry ones) made them very uncomfortable, and they were heavily repressed.

Most likely, you were taught that expressing your emotions (and therefore feeling them) was wrong. No one wants to see that. It´s disrespectful. It makes people uncomfortable. Boys don’t cry. Don’t be afraid. Good girls are warm and smiley all the time. Go to your room and don’t come out until you’ve stopped crying...

Our emotional education is so limited that we don’t even have the vocabulary to express them, we don’t know how to name what we are feeling. or even notice when we’re feeling something.

What happens then? We start to associate feeling emotions with being REJECTED, and for a baby, that is a life threatening thing, because as mammals, we need our tribe with us 24/7, otherwise we will die. Our physiology is made up to generate a series of hormones and biochemicals when our belonging to the pack is jeopardized, to warn us that our life is in danger. So we avoid doing anything that would put our belonging under threat.

All this happens before we even have a rational mind, since the cognitive part of our brain doesn’t begin to develop until our 8th year of life, so we´re not aware that this is happening, but we subconsciously come to avoid emotions at all costs.

Also, some emotions are uncomfortable by design, because they’re meant to make us want to move, to push us to take action. Like anger, that comes whenever a rule of ours has been broken, so it brings us the energy to set a boundary.

Our mind, its main job is to protect us from suffering, and the way it works is to always go to the familiar so as to avoid any unknowns that might cause pain, so it´ll do anything to avoid feeling discomfort.

This changes from person to person according to our main fears, of course. For someone their comfort zone might be not meeting new people so as to avoid the risk of rejection, for another one it may be constantly meeting new people so as to avoid being in silence with their own feelings. But as a rule, we avoid anything unfamiliar, whatever “unfamiliar” means to us.

So, the more we ignore our emotions, the less familiar they are, so the more our mind will tend to suppress them.

But the thing is, EMOTIONS ARE IMPORTANT! There’s a reason why they come and cannot be ignored without consequences. They are messages of our soul, a compass that alerts us whenever we´ve gone off track from our path...