Fear of Feeling (part 2)

Hi! I hope you enjoyed part 1 of the Fear of Feeling post. Feelings are not a design flaw. We truly are meant to feel – to experience all the richness life has to bring.

In this post, part 2, I want to talk about what happens when we don’t allow ourselves to feel, and I want to talk a bit about the purpose of feelings.

Enjoy what this post has to give you. In the next post, part 3, we’ll get into more good stuff – using feelings for true healing and spiritual transformation.

 
What happens when we deny ourselves the gift of feeling?

Emotions can be uncomfortable. If you’ve been conditioned to believe it’s not ok to feel this type of discomfort, you probably get hit with a flurry of voices and beliefs as soon as you begin to feel. “You have to keep it together.” “Stay in control.” “Don’t be a wimp!” “Don’t get sad. Get angry!” “Don’t get mad. Get even!”

Then you do like I did when I was younger. You take a deep breath and exhale those emotions down away from your heart. In my case, I held it all in, which drove the tension into my abdominal cavity. Of course, the emotions are dangerous, so you can’t let them out, right? This is most likely why I later ended up with ulcerative colitis.

When you hold on to emotions, especially if you tend to internalize them, you have to hold them tight to keep them from creating a dangerous or hurtful situation. You have to store them in a hidden space and constrict the connective tissue around them so they can’t escape.

Much of the time, this hidden storage space is your belly. Your organs can act like sponges and take that negative energy right in. Then you put them on permanent ignore for as long as you can – sometimes years, decades, a whole lifetime! Until they start to show up in ways you can no longer ignore. For me, they screamed at me through the ulcerative colitis. That got my attention!

How Emotions manifest in the body

E-motions are meant to be in motion – energy in motion. They are just energies that are meant to flow freely through us, like waves. They don’t make us bad or wrong or weak or dangerous. We need our feelings. Their presence is meant to give us information about the situation at hand and how we relate to it.

When emotions are uncomfortable, it’s often because we feel unsafe. What happens when we feel unsafe? The sympathetic nervous system kicks into action – the Fight, Flight or Freeze response.

As a part of protecting ourselves from a perceived threat, we tend to hold onto the emotions – to freeze the space around where we feel them. They become stuffed, stored, stifled in the body. We hold them tightly in place so they can’t move. This causes constriction.

Holding constriction stops movement around the energy of the emotion. It constricts movement and flow in the physical tissues and the energy body.

All life must have movement. The flow of life is a cycle of expansion and contraction. Breath, circulation, digestion, Lymphatic drainage, and all of the processes of life require the movement of expansion and contraction. The space in which this movement happens must be relaxed to allow full movement and flow.

If there is no movement or if there is restricted movement in physical tissues, it produces stagnation. Your body can’t receive what is needed, nor can it release what is not needed. Stagnation can lead to malfunction. For proper functioning, your body needs to take in what is good and release what is no longer good before it becomes toxic.

It’s easy to recognize this as true when we look at the digestive system. It’s our body’s system for taking in what is needed and releasing what is not needed. Overall tension and constriction can show its effects on digestion relatively quickly.

The same process of intake and release, taking and giving, receiving and letting go, expansion and contraction – these cycles are important throughout the physical systems of the body and for the body as a whole. The same cycles are reflected in the relationships between you and your surroundings and in your relationships with other people.

The body can become toxic on the physical, emotional and energetic fields of the body. If your body is no longer able to do take in the good and release the toxic, you can eventually end up with physical pain and illness, emotional distress and toxic relationships.

How the body sends us messages

Patterns we develop with emotions show up everywhere –the organs and systems of the physical body, through illness or discomforts, in our mental and emotional states, in our habits, in our relationships, in our beliefs, careers, patterns with food and money.

Everything on the outer is a mirror for some message that the inside is trying to convey to you. If you can’t receive what you need and let go of something once you don’t need it any more, these patterns are reflected throughout your body and mirrored everywhere in your life.

Think about this – if you are a spiritual being in a physical body traveling this planet earth on a journey to learn lessons for your soul, then how are you to receive the teachings? Yes, it’s great when you meet someone and learn from them. I don’t know where I would be if I hadn’t met a guide. And any true guide will tell you, the teachings for you are inside you – from you.

Your body is your vehicle for your journey. It is equipped with a messaging system that can tell you everything you need to know to navigate your personal journey. The key is to learn how it speaks to you and learn to discern its messages.

It’s kind of like one of those reality shows where you get dropped in the middle of the jungle and you’re expected to find your way home. Except in this case, you gradually forget who you are and where you came from, and you have to rely on what’s inside to guide you home.

Your body is the vehicle, complete with a dashboard with lots of gauges and warning signals. You just need to learn to understand its messages in order to navigate the terrain. And you have to wait for the right circumstances to light up your dashboard so you even realize your journey has a destination.

As a part of our human journey, the Universe brings situations to teach us and bring us healing to guide us home to the truth of what we are. This is how we learn and our souls evolve to more awareness and higher states of consciousness.

The true healing comes when we use the signals to guide us back to realize the truth of who we are and the connection from which we came – and which we’ve never left.

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to use feelings as a way to trace back to what you are seeking inside – ultimately a conscious awareness of your connection to the love from which you came. We’ll make the full cycle from Fear of Feeling to Healing by Feeling – a journey of spiritual transformation.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your reflections on the first 2 parts of this series. You can leave a comment below of join us on facebook for discussion.

Thanks for reading.

Blessings,

Mastura

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