Emotional Alchemy - Processing Emotions You Struggle to Access
What do you do if you know you have something you need to process, but you just don’t feel the charge of it in your embodiment practice? In this episode, we explore the process of accessing and processing deep-seated feelings that often elude us. I’m sharing practical tips to navigate emotions that feel overwhelming or difficult to access during your daily practices.
We chat about:
Trusting the innate wisdom, pace, and intelligence of your body
Why our culture glorifies peak experiences, but the sustainable and grounded approach lies in honoring the gradual unfolding within ourselves
My top three tips to work with suppressed emotions, from most to least gentle on your nervous system.
Listen above, or on any of your favorite platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and iHeart Radio . You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here.
Join me on this profound exploration of emotional alchemy, where you'll discover practical tools to process emotions, nurture your nervous system, and create a stronger mind-body connection. Unlock the power of unprocessed feelings and embark on a journey towards healing and transformation.
Podcast Transcript:
I got a question that inspired me to come in here and share because it's such a great question, and I want to share some really practical tips.
I know sometimes I can get a little esoteric with my musings on the feminine practice and living a devotional life. But today, I'm going to be super practical and give you some really grounded tips on this question. So I got this question: I know I have a lot of anger that is bordering actually on rage to process, but I can't seem to bring it up in my practice.
It sometimes comes up in moments with my partner, but it's usually not a convenient time to drop into practice, and by the time I'm taking time to practice, I can't seem to access the same anger. How do I work with this? So this is such a great question, and I think it's a super common experience where it happens quite a lot where you know that there's something there that you need to process or work through or work on.
You know, it could be something from your past. It could be something that keeps coming up. But when you drop into your practice, and when I say that, I mean a non-linear style practice, e sensu, flow of feminine movement practice, where you're really working through the lens of the body to work with something.
When you drop in with that, you're not able to really touch that same level that you feel, maybe in those moments with your partner when you're feeling enraged or angry, and you're like, "Wow, there is a lot of anger here. I really need to process this." But then when you go to process and do the practice and show up to do the thing, you're not really able to tap into it.
So what can we do when we find ourselves in these situations? I have my top three tips I'm going to share with you. I'm going to start from the most gentle and nervous system-friendly, gentle to the system in the body. To the least because if you only listen to the very beginning of this video, I really want you to hear this first part, which is... So number one, one thing that you can do is simply come to your practice and not worry about it, basically.
So allowing your body to bring up what is ready to be felt, what's ready to be seen, acknowledged, what's ready to be processed in her own time. So we actually can lean into trust the wisdom, the genius, the intelligence of the body, of the system. That when we create the space to feel, to express, to allow whatever wants to come up to the surface, that the body has her own timing and her own process around this, we can lean into the trust that it will happen in due time.
And I think in our culture, we are really conditioned to focus on peak experiences, right? So if you think about going to a Tony Robbins weekend or something like that, or even going to a retreat, right? These are like peak experiences where we're able to really tap into a very big current of energy in our bodies.
We're just really taught that this is aspirational. We should always be striving for these peak experiences, and then if we don't actually have a peak experience, that it's somehow less valuable. But the truth is that these peak experiences are not really that sustainable in the body and the nervous system.
Quite often what happens when we have these peak experiences is that we can't sustain that in the body. Whenever there's a big expansion, there's always going to follow a contraction. And sometimes that can actually take us down in a certain way if we aren't prepared for it, if we aren't looking out for it.
So when we drop into our practice, it might sometimes seem like nothing is happening or things are happening very slowly. Or yeah, maybe you drop into your practice and it's kind of like, I'm not really sure. I didn't really feel a huge emotional release. Like I didn't feel all this anger or I wasn't processing a bunch of grief and crying and down on the floor sobbing.
We have this thought that we have to have this huge emotional release for there to be something happening in our practice, and it's just, it's simply not true. So I want to dispel that myth and invite you that if, you know, if it feels good for you, you can just trust that your body will unwind and work through at her own pace.
And that is actually much more sustainable, much more grounded. And what sometimes can happen is that you may be going along for weeks or months even and kind of feeling like, "Is this working? What's really happening here? I'm not sure." And then one day you just notice, "Oh, you know, that anger that I was feeling, it feels like it shifted."
It feels like when those moments come with my partner, it's not coming as big of a response or some new awareness might open up about a boundary that you need to set, or a conversation that you need to have, or a need that you need to express. That completely shifts and opens this whole dynamic and completely shifts the whole thing around all of this anger.
And you don't necessarily exactly know when that moment is gonna come. So that's the first little tip that I have is actually just leaning into the genius and intelligence of the body, letting this happen slowly at your body's own pace.
Just one more thing to point out on that is that quite often what we think is supposed to be happening in our minds, our bodies, our system can be up to something totally different. So this can look like, for example, you're like, you know it's my ovulation week. I feel pretty good. I don't have a lot on my calendar today. I should be able to be very productive, do some creative project.
But actually, what's happening is I just almost can't get out of bed. Like your body, your system is just doing something totally different than what your mind thinks should be happening. This quite often happens in different situations.
You know, you're with your partner, for example, and you're like, "Everything should be great. We just had a beautiful connected evening together. I should be able to drop in and feel a bunch of pleasure and feel my heart and my body open." But it's not happening for some reason. Mind and the body are up to something different.
We are used to and trained to override what's happening in the body to prioritize what the mind thinks should be happening. And quite often, we railroad over the body and just be like, "Body, get on board, like we're going in this direction." To push ourselves, to push into an edge, and that can work sometimes and sometimes you have the capacity for that and that's fine.
Other times, it's really not productive to your body system to override because what ends up happening, you know, the result of that is actually greater disembodiment because every time you do that, you are just a little bit severing that connection with your body, severing that self-trust of like, "I can lean into what my body is telling me and listen to that guidance that's coming."
You have to sometimes desensitize to what's happening in the body in order to push past and push through what the body thinks should be happening to follow the impulse of the mind or whatever the mind thinks should be going on. If you do that a couple times, yes, that's, you know, can be fine.
But if you're doing it repeatedly all the time, it can create a habit of desensitization in the body. And I wanna point out that this is not to say that the body is always the loudest voice at the table of your inner committee of how you're living your life and what's happening.
Sometimes the body might not wanna get out of bed and yet you have to show up for something. You have to show up to work, or you have to show up for your kid's birthday party, or who even knows what, right? Like, it's not to say that the body is always the loudest voice and gets the veto vote on everything that's happening, but to consider that more than we're used to considering and to prioritize that as often as possible rather than basically never, which is our cultural conditioning to basically prioritize that never and only to live from the mind.
Okay. I think I've said enough on that. If there are questions or if anything about that was unclear, let me know in the comments and I will elaborate. Okay, so we talked about just following the genius of the body in your practice and just letting things very slowly and gently and maybe almost imperceptibly unwind or come to the surface when they're ready.
That's number one. Number two, and the next step on from most gentle to least gentle to the body and the nervous system is journaling. So a great way to start to bring things up to the surface is to approach it first actually from the level of the mind. So sit down with your pen and your paper and start writing about this subject or whatever the thing is that you know, that there's something there, that you need to tap into to process.
So in this question, this person's example of the anger that they know is there, just start writing. "I know there's anger. I'm so angry because..." and just start writing about it. Stream of consciousness. Just letting whatever wants to come up. Maybe saying all the words that you would wanna say if you're feeling angry and maybe you hold yourself back from saying because you're trying to be the bigger person and you're trying not to create a lot of conflict, whatever the thing is.
So journaling, letting it begin to activate and percolate, then dropping immediately right after that into practice can help unearth some of that stuff. Start to churn things up inside of you in your system so that there's something there to work with. Then when you drop in on the mat, so let's say you're gonna do a 20-minute practice, maybe you spend the first five minutes journaling and starting to bring things up to the surface, and then you drop in for 15 minutes.
Plan this in advance so that you have your container, you have your music ready. That is like, you know, maybe some like raging against the machine or something if you're working with anger or something that is very heart opening if you're working with sadness or grief. Plan it in advance so that you can go right into your practice from journaling so that when things are kind of fresh and churned up, you can tap into that more easily.
So that's number two and slightly less gentle because you are deliberately churning things up in your body, in your system. It's still gentle because with this method, like your body will tend, in my experience, to kind of only bring up really what you have capacity for, but is slightly less gentle because you are deliberately sort of activating yourself into an activation. You are deliberately sort of like, you know, turning things around.
So if you're gonna take that tack, you know, really do it in a time when you are resourced and when you do have time and space to come down and resource again after your practice and really plan on, and this goes for the next one as well, like really plan on having an exit strategy and off-ramp so that you can come back to feeling grounded and nourished in your body and your nervous system before you have to go into the rest of your day or whatever else you have to do.
So that you're just like taking care of those parts of yourself, recognizing that you're actually turning things up. So what are you gonna do to then take care of yourself afterwards? Okay. So we talked about gentle unwinding by just allowing the body genius to lead. We talked about journaling to start to turn things up, the third and the least gentle.
It's not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's just to have an awareness that this is kind of pulling your system in a certain way is to actually go into or act as if, or call that emotion up in your body. So with this example, with the anger, you could take 15-20 minutes, put on the rage against the machine, get your pillow, and just start yelling, punching, raging.
Saying the words that you'd wanna say to the motherfucker's face, getting it all out. Like just really, it's kind of that you would start acting as if, and then see if the actual emotion starts to come up. Because quite often if you just pull the thread on that, if you scratch the surface, it'll start to come out on its own.
Same with grief or sadness or something more tender like that if you put on some sad music if you just start feeling into that and start moving your body with the sadness start tapping into your heart. Maybe start speaking the words that your heart will wanna say and be witnessed in.
Can start to really unearth. It's a bit less gentle, I would say than journaling because you're putting your body into an active expression of that thing. Like you're doing something active with your system that's really kind of actively activating versus, if you're journaling, there may or may not be kind of a physical act activation and you can follow more the impulse of your body and the capacity of your body.
Whereas if you're doing this step of acting as if, and really going into the actual expression of the emotion, you know, you're actively doing something with your system, which because you are pulling your system into that type of expression, it can be less gentle.
So again, really just an awareness. Are you resourced before you go into that type of thing? Are you able to re-resource yourself afterwards if something really big does come up? Are you able to take care of your system if there's a contraction afterwards? Do you have some time and space where you're able to move through that and hold yourself through that?
So those are the three tips I have for working with something that you know is there to process or move through, but you don't seem able to access in your practice. I hope that's helpful for you. Let me know what questions you have in the comments.
Yeah, just sending you all love out into the cosmic sphere.