(Stillness in the Storm Editor) The following article is an in-depth and cohesive presentation of the problems that can arise from failing to process and release negative emotions. Emotions are energy, and the body is a capacitor, literally capable of storing electrical energy that itself has information. When we learn how to release this energy in a healthy way, it liberates our consciousness to grow as well as improves our emotional balance and overall state of being.
The Author, Jeff Street, speaks to the importance of formulating proper conceptions of the world. I want to echo this point and add to it as it is of central importance.
In the fields of psychology, energy work, and emotional healing, processes often involve releasing stored emotion or healing traumatic memories. These are symptoms of a greater cause that usually goes undiscussed.
What gives rise to emotions? Why do we feel bad or experience trauma?
Imagine a large barrel of water sitting on a table. Now imagine that the barrel of water has a series of holes in it, causing water to leak everywhere. You could furiously rush to find pots or buckets to capture the leaking water, or you could find a way to plug the holes so that no water leaks out in the first place.
It is this primary order solution, addressing the actual cause of negative emotions that I am speaking to.
Emotions are an energetic reflection of our mental structure. The energy that flows through awareness passes through our worldviews, beliefs, and ideologies, producing an emotion that indicates or reveals how we feel about something. The fact that the same stimuli or information triggers different emotional responses in people provides data that supports the notion that emotions come from how we define the world.
We tend to think the same experiences and things should evoke the same emotional response in people. If almost everyone in your local environment loves pizza, shouldn’t everyone? If everyone you know winces at the sight of blood, don’t all people? Generally speaking, prevailing trends of response do exist, but this doesn’t mean the cause of the response is intrinsic to the object or experience that gave rise to it. More truly, stimuli, be they experiences or objects, are emotionally neutral. It’s how we see them that causes us to react the way we do. It’s how we define the things we encounter in life that gives rise to meanings in our consciousness. Emotions come from us, they don’t come from the object or the experience itself.
One example of this is trauma.
Trauma is a subjective experience wherein a person feels so overwhelmed by what they are going through they dissociate as a defensive response. For example, if you’re the victim of a horrible crime, wherein a person tried to kill you with a loud gun, the sound of loud bangs in the future could trigger a PTSD response. Seemingly inconsequential parts of that experience, like the smell of the floor cleaner used in the room where you had to lay face down during a bank robbery involving a gun, might cause an extremely strong negative emotional response—even if there is no immediate threat. This is one extreme, yet clear example of that reveals the critical mechanism at work. Namely, that the mind uses association, conditioning or imprinting to implicitly define objects in experience that become into preconditioned emotional responses later in life.
The other point to consider is that we don’t actually interact directly with the “real world.” We interact with a kind of biological virtual environment.
For example, your not actually looking directly at the screen right now as you read, your eyes are absorbing light, translating those into electrical impulses, and your brain is creating a series of images that produce a facsimile or reflection of what you’re experiencing in your mind. And these mental objects, so to speak, are defined by our goals and perceptions, our values and our attitudes. You don’t really see a cup of water as a neutral meaningless object, you see a cup of water through the lens of what it means to you insofar as how it can be used, namely to quench your thirst.
So we have two factors at play, the fact we impress emotional responses into objects based on past experience, and that the nature of these responses is directly related to how we define them, via what they mean to us insofar as our goals and purposes.
As one more example, consider that annoying fly buzzing around your room. The book you’ve been reading or that stack of mail—when you’re looking for an object to swat the fly—ceases to be a book, and now becomes a fly swatter. And the act of using it in that way forever impresses itself into the mental representation of that object of your mind. The next time you hear a buzzing sound in your office, you might feel an impulse to grab a stack of junk mail.
The challenge becomes, how do we take this well-nigh completely automatic process of impressing meanings and emotions onto our experience and change them? How do we reprogram the mindscape of life so we can stop creating negative emotions that later must get released? How do we cure the disease instead of just treating the symptoms?
There are a number of ways to do this. I will focus on the overarching mechanism behind them all—philosophy.
Philosophy is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal, but most of us have a less than complete understanding of what it truly is. We are told, in school and in the media, that philosophy is generally for intellectuals, academics and it’s a waste of time. And in that sense, philosophy can be a rather abstract and almost useless activity. But more truly, philosophy is a fundamental aspect of being.
Consider that what you experience isn’t actually the real world, it’s a construct created by your mind, a kind of biological “video game” where things you perceive are rendered into a form your consciousness can interact with. The mechanism that creates this world is the philosophic process of meaning generation.
When you grab a hot pan on the stove without a towel, what happens? You get burned. That experience means something, chiefly that you should be careful when touching hot things on stoves. Now extend that principle to everything. Your mind is itself a meaning-generating machine, everything you experience, whether material objects or metaphysical things (like emotions), have meanings that are unique to you. In this sense, you are the author or video game programmer of your own experience, and the code that you use to program this world of mental objects is philosophy. In this sense, philosophy is the mental heartbeat, you can’t stop generating meanings about things you experience. But you can, like sailing a ship, take back the captain seat instead of drifting mindlessly on the open seas of life.
Most people never consciously take back their mental powers to create the inner landscape of meanings. They never actually sit down and ask themselves: “Is the meaning I’ve given to this experience helped me? Is it accurate and true and in alignment with my values?”
But when we do consciously examine what things mean, and do this as much as possible and in a holistic fashion, we slowly begin to exercise that philosophic muscle. The method for doing this is using arguments, building a case for why one meaning is true and valid and then investing time and energy into making that as real as possible. Eventually, the new program has more weight than the old one, and a shift in consciousness takes place.
This skill doesn’t manifest overnight. It takes time and dedicated effort to master.
Also consider that the weight of a program, especially a negative one, is substantial. For example, if you’ve spent years smoking cigarettes, and developed a whole host of unconscious justifications and values for doing so, that experience has a lot of weight to it. It’s likely that your new choice to quit smoking will conflict with years of entrenched programming. This means that the first few days, weeks, and months of installing the new program will take a lot of dedicated effort, as the old program rages against the original choice. The more cathartic or emotionally invested you get in the new program the more weight it has and the easier it will be to adhere to the new choice. Generally speaking, it takes about 90 days to form a new habit or override a program—if you’re almost perfect in your execution. So don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have success right away. Most times it takes a least 6 months to adjust yourself to something new, and even then, depending on what’s at stake, there can be lingering temptations and feelings.
Another thing to consider is that programs are generated by acting things out, thus changing a program will also require some level of action. In this sense, changing your definitions about an experience so as to change how you feel about it will require some kind of ritual act, something you can do, even if it’s just a gesture, to give it some experiential charge. For example, when you have cravings for a cigarette, you might buy a pack just so you can tear them to pieces over a trash barrel, the action will help ground this new choice into your mind as a bonified experience.
Finally, the more abstract or intangible the program or experience you’re trying to redefine or readjust, the more difficult it will be to change your thinking. A good example of this is personal relationships. Likely you don’t know precisely why you love or care for someone so it might require a lot of conscious thought to identify what needs to change, why you felt the way you did, and why you no longer should be with someone you know isn’t good for you anymore. In these instances, keeping a journal or talking with a friend, who can hear you out and allow you to fully explore and express these inner abstractions is very helpful.
An excellent example of reprogramming is a proclivity or a preference for food.
Consider that when you were younger, there were probably foods you hated, like vegetables. You defined them as gross or disgusting, and then that program gained momentum over time, to such an extent, that the mere mention of the food might cause you to have a deep and intense negative reaction. Later in life, as you get older and you understand more about the world (you expand your knowledge which in turn gives you more philosophic flexibility regarding meaning generation) that vegetable you hated as a child might not evince the same response. Part of the reason this happens is that as we expand our experience, the meanings change because consciousness is holistic and interconnected. This is one reason why something you learned how to do five years ago isn’t so easy to do now—because the mental structure that you used to do it has changed due to the fact you’ve expanded your consciousness. Like a rubber band, consciousness is stretching and changing all the time in accordance with experience.
Negative emotional experiences are negative because of how we defined them. And this means that when we discover that we have a negative experience the key is to consciously explore why and ask ourselves if there is anything we can do to expand our consciousness about it. Of course, this needs to be done carefully and with patience. We don’t want to cause our selves trauma. The best state of being for this is one wherein the brain is working holistically. If we’re triggered or in a fight or flight response, only the animalistic brain is working properly, and we won’t have the creative holistic aspects of the neocortex to help us along. As such, be kind to yourself as you begin to explore things that cause you to feel negative emotions. Keeping a journal to write down your thoughts is extremely helpful, partially because writing itself is a dissociative activity that creates a differentiation between the experience and the thing we’re examining through our writing.
As I said, this is only a principled discussion of the importance of developing an active and conscious philosophic process. There’s a lot to consider insofar as a method, or how you go about this.
There are several works and techniques below that employ the principles I just discussed. And in time I will be writing more about these topics. I’ll leave you with a personal anecdote.
I’ve had to deal with a fair bit of personal challenges and negative experiences in my life. I was an addict for three years back in my early twenties, and I’ve dealt with depression ever since I was a young man. I’ve used the principles I’ve just described for over twenty years, resolving depression, lack of life purpose, healing trauma, and overcoming what I call disgust programs. I can’t claim to be all-knowing and wise, but I can say definitively that these things work. The sooner you regain control over the meaning-generating mechanism of your consciousness, the sooner you can build coherent mental definitions that produce positive and coherent emotional states. But make no mistake, life is forever fraught with challenges. The goal isn’t to avoid negative emotions, it’s to embrace them as an opportunity for personal growth. Instead of thinking about it as an escape think about it as a personal challenge, develop a taste for personal growth, anticipate the challenge and build your tool chest for dealing with them today so that tomorrows hardships are easier to bear, even a joy to contend with. If you can get to that place, there’s nothing you can’t do and no hardship you can’t transform into an opportunity for personal growth.
– Justin
Read more articles by Justin Deschamps.
(Jeff Street) The subject of Trapped Emotions is one that many are unaware of, especially if they’re not familiar with energy and the energy body. A more common term for Trapped Emotions is “emotional baggage.” Although most people probably think that emotional baggage is just memories of emotionally traumatic life experiences, it is much more than that and has a slew of detrimental effects that most are unaware of.
by Jeff Street, July 19th, 2018
Just about everyone has some emotional baggage from painful life experiences. But it’s not all in your head like most people assume. Our emotional baggage is very real, and unbeknownst to most of us, it is causing profound negative effects on the quality of our lives including our health, relationships, happiness, success, and much more — including whether we’ll be able to continue participating in the ongoing Ascension process!
Trapped negative emotions are one of the big hidden reasons why so many people are unwittingly manifesting needless adversity in their lives and sabotaging the manifestation of their true desires. And, as a quick aside, trapped emotions are just one of many reasons why many of us are sabotaging the manifestation of the success and abundance we deserve, check out my FREE e-book to learn more about this.
Despite the adverse effects of the trapped emotions that virtually all of us hold, the good news is that our trapped emotions can be released and by doing so many undesirable manifestations will often disappear from our lives. And perhaps more importantly, by learning some new skills, adopting some new perspectives about the challenges and people in our lives, and changing ourselves (our state of being) we can avoid creating new trapped emotions, and their harmful effects, in the future.
The Detrimental Effects of Trapped Emotions
Trapped negative emotions are the root cause of, or a significant contributing factor in, almost everything that goes wrong with your physical body. Including dysfunction, disease, and pain. They also contribute to creating dysfunction in your relationships, career, and in many other areas of your life.
And trapped negative emotions often contribute to maintaining the undesirable circumstances that spawned them in the first place. And worse yet, they can even attract (via the Law of Attraction) similar adversity in the future. Trapped emotions are a potent force that is ever-present and silently blocking you from manifesting health, happiness, and success.
And last but not least, if we don’t clear our trapped negative emotions we will not be able to continue to participate in the ongoing ascension that is taking place here on Earth. If you are unaware of this, there is something profound underway on our planet. The long heralded great spiritual transformation of Humanity is underway. The energetic frequency of everything on Earth is rising, including the frequency of our bodies and consciousness. More and more people all over the planet are awakening and remembering their higher selves and the greater reality. More and more people’s level of consciousness is shifting upwards as well. This shift in consciousness will ultimately (over the next 20 to 80 years or so) completely transform ourselves and our world.
One of the things that can hold us back from this process is our trapped negative emotions. They are literally like an anchor that will hold us down, not allowing us to ascend with everyone else if we don’t clear them from our bodies. As the frequency of everything rises the detrimental effects of having trapped emotions will be amplified and those holding them will experience increasing health issues and adversity. So more than ever, it is extremely important to clear one’s emotional baggage.
With all the detrimental effects that Trapped Emotions cause I think you can appreciate why releasing them could be very helpful. Before we get into that let’s explore what Trapped Emotions really are and how they form in a bit more detail.
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What Are Trapped Emotions and How Do They Form
Emotional baggage isn’t just memories trapped in your head it’s also negative energy that is trapped in various other parts of your body. Everything is energy — matter is energy, thoughts are energy, emotions are energy, and of course, your physical body is energy. Your body is a very complex set of energy patterns (energy of a very slow vibration that is visible and seems solid) and the energy of negative emotions interferes with the energy that composes your body and its functions. That’s why it causes pain, dysfunction, and disease. Besides the effects trapped negative emotions have on your health they also are a potent force that, by the Law of Attraction, attract undesirable circumstances into your life.
Far too often many of us suppress and hold on to the negative emotions associated with unpleasant life experiences — emotions like anger, resentment, frustration, fear, sorrow, grief, despair, shame, unworthiness and so many more. When we do this, we trap the negative energy of the emotions in the energy field of our bodies.
Why do we suppress the negative emotions that we feel from painful life experiences? We suppress them because we don’t like feeling that way and we just want it to stop, we just want to get rid of them. What we don’t realize is that by forcing ourselves to stop feeling the uncomfortable feelings we aren’t getting rid of them we’re just hiding them from ourselves. The energy of unfelt (unreleased) emotions just stays in our bodies energy field, where they arose in the first place. This is why we say the emotion is trapped — we didn’t want to fully feel those feelings and hence release them so they stay in the energy field of our body.
Emotionally Charged Memories
Your trapped emotions aren’t just isolated clumps of negative energy, they are associated with the memories of the experiences that “caused” them. As an aside memories are energy patterns too, just like everything else.
Our memories of our traumatic experiences often have very strong negative emotional energy associated with them — that is, some memories are highly charged. And those charges stay there until you release them, but you don’t because you don’t like thinking about that experience and feeling the way it makes you feel. Or if you do revisit those memories, and you feel the feelings, you hold onto the feelings because you want to — for instance, you want to remain angry and resentful about the perceived harm another “did” to you.
But ultimately, your perception of any event, and the emotions that you feel because of it, is your choice despite how its seems. The choice to play the victim arises from not wanting to take full responsibility for all your experiences and how you interpret them. More about this important topic later in this chapter.
The emotional charges associated with your memories can vary widely — from highly negative, to neutral or none, to highly positive. But of course, positively charged memories are not a problem, it’s the negatively charged ones that cause all the problems.
And it’s not the memories themselves that are the problem. You can’t avoid your experiences being recorded as memories. There’s nothing wrong with memories, they are just objective recordings of what happened. It’s your interpretation of those experiences that creates the emotional charge associated with the memories.
The reason you store the emotional charges with your memories is because during and after the experience that triggered them, while you are intellectually and emotionally processing the experience, you don’t fully express, and hence release, the emotions associated with the experience. They were uncomfortable, and you didn’t want to keep feeling them. You may have also judged the emotions you were having as being “wrong” or “bad” — believing that you are not supposed to feel that way (for instance, some believe it’s wrong to be angry) making you feel even more uncomfortable with having those emotions.
One of the keys to avoid trapping emotions is to understand that there’s nothing wrong with feeling any type of emotion, including uncomfortable ones. If we stop identifying with and judging our emotions and instead see them as natural and allow ourselves to feel them completely and let them flow out of us, and hence be released, we’ll be much better off.
Instead, we bury them with the memory rather than fully feeling them at the moment and then releasing them. We force ourselves to stop feeling them and they get trapped in there with the memory. We think we’ve deleted the memory and associated feelings but all we’ve done is hidden them from ourselves — suppressed them and they become effectively trapped within us.
And each time we revisit those memories and dredge up the associated emotions we just reinforce the memories and their associated emotional charge because we never release them and hence we unwittingly maintain or even reinforce those trapped emotions and all the undesirable effects they cause.
How Trapped Emotions Affect What You Manifest
Anyone with just a superficial understanding of the Law of Attractions understand the importance of deliberately choosing your thoughts and keeping them positive and optimistic. But what about your subconscious thoughts? Your subconscious mind has a big effect on what you manifest in your life.
The detrimental effects of emotionally charged memories (trapped emotions) arise largely because they subconsciously affect how we think, feel, and behave and hence adversely affect what we experience and create. You may be trying your best to think positively at the conscious level, while subconsciously you are having lots of negative thoughts and feelings that are contradicting your conscious thoughts. The more trapped emotions you have, the more subconscious negative thoughts and feelings you have that are silently eroding or negating your conscious point of attraction and blocking the manifestation of your true desires and attracting adversity.
Also, we sometimes revisit those emotionally charged memories on a more conscious level — often more frequently than we are aware of — just to wallow in anger, blame, self-pity, etc. or when we’re worrying that something similar might occur in the future.
When you revisit your emotionally charged memories it’s like you’re reexperiencing the event with all of its thoughts and feelings. Which is the perfect formula for manifesting more of the same. It’s like the practice of intentionally visualizing and imagining your desires to hasten their manifestation except in this case your just remembering a past experience but the effect is the same — you are attracting it!
When you revisit your traumatic memories and reexperience the emotions you are creating a very potent point of attraction which is increasing the chances of experiencing more of the same. And most of us are revisiting these traumatic memories and feelings far more often than we’re aware of. It’s kind of just a bad habit.
This is probably why the Buddha shared these words of wisdom with the world:
Do not dwell in the past, do not worry about the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
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Releasing Your Trapped Emotions
So, I hope I’ve impressed on you the profound detrimental effects that your trapped emotions are having on the quality of your life. The good news is there are many ways you can release or clear your trapped emotions and gain relief from their adverse effects.
There are many different methods ranging from what I call passive external methods to active internal methods. What differentiates passive external methods from active internal methods is the degree which they require you to identify your trapped emotions and the experiences that created them, and to understand why you chose to interpret and respond to those experiences in the way you did, and perhaps prompts you to learn new ways of responding.
Because completely passive external methods of releasing trapped emotions do not require you to identify or understand the trapped emotions and their genesis they are quick and easy as compared to methods that lie on the active internal end of the scale. But their downside is you don’t learn anything that will help you avoid responding differently to situations in the future and hence avoid trapping more emotions.
In the following section I will explore some of the more well-known methods of releasing trapped emotions. There are probably more that I am not aware of and many variations. I will start with the methods that are more passive external oriented and progress to ones that are more active internal.
Sound Therapy
This method has many variations but what they all have in common is the use of sound to affect the energy in your body. One example of this is the use of a series of 6 musical tones called the Solfeggio Frequencies that are said to increasingly raise your vibration when listened to. These tones help dissolve or transmute negative energy such as trapped emotions which effectively releases them from your body and energy system.
This method is a totally passive external method that does not require you to identify your trapped emotions, or the experiences that caused them. Check out this great article about the healing power of the solfeggio frequencies for more info and to listen to the tones.
Third Party Removal
There are a number of energy healers that act as facilitators or intermediaries for non-physical beings who provide the service of removing or dissolving our trapped negative emotional energy. The exact methods used by the various practitioners vary but they all claim to be able to remove your trapped emotions and provide immediate long-lasting relief from their adverse effects.
This is a completely passive external method. It does not require you to identify your trapped emotions, or understand what experience was involved in creating them, or change yourself in any way. It simply requires you to want to clear yourself of negative energy and be willing to allow it to occur. A great example of someone who provides this service is Ethan Fox, check out Energy Transfer with Ethan Fox to learn more.
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The Emotion Code Method
The Emotion Code method was developed by Dr. Bradley Nelson and it uses muscle testing to quickly and accurately identify what trapped emotions a person has and what experience created them.
Muscle testing is a procedure that accesses the subconscious mind (and infinite intelligence) to get yes or no and true or false answers to specific questions regarding what trapped emotions we have and their cause. Apparently, the spirit realms have provided us this query tool to facilitate clearing our negative trapped emotions which is essential if we are to awaken and ascend according to the divine plan because trapped negative emotions are one of the key things that are stopping us from achieving this.
Once one has identified a trapped emotion they then state their intention to release the emotion and swipe a magnet (which produces an electromagnetic energy field) over the governing energy meridian of their body to amplify their intention and to release the emotion.
The Emotion Code method is a hybrid method that lies somewhere between passive external and active internal. Even though the direct method is fairly passive and external in and of itself. Dr. Nelson, in his book The Emotion Code does address the changes of attitude and perspective that can greatly help in releasing old emotional wounds and avoid creating new ones.
Overall, I think this is one of the best methods and one that anyone can learn and administer to oneself or one’s friends and family. Dr. Nelson provides a thorough explanation of the whole topic and teaches the methodology in his book The Emotion Code which I highly recommend.
Regression Therapy
Regression Therapy uses hypnosis to access a person’s subconscious mind to find forgotten and repressed experiences and the trapped negative emotions associated with them. The process facilitates the release of those trapped negative emotions and it also encourages the subject to change the way they interpreted those experiences and to change themselves so they will respond differently in the future making it perhaps the most active internal method available.
Other Methods
There are a bunch of other methods that claim to release trapped emotions that may or may not be effective. Here are a few of them: The Sedona Method, Access Bars, and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT / Tapping) — there are certainly others.
Shortcomings of These Methods
The problem with many of these methods is that even though they can clear your accumulated trapped negative emotions and the undesirable manifestations they cause from your life they do not ensure that you won’t trap more emotions in the future. And this is because they do not require you to change yourself — the way you interpret and respond to life’s traumatic experiences.
No Longer Creating Trapped Emotions
So how do you ensure you don’t trap more negative emotions in the future? By understanding how your current state of being is contributing to how you interpret and respond to challenging situations and learning a new way of being that responds differently. After all it is how you interpreted and responded to your past experiences that made them “traumatic” and “emotionally charged” and caused you to trap negative emotions in the first place.
The Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, had this to say about the importance of how you respond to life’s challenges:
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Here are several changes you can make to yourself that can change how you interpret and respond to life’s challenging situations. Making these changes will not only improve how you feel as these situations are occurring but will also greatly reduce the chances of trapping emotions.
Here they are:
- Learn to deliberately choose your emotions rather than being emotionally reactive.
- Allow yourself to fully feel whatever emotions arise without judgment.
- Become more forgiving and less judgmental.
- Take full responsibility for everything you experience.
- Look for the pearl of wisdom in every situation and learn the lesson rather than blaming.
Let’s explore each of these in more depth.
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Reducing Your Emotional Reactivity
One of the things that contributes to the creation of trapped negative emotions is your level of emotional reactivity. Emotional reactivity is when you unconsciously react to situations with strong negative emotions. It’s when you let circumstances dictate how you feel and respond rather than deliberately choosing how you want to feel and respond. It’s your knee jerk reactions that you have to life’s happenings.
One thing that can help you transcend reactivity is being aware that you, and only you, choose your emotions.
You Choose Your Emotions
Many people believe that their emotions are caused by what someone else is doing or the situation they find themselves in. You’ve seen this belief in action if you’ve heard people saying things like My husband makes me so mad…
or That made me so depressed…
or That put me in such a bad mood.
Of course, this is kind of ridiculous because no one but you chooses how to interpret and respond to situations — no one can make you feel any emotion that you don’t choose to feel. Things that happen to you do not determine the emotions that you feel. Although you may not have deliberately chosen every circumstance you find yourself in, you do have the ability to choose how you think, feel, and act. No matter what happens, you ultimately are responsible for how you respond.
Many of us unwittingly fall victim to our emotions at times. Our knee-jerk emotional reactions can happen so fast that it seems like there isn’t any time to choose differently. If you are late for an appointment, you may automatically feel anxious. If someone treats you rudely, you might automatically feel offended. When you are insulted or abused, you may immediately feel resentful or angry in response.
All of us experience disturbing situations occasionally but unless you take responsibility for how you respond, you will simply react. When you allow yourself to react, your subconscious mind and your ego often will deliver negative emotion, likely ones used in similar circumstances in the past. This is because you are allowing the situation to trigger your automatic response patterns, but you don’t have to. You can override them and deliberately choose how to respond. In every new situation you encounter you can choose to feel and respond differently than you have in the past.
You always are choosing your emotions it is just that you are either doing it unconsciously or consciously. Simply becoming aware of this can greatly facilitate you becoming less emotionally reactive. Of course, setting an intention to become more deliberate about how you respond to life’s bumps can help greatly also. It’s not always easy but you can get better at it with intent and practice.
So here’s a practical suggestion on how to avoid simply reacting unconsciously the next time you are faced with a challenging situation. When you feel that surge of negative emotions starting to build (and with practice noticing this will be come easier) take a short pause and breathe. This gives yourself the space to connect with your higher-self and remember who you really are or want to be and to consider what response will be the most productive, loving, and compassionate. And only then respond in a deliberate fashion based on that.
Of course, one of the keys to consistently choosing to feel and respond differently is to fundamentally change how you interpret situations. And the key to this is to adopt new beliefs and attitudes about people and situations. What I’m talking about here is adopting a more understanding, forgiving, less judgmental attitude, taking more responsibility for your experiences (rather than the tendency to blame others), and focusing on the pearl of wisdom that these situations almost always contain, rather than focusing on the problem itself. I will explore all of these in some detail shortly but first let’s take a look at how to handle the emotions that do arise, so you can reduce the chances that you will repress them and trap them.
Allowing Yourself to Feel the Emotions Fully
Regardless of what emotions do arise you must not judge those emotions or yourself for having them. Doing this is part of the reason that you suppress and trap them.
To ensure that you don’t trap them you must allow yourself to feel those emotions fully — without judgment. There’s nothing wrong with how you feel, they are just feelings. Let them flow through you and feel them completely. Really let yourself vent — jump up and down, scream, cry, or whatever you need to do and just keep doing it until the feeling dissipates.
You might want to remove yourself from the situation before you do this but let yourself do this. And like I said, and this is very important, don’t judge what you are feeling or yourself for feeling that way — this will only encourage you to suppress those emotions, which is what we are trying to avoid.
The goal is to feel your feelings fully and then let them go. If you hold a grudge or can’t stop thinking about a situation it’s probably because you haven’t released the emotional charge that you allowed that situation to create within you.
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Becoming More Forgiving and Less Judgmental
One of the ways that you can change how you interpret and hence respond to events is nurture a less judgmental and more forgiving attitude. The inability to let go and forgive is one of the primary reasons why people end up with trapped negative emotions. Understanding the reasons why you are less forgiving and non-judgmental than perhaps you could be, and how to change that is therefore an important step on the road to no longer creating trapped emotions. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Reducing Your Egoic Pride
One of the reasons that people find it difficult to let go and forgive is egoic pride. Although there are positive types of pride, egoic pride is an insidious and damaging type of pride that ultimately ends up harming those that wield it even though they are likely completely unaware of this fact. And sadly, it is very common.
Egoic pride expresses as selfishness, jealousy, hatred, resentment, superiority, ill will, or anger toward others. Egoic pride leads those that are in its grip down a dark path to strong negative emotional reactivity, often starting with the feeling of resentment. And of course, this makes them unwilling to forgive others. Instead, they hold on to the real or imagined wrongs they have suffered, and allow themselves to feel angry, frustrated, resentful, etc. And in the worst case it may even drive them to pursue retribution against those they perceive have hurt them.
What they unfortunately don’t realize is how damaging holding onto negative emotions is to themselves — because if they did, they would certainly choose to change their ways.
Becoming aware of the nature and consequences of egoic pride and to what degree we are in its grip can be very helpful in nurturing the ability to be less reactive, more forgiving, and to let go. The problem is that even though it’s very easy to recognize egoic pride in others, it is often very difficult to recognize in ourselves. But of course, with increased self-awareness you should be able to catch it in yourself. A sure sign that your egoic pride might be out of control is if you are easily and quickly offended (and brought to anger, frustration, and resentment) and tend to hold a grudge.
You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. — Buddha
The Liberating Effect of Forgiveness
It is so important to understand how much that letting go of old hurt feelings helps you. You may think that you are justified in holding on to hurt feelings because it punishes those that hurt you. But in truth, holding on to negative emotions hurts only you, not them. Those that you perceive have wronged you may or may not be aware of how you feel and may or may not suffer along with you. But your choice to hold onto the perceived wrong ultimately hurts you far more than anyone else.
The Buddha eloquently echoed this point when he uttered these words of wisdom:
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
They may have done something truly horrible and it may seem impossible to let it go. This is your opportunity to do something truly liberating — you can choose to forgive them unconditionally and free yourself of all of the negativity associated with the situation.
Forgiveness and Unconditional Love
One of the keys to becoming more forgiving is to foster the quality of unconditional love and compassion within ourselves. These qualities will motivate us to look beyond the surface of another’s actions to try to understand why they behaved that way. These qualities will enhance your ability to understand how and why they feel the way the do and why they have behaved the way they did.
When our hearts are full of love and compassion we are much more likely to get beyond our own self-centeredness, and we are much more forgiving, patient, and kind, we are much more interested in the welfare of others and making others happy, and we are much less likely to develop trapped emotions. Our tendency will be to overlook the faults and weaknesses of others, rather than to judge them. Our tendency will be to look deeper into the reasons behind another’s actions and feelings and understand that they are just doing the best they can based on the sum of all their experiences up to this point in their life.
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Beyond Forgiveness
We may even realize the deep wisdom that if we were in their shoes, truly in their shoes, we would feel and do the same. And so often the harm we do to each other is unintentional or happens out of ignorance and looking beyond the surface will often make us realize this. These realizations take you to the lofty understanding that everyone is doing the best they can given their life history and experiences up to this point and that it really could not be any other way. Then you begin to see the challenges as simply opportunities for everyone to learn and grow.
The qualities of unconditional love and compassion are worth nurturing within yourself because they will create a life of positivity that will have you floating joyously high above the negativity and drama of most of the everyday world.
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Taking Full Responsibility for Your Experiences
A very important realization that is both critical to self-empowerment and greatly facilitates changing how you interpret and respond to life’s challenges is taking full responsibility for everything that comes into your experience. For anyone on the road to self-mastery and mastery of their creatorship a crucial understanding is that blaming others is a hugely disempowering habit. When you blame others you implicitly are saying to yourself and the Universe “something outside of myself, over which I have no control, is the cause of my experiences and my happiness.”
Which of course is not true, because you are creating your reality absolutely without exception with your very own thoughts and beliefs regardless of whether you understand how. And by not embracing this you effectively abdicate your creatorship and you unconsciously create your experience which will likely contain more adversity and undesirable things than you would prefer.
The most productive attitude is “there is nothing being done to me.” By the Law of Attraction, you draw to yourself every experience your soul requires, in order to learn, evolve and grow.
Life isn’t happening to you, it’s happening because of you and for you.
When you accept this completely, you will begin to really see the gift in every situation, however challenging, and you will extract the pearl of wisdom from it and use it to propel your growth and evolution, and you will never again dwell on your past experiences with the slightest amount of resentment or remorse.
Focusing on the Pearl of Wisdom
Another way that you can change how you interpret and respond to life’s challenging situations is to always focus on the pearl of wisdom that every challenging situation almost always provides you — rather than focusing on the immediate problem or offense.
Is there a higher principle or ideal that can be gleaned from the situation? Is there a lesson to be learned? What pearl of wisdom does the situation contain that can help you grow to be a wiser, more loving, and happier being?
Focusing on the wisdom to be gleaned from, and the growth opportunity provided by, every situation takes you to a higher plane far above judgment, blame, recrimination, and any other negativity to something far more productive. And it will greatly increase your chances of never trapping negative emotions again and unwittingly suffering their insidious damaging consequences.
Cultivating Self-Awareness
One of the key skills that is important to transforming yourself so you can forever become free of negativity and the threat of trapping negative emotions is self-awareness. Self-awareness is essential to all forms of healing and change. Without awareness of your state of being no change is possible — awareness enables the choice to make a change. While this may seem obvious it is often overlooked. Without becoming aware of our defensive and negative thoughts and judgments how are we to choose to be different.
Nurturing and cultivating greater self-awareness is crucial to all growth including growing beyond emotional reactivity and holding on to negative emotions. One thing you can do that will help with this is to set the intention to become more aware of mental and emotional habits and behaviors. You might perhaps even ask for help and guidance — from the Universe, or God, or your spirit guides, or your higher-self, whatever works for you.
And believe it or not this will actually help you begin to catch yourself reacting in ways that perhaps you’d like to change. When you do catch yourself reacting go ahead and acknowledge it and give thanks that it has come to your attention. For example, you might say to yourself, I’m feeling irritable for some reason. I’m really glad I can see that.
The increased awareness that you will cultivate will give you the opportunity to learn, grow, and change.
If you always respond to becoming aware of your thoughts and feelings with something like I’m really glad I can see that.
and you feel genuinely pleased and grateful to be able to notice them and have the opportunity to address the source of them then you will find yourself quickly becoming more and more self-aware. And as you do you will find yourself gaining deeper and deeper insights into yourself and making more and more healthy changes. Just remember to be non-judgmental about anything you find in yourself that you would prefer to change. You don’t have to make yourself wrong to change yourself, in fact, it makes it harder. It is always most productive to notice your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors lovingly and without judgment.
With sincere intention and practice you can become very self-aware and this will facilitate much learning, growth, and change in yourself for the better.
Summing it Up
Trapped negative emotions are one of the biggest causes of all sorts of adverse effects on your health and what you can manifest in your life. You create them when you interpret and respond to situations that unfold in your life with strong negative emotions that you are uncomfortable with completely feeling so you suppress them, which only traps them in the energy field of your body and hides them from you.
There are quite a few ways that you can release or clear existing trapped emotions from yourself that will give you relief from their adverse effects. But ultimately, you will need to fundamentally change yourself if you want to avoid creating new trap emotions and subjecting yourself to their adverse effects in the future.
The choice to clear your trapped emotions and learn how to avoid creating more in the future should be a no-brainer once you understand how damaging they are to the quality of your life.
About the Author
Jeff Street awakened about a year and a half ago, after having been an atheist/agnostic scientist type with absolutely no spiritual beliefs for most of his life. After many ‘magical’ new experiences, he is now passionate about learning and sharing his insights about spirituality and metaphysics on his blog www.divine-cosmos.net. You can also follow Jeff on Facebook via www.Facebook.com/DivineCosmoz
This article (The Hidden Insidious Effects of Trapped Negative Emotions) was originally at Divine Cosmos and is posted here with permission.
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Source:
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2018/07/19/the-hidden-insidious-effects-of-trapped-negative-emotions/
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