Feelings
“We know this to be true, because of what happens when we become emotional, our heart rate soars, pumping blood around our bodies and our breathing is affected, as we instinctively prepare for fight or flight.”
“Where do feelings fit into your life? Are you an outwardly passionate person and do you express your emotions? Do you feel safe to communicate your feelings to those around you? The feeling self is connected to earlier stages of our human evolvement, as indicated by the location of the responsible regions of the brain, beneath the cerebral cortex, where our emotions are generated from. We know this to be true, because of what happens when we become emotional, our heart rate soars, pumping blood around our bodies and our breathing is affected, as we instinctively prepare for fight or flight. When we find ourselves emotionally aroused like this, we can often find blocks at various points around our body, for example, perhaps we are not able to breathe properly, feeling constricted in our chest or throat. Some of us may sense pain in our tummies, and or elsewhere on our bodies, and these can be very useful pointers toward where we are blocked and perhaps a little shut down in our lives. The body does not usually lie, as conveyed by kinesiology and muscle testing. The next time you find yourself involved in an emotionally expressive interlude, see if you can maintain a small witness state and see what happens physically for you.
Well known author and self-help guru, Louise Hay writes:
“The STOMACH digests all the new ideas and experiences we have. What or who can’t you stomach? What gets you in the gut?
When there are stomach problems, it usually means we don’t know how to assimilate the new experiences we have. We are afraid.
Many of us remember when commercial airplanes first became popular. That we could get inside a big metal tube that would carry us safely through the sky was a new idea we found hard to assimilate.
At every seat, there were throw-up bags, and most of us were using them. We would throw up into our barf bags as discreetly as we could, wrap them up and hand them to the stewardess, who spent a lot of her time running up and down the aisle collecting them.
Now it is many years later, and though the bags are still at every seat, they are seldom used. We have assimilated the idea of flying.” (13)
It is, I think you would agree, undeniable, that we experience emotional stress in our bodies, when we get upset and cathartic, we often feel these strong feelings in parts of our bodies, like the stomach, and often our breathing and diaphragm are affected. Emotions are not confined to our minds inside our heads, they pulse out along our blood stream between organs, and we feel their upsetting nature in our bodies like a received blow to the body or as the symptom of an illness. Emotions are very powerful things, and cause very real physical problems, when they are occurring and particularly over time, if they are not dealt with appropriately. I would hazard a guess and say that for most of us, around 99% of the aches and pains we experience are stress related; which is not in any way to denigrate or downplay them – as we do really feel them and a feeling felt is affecting our physiology.
©Sudha Hamilton – excerpt from his book House Therapy: Discovering who you really are at home.
