How to work with overwhelming emotions

Last week we talked about emotions in The Holistic Reset. This one is always a powerful week, exploring ways of working with emotions.

This often brings with it a realisation that the way you’ve been dealing with emotions up until now, often hasn’t been that healthy!

Emotions are an inherent part of our humanity, yet most people have a tendency to either suppress and cut themselves off from them or feel overwhelmed, express them in unhealthy ways or impose them on others.

Either way, you block the emotion from taking its natural course and end up bound by it.

When difficult emotions come up, they feel like annoying distractions. Something you’d rather not deal with.

Recently I’ve been reading Gabor Mate’s book, ‘When the body says no’ - in it he talks at length about the detrimental (and sometimes deadly) effects of emotional suppression and how it can eventually lead to disease.

Yet, have you ever looked at your own emotional patterns?

Then beyond recognising the pattern, do you have practices and techniques for working with emotions without suppressing, without overwhelm but actually listening to them, processing and finding ease within them?

What if instead of treating difficult emotions as annoying distractions, you treated them as helpful messengers with a gift?

What are you feeling right now and what is it telling you?

Do you need to change something in your outside environment, reassess your involvement in a particular situation?

Or maybe there’s a part of you that’s in need of love and attention?

When you can be with your own emotions and hear the message, those difficult emotions?

They don’t feel so difficult any more.

Instead you get to live with a greater sense of ease and integrity.

You get to hold and make friends with all the parts of yourself.