Clearing out Emotional Pain - The First Step
Many of us don’t realize that we are carrying around mountains of emotional pain burdens that weigh us down and hide the natural joy underneath. This can include anger from past injustices, guilt from our mistakes, grief from loss or personal suffering, along with countless other varieties. You might be peripherally aware of emotional pain but haven’t fully acknowledged its presence. But these emotional burdens weigh us down and hide all the joy that lies hidden underneath.
The first step in clearing out any kind of emotional turmoil is to acknowledge it and allow it to surface. We are often too busy to clearly notice the emotions that we are constantly towing around with us. In fact, it is quite normal for people to be carrying around vast amounts of pain that have never been acknowledged. You know it’s there on some level, but don’t want to recognize it. It’s easier to just go on about your life and pretend it’s not there.
Life always provides us with plenty of daily worries and distractions that make it easy to avoid our emotions and relegate them to the background. For many of us, our emotions have become nothing more than background noise. Just like a television playing in the background, our ears can “hear” the noise but our minds aren’t truly listening and paying attention to it.
In order to successfully begin working to clear out any emotion, the first step is becoming aware of it. We must stop what we are doing and focus our attention and awareness on it. This requires us to briefly put down our cell phones, laptop, and other distractions in order to spend a little time noticing what you are carrying with you. You cannot begin to successfully work with your inner landscape before you take the time to fully acknowledge the emotion and begin to experience it.
Try to Notice How You Actually Feel ''emotional pain''
For three minutes today, try to get quiet and simply begin to notice how you actually feel. Do you feel numb? Do you feel heavy? Do you feel anger, sadness, or heaviness in your stomach area? How does your chest feel? Does it feel heavy? Light? Angry? Sad? People have often told me how astounded they were that they had gone for so long without taking an uninterrupted look at exactly how they are feeling inside. Is there sadness? Anger? Do you feel a heaviness surrounding your heart or stomach area? Do you feel anxious? Fearful? Stop avoiding any unpleasant emotions and simply look at what’s actually there.
This is a huge first step in beginning the process of working with your emotions for the ultimate purpose of healing and releasing them. If this is the first time you are attempting this, congratulations. This is an important step on the road to learning how to work with your emotions and creating tremendous change in the way you feel.