by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Learning to Release Emotions Properly Can Set You Free of Yourself and the Past
One thing that I’ve seen almost everybody struggle with is their emotional ‘stuff’ from the past (I guess it’s just a part of the human condition or something):
It doesn’t really matter whether they’re successful or struggling, loaded or broke, or in a relationship or single – lurking down there beneath the surface, most people are carrying emotions that never got the chance to move all the way through them and that can end up causing inner friction, frustration, or even misery.
At the level of the rational mind, most people usually know these old emotions are holding them back and that they’re reacting instead of responding, repeating the same patterns, and struggling to show up as the realest version of themselves but the most frustrating part is that no matter how hard they try, they can’t think themselves into letting go.
This is because emotions don’t just exist at the level of thought – they’re experienced in the body and so trying to solve an emotional problem through ‘thinking’ alone is a bit like trying to clean your kitchen by rearranging the furniture in your living room – in other words, you’re working hard, but you’re operating in the wrong place.
Unfortunately, many of us have been taught from a young age that being “rational” is somehow better than being emotional and so we learn to explain our feelings away instead of actually just experiencing them.
We analyse them, judge them, and intellectualise them, and then, eventually – because no amount of ‘thinking’ can ever actually release emotional energy – we usually end up doing one of two things:
- Suppressing our emotions.
- Expressing them in an unreal way.
Both seem helpful in the short-term but none of them actually work:
- Suppression just pushes emotions deeper into the body where they continue creating tension, anxiety, and fragmentation.
- Unreal expression turns into emotional dumping, blaming other people, exploding in anger, compulsive behaviours and addictions, or endlessly talking about feelings without actually feeling them.
What’s interesting is that even though these two approaches look completely different, they’re actually the same thing which is a form of RESISTANCE which is ‘bad’ news because resistance always keeps us from reality (which is always what we need to build our lives on a lasting foundation).
This article is about an alternative to suppression or unreal expression which is RELEASE.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Emotional Release: What We Cover in This Article
- Learning to Release Emotions Properly Can Set You Free of Yourself and the Past
- The Three Principles of Managing Emotion That Change The Game
- 1. Emotions Are Not The Truth
- 2. Emotion Is "E-Motion, Energy in Motion"
- 3. You've Gotta Feel It To Heal It
- Why Most People Stay Stuck
- Why We're So Afraid To Feel
- A Simple Daily Practice For Emotional Release
- Five Minutes That Can Change Your Life
- The Final Word: The Freedom Waiting On The Other Side of RELEASE
The Three Principles of Managing Emotion That Change The Game
Before we get to the practical part, there are three truths about emotions that make releasing them infinitely easier once you accept them:
1. Emotions Are Not The Truth
This might sound strange because emotions often feel incredibly convincing – for example:
- Fear tells you catastrophe is coming (when it isn’t).
- Shame tells you you’re fundamentally broken (when you’re not).
- Anger tells you you’re completely right (when nobody is).
- Sadness tells you things will never improve (when there’s no reason they can’t).
- Etc. etc. etc.
The with being ‘convinced’ by your emotions is that they constantly contradict each other which is why it’s possible to love somebody and hate them at the same time or to want one thing but also want something else that cancels it out.
Emotions also fluctuate and continue to change which is why yesterday you were excited, today you’re anxious, and tomorrow you’ll probably feel hopeful again.
How, then, can you possible know which emotion is ‘true’ when the truth is eternal and can’t be contradicted but your emotions are temporary and contradict each other from one day to the next (or, in some cases, one second to the next?
The bottom line is that none of our emotions are the whole truth – they’re just waves rising and falling in the ocean of awareness where the awareness remains but the waves keep changing and this is why you’ll struggle if you try to build your identity around whatever emotion happens to be passing through you at a given time.
Respect your emotions, listen to them, but don’t worship them as being gospel truth – you’re the awareness experiencing the emotion and not the emotion itself.
2. Emotion Is “E-Motion, Energy in Motion”
In a way the word ‘Emotion’ gives the game away in itself:
“E-motion, Energy in motion”.
This is a good reminder that your emotions are literally just energy moving through your body in response to your internal state, your memories, your environment, and countless unconscious processes bubbling away beneath the surface of things.
The ‘good’ news is that when you allow this energy to move and complete its course through you then it completes itself just as naturally as a wave reaching the shore, a storm coming to a close, an exhalation after holding your breath, or the sun rising and falling without anybody having to ‘do’ anything.
The problems start when we ‘block’ this natural movement of energy because the ego has become frightened for some reason and so it attempts to protect its self-image and keep the shadow self at bay because movement has become a ‘threat’ and so it resists the flow of e-motion.
This resistance just causes the energy to get ‘stuck’ and so – instead of flowing through your experience and teaching you something about yourself and life on the way – it begins circulating endlessly inside your nervous system instead.
Over time, this often becomes chronic tension that we carry in the body in the form of things like tight shoulders, clenched jaws, involuntary movements like legs shaking (in some cases, and shallow breathing because the nervous system is permanently stuck in survival mode (known as Sympathetic Dominance).
3. You’ve Gotta Feel It To Heal It
Emotions aren’t the truth but they are an actual experience happening within you and so you have to give this experience some attention if you want to get through it.
Like I said in the intro to this article, though, ignoring them and suppressing them doesn’t make them magically disappear and neither does acting in an unreal way to try and shift the energy away from you (both of these strategies are a form of resistance).
The only way ‘out’ is through which means that you have to actually feel whatever arises within you – not forever but fully enough that it finishes doing what it came to do.
It’s a bit like you’re standing in the ocean as the waves keep coming towards you:
You wouldn’t try and ‘stop’ the sea, scream at the waves, or pretend they’re not there – you’d simply let them wash over you and the thousands of emotional waves arising over the course of your lifetime are something that you can treat in exactly the same way.
In fact, if you can learn to surf your emotions instead of fighting them, then you’ll discover a powerful sense of freedom as every wave leaves you a little bit lighter and more real (once it’s completed it’s journey of “e-motion, energy in motion”).
All you gotta do is feel it to heal it.
Why Most People Stay Stuck
Most emotional suffering comes from ignoring one or more of these three principles:
- Some people confuse emotions with reality in truth and so they become completely and utterly identified with whatever they’re feeling:
For example, instead of saying “I’m experiencing fear” they say something like “I am afraid” and the fear becomes a whole identity instead of just an experience (fear becomes something they ARE instead of something they temporarily HAVE). - Others block the movement of emotional energy (e-motion) and so every uncomfortable feeling is resisted and every sensation is tightened against to the extent that they eventually become dysregulated because the system is trying to carry years of unfinished emotional ‘stuff’.
- Others refuse to feel at all and so they either suppress or express in unreal ways – neither of which allow a healthy completion or release.
The REAL alternative to living in this unreal way is to remember the truth which is that:
Every emotion naturally rises, falls, and dissolves if you ALLOW it to do so.
Why We’re So Afraid To Feel
If emotions naturally dissolve, then why don’t we just let them do so?
Well, usually it’s because we’re frightened of what they’ll say about us and what we think it ‘means’ to feel whatever it is that we’re feeling (even though a feeling is literally just a physiological sensation and doesn’t ‘mean’ anything in itself).
For example:
- We think sadness means we’re weak.
- We think anger means we’re dangerous.
- We think fear means we’re incapable.
- We think lust means we’re immoral.
- We think shame means we’re fundamentally defective.
- Etc. etc. etc.
None of these conclusions are true – they’re each just a story that we project onto our own emotions because of our resistance (which just opens up a vicious cycle which is why things get worse over time the more you resist).
A Simple Daily Practice For Emotional Release
Over the years, I’ve found the following approach for emotional release to have helped me personally (I do it most days) and also my coaching clients.
It follows a simple framework of Regulate, Integrate, and Accelerate.
Let’s take a quick look:
Step One: Regulate
Find somewhere comfortable, close your eyes, and place one hand on your heart and the other on your belly.
Begin breathing slowly through your nose and feel your belly going up and down (this means your diaphragm is engaged properly).
For the breath itself, I normally recommend ujjayi breathing which is a technique where you gently narrow the back of the throat to create a soft ocean-like sound (it’s kind of like you’re fogging up a window or mirror with your breath but you keep your mouth closed and inhale and exhale through your nose).
Keep breathing until your body begins settling and you move beyond relaxation and into a sense of safety (almost all emotional healing happens inside a nervous system that feels safe enough to experience what’s already there).
Enjoy being in this feeling of safety (which is literally always there assuming there’s no actual physical danger) for as long as you like.
Step Two: Integrate
When you’re ready, the next step is to invite the emotion that you want to work on releasing into awareness:
The important thing to remember here is that you’re not bringing a STORY into your awareness – you’re bringing the actual FEELING (as a physiological sensation in your body).
It could literally be anything:
- Perhaps it’s sadness.
- Perhaps it’s shame.
- Perhaps it’s anxiety.
- Perhaps it’s lust.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Notice I included lust here – this is because so many men spend years either suppressing it or expressing it in completely unreal ways because they secretly believe having sexual instincts makes them morally inferior or whatever when it doesn’t.
Just like with your emotions, your instincts aren’t your identity because your biology isn’t your character (it’s just a bunch of automatic processes beyond your conscious control in most cases – you can only deal with what arises, not what will arise).
Anyway, whatever you’re working on then don’t ‘think’ about the emotion you’ve brought into the container of safety but allow yourself to feel it wherever it lives in your body:
Is it pressure?
Heat?
Tightness?
Movement?
Vibration?
Something else?
Stay with the raw physical sensation and leave the narrative behind because stories keep emotions alive whereas the sensations themselves allow them to complete (the stories are often a form of ego resistance that keeps the shadow self at bay).
Step Three: Accelerate
The final step is to allow the feeling to expand in your awareness and to become as big as it wants (the direct opposite of resistance which tries to make it ‘small’):
Don’t force it, don’t analyse it, don’t push it away, and don’t perform how you ‘think’ you’re ‘supposed’ to react to it – just let it exist completely on it’s own terms.
If you can do this (which you definitely can if you make this a daily habit), then you’ll probably notice something remarkable which is that eventually the feeling just kind of…softens and then dissolves.
It RELEASES because the energy has completed its movement.
You’re still here and nothing terrible happened by facing whatever it was you needed to face – all you did was make space for reality.
Over time this changes your entire relationship with yourself and life because instead of fearing emotions you now trust your ability to experience them and to handle whatever arises from one wave to the next.
If you’re ready to go deeper into releasing the unreal and stepping into your real life then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
Five Minutes That Can Change Your Life
People often assume emotional healing requires hours of meditation or dramatic therapeutic breakthroughs – they can definitely help (especially meditation) but, more often than not, the only thing that’s missing from our lives is a sense of consistency when it comes to facing our own emotional ‘stuff’ head on and not letting it build up until we either explode or have a breakdown.
This is why I’d love to encourage you to spend five minutes every day practising emotional release (even if you think you feel ‘fine’ all the time).
This isn’t because you’re ‘broken’ or anything like that but because you’re human (I’m guessing!) and so there’s always going to be something to release because the waves just endlessly keep coming (that’s that “human condition” thing again):
Sometimes it will be tiny, sometimes it will surprise you, sometimes you’ll realise you’ve been carrying something for decades without even knowing it – that’s certainly been my experience, anyway, and I do this practice every single day.
The results have been pretty dramatic because thousands of small releases gradually create more flow over time and so now I feel lighter, more present, less reactive, and less weighed down by things I didn’t even realise I was carrying.
I’m not saying this is the only thing I do – ultimately, it’s about your whole lifestyle but it’s a big piece of the puzzle and I know it can help you too because realness isn’t about becoming somebody new but about removing anything unreal.
The Final Word: The Freedom Waiting On The Other Side of RELEASE
Carl Jung famously said that “What you resist, persists” and I’ve found this to be universally true:
The irony, though, is that most of us don’t even realise we’re resisting because we’re acting on autopilot and following habits that we learned way back when for reasons that don’t really serve us any more and so we suppress, distract, explain, perform, control, and then continue to repeat what isn’t really working .
Learning to RELEASE is an opportunity to stop carrying yesterday into today and to actually start showing up in the present and to become so deeply rooted in awareness that emotions can come and go without taking you with them.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to release the unreal and start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you build some real flow.
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