Release emotions trapped in your body
When we deny our true feelings and emotions, these emotions can get trapped in our bodies. These stuck emotional energies then weigh us down, color our world view and put a wedge between us and our authentic selves!
Plus, having emotions trapped in your body is exhausting in the long run and can cause physical discomfort, posture changes and even illness.
But, when we acknowledge our emotions and let them flow, we feel better, we increase our emotional intelligence and get some much needed relief and clarity.
In this video, I walk you through a quick and effective emotional healing exercise with journal prompts so you can get back in touch with the parts of you that need healing.
emotions trapped in your body
Our bodies are a part of us. Our emotions are a part of us.
Most of us spend most of our time lost in our thoughts, disconnected from our hearts, and stuffing our true feelings. We’ve been trained to ignore our bodies, repress our natural emotional responses and deny our gut feelings.
This is particularly true for those of us who have experienced trauma. When we experience trauma (big or small), our body remembers everything, while our mind goes to work trying to protect us from our own overwhelming trauma responses. This creates a rift between the conscious stories of our mind and the lived experience of our body.
It feels normal to live in our heads rather than in our bodies, but we don’t realize how much it costs us. And when we ignore our bodies and emotions, our emotions don’t get processed and therefore continue to exist within us.
your emotions affect your physiology
Besides elevated stress hormone levels and hypervigilant nervous systems, the new science of somatic psychology tells us that our bodies hold onto stressful events in other ways as well. Our posture, muscular contraction patterns, breathing, digestion, sleep cycles, blood pressure, aches, pains, immune response and more are all affected by stressful and emotionally difficult experiences from our pasts. (Our thought patterns, emotional responses and perceptions of the world are affected as well.)
And, when we don’t listen to, acknowledge and process these emotional energies, they live on in our cells, our muscles, our nervous system reactions and our physiology in countless ways.
In order to release emotions trapped in your body, you need to learn to feel them and witness them so they can be integrated and move through your body. My favorite tool to do this is Regenerating Images in Memory® as it’s deep, effective and incredibly transformative.
(Be sure to watch the video so you can do the exercise to release emotions trapped in your body and actually experience a shift!)
watch the video now!
(This livestream is Day 3 of my 5 days to heal your emotional blocks: tangible tools to empower your healing journey). Click here to check out the rest of the schedule and watch the other videos.
healing quote:
This quote by author Jeff Brown beautifully speaks about the interplay of our bodies and our emotions.
"It's not all in your head. It's all in your heart. It's all in your feet. It's all in your hips. It's all in your shoulders. It's all in your breath. It's all in your body. Anything unattended to, unresolved, unhealed, and unprocessed lives in your tissues, your cells, your musculature. It may be manifest in your stinking thinking, but it doesn't begin there. The mind does not source itself - the body does. The trick is to not try to shift the thinking from within the mind itself. You can't. You may be able to subdue it there, but you won't be able to resolve it. Because the troubling thoughts are merely a symptom of the deeper issues. They are a reflection of our emotional holdings and constricted musculature. They emanate from the fleshy trauma tunnels that we dug in order to survive this world. Many of us sit in the waiting room of Awakening for decades, waiting impatiently for our new birth. And it never arrives, because we are looking for it where it isn't - within the mind itself. Babies aren't born that way. You have to go down into the depths of the body to bring a new birth to life. Down, down, down ... into the alchemical chambers of new thought - your magnificent body. This is where we are born again."
-Jeff Brown
Karena Neukirchner, trauma-informed emotional healing coach
How did that exercise to release emotions trapped in your body feel to you? What shifted or changed in your inner world?
I’d love to hear! Please leave a comment and let me know.
Thank you so much for joining me on this healing journey! I hope that you understand the profound relationship between your body and your emotions more deeply now.
