I cried my eyes out yesterday morning. It was a huge emotional release of worry and fear. I don’t need it anymore. It left my body. This worry and fear about something in particular was not serving me or my family.
Worry and fear doesn’t serve you either and I hope if any negative emotion has a hold on you, that this post will help you understand how important it is to release it. I’ll show an easy way how to do it too!
Don’t get me wrong, there is and has been plenty of joy in my life, but like you, lots of pain too. My emotional resiliency is a work in progress. I’ve rarely been “emotional” in front of others. Playing calm became second nature. In the past, I repressed and buried emotional wounds, which, as I discussed in my last post, literally damages the mind, body, and spirit. I’ve been working hard on changing all that.
As one that tended to avoid conflict at any cost, when my negative emotions spun out of my control in the past, my method by default had been to be passive aggressive or to shut down. Yeah. I have no pride in that. It’s not a healthy form of releasing emotions and it certainly won’t attract abundance in my life. When I see it in others, I feel empathy and compassion, I know there is pain driving that behavior. I now try my best to speak up about my feelings, even when uncomfortable. Not easy for sure.
When my kids were little, I read books about emotional intelligence (among every parenting book I could get my hands on in my futile pursuit of parenting perfection). I did my best to teach my kids about it. I obviously didn’t fully gasp the concept for myself! That said, I am one to learn lessons the hard way. I seem to learn best by experiencing pain first.
In my last post, Nourishing & Healing The Body, Brain (Soul & Spirit): Part 2, I shared, “15 Basic Tools for Healing 101,” and in those tips I provide a variety of ways to get your body in a parasympathetic state – the opposite of the “fight or flight” or sympathetic state. The constant stress from our jobs, health issues, relationships, and our environment, contribute many of us being in a constant sympathetic state.
One of those tools listed in my article is something called, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which I first learned about from a Monday Motivation blog post written by the New York Times bestselling author, award winning podcaster, and blogger, Diane Sanfilippo back in 2011. As a Reiki practitioner, it resonated with me but left my radar while I focused on my nutritional therapy education. EFT came back into focus when I began exploring possible reasons why some of my clients, while improving, were not fully healing. And, to be perfectly honest, why I wasn’t fully showing up.
Besides providing a nutritional protocol for clients, I’ve almost always included suggestions for lifestyle changes such as adequate sleep, removing environmental stressors, incorporating meditation and restorative movement. I’ve also suggested removing toxic thoughts and distancing oneself from toxic relationships. But not until recently have I discovered how critical it is to share the specific tools to: (1) release past buried emotions and (2) reprogram your whole self as someone you forgive and love unconditionally.
My Big Emotional Release this morning was actually prompted by some events that happened over the weekend. To back up a step, I have been tapping using EFT multiple times a day or more for the last week while listening and participating to 8th Annual Tapping World Summit (in progress at the time of this article was published).
I had an incredibly insightful conversation with my youngest son about my last article (referenced above) and the sympathetic/parasympathetic effects on behavior and health. We discussed some of his past challenges when he was younger and his self awareness about “then and now” floored me.
He has been studying biology in school, learning about the autonomic nervous system. At the same time, one of his coaches has been using a parasympathetic/sympathetic mechanism in between conditioning sprints during training. The coach taught the team a deep breathing technique to get themselves into a parasympathetic state – to gain more energy for the next sprint (I share a deep breathing technique I learned from Brene’ Brown, of Rising Strong, here). Brilliant!
I went on to explain that our minds do not perceive the difference between a real threat and something we see on TV or experience in video games, for example. We also talked about using that to one’s advantage as in practicing a sport. He knew about this already –professional athletes often practice visualization as part of their training. This conversation lead to an ah-ha moment for him.
There’s been a head strong but apparently respectful debate in his writing class where his teacher asked, “can video games contribute to violence?” During our conversation, in reference to that debate (as you might guess, he has been on the NO side), he pondered, “I guess I could see how video games could contribute to violent behavior.” Very mature of him, seriously! He is 17 as of this writing!
He went on to describe how he recognized the feeling of fight or flight. He told us how he can force himself into a sympathetic state for laser focus during an intense video game challenge – fascinating.
He also went on to talk about how he also recognizes now that he was indeed stuck in a sympathetic state when he was younger and not until we did some intervention to help his body get into a parasympathetic state, could he learn what it felt like to be calm and to even have the capacity to learn how to deal with stress.
This self awareness is going to serve him well moving forward in life.
As I said earlier in this post and in past posts, I am still a work in progress. All of us are. We are never “done” with our life lessons. I recognize I was still holding on to a bit of worry and fear. Will he be okay when he leaves home to go to college? How will he handle the stress?
Stress will never go away but I feel pretty confident he has the tools he needs to manage it, and manage it well.
I’m confident that it was this week of tapping for multiple purposes (and sometimes I just tapped without words during my daily meditations), along with this insightful conversation with my son, that guided these negative emotions out of my body. It was surreal actually. I felt joy and relief but I was releasing pain. I don’t think I’ve experience something like that before.
I’ve been so inspired by EFT, I purchased the summit and plan to teach it to any of my clients that don’t know about it yet. I’m especially excited to teach it to children.
EFT is easy, free, and safe. I sincerely hope you give it a try if you haven’t already! I have the book and audiobook, The Tapping Solution by Nick Ortner but I learned and practiced the method for free on The Tapping Solution website and Youtube videos first. The book provides the science behind why tapping works and provides additional tools and scripts for a multitude of scenarios (even weight loss!). I recommend it.
Here’s a tutorial by Nick Ortner. Try it and please let me know how it worked for you! I also recommend the How to Tap Youtube tutorial by his sister, Jessica Ortner.
Peace & Love,
Holly – xo
(Originally published in March of 2016, recently updated)
Disclaimer: The information contained herein is not to be construed as medical advice and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition. These statements made have not be approved by the FDA, nor should they be taken as a substitute for medical advice from a licensed physician.
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