The Gifts of Your Emotions

How many times have you felt ashamed to show your emotions? How many times have you been put down for being “too sensitive” or “too emotional”?

What if there is nothing wrong with what you feel. What if emotions are a lot more beautiful and important than you have ever thought.

Why should I get in touch with my emotions?

Emotions are not what we think they are.

As a psychospiritual guide, I support my clients every day with their emotions be it anger, shame, guilt, sadness and grief, or fear. There are many more emotions and states we can talk about, but for now let’s focus on these primary emotions and explore their gifts. Getting in touch with our emotions is an essential part of healing and shadow work.

Anger: A Fire that Illuminates

You might be ashamed or afraid of your anger. Maybe you witnessed one of your parents being angry often and how they handled their anger badly and how they hurt people as a result. Maybe you have been bullied or abused in the past and now you feel frozen around emotional intensity. These reactions to anger are normal and very common.

It is also important to make a distinction between anger and aggression/ violence. While anger is an emotion we feel, aggression is what we might do with our anger.

Healthy and heart-felt, vulnerable expression of our anger is often needed when we have to challenge or confront someone’s disrespectful or hurtful behaviour.

In such moments, we might be heated and intense, yet we don’t disconnect from our humanity or dehumanize the other person.

Becoming intimate with our anger allows us to stand our ground and be assertive. Healthy anger is also connected with our voice and power. The more connected we feel with our anger, the safer we tend to feel in life. Anger allows us to protect and defend ourselves if and when necessary.

Those who don’t feel connected to their anger tend to pay a high price for this disconnection. They tend to feel invisible and to have a hard time expressing themselves during conflicts with loved ones.

Shame: Empathy inducing Self-Awareness

Healthy shame connects us with our conscience and empathy. When we feel ashamed of a behaviour that might have hurt someone we care about, this emotion helps us to stop, evaluate, take responsibility, apologize, and make amends.

Without healthy shame, we cannot take accountability and repair broken trust in our relationships.

To access our healthy shame, we need to see through and stop believing the messages of our inner critic, this is how we work with toxic shame and guilt. This critic might be saying, “You are a loser” “You are weak” “Nobody loves you.” When we believe the voice of the bully within, we lose our power and feel small.

Sadness and Grief: Heart Broken Open

Grief is deep sadness over a loss. It is the emotion of endings and impermanence. Grief is the emotion of letting go. The deeper our healing, the more grief we access and work through. When we allow our grief to surface instead of resisting it, its deep waters cleanse and ground us.

Grief takes away the old and makes space for the new. Grief brings us more fully to the reality of this moment and roots us here.

However intense our pain might be, grief cracks open our hearts and allows us to breathe deeper and live more fully. The emotion of loss and endings has the power to reveal to us what cannot be lost and that which neither begins nor ends.

Grief is our most sacred emotion - a bridge between the existential and the spiritual. Let’s honour it and its gifts as fully as we can.

Fear: Expansion Guide Post

Our fear shows us where we might be holding back from life. If we get to know our fears and work on them with both patience and gentleness, we face what we must to have the life we truly desire.

Places in us where we feel contracted are the places where we must loosen. Fear shows us the way to our expansion as a human being.

When we hold fear with compassion, it expands and becomes excitement and life energy. The more space we give our fear, the more spacious we feel since working with fear naturally stills our minds, paving the way for a kind of peace that surpasses understanding.

Feeling whole and at peace within and becoming relationally mature are both about getting to know our emotions more deeply.

Find out how somatic therapy can help you.