Dancing with Your Emotions
Your body can be your own personal guide to a healthy and harmonious way of living, if you know how to work with it. It’s your constant, loyal companion, and it always lets you know how you are feeling – if you pay attention to it. Most of us have not learned to connect with our body and listen to its messages, and we often even go as far as ignoring them. What we mean by messages from your body is that your body lets you know how you are feeling by way of your emotions such as love, joy, sadness, anger or fear, and by way of your physical sensations such as pleasure, pain and all of the information we get from our senses.
In order to be happy and at peace we must bring awareness to our inner space, our body. When you focus your attention on the body you will also get in touch with your emotions and how you allow them to be expressed. We like to say that emotions are energy in motion. They are not you – but they are experiences you are having, and they are messages from your soul. Just like physical energy, emotional energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transformed. If you resist this energy, it may turn into tension in your body, or perhaps show up later as an unexplained anxiety or panic attack. It might turn into the flu you get next week, or even contribute to the heart attack you have twenty years from now.
When you connect with yourself when an emotion comes up within you, you no longer have to linger in it for days or hours, and the energy in the emotion doesn’t have to be stored in your body. You can experience it, thank its for its message to you, and then let it go. When you practice this consistently, your emotions no longer control you, and you no longer need to control them. They becomes more of a dance that you participate in.You can experience your emotions and feel them as their energy sways you this way and that way. Like a tree, you can be flexible in this emotional wind, swaying with them as they come, and returning to your center as they pass. As long as you stay flexible and don’t resist the movement, you will as always return to your stable center, like trees do when the wind passes. This flexibility, is the true source of strength. If you try to resist the energy of your emotions, then you start to become brittle and may find yourself breaking down.
When you bring awareness to your inner space you become more emotionally harmonious under stress. In times of tension you are able to recognize your emotion: you connect with it and it moves on, and no tension needs to be stored. Stress, anxiety and tension in the body is the result of your emotions being resisted and stored, emotions such as fear, sadness, or anger. By resisting or not paying attention to these emotions as they arise, you ignore your body’s cry for help. And since you are one with your body, your mind, emotions and spirit – all of these areas get affected. If we continue to resist or ignore the body and our emotions, over time we experience aches, pains, disease, depression, chronic stress, anxiety, burnout, exhaustion, and on and on the list goes. We believe that just about every physical symptom or disease has an emotional imbalance at its core. By paying attention to, feeling and then balancing our emotional body, we can avoid much pain and suffering in our physical body.
So how can you bring awareness to your body? Just simply listen. One way you can start is by paying attention to your breath. Sit quietly and observe your breath. Does your it stop in your chest? Does it go down to your belly? Is your exhale longer than your inhale? Do you pause when you inhale or when you exhale? How does your breath change as you go about your day? How do you breathe when you go to sleep? How do you breathe when you’re on your way to work in the morning?
This is just the beginning of what you can observe when you start paying attention to your breath and the body. And all of these little details are worth your attention. Your body is trying to get your attention! Choosing to respect it and choosing to listen to it is the first step on the path to letting go of stress, and can be the beginning of a beautiful and rewarding friendship between you and your body.