Releasing Emotions from Your Body

If you’re having a hard time with emotions, you’re not alone.

In my private practice, I’ve learned that most of us are quite confused by emotions. This is true for uncomfortable emotions, like sadness and anger, but also for more comfortable emotions like happiness and joy.

For many of us, we never learned how to work with the range of human emotions in a healthy and productive way. With that in mind, here are some thoughts and suggestions to shift your relationship with emotions and help release them from your body.

Re-framing Emotions

Part of the challenge for many people is we don’t necessarily understand the role of emotions.

But, it would serve us well to rethink emotions so we have a better understanding of their purpose and value.

Let’s start with an example. Let’s say you’re feeling frustrated with a colleague. When you’re around him, you feel stressed and impatient. You don’t give him the benefit of the doubt and you have no interest in working with him. Perhaps you also notice more tension in your neck and shoulders in his presence.

Feeling frustrated isn’t the most pleasant experience, but it usually serves an important purpose.

I think of frustration as a type of anger, which is connected to our sense of what is right and wrong. If you’re feeling frustrated, it’s important to listen to and feel this emotion because it can serve as an inner compass that’s connected to your sense of justice.

Frustration and anger oftentimes come with a surge of energy, which can propel us to take action and address this source of injustice.

In this scenario with a colleague, your frustration might provide you with energy to have a conversation with him to talk about what you feel is wrong. If this colleague is your boss, perhaps this emotion will provide you with energy to search for a new job so you don’t have to work with him any longer.

Emotions are messengers that provide useful information. Feeling emotions is one of the most important steps to releasing them from your body; but in order to feel and work with the emotion, it’s helpful to understand its purpose.

Here are additional steps I recommend - grounded in somatics - to work with and release emotions held in your body.

Somatics for Emotional Intelligence

1. Focus on feeling your body because that’s where emotions reside. They’re visceral experiences, rather than something that you can understand or experience through your mind alone.

When you’re sad, tears well up in your eyes and your shoulders likely round forward and in. When you’re angry, you might feel hot and energized. When you’re glad, you likely feel a softening and opening across your chest. Emotions are somatic, occurring in your body.

2. Cultivate a daily embodied mindfulness practice to strengthen the connection between your mind and body.

This practice takes 10 minutes and is described here.

3. When you’re noticing a change in how you’re feeling, give yourself 1 minute to just feel the sensations that arise in your body.

Breathe through them and notice what happens after that minute.

4. After an emotion arises, notice what action you feel like taking. Don’t necessarily take that action, just notice it.

Because emotions predispose us to act in a certain way, it’s helpful to acknowledge what that action is without following through. Emotions can serve as guides for our behavior, but it’s judicious to let the intensity of an emotion pass before we decide how to act that’s in the best interest of ourselves and others.

5. Thank your emotions.

Emotions communicate wisdom to us. The more we welcome and appreciate our emotions, the more accessible this wisdom becomes.

6. Consider somatic coaching or craniosacral therapy for additional support.

Somatic coaching leverages the mind-body connection as a way to create change in your life. If you’d like to work through unprocessed emotions that are stored in your body, and if you’re in the Greater Seattle area, then consider craniosacral therapy.

At the very least, remember that changing your relationship to emotions is at the heart of most personal and leadership development.

Dogs are incredible teachers of how to release emotions from your body. Unlike most humans, dogs are connected to their emotions and communicative about how they’re feeling. As a result, they don’t suppress their emotions and store them inside. Us humans could take some notes from our furry friends.