Inhabiting Your Body
You might reside in your thinking mind. It is easy to dissociate from your body because that is where all of your unprocessed life experiences are repressed. Breathing into your emotional pain unravels the emotional patterns that are packed into your body. When you are deeply present to what feels uncomfortable, your stored emotional pain begins to loosen and unravel. This unravelling process, while painful at first, eventually brings new love and light into your body.
Breathing through the emotional pain of your human experience is an initiation that makes more room for your soul to inhabit your body. As you surrender to what is arising for healing from your emotions, you will make room for your authentic essence to inhabit your body. As you dismantle the dysfunctional patterns that have dominated your life, you can enjoy creative freedom, effortless awareness, and an unconditional appreciation for life just as it is.
Surrendering to Negative Emotions
Try this meditation for about 15 minutes to begin with:
- Surrender to Painful Sensations: To stop resisting your emotions, move toward your strong sensations. You might even want to lie down in order to fully embrace your emotions. Watch your emotions move and shift. Surrender to them. When a new emotion arises, notice where it is, and how it feels in your body. Emotions transform when we kindly follow each new feeling without telling a "victim story."
2. Turn Toward Fear: To the protective ego, emotional pain feels like, “I am not going to survive....I might even die from this pain.” Instead of vacating your body in fear and avoidance, move toward your emotion with your whole heart. How is this emotion expressing in your body now? Do a body scan and gently touch the places in your body that hurt. Move your hands toward the pain in your body with love. It is also very helpful to tenderly say, "I love you" to each place that hurts.
3. Don't Try to Change Anything: Move in the direction of your emotional heaviness with curiosity. Breathe into your sensations even as they are discomforting. If you are kind to your emotions, they will eventually share a longing or need. Your emotions might even say, "I long to be loved as I am." In the process of surrender, we do not attempt to change our emotions at all. We observe them and allow them to reveal their longings.
4. Observe Each Emotion as it Shifts: To shed emotional layers, continually drop back into your body. Observe and be conscious of each emotion as it moves. Breathe into each new feeling as it arises. Repeat "I love you" to each emotional shift. Eventually, there will be no more layers to shed (at this time) and you will reach a good feeling.
5. Wait Until You Feel Good: If an emotion feels trapped in your body and is not moving, breathe your emotion out into the room. Give your emotions more space to transform. Let your emotion be in and all around you. When the good feeling finally emerges through this state of loving surrender, enjoy it for as long as you can. You have earned it!
6. Listen for Information: Emotions hold information about what needs to change. After you fully feel an emotion, it will reveal the limiting beliefs that need to be transformed. With "fresh space" in your body, you will likely receive insights about how to heal your pain. This benevolent emptiness creates new space to anchor higher intentions. Enjoy basking in the larger sense of presence that you have cultivated.
