Share This Article
Absolutely it’s important to not wallow for days and weeks in heavy feelings, as this keeps our vibration low for extended periods of time. Our mental and eventually physical health too will begin to suffer from holding this low vibration.
You May Also Like
At the same time though, we shouldn’t be all the way on the other end of the scale, i.e. forcing ourselves to be ‘happy high vibes always’.
As with everything, balance is key.
If we can allow the yucky feeling to be felt in our body, without attaching any story to it, this is the sweet spot, the healthy place to be in. I place of simply, compassionately holding space for any emotion to be felt. Giving it space – without judgment or attaching a story to it, will allow he emotion to move through and out of the body. Emptions are energy-in-motion, so once it is given spaciousness it will move through – as energy naturally does.
‘Good Vibes Only’ conditioning is preventing us from experiencing the healthy full range of human emotions.
There are also a variety of somatic practices one can do to help move this energy through, like breathwork, dance, art, to name a few.
It is estimated that an emotion will last no longer than 90 seconds, so long as you don’t – with your mind – bring it back. Which is to say you keep looping it back in. (loops like “Should have”, “Could have”, “Would have”)
So then, the key here is for your mind to remain out of the equation, and to just focus on how it FEELS. Does it have a warm feeling, a prickly one? Perhaps it feels hollow. Does it have a shape, a colour? How big is it?
If we can start to view these emotions simply as energy – we can be more compassionate to these states instead of trying to push them away.
If we keep stuffing them down – while painting a fake smile on our faces – we are only making matters worse.
The problem with false positivity is that it’s a form of avoidance, not a solution. We are sidestepping the real issues, the real feelings. By doing this we are denying our true emotions, masking them with a smile.
While it may feel good in the moment (you have sidestepped feeling icky) it’s not sustainable.
We can’t keep suppressing our emotions and expecting them to disappear. We can’t keep pretending that everything is okay when it’s not. These emotions will not simply go away, rather they will begin to fester and grow, until they become too big to ignore. This energy becomes stuck and blocked, and will begin to affect other areas, usually in the form of dis-ease.
Gabor Mate speaks on how his findings show that rage, panic and grief are the most suppressed emotions. And how the repression of these healthy emotions underly your very physiology.
‘Rage, panic and grief are the most suppressed human emotions. The repression of these healthy emotions underly your physiology.
Gabor Mate
Women for example push down their healthy anger. It is what we are societally conditioned to do. This can lead to autoimmune disease, cancer and neurological disease.
A study that followed 2000 women over a 10-year period, showed that those who were unhappily married and didn’t express these feelings of unhappiness were four times as likely to die as those women who were unhappily married but talked about their feelings.
Neuroscientist Dr Jaak Panksepp studied the neuroscience of emotions. He discovered that there are certain brain systems that we share with other mammals. These are associated with specific brain chemicals and circuits in the brain. Each of these emotions are necessary for mammalian life, all being vital parts of our apparatus.
It is time for us to stop pushing away emotions we deem ‘not worthy’ to be felt or expressed, and to instead start to integrate ALL the parts that make us whole and human. In healthy ways.
Let’s end the charade.
Stop pretending.
Stop putting on that brave face and feigning that everything is okay.
Instead let’s acknowledge our full range of true human emotions and work through them in a healthy way.
Let’s start being real with ourselves and each other and stop flying the ‘GOOD VIBES ONLY’ flag in our culture!
This I believe is the only way through to true happiness and peace.
