Increasing Emotional Wisdom and Our Capacity To Feel
Increasing Emotional Wisdom and Our Capacity To Feel
Our emotions are vital, and yet we have deep set cultural myths that often prevent us from feeling, expressing, and releasing our emotions. What if the path to healing wasn't learning to "control" or "manage" our emotions, but instead learn to expand our capacity to feel intensity without betraying our self-trust?
The Messages of Emotions
Our emotions are an integral part of our human experience. However, we've been conditioned to believe that some emotions are "good" while others are "bad," and we should suppress the latter. What if all emotions were vital messages for us? Messages that were leading us along the path of growth and transformation.
Emotional Resistance
We often pathologize ourselves, seeing our emotions as something that needs to be fixed or managed. This cultural myth creates a massive barrier to emotional wisdom and growth. We've been taught that managing emotions is a sign of emotional intelligence, but I believe that expanding our emotional capacity is the true measure of emotional intelligence. By learning to hold space for all our emotions without judgment, we can experience greater depth and healing.
Emotions Stuck In The Body
Emotions are embodied, somatic experiences. Think about when we feel anger and our skin gets warm, or when we feel love and get butterflies in our stomach. Emotions are sensations, and when we don’t allow ourselves to experience them, they can get stuck in the body and manifest in unexpected or undesirable ways. Most of us experience some degree of emotional resistance, and this resistance is normal and valid. But taken to an extreme, when we push down or resist our emotions consistently, they can manifest as extreme emotional or physical experiences.
When we resist our emotions, they tend to persist and intensify. In this episode we discuss some of the ways we can learn to release resistance around our emotions, so we can feel them without judgment or suppression.
“The emotion is not the block, it’s the medicine”
What You’ll learn in this episode:
Two ways emotions can get stuck in the body
How to release resistance around our emotions
The top 3 cultural myths we have around our emotions
Why we pathologize ourselves and how we can care for our big emotions differently
“The more we try to distance ourselves from certain experiences that we label as “pathological” vs. “normal”, the more we distance ourselves from parts of our humanity. ”
DEPTH Work - A Holistic Mental Health Podcast
This is a space for those who love to dive into the underbelly, to revel in the mystery, question assumptions about what is normal, play in the both/and, and honor the wide range of human emotions.
As a complex trauma survivor, holistic counsellor and co-founder of a mental health institute, I learned that there is immense wisdom in our pain and what we call crazy is just what we are yet not willing to understand and explore. Let’s dive in!
Links:
1:1 Holistic Counseling Sessions - https://www.jazminerussell.com/my-practice-1
Breathwork Sessions - https://www.jazminerussell.com/breathwork-sessions
Energy Healing Sessions - https://www.jazminerussell.com/energy-healing
Research
46 Percent Of Americans Will Meet The Criteria For A Diagnosable Mental Health Condition Sometime In Their Life https://mhanational.org/mentalhealthfacts
GROUNDING PRACTICES:
FOR ALLEVIATING FEAR, ANXIETY & DISSOCIATION
12 SIMPLE GROUNDING PRACTICES TO HELP YOU COME BACK TO YOUR BODY
