Episode 4: Emotional Alchemy; The Importance of Processing and Softening into Emotional Release.

Hello and welcome to the Body Rhythm Podcast, and today gonna be talking about all things emotional body, emotional experiences, and how does that impact our ability to move through life in a way that. Feels good. That is nourishing to the body and to our soul. And our spirit. And really, I was thinking about this because I saw a trailer for a movie called G 20 with Viola Davis, who looks amazing.

She's kicking ass. She's a tough, strong woman. And um. It just got me thinking. 'cause I think this is really what we're seeing in culture, in movies is this image of tough, strong women kicking ass and you know, that's wonderful. But there are so many more experiences. And qualities that women have that aren't attached to kicking ass, basically.

masculine and feminine, yin and yang, these are the masculine and feminine energies, and you can't have one without the other. I. And I think a lot [00:02:00] of the messages that we're receiving from culture is that you have to be a super woman without emotions, or the only emotion that you can have is to kick ass, go get it done, and then go have a drink with your friends at the bar and I don't think that that's realistic for most of us as we're living in our day to day experience. Women, we are unique creatures our physiology is unique, right? It's not male phy physiology, which has its own uniqueness, but there is a clear difference there and our Physiology affects our emotional experience, [00:03:00] and each of our emotional experiences is unique.

Your emotional experience is different from mine, and our experiences are different day to day, moment to moment, month to month. Year to year,

 A few weeks ago I was at the Holocaust Museum in LA and went to go see a talk by a holocaust. Survivor, who was eight years old at the time of the Holocaust, and she was talking about her dad was gone and it was her and her mom, and they were on a march from [00:04:00] Hungary to Germany, and during this march her mom was taken and shot.

And killed. And she spoke about how she was just crying because her mom was gone. And she said there was another woman who was on the march who said, I'll take care of you. Come sleep with me. And, and then as she got to the camp, there were other women, women there who said, you can sleep with me. I'll take care of you.

Women that she would go to for comfort and nurturing. And then when the camp was liberated, she went to Sweden and was at a school and she spoke of the woman there who took care of her, her nurtured her, who was like her second mother. And [00:05:00] I really got to thinking, because these qualities, of love and nurturing and caretaking have really, I feel been put on the back burner as not important.

It's being told to us that these qualities aren't as important as achievement as kickass mode. Right. I can't remember the last movie that I saw where you had a strong mother figure who was nurturing and loving to her kids.. I think a lot of things that I've seen lately is like the parents are kind of sarcastic to the kids or more, so go get lost.

But, um, this kind of reminded me of the Mary Magdalene archetype, which is the archetype of a woman of love and compassion and redemption and archetypes really are representations of aspects of who we are. But those representations we might have qualities of, or they might exist outside of us. And so when I think about Mary Magdalene or what this woman experienced on her journey, I feel that we're missing in society.

That we're missing in our day-to-day experience. The feminine energy, the yen energy, that coolness, that peace, tranquility, compassion, nurturing, caring, those qualities aren't currently valued by the culture. But those qualities are necessary for how we process our own emotional experience. Think about it, if we're always in the masculine mode of do, do, do, of kick ass, of never taking a break, then we're not giving yourself any room to process the emotions.

We're not giving yourself any grace to feel the qualities that the emotion is bringing to our life experience.

And it's an honor. It's an honor to be a woman. It's an honor to be able to have these qualities of. Beauty and softness and nurturing and loving. It's an honor to be compassionate, even when life is asking you to eat shit. When it seems like everything is going against you. It really is an honor to be a woman and to bring these qualities into the world.

When we are emotionally unhealthy. We become rigid. I don't know if you can think of time when you've had a lot going on, maybe a very stressful situation. The natural inclination is to become more [00:09:00] tense, more rigid. If you've ever noticed when you're stressed, maybe you have a little bit more aches and pains, maybe you have a little bit more back pain, maybe a, some tightness in the shoulders and the neck, and that's the stress response, trying to get through the situation.

But then that turns off our tendency to feel. And so because we're just trying to get through whatever that situation is, the emotions get turned off. They get pushed down into what I call the void, that black pit of doom in the subconscious that. We push everything down that we don't wanna deal with. 'cause it takes energy to feel sensation. It takes courage to bring up things that don't feel good. And sometimes we don't have the capacity in that moment to feel the emotions. My. Dad, this past year and a half has been going through his cancer journey, and as I'm with him at the emergency room or in the hospital or talking to the doctors, that's not a good time to deal with the emotions, right?

I'm just trying to get things done to get the testing done, to see what's happening, what are the next steps, so. Feeling emotions, that's not the good time to do it. The the time to do it is when I'm able to take some time for myself away from the situation or after the situation has passed, and give myself time to sit and engage the senses.

If we've been under chronic stress for years and years or months and months, and we've just gotten used to pushing down the emotion to pushing it off to the side, and then the thought of bringing any of that stuff up can just be too overwhelming to deal with. So you just let it kind of sit there and sit there.

And sit there. But when we don't or can't work with our emotions, when we can't feel our emotions, then our emotional body isn't healthy.

But when we are emotionally healthy, we are able to feel things more. We can feel things more, even the hard things, but the hard things don't stay with us as long. When we're emotionally unhealthy is when you might get attached to the feeling or the situation and keep dwelling on it, and dwelling on it, and dwelling on it.

When you're depressed or feeling down, have you ever noticed that you might stay in that emotional state for a long time and it's really hard to let it go? When we're emotionally healthy, we can feel these emotions and we're not stuck with them as long we're able to let them go a little bit sooner. We don't hold on to that emotion,

and because we don't hold on to that emotion, we become more calm, we become more stable, we become more resilient. We expand our capacity, our threshold, our container of how much we can handle before we numb out and just crash.

So how do we know if we are emotionally unhealthy? Well, one way is by noticing how does the body feel? You know, there's that popular book called Your Body Keeps the Score,, and that's because the body absolutely is a gateway into what is happening in the emotional body. The body is always speaking to us.

If we have shoulder pain, if we have back pain, even if we have digestive issues, are we hearing what the body is telling us? Sometimes we're so distracted by what life? It is throwing at us that we are missing all of these cues, or we're telling ourselves that these cues aren't important. Yes, I have this back pain and it's really bad and it's bothering me every day, but I'm not gonna do anything about it.

I'm just going to keep going, going, going. Or I have this kink in my neck and it's really bothersome, but I have all this other stuff I gotta do. I'm not going to try and address it. And really what's happening is in the body, the motions are getting stuck, and that's where movement comes in. That's where yoga comes in. That's where breathing comes in, because it begins to move some of the emotions through the body to get unstuck.

But this also requires us to look at how we treat ourselves. How do we allow ourselves to be held? How do we allow our body to become a place of love and compassion and kindness? And nurturing and caring for ourselves, first and foremost before we turn around and give it to others. And when you begin to pay attention to yourself, when you begin to pay attention to. Your body, you begin to heal.

It takes deep listening, especially when we are in a culture where listening is not valued. We have screens. Everything is a distraction. The tv, all the alerts on the phone, all of the shows on Netflix. Everything is a distraction. If we have kids, we're taking them to all of their activities. If we are married, we have our husbands, our spouses to worry about and take care of, and we really put our own needs on the back burner.

But when we begin to listen. To the body, to what the body is telling us. It has its own natural intelligence. It knows what it needs to heal. It just needs the space to do it. It needs the ease and the rest to do it. It needs our attention.

Prana is called Life Force Life Energy. It is the energy of life that exists before you take the breath.

Without prana, there is no life experience, prana, our life energy has the power to resolve and absolve. Blockages pranayama breath work. It's moving the energy of life throughout the body, and that has the power to remove some of these places of tension and stress and dis-ease within the body about. 10 years or so ago, I was at a retreat in Spain and I had a lot on my plate at the time.

And, um, I was suffering from sciatica for a couple of weeks before I went to this retreat. And um, the woman who was facilitating the breath work said, do some breath work. It's gonna resolve the pain for you. And I looked at her like she was crazy. 'cause I had done everything. I had done my yoga asana. I had done some meditation.

I was moving, I was walking, nothing was touching the sciatica. So I ended up doing probably three to four sessions of breath work. And the sciatica was gone. I felt wonderful for over a year before the stress in my lower back came back. But then I began to notice that whenever I am stressed, the pain in my lower back starts to act up.

And if I don't take care of it, if I let the stress continue, then I begin to notice that the sciatica starts to act up. So Prana is movement. Emotion is movement. Tears are movement. Anger is movement. All of the things that we need to feel to work with our emotional body is movement.

And when we begin to move emotion, the rib cage begins to open up. The heart moves up, the long tissue expands. The ama or the toxins begin to move from the tissues and be released through the body.

And how so how do we begin to explore the emotional body? think it begins with a question of what have you not been wanting to feel,

and if you were to feel that emotion, what would happen? What thoughts might arise? You know, we go through life and we wish that everything would sort of just be wonderful and great all the time. But I don't know about your life experience, but my insured hasn't been like that, and I think it can be really easy to get stuck, especially when bad things happen. Things that we don't understand happen when. We experience something so traumatic that it's easier to just push the experience down, to push the emotions down, and that serves us in that time. ' cause that's how we make it to the next day. That's how we make it to the next month. That's how we make it to the next year.

But when we get into that pattern of that's how we live life, then we're begin to close yourself off from our emotional experience. Because if we don't process the emotion, the emotion that we don't wanna feel, then we can't experience all of the highs that life has as well. All of the joys and the happiness.

If we don't experience sadness, then we can't experience joy. And I don't know about you, but I really wanna experience joy. I really wanna experience happiness. I really wanna experience elation, but we can't know what those. Feelings with those qualities feel like if we haven't also allowed ourself to experience the lows,if we haven't allowed ourselves to experience devastation or sadness or hate. If we don't experience hate, how can we know what love is? And I really think that's where the work is.

That is the uniqueness of our emotional experience. Right. When was the last time that you ever heard a man talk about his emotional experience? I'm gonna say probably never, and I think that's beautiful. Uh, can we allow ourselves to open up more into the unique power of women to heal yourself, to heal our emotional self, to heal our physical self? We experience joint pain, back pain, digestive problems. Headaches, depression, fear, doubt. All of these are manifestations of emotions that haven't been resolved yet. Recognizing the emotion, giving a name to the emotion, processing it, and then letting it go. But we also need to have Agni, a digestive fire that allows us to transform that allows us to metabolize the emotion because we have to be able to let it go. And so what are some things to begin to create a bigger container a, a bigger threshold dancing. I love throwing on my favorite music and just dancing. Being out in nature, knowing that you're supported by something bigger than yourself, yoga, any type of movement, a nice walk outside.

All of these things, all of these practices begin to allow us to create a bigger emotional containerso that we can begin to process the emotion in a more healthy way.Being emotionally healthy is how we begin to create resilience.Because what I've seen is that life is a series of ups and downs, and maybe they're not yours, but they're your friends or in your family,and we have to be more pliableso that we can continue to move forward. In life, in our life experience in a way that feels good, in a way that allows us to deepen our connection with ourselves and with our friends and family and with God. My hope is that we can begin to recognize the uniqueness, unique qualities that women bring to our human existence and value them just as much as we value the power and the aggressiveness and the go get-it-ness and. That more fiery type energy because that's just important in our life experience as well. I hope this has sparked something in you about your emotional body and your emotional health.

Have a wonderful day. Thank you for joining me on this episode of The Body Rhythm. Be well and nourished.