If you want to have a healthy, peaceful, and thriving inner-world, relationships, spiritual life, and creative/professional life, a regular conscious emotional release practice is essential. This means that when we are emotionally triggered, rather than turning to addictions, flight/fight/freeze, and other unhealthy coping mechanisms, we safely release the charge and upgrade our neurology as well as connection to life in the process. We come back to love, ease, flow and maturely address whichever relationships and issues are in need.
It’s excellent that people are using the Seven Emotional Release tools, and I also see some people misusing and abusing them. This includes loudly expressing in the presence of others as a form of attention-getting, overdoing it so that the voice is hoarse, or overstressing the nervous system. The misuse of these tools undermines the healing and empowerment that emotional release offers and can actually take you — and your relationships, spiritual life and creative/professional life — many steps backwards.
How can you ensure that you’re using the emotional release tools to their optimal benefit?
Have a clear intention for healing.
When you’re vibrating the emotional body, go in with the intention to move through the feelings, not endlessly spin in them. When you have a clear intention to get to the other side of the charge, you meet presence, ease and love. What I sometimes see is people misusing the Seven Tools to recirculate emotional energy and addictively indulge in their emotions, rather than moving through them. You are using them to release into ease, peace and wholeness, not to get off on your emotional drama.
Your emotional release practice is between you and yourself — it’s not a drama show.
While you may be incredibly triggered, it’s often not the right place to release emotions in a space with other people (especially those who have triggered you). Emotional expression is not a method for getting attention, punishing others, or monopolizing the space. Hand screams, power stomping, tantrums, grieving, and screaming in a shared space can cause a distraction which is often an attempt for attention and actually undermines power and healing. Be responsible and respectful. Unless you are in a space with others where there is an agreement field to use the tools together, take yourself to a private space and release emotion there. Using the silent tools are also useful for fully vibrating the emotional body without impacting, distracting or interrupting others.
If you need support or want to be witnessed, do it consciously with a direct request, rather than screaming and hoping someone will come help you.
Listen to your body’s signals and don’t push beyond your respectful limits.
Don’t push your body beyond its limits. Emotional release is intended as a healing practice, not one that further injures you. It’s intended to take you into your body, not out of it. Emotional release never needs to involve a hoarse throat or sore joints from pillow bashing or hand screaming. Again, using the Seven Tools silently, or doing them in slow motion can be just as effective. If you feel you still have more to go, you can always rest and come back to it later. This is about embodiment: listen to your body and don’t abuse it.
Let the rivers flow.
You know you’re vibrating your emotional body well when you can feel a release. Often this includes the movement of mucus, especially when there is intense sadness, grief or rage. So, let yourself cry and let the mucus come! You’re being unclogged.
Your body will tell you when you’ve released because you’ll feel it in your neurology and physiology. FEEL your BODY and listen to its messages.
Healing comes in subtlety.
Subtlety is crucial for effective emotional release. It’s often in the pauses and stillness that the inner movement and unclogging can really happen. The power of your release is not equal to the volume of your screaming or thrashing. Sometimes we need some of that dynamism to get things moving, and often it’s in the soft moans and sobs that our core releases, heals and integrates. This is slow somatic release and it supports your neurological reprogramming. Remember the intention of the emotional release: you’re here to integrate and come to wholeness and peace, not to test your highest decibel.
Let go of the baggage: Renew and upgrade.
Expressing and releasing means expressing what’s held within us and releasing it. When we’re vibrating our emotions through the body and coming into relaxed resolution, it’s a good time to breathe, feel, and examine our beliefs, judgments and telepathic agreements. Reset and upgrade the old neurology with more empowering beliefs, e.g. the belief that “it’s not safe to feel my feelings” is no longer true and my new experience is that “my feelings and emotions are powerful and beautiful and they affect every cell within me and the greater quantum field”.
To find out more about how to give yourself the tools and experiences that can reconnect consciousness to the emotions and body see www.ista.life and read the book Sacred Sexual Healing The Shaman Method of Sex Magic.