Emotions – How To Understand, Identify and Release Your Emotions

  By Mary Kurus

Copyright Mary Kurus 2003

All Rights Reserved

  ·       Why Bother With Emotions:

  Emotions control your thinking, behavior and actions.  Emotions create illness.  Emotions affect your physical bodies as much as your body affects your feelings and thinking.  People, who ignore, dismiss, repress or just ventilate their emotions, are setting themselves up for physical illness.  Emotions that are not felt and released but buried within the body or in the aura can cause serious illness, including cancer, arthritis, and many types of chronic illnesses.  Negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, negativity, frustration, depression cause chemical reactions in your body that are very different from the chemicals released when you feel positive emotions such as happy, content, loved, accepted.  Repressed emotions lower your vibrations.  It takes a lot of your vital energy to repress emotions and keep them repressed – and you wonder why you’re so tired?  This article deals with emotions, how to identify and release your emotions. 

  As a Vibrational Consultant I work with people who come for help because they are feeling ill, fatigued, depressed, or unhappy with their lives.  They want the vibrational medicines I make called Choming Essences to heal them so they can become healthy, energetic, and able to live vibrant lives.  And Choming Essences do this for people.  They cleanse deeply, raise your vibrations to an optimum level so that toxins, parasites, worms, viruses, infectious bacteria, fungus overgrowths such as candida, and metal, chemical and atomic poisons are eliminated, releasing your vital energy to its highest frequency.  Parasites, viruses, candida, all types of invaders, cannot live in a high vibration.  But emotional issues can affect your health as much as physical or energetic issues.  Choming Essences also help you to know and release your emotions. 

  For additional information on Vibrational Healing, please visit my website at www.mkprojects.com.   Choming Essences are the pure vibrations of plants, flowers, herbs, grasses, trees, gems and crystals.  If emotions are not dealt with in a healthy manner, the wonderful benefits of Choming Essences will gradually fade away and those old complaints of lethargy, fatigue, depression, indigestion problems, and many other symptoms, will return.

  ·       What Are Emotions – Feelings?

  Different people define emotions in different ways. Some make a distinction between emotions and feelings saying that a feeling is the response part of the emotion and that an emotion includes the situation or experience, the interpretation, the perception, and the response or feeling related to the experience of a particular situation.  For the purposes of this article, I use the terms interchangeably.

  John D. (Jack) Mayer says, “Emotions operate on many levels.  They have a physical aspect as well as a psychological aspect.  Emotions bridge thought, feeling, and action – they operate in every part of a person, they affect many aspects of a person, and the person affects many aspects of the emotions.”

  Dr. Maurice Elias says, “Emotions are human beings’ warning systems as to what is really going on around them.  Emotions are our most reliable indicators of how things are going on in our lives.  Emotions help keep us on the right track by making sure that we are led by more than the mental/ intellectual faculties of thought, perception, reason, memory.”

  ·       Belief Systems

  Underlying much of our behavior is what is called a belief system.  This system within us filters what we see and hear, affecting how we behave in our daily lives.  There are many other elements that affect our lives, including past lives and the core issues we come into this life for resolution, but our belief systems in this life have a major effect on what we think and do.

  Your belief system affects your perceptions or how you interpret what you see, hear and feel.  For example, a person raised by an angry man or woman will view people in the future with beliefs that anger is bad or that it is something to fear.  Another example would be someone who is quite intelligent but who has never been encouraged or honored for their intelligence, this person might believe they are stupid.  Men raised in conservative societies might have the belief that women who work outside of the home are not as good as those who do not work outside of the home. 

  It takes a lot of work to look at yourself and identify the beliefs that are affecting your life in a negative manner.  However, knowing your beliefs will give you a sound basis for emotional freedom.  I do believe that it’s wise to deal with the belief systems before dealing with the identification and release of emotions.  First things first!

·       Other People, Places, and Things Cannot Change How You Feel

  The only person who can change what you feel is you.  A new relationship, a new house, a new car, a new job, these things can momentarily distract you from your feelings, but no other person, no material possession, no activity can remove, release, or change how you feel. 

  How often do you hear people say things like “when I have enough money, I won’t be afraid anymore”, only to find there never seems to be enough money to stop being afraid.   Or “when I’m in a secure relationship I won’t feel lonely any more”, and finding they are still lonely regardless of their relationship.   We need to understand that we take our feelings with us wherever we go.  A new dress, a new house, a new job, none of these things change how we feel.  Our feelings remain within us until we release them. 

·       Emotions Are Not the Only Cause of Illness

  Emotions are not the only cause of illness.  Little babies and young children get ill, and not always because of their emotional issues.  There are many causes of illness including emotions, but they are not the sole cause of illness. 

  The causes of illness today are quite different from the issues causing illness 20 or 30 years ago.  We are living in a world filled with chemical, metal, and atomic poisons, radiation, pollution, and pesticides in our food.  We are bombarded with all types of electricity. These energies affect the physical, mental/ intellectual, energetic and emotional health of people. 

 As we travel more, moving with ease from country to country, different types of infection causing elements are spreading around the world more easily. Infections of parasites, worms, viruses, and different types of infectious bacteria are many times greater than 20 years ago.  Our water supplies are filled with chemicals and metals.  The benefits of antibiotics have also brought with them the difficulty of the candida fungus overgrowth and other physical and emotional difficulties.  The causes of illness today are different.

  ·       Two Basic Emotions In Life – Love and Fear

 There are only two basic emotions that we all experience, love and fear.  All other emotions are variations of these two emotions.  Thoughts and behavior come from either a place of love, or a place of fear.  Anxiety, anger, control, sadness, depression, inadequacy, confusion, hurt, lonely, guilt, shame, these are all fear-based emotions.  Emotions such as joy, happiness, caring, trust, compassion, truth, contentment, satisfaction, these are love-based emotions. 

  There are varying degrees of intensity of both types of emotions, some being mild, others moderate, and others strong in intensity.  For example, anger in a mild form can be felt as disgust or dismay, at a moderate level can be felt as offended or exasperated, and at an intense level can be felt as rage or hate. And the emotion that always underpins anger is fear.

  ·       Physical Effects of Emotions

  Emotions have a direct effect on how our bodies work.  Fear-based emotions stimulate the release of one set of chemicals while love-based emotions release a different set of chemicals.  If the fear-based emotions are long-term or chronic they damage the chemical systems, the immune system, the endocrine system and every other system in your body.  Our immune systems weaken and many serious illnesses set in.  This relationship between emotions, thinking, and the body is being called Mind/Body Medicine today.

·       You Cannot Control Your Emotions

  You cannot change or control your emotions.  You can learn how to be with them, living peacefully with them, transmuting them (which means releasing them), and you can manage them, but you cannot control them.

  Think of the people who go along day after day seeming to function normally,  and all of a sudden they will explode in anger at something that seems relatively trivial and harmless.  That is one sign of someone who is trying to control or repress their emotions but their repressed emotions are leaking out.

  The more anyone tries to control their emotions the more they resist control, and the more frightened people eventually become at what is seen to be a “loss of emotional control”.  It is a vicious circle.

  It’s important today to be politically correct.  And that means not challenging or disagreeing with what the average person believes.   It means not expressing negative emotions in public.  Showing emotion in public in North American and European societies represents being “out of control” a great sign of weakness.  People feel uncomfortable with those who express strong emotions.  We are a society that is taught to hide our emotions, to be ashamed of them or to be afraid of them.   Regardless, we are born with them and must live with them.  This means learning how to know them, be with them, and release them.

·       The Difference Between Core Issues and Emotions

  We each come into this lifetime with at least one core issue to resolve.  Different situations will continue to present themselves in different but repeat patterns until you have dealt with the core issues in your life. 

   A few examples of core issue are abandonment / victimization, demanding justice in all matters, living spiritually rather than materially.  These are overarching issues that affect emotions completely.  Many people find out about their core issues by learning to deal with their emotions.  It is a gentle pathway that leads you into a deeper knowing of your core issues.

  ·       Emotions and Emotional Abuse

  Emotional Abuse is a form of violence in relationships.  Emotional abuse is just as violent and serious as physical abuse but is often ignored or minimized because physical violence is absent.  Emotional Abuse can include any or all of the following elements.  It can include rejection of the person or their value or worth.  Degrading an individual in any way is emotionally abusive, involving ridiculing, humiliating and insulting behavior.  Terrorizing or isolating a person is deeply abusive and happens to children, adults, and often the elderly.  Exploiting someone is abusive.  Denying emotional responses to another is deeply abusive.  The “silent treatment” is a cruel way of controlling people and situations.  Where there is control there is no love, only fear. 

  If you are living in a situation that is emotionally abusive please seek help from either a professional or one of the many helpful organizations present in most communities, to help you sort out your issues.  Emotions stemming from emotional abuse are deep and complex, requiring ongoing help from those trained to deal with emotional abuse.

  ·       “Go South” – Feeling Your Feelings

  People spend much time talking about how they feel.  They attend workshops, they visit therapists, and they tell others who did what to them and describe how they feel about it.  They talk and talk about their feelings but they don’t feel their feelings.  They intellectualize and analyze their feelings without feeling them. 

  People are afraid to really feel their feelings, afraid of losing control, afraid of the pain involved in feeling their emotions, of feeling the sense of loss or failure or whatever the emotion brings with it.   People are afraid to cry.  So much of life is about what you feel rather than what you think.  Being strongly connected to your emotional life is essential to living a life with high energy and a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.

  I was privileged to work with a professional many years ago when I was learning about my emotional self.  I remember the day Fred told me that he knew what I thought about the situation, and then asked me “How did it feel?”  I was smiling as long as I was providing a description of the situation.  As soon as I looked for the feelings inside of me I began to cry.  It did not feel very good.  I was hurting.  Fred used a term “Go South” to help me go to my feelings rather than an intellectual approach.  He used to tell me to “Go South”.  Many of our feelings reside in our midriff and navel area.  Today I will often tell myself to “Go South” Mary, meaning, “How does it really feel Mary”?

·       How We Repress Emotions

  When we have an experience that we find painful or difficult, and are either unable to cope with the pain, or just afraid of it, we often dismiss this emotion and either get busy, exercise more, drink or eat a bit more, or just pretend it has not happened.  When we do this we do not feel the emotion and this results in what is called repressed, suppressed or buried emotions. These feelings stay in our muscles, ligaments, stomach, midriff, auras.  These emotions remain buried within us until we bring that emotion up and feel the emotion, thus releasing it.  Emotions that are buried on the long-term are the emotions that normally cause physical illness.

  The following are a few examples of the methods people use to avoid feeling their emotions.

·       Symptoms of Repressed Emotions

  It takes a lot of energy to keep emotions repressed and buried.  If you keep emotions buried for a long period of time, you lower your overall vibrations, and lower vibrations lead to illness and an accelerated ageing process.  Buried emotions create fatigue and depression.  The following are some major symptoms of buried and repressed emotions.

·       Effects of Repressed or Buried Emotions

  Repressed or buried emotions can cause major difficulties in the physical body and energetic systems.  They affect all your relationships, and they especially affect your ability to grow spiritually and shift your level of consciousness. 

  Emotions repressed for the long-term can caused serious illness including cancer, arthritis, chronic fatigue, and many other major health problems.  Since repressed emotions can rest either in your body or auras, they can cause holes in your auras, through which your energy leaks out and creating fatigue,  a sense of vulnerability, and low self-confidence.

 When you have repressed emotions, your behavior and reactions to events in the present moment are really reactions to past events as well as the present.  This has a negative effect on all relationships in your life.  You cannot be fully present with those you love in today until you have released your emotions from the past.  You buried emotions because they were too painful and difficult to deal with when they occurred and your reactions to today’s events are affected by this pain and hurt that remains buried in your body.

  It takes a lot of energy to bury emotions and to keep them buried.   There isn’t much energy left over for other activities when your energy is being used to keep stuffing these emotions back down.  By nature, buried emotions want to come up so you can become aware of them, feel them and release them.  You work very hard to keep them stuffed down.

  Our real purpose in being on Mother Earth is to keep increasing our level of consciousness and living a more spiritual or love-based life.  The higher the consciousness someone has, the higher degree of spirituality in his or her life.  The higher the spirituality the closer we are to being what we are meant to be, a fully integrated and loving human being.  You cannot shift to higher levels of consciousness as long as you have major negative emotions buried within you.

  ·     Committing To Emotional Health 

    People who make a deep commitment to themselves to become emotionally healthy are willing to go to great lengths to learn about their emotional selves and to do what is required to release buried emotions. This is often an uncomfortable and difficult journey when you begin, but I promise you great joy once you’ve gotten over the first few hurdles. Once you make this commitment your journey to identify your issues and release buried emotions will become much easier.

  ·       Methods To Identify Your Emotions

  Emotions are reliable indicators of what is really going on inside of us.  There are many ways to identify emotions and you will have to choose the manner that is most suitable to your personality.  Some people need to do this in solitude whereas others need to do this with others.  Some will want to write while others will use a much more casual approach.  Sometimes it’s best to combine a number of approaches for a deeper identification of emotions.

  The following are a few methods you can use to identify what you are really feeling about a person, place, situation or thing.  Identifying your emotions is the first step to a rich and healthy emotional life.  Use a number or all of these methods.  Find the ones that suit you and use them to help you in your journey towards emotional health.

  Awareness is the first step of change!  

A good example of this is the difference between jealousy and envy.  Jealousy relates to being resentful of a person’s advantages be they in social standing, education, profession, or it can relate to resentment of a rival in love or affection.  Envy is a discontentment or resentment aroused by another’s good fortune or success.

Try to identify the times when your excessive behavior was triggered and, as soon as you can, identify the emotion that is causing this behavior.  It can be stress or fear related to a new job, the death of a friend or partner, difficulties with lovers or children.  Document these emotions as best as you can.  We never do anything without getting something from it.  There is a reason why you are engaged in excessive or compulsive behavior.

Identify those situations where you have created depressing feelings within yourself by agreeing to something that makes you don’t really agree with.  Write them down.  This will be difficult for people who have difficulty saying no, or who are too anxious to please others.  But the feelings generated by these situations are very important when dealing with your emotional life.   Many times we need to excuse things and just overlook them.  That’s normal in life.  But we apply this to situations that affect us deeply.  It’s these situations we need to  identify.

There is a very special time just as you are waking up in the morning but before you are fully awake.  This is the time zone when you can often hear your sub-conscious speaking to you.  Listen to your thoughts at this time carefully and you will pick up important messages, messages that can help you to identify your emotions, even your core issues.

·        Crying About Your Experience:  Crying is a normal releasing function for each human being.  We are born with this ability because through crying we release pain, hurt, and associated stress.  Please begin to cry about whatever hurts you.

Crying or writing and crying about what has happened to you can help you sort out your experience and understand it.  And understanding is crucial for many people.  If you have had a very painful experience, write one sentence and sit with this sentence and cry.  Then write another sentence and sit and cry.  In time this process will relieve some of the sensitive pain around your experience and eventually make it endurable.  With time, the pain around the situation will lesson, as long as you allow yourself to feel it.

We need friends who love us and care about us, especially when we are hurting.  And usually this is not the time when you could say we are at our best.  Tell your friends about what hurts you.  Feel their comfort and love.  Make sure they understand you may not want advice on how to resolve your issues.  What we all need is a loving ear to listen to us with their heart.  We need loving friends in our lives.  Many people pay for a therapist to listen to them because they cannot tell their friends about their experiences.  Take the risk and share these happenings and your feelings with close friends whom you can trust.

·       How To Release Emotions 

Don’t be afraid of your emotions.  Don’t fight them, run away from them, and block them out.  Welcome them, be with them, regardless of what they are.  We were born with all emotions.  They are neither good or bad, they just are.  Emotions dissipate and slowly disappear if you feel them, and are present with them.   Just close your eyes and feel them as deeply as you can.

I have repeatedly found when working with clients that their repressed emotions began to surface once they had eliminated their parasites, candida, toxins, metal and chemical poisons, and all things not natural to the physical and energetic body.  A Detoxification Program with Choming Essences can eliminate all “invaders”.  It seems that once these “invaders” are eliminated and the body is deeply cleansed of toxins and poisons, emotions rise to the surface much more easily.  These “invaders” can be part of repressing emotions.  To learn more about vibrational healing with Choming Essences, please visit my website at www.mkprojects.com.

The following are a few questions you can ask yourself when deciding what response would suit a particular situation best – and each emotion, each situation is different.  *Am I reacting to this situation or is this reaction partially a reaction to a past situation as well?  *Am I able to discuss the issues with the person without venting anger?  *Will I be able to talk about how I feel to the person?  *Is a direct approach the best way to proceed?  *What are the consequences of dealing directly with the person/ situation?  *What do I expect from this discussion?  *Are my expectations realistic?  *Should I discuss this with someone before doing anything? 

By asking these questions you will be deciding whether a direct approach is the best approach, and if so if you are ready do this at the present time.  If your anger is at a “rage” stage, you need to release some of this anger before proceeding to discuss this with anyone.

Secrets are shame-based and incidents kept secret or feelings hidden from others will make these feelings deeper and longer lasting.  Emotional secrets lead to emotional and mental illness.

Then slowly look for the emotion, find where it is buried in your body.  All repressed emotions rest in your body and at times in the aura as well.  Anger rests around your belly button area but it can also be seen as a black thread-like substance all through the body.  Sadness sits in the midriff area.  Emotions can rest anywhere in your body including the muscles, ligaments, in bone joints.  Take your time, find your emotion.

Then take time to really see what this emotion looks like.  I had a huge amount of sadness and when I finally found it I saw that it was the shape of a large mass of clouds, clouds so dense and thick that you couldn’t begin to even dent them.  These clouds were a very dark gray color.

Once you have found your emotion, and described it to yourself, stay with it, hold it, be with it.  Do not try to do anything to it – VERY IMPORTANT - just be with it.  By being with it you begin to integrate this emotion into your very consciousness and this is the next step in releasing your emotion.  As you go back to visit your buried emotion week after week you will find the shape getting smaller and smaller, until eventually it just disappears.  It takes many months to transmute an emotion in this way, but it is a powerful manner to release emotions. This is what is meant by “transmuting emotions”. 

Pray for the person you are resenting.  Wish for this person every wonderful thing you would want to have in your most perfect life.  Wish them blessing and good fortune in all things.  In time, this type of a prayer will release you from your resentment.  This is difficult. 

You can also write about this person.  Write all the negative qualities you see in this person.  Then write about all the positive qualities you see in this person.  Eventually, by writing about the different qualities, a shift will occur within you, bringing you peace of mind.

You can write about the situation, what the person did to you and how it affected you, how it made you feel.  Write about how you reacted to this situation, what you said and what you did.  When we accept responsibility for our own behavior, the resentment often disappears.

There is one thing that I have included in my prayers for many years, asking for a grateful heart.  In my late 20s, I was in deep emotional pain and did not believe life was worth living.  I was taught to look for things in my life that I could be grateful for, regardless of the difficulty.  It was  hard to do this when I was in such emotional pain, but it was essential to my healing.  This prayer for a grateful heart has stayed with me for the past 30 years.  And today I do have a grateful heart.  Being very human, it disappears at times, but it returns when my energy goes there.

Once you have relaxed, feel your heart, be with your heart.  Then go out into the Universe, and visit the stars and the spaces between the stars, until you find that sacred place, the Heart of the Universe.  Approach it slowly, respectfully and with humility.  Then ask that the love of the Universal Heart be more deeply connected with your heart, and that your heart be filled with the love of the Universe.  Stay with this for as long as you can.  Feel the love of this Universal Heart.  Once you feel your heart has received the love it needs at this time, thank the Universal Heart for sharing its love with you and slowly open your eyes and come back into the present moment.

We need to ask!

Over time, this meditation will expand your ability to love more deeply, shifting out the negative emotions.  It’s a powerful meditation.

Fears are tricky things.  There are some that you need to ignore and just act as if you were not afraid.  Fore example, if you’re afraid to say no, your fear will leave as you begin to say no when you need to say no.  At times it’s like exercising a muscle.  The more you use it the easier it gets.  Other fears are a healthy warning that something is very wrong.  For example, a person might be afraid of another person.  This fear might be the signal to avoid that person, to leave the relationship. 

As you become aware of your fears and own them to be truly yours, a day will come when you will notice that one of them has somehow disappeared.  That’s the way it is with fear.  As you live a life in tune with your emotions, a life focused on coming from that place of love,  you will find that many of your fears will just disappear.

·       Conclusion

·        Living In Peace:  Once you have completed the looking, the understanding, the releasing of your buried emotions, you may find you have become accustomed to being in a more intense emotional state.  The exercises above will heighten your overall emotionality.  If you are relatively certain you have done what can be done, make a decision to live in peace, at peace with yourself, and at peace with others.  You can decide this.  Avoid those situations that you know will create conflict and upsets.  You cannot change others, you can only change yourself.  There are times where it’s important to stand and fight.  It takes a lot of wisdom to “accept the things you cannot change, and change the things you can”.  Wisdom to know the difference brings peace of mind.