When we accept our emotions, we create an opportunity for them to come up and be released from our system. When we don’t offer the space that meditating with our emotions can provide, the emotion often becomes oppressed or suppressed, and it can wreak havoc in our system. Suppressing anger, for example, doesn’t release it. The anger is still there as a vibration. It still has attracting power, and it still affects our bodies, our minds, and our energy field.
By giving emotional space — which we can do in a meditation practice — we create the opportunity to release long-standing emotional patterns and habits and to become aware of what we’re currently feeling. We deepen our awareness of what’s going on within our own being. Our emotions can be many things, as we’ve been exploring in this series: they can be habits, vibrations, responses to the mind or to our hormones, a guidance system, or something we’re picking up from the energy field around us, our family, our neighbors, or our community. When we give the emotion space, we give ourselves space.Â
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Anyone who has had a bout of anger that lasted for days knows how exhausting that can be. After a couple of days of anger, you might feel depleted. Your body can feel fatigued or tight. And just because you’ve gotten used to feeling that way doesn’t mean it’s natural. It might feel normal to you, but it isn’t true to your authentic nature.
We know the impact emotions have on our bodies. Doctors tell us that stress kills, and much of our stress comes from emotional systems that we’re not dealing with or don’t know how to deal with. When we give ourselves emotional space — which we can do through meditation — we give ourselves a very healthy way to accept our emotions. We never want to make our emotions “wrong” simply because they exist. If you sit down and notice that what comes up is anger, you don’t want to condemn that anger. It is what it is. It exists as a vibration, as a frequency. Angry thoughts and feelings have a distinct feel, both in the body and in the energy field around us.
Sometimes anger is a long-standing pattern. Maybe you grew up in a household full of angry people, and the frequency of anger found a home in you. In that case, you’ll want to release it because you don’t need to hold or run frequencies that are not real and true for you — especially not real and true for who you are today. Other times, anger is an appropriate response. It may be part of your emotional guidance system telling you that something isn’t okay with you, whether it’s something you’ve done or something someone else has done. Once you receive and understand the message that something is not okay, you can then release the anger, because in that situation, anger is simply guidance.
When you provide yourself with emotional presence by giving your emotions space, you give yourself the opportunity to let them go in a healthy way. You can do this by taking a few minutes to sit with your emotions. Breathe into the emotion and allow it to just be. When you don’t condemn, judge, or overanalyze the emotion, you just let it be. You simply acknowledge: “I feel what I feel right now. This is what I’m feeling.”
As you breathe, feel how that emotion shows up in your body and in the space around you. Ask yourself: What does the space around me feel like? Is it heavy, like a wet blanket? Does it feel dark? Do I sense voices or a presence? What is actually going on with this emotion, such as anger? When we sit with it in this way, we simply observe it. That’s the first step. Observation is the first step to clearing, releasing, or healing something — simply by seeing it without judgment.
In the beginning, don’t put too much energy into figuring out where the emotion came from. Just be with it. Give it space. Let it come up and surround you. As you feel it in your body, breathe into the areas where you notice the emotion is affecting you — maybe your chest, shoulders, back, hips, or legs. Imagine your breath moving into those areas, capturing the energy and the feeling, and then breathe it out. Work with it. See it as a current, an energy system, or a congestion in your body.
Try not to make it so personal. Allow the emotion a chance to express itself without you acting it out in unhealthy ways. Don’t try to push it down. When we push emotions down, we often use different tools and distractions to do so. This is one reason addictions form. It’s also why people sometimes do things they later regret — hurting themselves or others, or saying or doing things in emotional states they would never otherwise exhibit.
You don’t want the emotion to take you over. Giving yourself space with your emotions helps prevent that. You recognize that an emotion is happening, but you are not the emotion. You are experiencing an emotion; you are not the energy system itself. You are a conscious, radiant being having a human experience, and part of that experience is feeling emotions.
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Once you start to understand your emotions more deeply, you can breathe into whatever has upset you. Breathe love, compassion, and understanding into what happened — whether it was 20 or 35 years ago, or whether it’s happening now. Breathe consciousness into yourself, into the trauma, into the event, into the experience. From there, if action is needed, you can take well-balanced action from a conscious position, grounded in self-understanding. You’re no longer reacting blindly to emotion or being carried away or blinded by it.
People can be overtaken by their emotions to the point that they don’t remember what happened while in a fit of anger. They can feel overpowered by a force rooted in pain. Emotions are powerful. Anyone who has been on the receiving end of abuse knows that when someone is in a dark, heavy, or unbalanced emotional state, they can act in very difficult and damaging ways. Emotions are more than just feelings. They can feel like movements, spirits, demons, or forces.
We also hear stories of people accessing seemingly supernatural strength in a moment of crisis when someone they love is in danger. They do things they would not normally be able to do because they’re moved by an emotion — by fear, by love, or by something else. This is why we want to be respectful when dealing with our emotions: they have power. One of the gifts of giving our emotions space is that we diffuse some of that power by bringing consciousness into the emotional state we’re in.
If you struggle with your temper, a meditation practice throughout the day can be especially helpful. Practice multiple times, particularly when you notice the moment right before your temper flares. Give yourself a time-out — just like we tell our kids. Adults also need to tell themselves, “I need a time-out.” Often, two minutes is enough to reset.
One of the ways we reset is by giving the emotion space to move through us. The more you meditate, the better you become at this. With a regular practice — sometimes doing longer meditations and other times short ones — you’ll find it easier to take short time-outs during the day to reset your thinking, emotional state, and energy. In situations where you might normally shut down, a brief meditation can help you reset, so you open up instead and let out what would otherwise shut you down.
We do this with space. As you begin working with your emotions, remember that the first step is simply giving them space: allowing them to be, without analyzing, judging, or condemning. Once an emotion is present, it’s present. When something exists, it exists. Don’t pretend it doesn’t. Don’t criticize it for existing, and don’t criticize yourself for feeling it. If you’re sad, frustrated, depressed, or angry, that is what it is.
From there, you can acknowledge that while this is what you’re feeling right now, it’s not what you choose to continue running or experiencing. It’s already in your space. So you give it space. You breathe into it. You breathe it out. You begin to work with it.
These are some of the practices I teach and encourage you to explore: be with your emotions, open your body, become emotionally present, and give your emotions space.
I look forward to meditating with you,Â
Kim Owen, The Peaceful Meditator.com
