There is this idea in mindfulness circles that difficult emotions dissipate quickly when we bring attention to them. Although this might sometimes be the case, for the most part, this has not been my experience. This is indeed why I write about emotions so extensively.
But this is, again, a difficult post to write because I don’t know who I’m writing for. Am I writing for someone who has done some self-awareness work? Or am I writing for someone who has never explored any of their emotions? I dare say that this post will only be of interest to people who have reached a certain point of maturity or willingness.
That said, this is probably one of the most important posts of this inner work series. And so, it’s a long one. In this article there is a section that will be of value to beginners, people just starting their journey. There is also a section that is intended for those that have done some emotional integration and mindfulness work.
Focus on What Works
A few years ago, when I was going through my darkest time, I watched countless Eckhart Tolle seminars on YouTube. It helped me to stay present during what I can only describe as excruciating emotional turmoil.
In one of those videos, a woman asked Tolle for advice on how to cope with the sexual abuse that she went through as a child. She was aware that she had a heavy pain body because of this experience. This was a few years ago, so I don’t recall his full response, but one of the things that he said was that it isn’t always possible to integrate such pain in one lifetime.
I remember feeling unsatisfied with his answer. I come from trauma, so I have first-hand experience of how difficult it is to work through associated pain and emotions. I thought that Tolle could have given the woman—and by extension everyone listening—advice that was more pragmatic. It might very well be true that one lifetime is too short for total emotional integration, but that is not to say that we should become complacent or demoralised.
There are actionable things that we can do. There are ideas to try. There are long-term practices that we can commit to. Today I realise that if Tolle’s answer had been detailed and complete, this blog might not exist in the way that it does.
When it comes to trauma (and emotions) I have found that it’s a good foundational principle to be pragmatic. Focus on actionable things that work. An approach of trial and error has aided me more than dogma. Focus on what works—but don’t expect quick results.
It is possible to integrate difficult experiences. But it also requires time, mindfulness, experimentation, and a willingness to sit in (and work with) extreme emotional (and physical) discomfort without going into mental narratives. Integrating difficult emotions is primarily a body experience. Emotions are felt in the body. If we can meet difficult feelings with mindfulness, we can become free of them.
For Beginners
In many ways, the initial stages of emotional work are the hardest. The emotions might not be extraordinarily charged at this stage. But what makes this stage terribly difficult is that we are unlearning our automatic reactions. We are choosing to break our automatic patterns. These patterns might include anything from outbursts to eating. The avoidance pattern might be destructive, or it might be mild. It matters not. What matters is that it has covered some difficult emotional baggage.
So, learning to pause and turn inward when a difficult emotion comes up is, in some ways, the hardest part. Pausing and turning inward—just that. The reason why this is hard initially is because the pattern of avoidance has been ingrained for years. It will take time to change.
It has been my experience that certain feelings get progressively more intense when we face them repeatedly. That is true, until the point of integration. After that point, the feeling becomes a non-issue really. Something to look forward to. But yes, that road might be long and winding.
Build Capacity to Pause
As a beginner to emotional work, we need not be concerned about complete integration of some difficult emotion or experience. In fact, a mindset that wants a quick emotional release will often not be conducive to integration work. This is because wanting things to be over quickly, stands in contrast to bringing full awareness to the experience. The emotional body doesn’t want to be treated like a burdensome child. And when we want to force a release, we end up staying stuck. There are parallels here to deep states of presence. Presence is more “allowing” than forcefully quieting the mind.
As a beginner to emotional work we should be concerned with this: Building the capacity to pause and contain difficult emotions. That is all. Containing difficult emotions is a skill. And as with any skill, this gets easier the more we do it.
We have ignored certain feelings for long, and so we can expect some significant resistance to a different way of doing. We might even repeatedly fail. That said, if we persist we can, not only become better at facing difficult emotions, but also integrate those emotions. The ultimate goal is to reach more inner peace.
Becoming Better At Feeling Is A Skill
When we turn our gaze inward, it becomes a body experience. At this point, we can ask some questions to explore and possibly get to the root. Questions might include:
- Where in my body do I feel this?
- What’s the worst part of this?
- When was the first time I felt this?
It is important to stay with the feeling and not the story. Feel the pain and embrace it. Cry or hold it kindly. Allow it to be there. Allow it to pass. It might release, it might not. But don’t get caught in ideas of vengeance, or blame. This is a tricky balance because we might be entirely justified in feeling angry and hateful about something. And we should acknowledge that certain things might have been wholly unfair. That said, the worst thing we can do is go into loops about how unfair something was. It doesn’t integrate the pain underneath.
We want to treat the pain as a vulnerable baby. We might even decide to talk to it: “It’s okay to feel this way. What happened was terrible. You are safe now.”
When we reach this point—the point at which we are no longer reaching for the crutch to numb the pain—we should give ourselves a pat on the back. That is an enormous accomplishment! Just being able to pause and feel is something that most people cannot do. And we might occasionally falter and still avoid or reach for that numbing mechanism—but we are learning to respond and not react. We are learning something new.
Think of this skill—the ability to pause and feel a difficult emotion—as similar to learning to play an instrument. There are numerous nuances to, say, playing guitar. It isn’t just about knowing one or two chords. Playing guitar has many levels of difficulty, styles, strumming patterns, finger-picking techniques, etc. To master the guitar can take decades.
Feeling difficult emotions is also a skill that might take years to master. For instance, you might find that certain emotions are unbearable while others are more digestible. You might find that some emotions release quickly while others are lodged into the body. You might find that shame is a cloud of filth all around you. Or you might find fear as a tiny black hole in your chest. Anger, a red hot vibration that radiates to your arms. You are learning a new language. The language of emotions. You are learning to be at the centre of the difficulty without exploding, collapsing, or avoiding. You are building inner fortitude.
Here’s something encouraging to keep in mind: learning to pause and process emotion will aid your entire life.This is a skill that will ripple outward into all avenues of importance: health, career, relationships, all of it. It’s worth cultivating.
For Non-Beginners
The more we progress on our emotional journey, the more likely it is that we will encounter difficult emotions. That’s my theory at least. The hardest leg of the journey comes when we have to face the deepest, most horrible feelings. If we can integrate that—the muck at the bottom of the barrel—then things become easier.
But life is unpredictable. We might not have the opportunity to work through milder emotions before facing the truly horrible ones. It might be that some life event triggers old wounding before we’re really ready to start emotional integration. But even in the latter case, things happen for a reason. We are never without resources and help. It’s good to keep this in mind as we move through the difficult waters of emotional turmoil.
In any event, if you are reading this, you have already learnt to pause and feel. It might be that you have built a foundation of mindfulness (hopefully for a year or more) and have now encountered stuck parts that do not want to shift. You might be at a point where you want to dive deeper to resolve your internal formations, avoidance patterns, muscular tensions, and frozen states.
There is no way for me to give specific advice concerning deep emotional integration. What I can do is give an overview of what worked for me, which books I found helpful, and some foundational ideas to keep in mind.
Books
If you are at this stage it is important to read books that will aid you. It is of utmost importance to take integration work seriously at this point. (That is, if you are indeed interested in resolving long-standing issues). Why? Because an internal block that breaks open—if I can describe it like that—can be quite destabilising. This is also why reading is so important. There are countless nuances to emotional integration that I cannot delve into in one post. But I will say that, at this stage, it might very well be necessary to do somatic work and/or breathwork.
Here are a few books that I found very helpful. This list is not exhaustive and I would encourage people to follow their intuition on what might be helpful.
Body, Breath and Consciousness. A Somatics Anthology – Editor Ian Macnaughton. This book has a collection of articles from various authors. One important thing (that I often neglect to go into in detail in my writings) is that psychological problems do not always arise because of muscular tension. There are times that muscles become flaccid in response to overwhelming stress. This would have the effect of someone becoming too passive in life. This book goes into deep detail on these topics. I found it a great resource.
Healing Trauma – Peter Levine. It is important to take a good look at Levine’s work if you have stuck trauma. I’ve recommended In An Unspoken Voice in previous posts. Healing Trauma is a short book that has a number of exercises that one can try to access and integrate frozen states.
Focusing – Eugene Gendlin. I’ve recommended this book years ago in my initial posts on emotional work. I think it’s good foundational material to read.
I also found the following books really helpful from a mindfulness perspective:
Anger – Thich Nhat Hanh. I’ve recommended Anger countless times and personally read it twice. This book has helped me to integrate deep rage. If every single human read and implemented Thich Nhat Hanh’s suggestions in Anger, humanity would encounter major breakthroughs.
Fear – Thich Nhat Hanh.
Silence – Thich Nhat Hanh
The Presence Process – Michael Brown
Guiding Principles
Integrating what I have come to call internal formations is a complicated topic. How things unfold is highly personalised. It depends on what happened, your personality, your family, culture etc. That said, here are some guiding principles that I have found helpful:
- Listen to your dreams. Let them guide you.
- Be responsible. Be consistent. Be gentle.
- Read. Keep on reading. Keep on learning. There isn’t one expert out there who will have all the answers—but the right book at the right time can be an excellent guide.
- Things might get worse before they get better.
Concerning the last point, here’s a quote from Healing Trauma: “When you contact that stuck sensation, it will begin to change, simply because that’s the nature of all sensation. However, when you come in contact with that constriction for the first time, it can often give rise to fear. Indeed, the sensation is likely to get worse before it gets better because for the first time you’re experiencing it directly. As you stay with it, it may continue to get worse, then better, in a cycle of expansion and contraction. What’s important to realize is that you can pendulate—swing back and forth—between these sensations of expansion and contraction. And this means you’re no longer stuck!”
That passage contains so much. It tells us that, yes, we will probably encounter enormous amounts of fear when we address a stuck trauma at first. This has certainly been my experience. It is really difficult to move through that fear. But it is possible. Additionally, integration work is often cyclical. It gets better, then worse, then better again. Take a long-term approach to see true results.
My Own Process
My own process, if I had to distil years of emotional processing into a few paragraphs, went more or less like this:
I first had to come to terms with what happened. Dreams and therapy helped with that. Keep in mind, I had been meditating for years before this point. But I was also starting to experience intense emotions during meditation. This meant that my meditation practice, which had always been my sanctuary, was no longer a sanctuary. My perspective today is that I was experiencing those emotions because it was time to face them. It was just time.
It was only after therapy that I started working on body-related issues: posture, flexibility, and later strength. Over time, I noticed that certain muscles held tensions. Working on these tensions would bring up heavy emotions. Certain yoga postures activated strong grief. Other positions activated anger. I tried to integrate the emotions as they came up. But this was rough and messy. I would from time to time fall back into destructive patterns. On other occasions, I would have to rest for extensive periods.
I did yoga and grounding work on and off for years. I also used breathwork—conscious connected breathing and coherent breathing—to connect to buried emotions. A certain tension in my shoulder had been stuck for years, a knotted tightness that radiated from heart to hand. I used heat and breathwork to loosen tensions there. I am still doing many of these practices. I have lost count of how many times I did the ten-week breathing program of The Presence Process.
I wish I could say that this process was quick and convenient. It wasn’t. Some emotions lingered for days and weeks before getting better. And there were times where it felt like I’d experienced internal carnage. I would often experience a few days of re-balancing whenever I had worked through something truly intense. This “rest and recovery” period didn’t involve heavy emotions but exhaustion.
A word on crying: When we do eventually access pain, we should not hold back on crying. This can be very detrimental. The frozen energy has to transform somehow. Cry and feel and release. It is the purest way to integrate.
Final thoughts
You might wonder why anyone would want to face their emotions when it is such a messy, uncomfortable process.
Here’s what I can say about this: Most of life is filled with fears, fights, fixing and distractions. We are in an endless state of chasing tails, attempting to prevent, or gain, or defeat. What this work—what I call emotional work—has done for me is deepened my presence and sense of well-being. In a world where we are confronted with an endless stream of nonsense, that’s huge.