Ever feel stuck? Like you can’t move forward in your life and don’t know why? Fear of feeling is the block that prevents one from going forward in life.
A human being is meant to experience life, digest the experience, take the lesson and meaning from the experience and release the negative emotion from each situation. But, most people do not know how to process experience effectively. To process a life experience, one has to go through the actual circumstances, take time to feel the feelings that have been triggered, evaluate the message of the feelings and release the negative emotion.
What many people will do is go through the circumstance and then run the circumstance over and over in their heads. They stay focused on the circumstances of what happened, he said, she said, without allowing the emotions to be handled. They tell the story of what happened over and over but nothing changes because the story is being relived mentally.
The human system is designed to express emotion in order to release the tension, sadness, fear and other negative emotions so that we can move past difficult experiences. And really, it is so easy to express emotion in a creative and constructive way. The steps are as follows:
1. When you are going through a difficult situation, set aside time to process the experience. Take some time to stop everything and get quiet.
2. Stop thinking and start feeling. Turn your attention into your physical body. Notice what you are feeling about the situation. Where are the feelings being experienced inside your physical body?
3. Once you have identified the feelings, take some time to feel them, without trying to make them go away. Just be with your feelings. This prevents you from running from them.
4. Now, find a way to express those feelings. Crying is one of the best ways to express, but you can dance, sing, paint or act out the feelings until they have diminished.
5. When the feelings are out of your body, you can evaluate the situation and what you learned from it. You will instantly be able see clearly what actions to take to handle the situation.
I write about this today because I just attended a Return to the Heart Workshop with Bill Ferguson. He has created a lovely system for healing the pain of difficult situations. His method is focused on connecting directly with the emotions and releasing them rather than trying to mentalize or even understand the feelings. I am so taken by Bill’s program that I want to encourage you to look at one of his websites. You can find him at BillFerguson.com. What you can learn from Bill is how to transform negative emotion into the experience of love.
What got me involved in helping people transform stage fright and fear of public speaking was that, like Bill, I learned how to express and release negative emotion and it opened my heart to feeling love. Then I learned I could approach my fear of public speaking with the same directness! And, oh my, I was so comfortable in front of people then! And I started to fall in love with my audiences when I spoke and taught classes! Now speaking is such a delicious experience of being bathed in love that I want to share it with everyone who will listen. If you want to learn to fall in love with audiences, please visit my webpage on Speaking from the Heart. If you want to learn to release negative emotion is general, check out Bill Ferguson.
