Allowing Feelings Versus Transmuting Them
“Can’t I just let myself be as I am even when I’m sad, anxious, or angry? Is it compassionate to keep trying to change myself? What about accepting what is?”
These are some of the poignant questions that arose in the Radiant Living retreat. Have you contemplated the question of when to allow yourself to surrender to what is in your inner world versus when to regulate yourself and transmute your state?
When you’re feeling anything at all, the first step is to be with what is. By feeling your emotions and allowing them to move through you, without controlling them, they often come to their own natural resolution.
For example, if you’re applying to a new job and you feel nervous about your interview, that feeling is proportional to the situation. It’s a natural response. You can support yourself with breathing practices, supplements, or remedies to help get you through your interview. Allowing and supporting is the healthiest response.
In contrast, consider a situation where you feel disproportionately angry with someone at work because it’s triggering old trauma. You allow the anger to move within you but you’re stuck, replaying the story of what happened and brooding in your anger. Even when you set some healthy boundaries, you’re still not able to move beyond your anger and every time you think of your co-worker, the anger boils up again.
In the second scenario, the emotion isn’t coming to a natural resolution. It’s not purposeful, in terms of fueling change, it’s weakening your body-mind. It’s challenging to think your way out of this kind of trigger. I find it doesn’t work well because the anger is stored in the body. In this case, it’s appropriate to use somatic techniques to transmute the anger.
If you can access the part of you who’s triggered, not in the present story, but earlier in your life, it’s much easier to soften the anger that’s resting on top of deeper pain.
Try these steps to support yourself in transmuting your anger or other triggers.
Take 10 minutes and do a basic breathing meditation, guided or on your own.
Once you feel more centered and grounded, connect to a higher frequency of love, wholeness, or joy. Access it by tuning to be a powerful place in nature or to a higher power.
From your resourced healthy-self, feel beneath the current trigger into the deeper source of this pain. What was happening to that younger part of you? What did they need that they didn’t get?
In slow time, tune to that hurting part of you, hold space for them, resonate with them, and offer your loving presence. Take time until you feel complete.
Come back to breathing and expand your awareness into the space beyond your body. Widen your focus back into your place in nature and/or tune into the energy of your higher power.
Let yourself be nourished and allow your practice to integrate.
This type of practice lets you access the deeper experience of the pain that’s under your current emotions, not through your mind, but through your body. It’s most transformative when resonant self-talk is combined with accessing higher frequencies.
In contrast, when we don’t take the time to tune our healthy self to a higher frequency before we support the wounded part(s) of us, we can get overwhelmed or discouraged. Remember, there’s a reason those parts were suppressed. They contain deep levels of emotional pain.
The healthy self, supported by the higher frequency, connects with the pain enough to resonate with it and hold space for it without re-entering or reliving the old trauma.
Meeting our unmet needs is a profoundly transformative kind of self-care. These unheld, wounded aspects of us become frozen and they wait, as disintegrated fragments, to be loved back into wholeness.
I’ve used this model personally to transmute mountains of intergenerational trauma and with clients to heal what lies under many dis-eases.
Returning to the original question of when to allow emotions and when to transmute them, ask yourself these questions.
Does this emotion make sense relative to my life circumstances? For example, if you’ve lost a dear friend, grief makes sense. You can benefit from support but it needs permission to be as it is.
Am I stuck ruminating in an emotion that’s weakening me? Then, consider ways of accessing what’s under that emotion and transmute it.
I hope this perspective is useful to you in your daily life.