A Guide to Navigating Your Emotions

After treatment, as your body is healing through all its old layers, emotions can come up “for no apparent reason”. No obvious trigger, no “story” behind it.

This is part of the body getting healthier and releasing what it no longer needs to hold onto. Your body is going through “the unlayering process”, and emotions are just one (rather loud) part of it.

Below I’ve provided some simple tips for navigating your emotions and a bit of the science behind why tricky emotions crop up as we heal.

Simple Tips for Releasing Emotions

When emotions come, the most important thing is that you try not to block it. Just go with it for a couple of minutes. Give yourself the space to feel it. Emotions are not negative and they’re not malfunctions. Being able to process and release your emotions is a vital part of good health.

While feeling emotional, notice any physical sensation in the body. Where? What sensation is it? Just notice for a minute or two, breathe, and allow a little space for it in the body to metabolize itself through.

If things are feeling stuck, the idea is to try and “discharge” them. Talk to someone, have a cry, write something down, let yourself be angry. This works for some people more than others.

Soon graduate to a roar, scream in your car, sing, stomp, punch a pillow. This is very helpful to do with your kids! Running, dancing, yoga, breathwork, shaking, tapping. These are all ways to discharge your emotions so they don’t sit pent up, brewing in the body.

For the really intense emotions, I use this method to lean in and move through. First, try not to “calm down”, “escape” or distract yourself. Next, notice which muscles feel tight or angry, and then start to squeeze and tense them a bit harder. Breathe, but squeeze, and keep breathing and squeezing. Allow the jaw muscles to join in, clench the teeth, ball the fists, squeeze your toes, and maybe let yourself make some loud whooshing breaths. Growl, swear, silent scream with all your breath. After about 30 seconds, make sure to totally relax the mind and body.

This can be extremely intense. But when you lean in like this, you can trust that this feeling absolutely will pass. You can move through it so the emotion metabolizes itself away. Do this for 30 to 60 seconds and you can expect to feel serious relief in the body and mind. Repeat if it feels right but make sure to breathe and relax in between.

A lot of this is easier said than done. In the moment, emotions can be all consuming. Your first instinct might be “no no no, ugly emotion, push it away”. But your body is bringing this up for a reason. If you stop and listen with a bit of courage, it’ll be over and through in a few minutes. You don’t need to rationalise or create a story around it, just let your body do it’s thing.

Don’t Shoot More Arrows

Here’s a lesson from Buddhist philosophy that I find useful. The “first arrow” is the painful event itself — the emotion, the injury, the loss. This is unavoidable. Life shoots arrows at all of us.

The “second arrow” is what we do to ourselves in response. The self-judgment, the shame, the “why am I like this”, the resistance to the feeling. This is an arrow we shoot at ourselves.

The “third arrow” is the story we build around it. The rumination, the narrative, the replaying. “This always happens to me.” “I’m too sensitive.” “I should be over this by now.” The teaching is that we can’t always avoid the first arrow. But the second and third are optional.

The simplest tool in your kit is to be kind to yourself. The body makes no mistakes and your emotions are not a malfunction. All it needs is to be experienced fully for a minute or two, then will naturally be metabolised away. The less we try to control or explain it, the better.

But, if you want to understand a little more about the role our emotions serve, I’ve written a lot more about it below.

Emotions & Their Organs

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, every emotion is associated with an organ. This relationship has been recorded for thousands of years, and modern research is beginning to catch up.

The liver governs anger. When the liver is overburdened (too much alcohol, processed food, medication) irritability tends to increase. In the other direction, chronic unexpressed anger or resentment creates stress in the liver.
The kidneys are associated with fear and ancestral anxiety. Adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys and govern the stress response. The connection is physiologically literal.
The lungs process grief and letting go. People in deep grief often experience chest tightness, shallow breathing, and respiratory illness.
The stomach and spleen are responsible for worry and overthinking. Digestive disruption under stress is one of the most commonly reported and well-documented connections. It may be where the phrase “struggling to digest information” came from.

From this point of view, it seems obvious that if you have a liver, you’re going to feel anger at some stage. If you have kidneys, you’ll fear fear. It’s just a part of being human.

Why Do Our Emotions Exist?

All of our emotions exist to serve us. Each emotion can be traced back to a survival mechanism.

Embarrassment tells us we’re doing something that might get us isolated from the group. Anger is a signal that we’re being mistreated, and we need to stand up for ourselves, or remove ourselves from a situation.

While we often tell ourselves that anger is negative, ugly or unproductive, it’s not the emotion that’s the problem. It’s how we express it. Starting fights, saying things we don’t mean, breaking things. Instead, we need to give ourselves a moment to feel our emotions without judgement or rationalising or self-shaming. Perhaps you can even have that argument out loud, on your own, to help release it without having to deal with the unreasonable person who made you angry.

Try this: Next time you’re experiencing a difficult emotion, say “thank you body, I know you’re just trying to protect me” and see if that helps you move on. Or growl “THANKS BODY, THIS FEELS YUCK BUT I UNDERSTAND WHY IT’S HERE”. Find a tone that fits the emotion, or a way that feels right for you to talk to your own body.

Does The Mind Rule The Body, Or Does The Body Rule The Mind?

Emotions actually occur top-down and bottom-up. Neither rules the other exclusively. I’ve written some easy to digest examples below:

When we’re low on magnesium, we tend to have more anxiety. Equally, when something anxiety-inducing happens, our bodies chew through extra magnesium.

When we don’t get enough sleep, cortisol rises and frustration sits closer to the surface than usual. When we’re under chronic stress, cortisol stays elevated and sleep becomes shallow and broken. Each one feeds the other.

When something shifts in the gut — bloating, sluggishness, disruption — low mood and brain fog tend to follow. And when we’re anxious or grieving, digestion is often the first thing to suffer. The gut and the brain are in constant two-way conversation.

So, emotions can’t always be rationalised or pushed away. Quite the opposite: they’re your body’s way of asking for extra support and understanding.

Treating The Body And The Mind

You don’t need to be ashamed of, or annoyed by, your emotions. It’s all part of the healing journey and it’s a good sign that your body is communicating its needs.

If you need any extra support dealing with loud emotions, you can book another appointment with me here.