The following quote was taken from a discussion on emotions from a well-known website:

“Emotions are not thought about. Emotions are experienced. Emotions are felt. Emotions are sensed. Emotions are integrated into our consciousness through feeling the sensations in our body.”

I would also like to add to this list a *key* piece…emotions are *expressed through the body via bodily movement, sound or tears*. It is the allowing of our triggered emotions to *make sound* that causes the vibration that evolves the emotions from their current state. When the emotions are expressed, they vibrate, and when they vibrate, they evolve, and as they evolve, they *release the buried treasure of understanding* so the light of our spirit may shine on them and understand what the root cause of the emotion is (often different than the surface trigger that stirred the emotion to life). This is a synergistic experience of mind and emotions where, once expression has occurred, healing happens.

Many of us have become willing to notice, acknowledge and feel fear in our bodies, seeking to find root cause, but have not fully found evolution in the fear responses they normally have to the same stimuli over and over. This is because this last key piece is not being allowed or is not known about as the key piece.

There are root judgments not only about what is feared but about daring to actually express the fear in pure wordless sound (shrieks, keens, yelps, barks, crying out…these are some examples) or tears or bodily shaking, quaking, chattering, kriya jerking, or however. A root judgment we all share is “If I dare allow this fear/terror to express through my body, I will go crazy/never survive it/create more of it/become dysfunctional”. This fear and judgment of our own emotion of fear (”there is nothing to fear but fear itself” is a piece of bullshit that needs to be dismantled) is barely even noticed anymore unless one gets close to considering releasing/expressing it in the sound and movement it would naturally like to make. And of course we need to find safe space in which to express…that is a given.

Judgments of our fear and judgments of what is feared can be formally and verbally released, out loud. This is very effective in removing the “denial stopper corks” from our bottled up energy in the form of fear (which by the way can, over time and deeds once safe expression becomes the norm, evolve into trust and love once expressed and *fully* understood for its cause, thus ending the whole tempest in a teapot issue of “fear versus love” once and for all). “I release the judgment that if I give into my fear, it will never end. I release the judgment that if I express my fear in sound I will become crazy, I release the judgment that expressing fear through my body is just plain wrong.” These are some examples of widely held consensus beliefs about fear that can be released verbally out loud in formal statements just as I have described. The out-loud release undoes the black magic spells in our minds that we have woven with our judgments of fear that we have stated in the past. There are many more.

I have discovered that we can’t just accept and notice our fear or any emotion with our minds/awareness or feeling bodies. I have discovered we must take the additional step to express any triggered emotion to truly evolve them to the point where they can teach us all we need to know about how to heal, survive and live well, and change their outpictured reality on the mass scale.

That big reality out there is a scary picture that feels overwhelming if we really feel it…and we can each do something about it to change it. (most of us hold judgments that we can’t have any effect on the large scale picture out there). We can feel and EXPRESS what we feel about it all. It *can, does, and will help* the more of us who can dare to bring these emotions back inside ourselves through full acceptance of our emotional natures, which can be done by allowing ourselves to express emotions whenever triggered, starting now. It is the nature of emotions to express…and we were never taught that growing up, most of us. We were taught the opposite in many overt and subtle ways…to hold them in. And so, we have this large outpicturing of this state of denial before us on the world stage.

When I first contacted my rage it was pointed out to me that I was smiling as I spoke angrily. Smiling! We have all been taught from early childhood to channel or mask rage in ways it doesn’t naturally want to, in order to toe the denial line.

What broke me open into a more pure expression was when I got into the woods, deep enough where I felt safe that I wouldn’t be heard. I started to let my triggered rage move through my body by taking fallen limbs and swinging them like baseball bats against dead trees. Eventually I contacted primal desire to express sound by doing this. In the woods I also let myself jump up and down and stamp around, and that also helped me contact my sound, swinging my arms sharply up and down. In other words, I let myself “throw a tantrum” to use the terminology our elders used disparagingly growing up.

Nowadays I realize that “throwing tantrums” is a marvelous way of expressing primal rage. Body will communicate quite clearly how it really wants to express, if we let it. Any forceful, yang, physical movement can activate deep release. Indoors I throw clothes around the room, stuffed animals - things that won’t break – although sometimes anger wants to smash breakable things. Throwing old crockery against a wall when triggered could satisfy this urge. It’s important to intend to allow your sound to come up once your body is in motion (smashing, pillow-punching, stamping).

The moment of “impact” can be a great time to allow a short or long shout. If it comes naturally, let the emotion take over and become screaming, even if you’re scared about losing control. If judgments swim up that say you’ll never recover, make sure to release them when your sound dies back…during these times, judgments can be released more easily.

Even in more densely settled environments, it is possible to find safe places to express. Spending time in parked cars at the edges of empty parking lots with the windows rolled up even on hot days, slamming towels off the dashboard and hitting the steering wheel with open palms can work well in cities. This works when no other safe space is available. Once the sound starts to come forth, no matter what you have to do to get it going, it gets easier, and over time, subconscious, kneejerk control over expression in sound begins to loosen.

Our subconscious fear of repercussions for moving rage in sound has got a vice-grip on its organic expression. Focus on releasing judgments of what will happen to you or how you are (”bad”, say the internalized judgments) if you allow loud brash sound to come out when you are angry, and start expressing the fear inhibiting the rage. Fear can express in sound too, and it’s just as important as anger to allow in its pure expression - they have a symbiotic relationship and can often be holding one another back. Fear can express sometimes in keening wails, in teeth-chattering weird noises that vary in pitch, in short clipped barks (that often emerge from allowing teeth to chatter) to sudden yells of pure anguished terror.

Crying can come before or after anger or fear expression. Tears coming after release are golden, because they are only accessible once the rage/terror sitting on top of them shifts. These “underneath” tears connect you to your deepest denials and can bring the most profound healing. Sometimes, anger will express in tears as well, and that should be allowed also.

Fear of your own fear is even more problematic than the original fear itself. (Whoever said “nothing to fear but fear itself” was not into healing and dealing!)

The initial stage to transforming the effect of any old emotion within the self is acknowledging that it’s your emotion. We can easily become confused and say the trigger of the emotion is the owner of the emotion, or that we would never be feeling this emotion if it weren’t for them triggering it. We want to change their behavior so our fear can go back to the quiet slumber of denial that it was in before getting stirred to life. But if you’re feeling afraid, the fear is yours.

Acting outwardly in the world to quell the feelings of fear inside is acting out the emotions instead of feeling them. All that does is delay the resolution of the fear, which will draw another situation to be afraid about, another situation to trigger itself. In the long term, acting out emotions won’t resolve them.

A woman worries that her son will contract the prostate cancer that he is genetically predisposed to. She spends significant energy trying to manage his health by giving him information and pressuring him to see a doctor. Some may say this is purely mother love. It is, but this is also worry taking action that can be seen as a terror, deeply buried, of her own mortality. She subconsciously fears death. When we have subconscious feelings, it is standard practice to project them onto someone else close to us because we don’t always recognize that the feelings we’re having are really ultimately about us. The person being projected onto is the mirror for what we cannot easily see about ourselves.

We all fear death to one extent or other, even if we don’t consciously know it, because we have died many times before and we don’t want to experience those feelings of being snuffed out again. Parts of our beings, the emotional, physical parts, hold encoded memories of these deaths buried deeply in the subconscious. These are parts of us that aren’t spirit. These parts do not rise to “heaven” between lives, and these parts have and hold the memory and terror of death.

Projection is a hallmark of our misunderstanding about emotions. Only resolving emotions fully allows us to take personal responsibility for them in any kind of real, gut-level way. It’s nearly impossible to not project an unfelt, unacknowledged emotion. With experience it gets easier to know even in advance of expressing the charge of the emotion that it is really ours.

You can also ask your Higher Power, Spirit, Deeper Self, or whatever term suits you for the Divine to give you guidance in a form you can hear on how to deal with your feelings. This could be a “sign”, a dream, an inner voice or some other way that is just right for you. Remember to watch and listen for an “answer”, something you can recognize as help.

If after all this you are convinced that the fear is not yours, perhaps it isn’t. You could then ask Spirit to remove any fear that is not your own and put it where it belongs. If nothing changes, then you can rest assured the fear is yours, and it will require you to release its backed-up charge from having been denied for so long, in order to transmute it into love and trust.

One last suggestion, if none of the above works: try a therapy group that encourages emotionality. Go into it with an intent of resolving issues you normally project onto others, with a curiosity to discover what your strong feelings about others says about you. Shop around for a group that feels right to you; you are worth the effort. If you have a strong intent to change your emotional patterns then you’re likely to find the help you need.

A friend wondered what feeling her fear was supposed to do for her. She said that what she usually did whenever fearful pictures arose in her mind, which was often, was to suppress the feelings that came with the pictures.

Acknowledging, accepting, feeling and expressing fear in wordless sound or body movement is often extremely uncomfortable, especially at first. Expressing fear safely and with as much acceptance as you can give it actually relieves the pressured feeling inside that any growing, internalized fear bubbling to the surface gives us. That’s what expressing the fear can do for you.

Most people don’t even recognize that emotions are a part of the self, and a part that needs healing because of routine, lifetimes-long denial patterns. We can’t successfully cut off parts of ourselves, but that’s what we are attempting when we suppress. Emotions are a part of ourselves, and fear only feels bad because we have denied it for so long. Anything that gets routinely denied feels dark, monstrous, alien, and scary. Fear doesn’t feel nearly as bad to me as it used to because I don’t deny it nearly as much as I used to.

Before you feel it, the fear feels like a dragon in the closet; as you go into it and come out the other side, the dragon shrinks away, perhaps to a salamander. The judgment that comes up for everybody who considers expressing fear for the first time or first few times is, “If I dare feel or express this fear, what I’m afraid of will manifest”. My experience is that the opposite occurs – if I dare to release the fear by allowing its expression it doesn’t need to draw a reflection of itself in order to trigger it. It’s the denial of fear while focusing on mental pictures that attracts what we fear. Often if I can release the fear ahead of any event, the event either doesn’t happen or manifests much more benignly than I’d originally feared. In this context, “nothing to fear but the denial of fear itself” would be an accurate coining of the old maxim.

Worry is a more sublimated form of fear. It’s the tip of the iceberg of a terror held in the subconscious parts of our being. The continuum looks like this: worry->anxiety->fear->terror. They’re all forms of the same emotion, depending on how much of it is consciously felt in a given area. Fear is an emotion, but is not universally understood, recognized or acknowledged as an emotion, like anger or grief is.

Fear can be expressed in several ways; allowing the energy of it into your jaw to make your teeth chatter, allowing spontaneous weird sounds to emerge, or by crying. Private or safe space is best for emotional expression. Expressing fear means giving in to it, allowing it up into the throat, into the voice, and then abandoning control and letting it happen. I nearly always feel better after I release, with more understanding of the triggering situation than before I started. This understanding doesn’t always come immediately, or on the same day, but it does come.

I grew up hearing the phrase, “the less you do, the less you want to do”. It applies here; the less you are in touch with your emotions, the less you want to be. It takes a conscious willingness and intentional effort to go there. Like anything else, it gets easier the more you practice.

Deep autumn is a classic time of year for the pea soup of depression to hit. In the Pacific Northwest, the rains kick in as the sun becomes a fleeting memory, and all the things we’ve been running from for months begin to creep forward into our consciousness, pushing for triggering and release. If we haven’t “cleaned house” in awhile, these ghosts emerging from the depths of our closets have the ability to overwhelm us - and in so doing we become, like our backyards, heavy and laden with muck, mist and bog, and we find we can’t move as easily.

Most of us know what real depression looks and feels like. Even if we haven’t experienced a depressive period ourselves, we probably each know or have heard about somebody who has, and how they were during it. Depression is rife with a feeling that there is no way to get out from under, that nothing can work. It’s a time where we look at all of life through shit-coloured glasses. There’s no energy to do the things we like to do or have to do. The life force drained out, we vegetate, flatline, feel squashed and compressed. We can’t feel. We indulge in distractions and addictions of various kinds. We are uncomfortably numb.

The central theme of depression, if it could be described in one word, is hopelessness. It’s very uncomfortable for the loved ones of a depressed individual (DI) to be around him or her, and the kneejerk tendency is to help them lift out of it any way possible. They try to distract the DI from what ails them (should that even be evident), point out how so-and-so from Iraq has it worse so buck up, become an ad hoc salesperson for the latest miracle pharmaceutical or toss a few hope ropes in case the DI has the strength or ability to grab one and hoist themselves up.

Realistically, there’s nothing a friend of a DI can do that’s more effective than staying close by while the DI muddles through as best s/he can, ready to lend a helping hand when asked. For the DI, it’s a time to find as many mental judgments about his/her situation that can be found, and then formally release them out loud (e.g. “I release the judgment that I am never going to have the life I want,” etc). Sometimes doing this can trigger the tears, rages or freakouts that can dispel the heavy fog.

Whenever I am depressed, what also helps me find my way through is getting into my body. If I can walk a little, do some deep breathing, yoga, Somatics, anything to help me focus inward – it can enable me to get some sound expression happening, which always helps shift me when nothing is moving. It’s said that the less we do, the less we want to do, a vicious cycle. Inertia begets depression begets more inertia. Distraction and medication can be very short term solutions that in the end reveal themselves as circular train trips returning us to the very station we try to escape.

Hating or pressuring ourselves to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps doesn’t work either, it’s another circumnavigation. Sometimes nothing at all works. The best we can do is sit for awhile in the low vibration of hopelessness with what is happening or not happening, accepting ourselves as best we can for being in this place, trusting on the way to trust that this too shall pass.

How do you know when emotions you feel are yours or someone else’s? You can’t necessarily know until after they express, when greater understanding is available. Either way, it’s going to be a “real” expression. You still have to vibrate the anger, fear or grief out of you (i.e. express it in sounds and/or body movement), whether it’s yours or not. Sometimes an empathic person might hold the emotions of another: someone else in the room, maybe a friend, or perhaps, their partner’s . Often, it’s a woman holding the emotions of her man. Generally speaking, this is because a woman’s energy field tends to be more magnetic in nature, whereas a man’s tends to be electric.

An example: a man is always haranguing his wife, a habit which lasts over the course of years. He lectures, bullies, and intimidates, but never really expresses his rage, just sort of “gives” it to her (and she literally holds it “for” him, but it’s really his all along). Finally, she snaps and screams at him and just keeps screaming. She’s trying to “move” the rage back out of herself to him, but he in all likelihood doesn’t recognize that what she is doing is trying to give back to him what was never hers in the first place. Some of it might be hers, but a lot is his.

Ideally, what occurs to rectify the imbalance is that when an exchange of strong feelings gets initiated by the woman, the man does not battle her and perpetuate the war; he instead receives her and has an appropriate response. That response could be his own expression in sound or just compassionate, silent receiving and validation of her feelings. If he can “own” his anger at that point, he will not rise up louder and bigger than her and send a volley of words back. If he feels guilty in response to her anger, he must ultimately recognize that any anger he might feel in response is quite often rage toward his own guilt and is not really about her, despite superficial appearances. Many of us have guilt, both denied guilt and conscious, that says we “deserve” to hold the toxic waste of someone else’s denied stuff.

If all emotional energy could freely travel to its rightful owner by saying a prayer or a ritual, we could all release other peoples’ emotions just by visualizing it happening or saying words with that intention. In most cases, it’s not that simple or easy. Emotional energy is very magnetic and in order to get the stuck energy moving freely, it needs to be vibrated with sound or strong energy of some sort. It needs to be expressed in some way, though not necessarily in raw sound. Some may be able to let it rip in words and feel lighter as a result.

I went through a long period in my early years of emotional healing being terrified of rage. I quickly learned I was frightened of my own unmoved rage. I had to have enough movement of pure, unfettered rage expression in raw sound to make friends with the vibration of deep anger. This helped me stop feeling victimized because another person in the room was angry. The more I owned my own unprocessed anger, the more I stopped feeling afraid of someone else’s rage and of “taking it on”.

I am learning to only do for others if I really feel like it. I know that’s counter to what many people say is loving. I naturally want to give to others, though, so it’s not like I don’t go there much. I go there often, because it feels good. I just intend to do it when I really want to, and that’s partly what re-integrating my true feelings in each moment is about.

There are many judgments against putting oneself first. In perhaps all societies, people on the whole don’t tend to put themselves first much, and certainly not without being stigmatized. The very act of putting oneself first too often is harshly put down and written off as “selfish, irresponsible, self-absorbed and unloving.” “Putting yourself first leads to chaos, anarchy and nihilism” is another popular judgment. Rarely is anyone commended for following his or her own truth if self-firstness is a common personal practice. (I prefer the word “self-first” to selfish.)

The only sustainable way for a human being to give that doesn’t produce backlash is to give from a full or at least filling cup, and from pure desire to do so, not from some belief that “it’s the right and loving thing to do” by somebody else’s standards. I love to give, and I am very good at it, but I can no longer give from an empty or nearly empty cup. That way began to kill me, and I want to live forever.

Societies have never tried nor condoned giving to oneself and loving oneself first, and taking care of oneself in order that one can take care of another. The plan of free will in a functional society needs to be repercussion-free for pursuing free will. Instead, because of emotional body denial, guilt is king and everybody is prone to taking guilt-based actions.

We in western culture live an illusion of freedom, but we’re not really free. We’re time slaves, economic slaves, slaves to rules and strictures, inequities and enforced controls overseen by an external global power who has very specific agenda to curtail freedom while diabolically repeating like a mantra that it is protecting and preserving freedom instead. At the collective level, this is the outer reflection of rules curtailing freedom to act as we see fit, originally caused by inner denial of free will. We often deny ourselves what we really feel like doing with many should’s, frozen fears and judgments.

One way to start undoing this imbalance is to try allowing what we feel like doing and see what happens. At first, long-denied personal desires may rush forth and begin to act as selfishly (in the traditional, imbalanced sense) as judgments held against them say they would if allowed to be free. These judgments and intertwined emotions must be released for the desires to find eventual balance in their manifestations. True balance does not sacrifice personal desire and the self, nor does it override and abandon loved ones nearby who are dependent or need help, but finds the middle ground. When we’ve had enough experience and triggered releases, fears and judgments around sacrifice and selfishness can disappear and stop fueling the macrocosmic reflection.

I AM a whole universe, contained within myself. I AM life. I desire life. My desires and my life force and essence are priceless. When I give to myself, I AM giving to the All by vibrating self-love across the psychic realms, across the hologram that we exist in.

The movie “The Upside of Anger” features dramatic, familiar manifestations of acted-out rage: doors kicked down, sharp, blaming words exchanged, cars driven too fast, bodies striking other bodies. We were also shown cold, expressionless, commanding rage delivered in others’ faces, revenge fantasies featuring horrible things happening to another and all manner of attempt to hold back the rage charge from escaping. In the climactic moment, I fervently hoped that finally Hollywood was going to allow a full expression of primal sound to escape the main character’s lips.

Alas, I was disappointed at the cinematic reflection of our society’s refusal to “let the air out of the balloon through the original opening,” instead trotting out all the old cliches of what anger is and does. Emotions were allowed to subside and go back to sleep, with the occasional leaked tear. Sigh. At least no one pretended they weren’t angry! I imagined anger filling the balloons of our emotional bodies to the bursting point, with an ever-ready pin to bring havoc and destruction instead of safe release and epiphany.

We’re all connected, not just in spirit, but in emotional essence too. When you or I hold back rage, the pressure added to the Big Balloon intensifies somewhere else, through some “far distant” and weaker point in the “balloon skin”, and then – POW! Of course the balloon forms again – weaker this time, more easily poppable. When “popping” occurs, someone gets hurt; sometimes us, sometimes “the other guy”. We watch the outer reflection of our inner collective anger in places like Iraq and Palestine, and all over any news service. Not knowing what else to do with it, we shove our anger into others with blame, the rage never evolving through appropriate expression, just getting passed around.

Imagine our rage is in a balloon, and we’re holding the balloon, two fingers clutching the cinched opening. Why wait for the bang’n’shreds when we could just let go? Letting go doesn’t mean just sending it into the Earth or somewhere else through a technique. We have to take more responsibility than that; our emotions are a part of us. Expressing anger in wordless sound “vibrates” the emotion, literally speeding it up, evolving and entraining it with spiritual understandings which are already vibrating at a very high rate. The part of us encased or entwined with old anger has been too shunted away in the dark to know what our minds and spirits know already. The vibration achieved through expression brings our angry parts up to speed. Ever notice that, having gone through an emotional time, you understand things much more deeply than before? That’s emotional essence having caught up with the rest of the self.

Letting go means allowing the raw power of the rage that wants to just scream or shout. Use a pillow if necessary to block your sound; however, anger can “prefer” unfettered sound expression in a safe space. Sometimes anger wants to stomp or smash things; allow this as much as possible while smashing things that don’t mind being smashed, such as an old tree bough on the ground. Throw soft things around the room, pound your bed, buy some 50c crockery at a yard sale and clear an area of your garage wall to throw them against - whatever works.

When you dare to release your anger this way, you’re helping undo the mass of denied and inappropriately-expressed rage across the planet, directly affecting volatile situations in war-torn areas of the world. If need be, release the judgment that this couldn’t be true. Every time we allow angry feelings to release safely in pure sound, it “goes out the hole” and eases the pressure on the Whole.

My friend Carmen wanted more information about releasing fear. She asked for an example based on a fear she had about losing her freedom in the form of money (Carmen and her partner are heavily invested in the stock market). I painted for her the following fantasy:

Imagine a stock market crash. You stand to lose thousands of dollars with slim hope of recovery. In six months you’ll have difficulty paying your mortgage, unthinkable only a short while ago. You must radically change your lifestyle, which looks like a severe cutback in your freedom.

Your days become filled with fear. If you are observant of your body’s responses and honest with yourself, you recognize the fear in your solar plexus region, maybe your jaw. You might even have a headache, feel intermittently nauseous or lightheaded. You start to feel “delicate” and uncomfortably vulnerable.

Imagining such a scenario can trigger fear in your body as if it were really happening. This would be what I call a “safe trigger”, since it’s only imagined, not really manifesting in your life. A manifestation that brings an actual reversal to your fortunes monetary or otherwise would be an “unsafe trigger”.

Manifesting a lot of unsafe triggers indicates that you have ignored one too many previous, lesser-magnitude fear triggers. In my example, the unsafe trigger would be where you actually get seriously reversed financially in order to overcome your repeatedly reinforced resistance and wake you up in that area. You had become too numb or too resistant to have anything of lesser magnitude get you off the dime emotionally.

“But what do I do with the fears when they arise? It’s so hard not to try to think about or do something else to take my mind off it all, so I don’t have to feel this fear anymore,” Carmen said.

You have arrived now at a “choice-point”. You are free to distract yourself from that fearful undercurrent with various means at your disposal. This is denial of how you really feel. Feeling hard emotions is not easy. You want to deny that you are afraid by overlaying activities or new thoughts that cover up the fear so you don’t have to notice anymore that you are afraid. Faith must be cultivated that there will be some sort of payoff in the end that will be worth going through the feelings to the other side.

Imagined scenarios are good for proactively triggering old fear. They cause the physio-emotional system to respond no differently at root than if the feared event had manifested. Our collective judgments say something to the effect of “I am causing unnecessary fear with such thoughts” and encourage focusing on something else to stimulate a more pleasurable emotional response. I don’t suggest intentionally generating fearful thoughts. Simply notice when the fearful thoughts arise organically, and once you’ve noticed them, let them arise and vibrate, don’t push them back down, cover them up or distract yourself. You can allow the feelings to come to conscious awareness and express them in sound or tears. Fear will eventually evolve into trust with enough passes through it over time.

Getting to fear “flashpoint” for the first time is not easy. We have all developed intricate minefields of resistance to expression. We have a lot of judgments running about how the fear will “swallow us”, “it will be endless”, “I’ll just be creating more of it”, etc. Those judgments need formal release. The more willing and able we are to vibrate (express) emotions with smaller triggers the more safe, or “proactive” triggers we will experience as opposed to unsafe, or “reactive” triggers.

           Genvieve hurls insults at her partner when he says she should know better than to trust her doctor to give her the right advice for her injured foot. She runs crying out of the room. Later, she tells a girlfriend that she overreacted.

Oftentimes people believe that if their emotional response is out of proportion to the trigger at hand that they have “overreacted”. Overreaction is a popular misunderstanding about anger or hurt. It is used as a categorical label to describe a reaction misunderstood because it is not logically proportionate to the “weight” of the surface trigger. Yet children, our emotional teachers, sometimes cry voluminously at the slightest injury, taking advantage of every opportunity to offload accumulated emotional charge.

Instead of labelling Genvieve’s true response an overreaction, we could say she reacted exactly in proportion to her backlog of held emotions. The word “overreact” connotes that she was out of line for having the response she did. The concept of overreaction also reveals a widely held judgment that one’s emotional reaction should be controlled to match, but not exceed, the exact level of response stirred by the trigger at hand – input in, input out, the modus operandi of a machine or computer. The emotional body doesn’t operate under the same rules of logic as the mental body; yet, in its own world, functions perfectly logically at all times when one considers all that has been emotionally denied in our existential history.

Attempted non-reaction is not healing and dealing either. My friend Carmen wrote to me relating her attempts to suppress her initial angry response in a potential “road rage” scenario:

“What I hope is happening when I ‘refuse” to feel or ventilate road rage is eliminating the knee jerk reaction. I think we are somewhat programmed to feel ENTITLED to be angry when we perceive an insult.”

Yes, that old righteous indignation thing, where we’re “justifiably” enraged. “How dare they do that to me!” This comes from believing we have no responsibility for our experiences, another thing we’re programmed about (”everything that happens to us is random”), or we adopt a superior stance: “I would NEVER do that”. We feel entitled to strike back because of our cultural revenge imprint; miniature pitchfork devils whisper in our ear that “the score must be evened”.

Carmen continues, “It doesn’t feel like I’m burying it, it feels like I’m refusing to rise to the bait.”

As if to react emotionally at all is to overreact! Emotional responses are immediate, and natural. If your reaction is kneejerk, and you prefer a different response, then how to address that first reaction? Refusing to “rise to the bait” means refusing to acknowledge the reaction, therefore denying that you are having the reaction by enforcing calm as a secondary response. The debate is whether that first reaction is real. Instead of substituting a second response, one could address healing that initial, ‘kneejerk’ response by healing over time so that one no longer has the same over-the-top response to the same stimuli, ad infinitum. People on an emotional expression healing path are attempting this slow process of organic healing.

Healthy open expression of anger and emotions such as grief, hurt and fear seems farfetched because we live in a culture of denial, where holding them in is seen as natural. When something has been practiced for millenia, it seems that must be the right way. I disagree that it’s the right way; it does not lead to healing to hold feelings in as a matter of course. As Sinead O’Connor once sang, “Life’s backwards, life’s backwards/People, turn around”.

Some think that guilt is useful because there is a judgment in the collective subconscious that says we would run amok, giving into every impulse, no matter how inappropriate, if we didn’t have “healthy guilt” (now there’s a contradiction in terms) to keep us in check. Balderdash! Were we truly healthy, our free will choices and actions would flow freely, even impulsively, yet harm none. Guilt is not a tool or an emotion, but it takes up energetic space where emotional response is supposed to be.

Moving from being guilt-ridden to being healed is a process, and in an environment where free will is encouraged, there will be mistakes along the journey to attaining balance. Using guilt to keep us in line has not served humankind, for there can be no self-acceptance of all the facets of ourselves if guilt is in charge. There is no loving light in the voice of guilt. It can sound right intellectually, but feels wrong to our emotional body. Guilt takes a kernel of truth and uses it against us with a hurtful twist or thrust to it; this unloving tone is one way to recognize its presence, especially if we are chronically swamped in guilt. We’ve lost sensitivity to be able to tell the difference between guilt and love.

Guilt divides us by turning parts of ourselves against us, separating us from Spirit and each other, triggering hopelessness and a sense of futility which leads to depression, addiction, and other chronic nasties. Guilt uses hindsight against us, saying we should have known because of XYZ, we should have done this, we were wrong not to do that. Its voice can disguise itself, often “reflected” to us from others outside us wagging subtly and overtly disapproving fingers our way. If guilt is synthesized down to its most basic message, it is saying we should be doing better than we already are. If self-acceptance is the key to healing, guilt is utter lack of self-acceptance, and in and of itself, not useful in the healing process.

Guilt’s presence, however, is a signpost that buried emotion lies hidden underneath it, and this emotion can be sleuthed out, and ideally, subsequently expressed and released. I need to notice how I really feel when guilt’s voice speaks to me, and then give into that emotional response, not just in words, but in sound and tears, in a safe space. When authentic response is given to every stimuli, as fully as possible, the space for guilt to stay or enter closes and one’s personal will becomes more and more free over time.

Conversely, the more I deny my true response to emotional triggers, the more guilt enters the space and speaks to me from outside and inside myself, and in the worst case scenario, runs my life. When guilt gets projected outward onto another person or situation, it comes out in the form of blame. If I find myself blaming another, or others blaming me, it can usually be traced back to guilt, either theirs, or mine reflected to me by them, or both. Noticing and acknowledging guilt is the responsible first step in disarmament during any personal war, and as mentioned, can then be released with the true expression of the emotions it conceals. The more we can disarm and own our sides of our personal vendettas, the more we as individuals, the microcosm of the planet itself, can disempower warmongering on the large scale.

“So what’re ya gonna choose, fear or love?” The ultimate rhetorical question, posed by smugly smiling gurus of all ilks down thru history. There is no possible answer; the two forces are not really oppositional. There’s no way of “choosing” because fear is felt in a millisecond. It’s already there, and it’s quicker than you are.

Fear is embedded in us from the start, and when the sleeping giant of fear gets stirred by an inner or outer event, the real choice around what to do with it is love it (by acknowledging, accepting and expressing how it really feels) or fear it (denying it–pushing it away by mentally lifting out of it with affirmations or a strong intent to “overcome it”).

Fear is not the problem; it is simply another emotion to be felt, like grief or anger. Fear of fear is the problem. Fear of fear is rooted in judgment and hatred for how it feels to be afraid. This isn’t wrong; it’s actually quite important to notice what is in the way of feeling and expressing. If you hate your fear, that’s the starting place. Hate it, but let the hatred blow up big and in sound. Judge it, rage at it, spew out loud how much you hate it. Stomp around, imgine putting your fear in chair and whap the life out of it with pillows or something. Eventually, releasing those judgments of fear is going to be important — more about this in the article entitled “Judgment Release”.

The way to truly transform “crunchy” emotions like fear, rage, or hurt is to let the emotions vibrate by allowing the sound to come up from the place in our bodies where we feel the emotion, into our throats and out our mouths as sounds; weird sounds, loud sounds, tears. This is the only way to organically transform an emotion at its root. We have all tried cutting emotions off as a way to “get rid of them”, separating ourselves from the feelings in various ways, but that kind of denial catches up with us sooner or later.

I propose the following definition of fear: a deep, non-mental mistrust that something which is perceived to have power over us might hurt us in some way. Or, an indefinable mistrust of ourselves or another. Mistrust is the keyword. Fear, or any emotion that we have labelled negative can be born into love thru accepting its presence and allowing its expression, and new understandings will fill us when we are done expressing, about why we felt the way we did. Fear or mistrust, once within love, becomes trust.

A big part of our problem with emotional expression is, we’ve been taught from birth to deny the fullness of our emotional expression, and here we approach the roots of denial. Emotions if completely accepted for what they are, express themselves in sound. A baby in its first year of life is a ball of sound. Slowly but surely, inner and outer forces conspire to contain the level, breadth, and freedom of expression until expression in many adults happens rarely if ever. We feel it sometimes rise up from the inner depths still, but we routinely push down this rising inclination to make sound…which then squeezes itself out of us nonetheless, once we’ve magnetized a particular life experience big enough to trigger it (funny how that works, eh?). Without self-acceptance, that expression looks as twisted and feels as yucky to ourselves and others as we’ve judged it to be.

“So how will you approach your fear, with fear or with love?”

How many times have we heard the phrase “Body, Mind, and Spirit” bandied about? Or how about “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”, if you prefer a more traditional way of arranging the players within the phrase? It has become a boring given that our culture has sidestepped or looked past the feminine principle. The feminine principle, the Mother energy, is inextricably linked to emotions. She-in-us, regardless of gender, is our emotional body, among other qualities with soft, purring features like desire and receptivity and intuition. And, let’s face it, this emotional side of who she is has been thoroughly denied in most of us, even in women.

As consciously growing adults, many of us have started edging towards acceptance of our emotional reality. We are starting to notice when we are angry, sad, feeling hurt,or scared. Sometimes. Other times, we just know we don’t feel good, but we don’t know why. And underneath our so-called negative emotional backlog of anger, fear, and grief that we so often don’t even know is there until it gets triggered, lies the gold…denied joy, spontaneity, laughter, childlikeness. It seems the nature of the beast that when we deny the hard feelings, the ones we’d like to experience go away as well, to one degree or another. The spontaneous and joyful gifts of childhood are the casualties of inner and outer repression.

Denial is hereditary, passed down through generations. As our society matures, many parents are no longer swatting their children for emotionally expressing sound, as many of our parents and their parents did…still, the encouragement to deny expression is everywhere. It’s there in the well-meaning parent joggling a baby to “help her stop fussing”, it’s there in distracting young children with tv and videos and food rewards if they would just quiet down, it’s there in laws and social mores that discourage adults from being outwardly emotional, especially if it’s loud.

The “why’s” of our misfired lives are hidden underneath the emotions and often can’t be accessed mentally until the anger, grief, hurt or fear has had its emotionally expressive say. I have found many clear understandings about what is going on with me after I’ve expressed emotion, but could not find that level of clarity beforehand, no matter how much I tried to get clear before expressing my feelings first.

Some suggestions: find safe ways to express that do not verbally or physically harm you or others. Hit soft things, yell into down pillows to block your sound if sound safety is an issue. Ask your higher power to fill you with loving light. Form peer healing circles, and uncover your own denial within that group; this can be a do-it-yourself process with the occasional support of those who do the same thing in their lives. A therapist is not always necessary.

Give yourself safe, proactive triggers, so that it is not always life’s hardships in your face that are putting you through your paces. I’ve made tapes of triggering music and lit candles and prayed in order to trigger the pain I knew was lurking and impacting on my life every day. Surrender to what rises in you with as little control as possible on the expression. If triggered by another in the space, move away from them when possible, unless the two of you have a longstanding agreement to do this kind of interpersonal work together and are each willing to feel the “cascade” of back’n'forth triggering along with the leaking blame that spews inevitably as the sparks fly upward. Taking responsibility for your involvement in each and every controversy is important.