Create A Safe Space To Feel Your Emotions

One of the patterns that will keep you feeling perpetually sick and tired is trying to keep a lid on all your emotions.

E-motions are just energy in motion.

When we feel whatever it is that we are feeling, we allow the energy to flow.

It takes a tremendous amount of energy to try to stop the flow of our feelings. When we try to repress or suppress what we are feeling, that may leave us totally exhausted.

One of the best ways to create a safe space to feel your emotions is with what I call The Container Exercise:

1. If and when you feel your emotions coming up and you feel in any way overwhelmed by the intensity of what you are feeling, begin by imagining a container.
2. Your container could be very very small, such as a dainty little teacup, or very very big, such as a dumpster.
3. Once you have created the container in your mind, allow yourself to feel all your feelings until the container is filled up. Breathe into whatever you are feeling and explore your feelings with all your senses. See them. Feel them. Hear them. Know what it’s all about.
4. Once your container is now full, visualize yourself emptying your container. You could visualize yourself throwing the contents of the teacup out the window. You could imagine the City of Atlanta Sanitation Department coming along and picking up the dumpster. Either way, get rid of it.
5. Now shift your energy. Get up from where ever you were and go and do something different. Give yourself permission to shift your focus.

What’s so great about the container exercise?

1. It allows you to feel safe while you are feeling all your emotions.
2. It creates boundaries so you will know that there is a beginning and end for the time being.
3. It empowers you with a feeling of control, so that you don’t feel overtaken by the severity of what you are feeling.
4. It gives you permission to process your emotions at your own pace.

In my practice, I have worked with clients with every kind of addiction you could possibly imagine: alcoholics, workaholics, foodaholics, exercise bulimics, prescription drug addicts, people who are addicted to illegal drugs. And that’s for starters.

The common denominator in all these patterns I find is that addictions are just a handy way to avoid our feelings.

I tell my clients you will know you are well when you can finally get angry, have a panic attack or feel very very lonely and sad and cry without having to take a drink, work 14 hours, overeat, over exercise or take a pill.

You can say to yourself, “I AM SAFE. THIS IS ONLY MY FEELINGS!”

You know you are very strong when you are strong enough to handle your emotions, knowing that whatever you are feeling in this moment is just energy that will flow through you and pass.

Giving yourself permission to let the air out of your emotions may also be one of the simplest natural healing remedies you have ever tried to overcome chronic fatigue.

Because it takes so much energy to hold back the waves of our emotions, suppressing and repressing your feelings may have been causing you to feel very tired.

Benefits of allowing your emotions to simply flow include increased energy and decreased pain. You may be shocked how you can get rid of every manner of discomfort and dis-ease simply by feeling whatever it is that is going on inside yourself.

What is healing? Healing happens when we create a safe space to feel all our emotions, allowing them to flow and knowing and experiencing that we are strong enough to handle whatever it is life brings to us.