Emotions, energy in motion, drives us to react to the baby crying, the door slamming or the person we love in a myriad of ways. How many of us have heard the saying that love can move mountains? Emotions are real energy. It is this energy that drives us to do things sometimes we have never even imagined. Yet sometimes we rarely know where the emotion comes from unless we stop to reflect within ourselves and take inventory.
Unfortunately in this day and age, we have managed to use fear and control to manipulate human beings and society into repressing their emotions. Some churches limit sexual activity between partners, young boys are often told men don't cry and women are sometimes shamed for showing hurt feelings or ridiculed. What we don't realize is that by repressing these emotions they show up in our lives in other ways. Energy simply has to go somewhere. It is continuous, so our repressed emotions might show up in violent acts, anger, addiction, and most often in acts committed against ourselves - self hatred.
Many times we can pinpoint where an emotion came from. Sometimes we can catch the thought that starts the drama and recognize where it came from. A woman may look in the mirror and think to herself she's fat. Further inquiry might reveal that her mother was fixated on her weight. She may indulge in an act of self hatred like eating a box of cookies, then labeling herself again as a failure, a fatty, worth nothing.
A man might act out in anger not knowing why, when further self inquiry might reveal that his father also acted out in the same manner. His form of self punishment may be to go to the bar and drink his sorrow away. Eating and/or drinking, any act or form of self punishment is there as a defense mechanism for us and something we put there to deaden the pain. We don't want to feel it, so our egos busys ourselves with something else; a drug, a drink, food, or simply negative thoughts about ourselves.
These cycles continue. Through generations of families, through societies, countries, and individuals. We can't do anything about "everyone else", but we can focus on ourselves to release these emotions from our fields and transmute them in order for us to heal.
The emotional body is one of the four bodies that need purification for spiritual ascension, but also for a peaceful healthy life. Instead of repressing emotions we need to allow ourselves to feel them. We need to recognize the emotion and express it. As painful as it may be we have to accept what the emotion brings with it. Expressing it allows for us to grieve the situation and let it go. We can then begin to heal ourselves and reprogram our emotional energy re-routing it to a healthier place.
In my household we had to contend with abuse. Abuse sometimes leads you to feel powerless, a loss of control over your own life and diminishes your self worth. Inside sometimes you feel very angry at your abuser, yet most often that anger isn't directed at the abuser themselves. Most often it's directed at someone you feel "safe" directing it at. In my family that was me. My sons abusive experiences became anger outbursts at me. When I recognized what was transpiring, I knew we had to express all that pent up energy that my son was feeling. We began to engage in what I call - the pillow wars.
Pillow wars allowed both of us to name our pillow (the abuser) and punch, hit, kick and scream at it. Doing this made us feel more at ease, released the emotion, helped us recognize it for what it was and allowed us to be more conscious and take more control over our emotional bodies.
These stored energies have to come out. Whether you want them to come out consciously by paying attention to them and healing them, or unconsciously, by burying them, then having them come out in other ways is up to you. But they do go somewhere. Energy is always in motion. We can use that to our advantage and transmute that energy, or let it run the same course it has been, in the same rut, pushing our same buttons for the rest of our lives.
I've posted several videos below. The first is from a movie called "What the Bleep do You Know" demonstrating how our emotions can run rampant and we recreate the same situations in our lives. This "internal wiring" is real, but we do have the power to "re-wire" ourselves and heal.
The second is from Mary J Blige. She speaks about her life and how emotional baggage in her life has made itself manifest.