One of the most essential parts of becoming a balanced and fulfilled human is the ability to healthily, productively express your emotions.
We are often taught and modeled throughout life to stifle and stuff down the emotions we don’t want to feel, but when we ignore or deny their expression, they become lodged in our energy body, creating blocks that can stifle us and create much more struggle than we need to experience.
That’s why it’s so important for everyone, but especially empaths who absorb and hold onto so many emotions, to have some simple, effective clearing practices that’ll help release any blocks and keep your life flowing smoothly.
Here are some of the best ways we know of to clear out all the heavy, stuck, and stagnant emotions you’re holding inside you in a healthy, transformative way that will bring real relief!
Shaking
When we feel intense emotions, like fear or stress, we unconsciously tighten and stiffen up, clenching our energy inwardly. An almost immediate reliever for this is to open your hands, open your jaw, exhale and shake out your body!
Shake out your limbs, shake your hips, shake your hair around. You can twist and turn and bend and stretch and let your body guide you as you focus on shaking every part of it out.
This almost immediately dispels and transmutes any erratic, intense emotions into clearer, calmer energy. Not only is it effective for the emotions you feel in the moment, it can also help you clear out past trauma and intense emotional experiences that have lived in your psyche for years.
Try focusing on the anger, the pain, the sadness, whatever feeling it is you want to clear, as you jump and shake and wiggle your arms and hands, legs and feet, torso and head.
You can put on some favorite music or even yell, scream or grunt while you’re doing it, whatever feels most freeing to you!
Shake, shake, shake until you feel a sense of relief, like the emotional wave has crested, until the emotion has transmuted and feels less intense.
Vocalizing
Sometimes, you have to just say what you really want to say, and express the thoughts that seem too awful to express, because holding them in can quickly become detrimental to your own health and happiness.
The caveat with this is, you do NOT want to express the unadulterated raw emotions to another human! You do not want to send this energy into anyone else’s field or make anyone else feel bad.
This is often what unconsciously happens when we suppress our emotions and then are triggered by an experience. We react with the fire and fury of all that we’ve been holding in, rather than responding to what’s actually happening in the moment.
So to dispel those stuffed down emotions before they boil over and scald someone else, taking a personal, private moment to vocalize your truth can make a world of difference.
In your own privacy, behind closed doors, or even during a shower if it’s hard for you to steal an alone moment otherwise, it’s time to get loose and let the words and vocal expressions fly.
Try saying the things that are on your mind that you feel like you can’t express to anyone else. Say the things you would never say to someone else directly, but that feel like a true emotion for you. This is an act that helps move them out of your psyche and soul.
It can also be extremely helpful to take words entirely out of the picture, and practice expressing your emotions with grunts, growls, screams, and sighs. You can sing, speak in gibberish, shout obscenities- do whatever it is you need to do to move those emotions out of your body!
Vocalizing like this moves the unfelt into the felt, it moves the intangible into a sensation of experience, allowing the blocked and stifled pain to shift its energy and dissipate.
So next time you feel like you had to gulp down an intense emotion you felt in the moment, remember to come back to the feeling later when you have a private moment and let the power of your voice move it out of your body so it doesn’t become an energetic block.
Tapping
A wonderful practice to help release emotions is called EFT, or the Emotional Freedom Technique. This involves using your fingertips to tap on specific meridian points around your face and body, as you focus on the emotional sensations and subconscious beliefs you want to release. This technique can help clear out deep beliefs from their energetic source.
You can also look into qi gong practices, which offer fun and simple movements that work to ground you in your body and shift your emotional energy. There are many actions in qi gong where you tap, slap, or pat along different meridians in your body, moving energy through and out of your field and ensuring that none of it gets stuck or stifled anywhere.
Energy medicine techniques also utilize tapping on meridians or on specific glands to stimulate and move emotional energy through, so it can be processed and released.
You can search any of these techniques online to find how-to videos and information, or follow your intuitive guidance and simply tap your fingers, or gently pat your hands, on the areas where you’re feeling tension or emotional angst in your body.
Try tapping on the thymus gland in the center of your chest when you feel anxious, on your temples when you feel worried, or around your hips when you want to loosen up.
You’ll often be guided to exactly what areas you need to focus on if you can quiet your mind and listen to the intelligence of your body.
It does you no good to hold onto all that excess emotional energy, so try shaking, vocalizing, and tapping your way to happiness and balance!