“The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.” — Nicholas Sparks

I was sobbing uncontrollably. Tears streaming, heart aching, every ounce of emotional energy within me being squeezed out.

I was sitting by my mother’s empty bed where she had passed just hours earlier. She was only 72.

Then something happened that I didn’t expect…

As the emotion flowed, I became conscious of a strange sensation. I began to feel like I was connecting with her through my pain.

It was like I was honoring her and acknowledging how much she meant to me and my life.

So, I leaned into my grief instead of fighting it.

And in that moment, after a life spent avoiding emotional pain and uncomfortable feelings, I realized I had nothing to fear.

I would be ok on the other side of all that pain.

That’s when I realized I would never be afraid of feeling difficult emotions ever again. Regret, hurt, sadness, anger, disappointment. They were all just emotions.

In fact, the more I felt them, the more alive I felt.

And that’s when I learned to lean into all my emotions – the uplifting, constricting, and everything in between.

It was my definitive acknowledgement of a fundamental truth:

The richness and quality of our emotions determines the richness and quality of our lives.

Gap Insight: Feeling is the key ingredient to aliveness. When you feel dead inside, stuck, or numb, you’re simply suppressing your emotional vitality. Start feeling to begin healing.

How the Hose Became Kinked

As children, our emotions flowed out of us like water through a fire hose. It flowed freely without obstruction.

But it didn’t stay that way.

As we grew, that hose became kinked as we learned those same emotions could be problematic:

• Parents and friends could reject us if we expressed how we felt.
• Fitting in became more important than trusting our feelings.
• We had no idea how to cope with painful emotions like shame, anger, or hurt.
• We didn’t have the tools or the perspective to deal with difficult home lives and emotional turmoil.
• Very few role models existed who demonstrated a range and depth of emotion or made those emotions seem safe and normal.

So we learned to bury, ignore, or suppress our emotions along with our full aliveness and vitality.

It didn’t end there.

Emotions don’t just live in our hearts and minds, they are actual biochemical responses. They turn into neurotransmitters and hormones that impact every single cell, organ, and tissue in our bodies.

Cortisol, adrenaline, oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine are all biochemical products of emotional experiences.

They are also molecules that alter gene expression, immune function, cardiovascular health, digestive function, and cellular repair in real and measurable ways.

Thereby, every emotion you feel or suppress is a full-body physiological event.

The emotions you don’t feel — the ones you bury, avoid, suppress, and push below the surface — don’t disappear. They go into the body.

Monumental works like Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, and Dr. Candace Pert’s book, Molecules of Emotion, bridged the gap between the mind and body and detail how our emotions greatly impact our health.

Gap Insight: Emotional disconnection is not a character flaw, it was a survival strategy. The problem is that what kept you safe as a child and adolescent is keeping you imprisoned as an adult.

The Emotional Spectrum – Your Birthright

You were born with the full, unfiltered, extraordinary spectrum of human emotion from:

• The crushing depths of grief to the soaring heights of joy.
• The fire of righteous anger to the tender vulnerability of love.
• The contraction of fear to the expansion of beauty and wonder.

Every emotion on this spectrum is part of you. Every emotion serves a function. When felt, acknowledged and allowed to move through, every emotion carries information, energy, and ultimately, liberation.

That’s why emotional freedom isn’t about feeling only uplifting emotions.

Freedom is created when you feel ALL OF THEM responsibly and without resistance so that they move through you rather than becoming trapped inside.

An emotion fully felt passes through you. An emotion suppressed persists indefinitely inside you.

If you don’t let it pass, and remain in anger, despair, hurt, denial, grief, or depression for long or without expressing them, they will constrict your life.

Gap Insight: The emotion itself is never the problem. How you use the emotion, whether feeling it, or suppressing it, will determine whether it becomes a problem or adds vitality to your life.

3 Ways to Restore Emotional Vitality

1. Feel your constricting emotions

The process is simple. Next time you notice anger, hurt, resentment, worry, or any other emotion welling up, take time to feel it.

Close your eyes, sit with the energy of it. Breathe into it, acknowledge the intensity, and feel it for several minutes until it passes.

It always passes when you feel it fully and wait it out, and a few minutes is usually all it takes.

2. Write in a journal

Connecting to, and expanding, your emotional vitality can be as simple as keeping a daily journal.

Write out your anger or hurt, worries and fears, wins and successes, disappointments, and revelations. If you write with the intention of feeling as you write, you’ll expand the depth of your emotional reservoir.

Try it for one week. You’ll find it’s enjoyable to connect to yourself along with your deepest thoughts and emotions that you hadn’t previously acknowledged.

3. Intentionally feel an expanding emotion every day.

Every morning upon waking, reserve the first two minutes to feel gratitude, love, or excitement for the day. This practice alone will change you.

You’ll start feeling more deeply, begin to train your brain to focus on the beauty in life, stimulate your immune system, and decrease stress all in one.

Final Thoughts

How often do you sit and feel your emotions?

What is the one emotion you avoid feeling at all costs?

Is it grief, sadness, loneliness, rage, or something else?

Often the one emotion we refuse to feel is one we NEED to feel to become unstuck.

Emotions are our life force. They are the fuel.

To the extent we bury, suppress or mute any of them, we mute them all – along with our experience and enjoyment of life.

Sometimes, healing is a matter of clearing emotional energy you’ve been unconsciously avoiding.

Reconnecting to your emotional vitality can be as easy as purposely feeling your emotions, keeping a journal, or producing expanding emotions on purpose.

With one conscious emotion at a time, you can reclaim the full depth of your experience.

And you close the gap between the life you’re living and the life you’re capable of.

Yours in health and emotional vitality, David