Learning to Meet My Emotions: A Journey of Emotional Healing Through the Body
Why Emotional Empowerment Matters
Emotions are not just thoughts in the mind, they are sensations and energies that move through the body. Emotional empowerment is one of my favourite themes to address in my 1-1 sessions and group spaces. Let me share why this work is so powerful.
The Moment My Body Asked Me To Listen
Learning how to hold space for my emotions, express them in a healthy way, process strong emotional cycles, and to use emotions to keep me on my right path is a lifelong learning that supports the health of my mind and body every single day.
There was a time in my life, perhaps only 6 years back, where I was not so connected with my body and my emotions. I had no idea that the body is a somatic expression of our thoughts and feelings and that our emotions are beautiful messengers in the form of energy. They flow in and then they are meant to flow out again. But the flow out? This is where we can sometimes meet a little resistance … because for the emotion to flow out, the message must be received first. I will share with you later how you can support the flow of your emotions in and out and improve your relationship to them.
6 years ago I went through a huge transitionary period in my life, I was working in top sport as a Performance Nutritionist, living the life I thought I dreamt of. Being a high achiever, I was also pushing from my mind, letting my ambitious thoughts drive me to the next big thing. As an academic and medically minded at the time, I viewed the body only as a physiological vessel and I kept ‘healthy’ by eating well and exercising regularly. Little did I know at the time, that this is only half of the picture of health because if you are disconnected from your body, you are disconnected from yourself… and if you don’t listen to your body or interact with its felt sense, well then it has a way of making you listen.. eventually.
How Stress Began To Show Up In My Body
As stress built up more and more in sport and I was starting to question my purpose in this world, my body started to give me signs to slow down and to reconnect .. to listen to my body, my intuition and to take a breath to feel the chronic emotional frequency I was in, which was fear, stress and anxiety.
One small symptom appeared after another and I was starting to question why my body was ‘letting me down’… outbreaks of acne on my face, development of Raynaud’s disease, chronic back pain from an injury that should have healed, waking up with a full body rash one day, my joints becoming irritable and unstable. I visited various medical professionals to try and ‘fix my body’ and nothing worked. I give them credit because they all did the best they could with what they knew. But no one ever shared with me how my emotional state and my stressed nervous system could manifest in my body as physical symptoms and that these physical symptoms can also give big clues as to what emotions they are linked with.
My body didn’t need to be fixed, it was just asking to be felt.
Discovering Somatic Healing
Eventually it was an overwhelming sense of anxiety that took me out of my work and into my healing journey. It was during this time off work when I started to receive body-belief somatic release therapy (a modality I have now trained in with BodyBelief). Quite early on in my sessions, I learnt that I was holding onto a lot of anger and unprocessed stress cycles in my body (perhaps also some passed down ancestrally) and that my nervous system was regularly in fight or flight.
These sessions offered the first opportunity to connect with my anger. We are often taught that emotions are good (like joy, excitement, love) or bad (like anger, fear, worry) and because of this, we tend to supress the bad ones and resist feeling them, also because the ‘bad ones’ often carry the biggest weight when it comes to feeling them. The truth of this is that these emotions have different energetic frequencies and effects in the body. We do have the capacity to hold them all when we know how to, we can even hold two opposite emotions at the same time which is called duality… but more of this in another post ;)
During these sessions, I was guided how to express my anger in a safe way through shaking, breath, sound and movement. It was in the embodiment of the anger that I was able to communicate with it and understand its purpose and its role in my life and THEN to transform it.
Understanding Anger: Why It Is Not a Bad Emotion
I learnt that anger is not a bad emotion at all, anger is a blessing to experience because it is showing me my boundaries, my values and my sense of worth. Anger is arising when any of these were being crossed or challenged and it has the energy of action, fuelling us into doing something, changing something or taking a new direction.
When we hold anger in our bodies for a long time, it affects the person holding onto it more than the external source. So, you either let it go and release it somatically from the body in a safe way. Or you take this fire energy and use it to fuel you towards action that makes a positive change.
How My Body Began to Heal
Naturally when I built a healthy relationship with anger and met other emotions too, my physical body began to ease and my pain lifted. In the place of slowing down and listening to my body, of transforming my anger and recalibrating my stressed nervous state, my body was able to drop into its self-healing form which is where the body naturally likes to be and this is where the magic happens and the body can return to its optimal function.
This journey completely changed the way I relate to my emotions and my body. Emotions are no longer something to suppress or push away, but powerful messengers that guide us back toward truth, boundaries, and self-connection.
And it is this work — learning how to listen to the body and work with emotions rather than against them — that I now share in my sessions and group spaces.
