Process Difficult Emotions In 5 Steps

My head was swirling with volatile thoughts. I was sweating, enraged, and wrestling with my emotions in the dark at 4am. I was really upset about something that had happened earlier that day and I couldn’t fall back to sleep.

Then I remembered…’Put the stories aside and allow myself to just feel. Acknowledge the emotion so the energy can be processed and released.’

I did just that, and I was back to sleep in 5 minutes.

“When you process your emotions, you become a field of peace.”

-Jennifer Partridge

Often when we’re upset or in pain, we push our emotions away, stuff them down, numb ourselves, and do anything to avoid and escape these uncomfortable feelings. The problem is that unprocessed emotion creates stagnation in our energy field and can show up later as illness, dis-ease, and create all sorts of issues in our lives.

So why do we do this to ourselves?

Most of us haven’t been taught how to process emotion in a healthy way. In fact many, like myself, have been conditioned to resist negative emotion at all costs.

Resistance comes up when we think we have to stay in the pain and discomfort forever. But when we give ourselves permission to feel the raw emotion, fully and completely—without the web of narratives, judgments and expectations around it—we're able to release it very quickly.

If we just observe without getting lost in the story of ‘who did and said what’, emotions can be naturally processed out of our system in about a minute or less.
 Any longer than that and we’re simply caught in the narrative, and that’s when we stay in a seemingly endless loop with the unwanted energy.

“The escalation of emotions—where you’re really in the river, swept away, losing all your perspective, totally carried away by loneliness and anger and despair—is fueled by the story line.”

-Pema Chödrön

5-Step Process for Emotional Release

The next time you feel a difficult emotion like grief, anger, sadness, or fear rising to the surface, I want to invite you to give this liberating process a try:

Step 1: Give yourself permission to feel raw emotion

By giving yourself permission, you’re letting your mind-body-spirit know that it’s safe to feel, which creates a space for your process.

Step 2: Put the story aside

There’s no need to analyze why you're feeling this way or who caused it. This will only get in the way of this specific technique. For now, leave the logical mind out of it. You can always re-visit the narrative later on to take away important insights.

Step 3: Observe the emotion in your body

Notice where you feel the energy in your body. And, what are the physical sensations where the emotion rests (i.e. heavy, hot, cold, sharpness, numbness)? The energy may show up as a knot in your stomach, heaviness around your heart, or dull pain in your lower back.

Step 4: Expand the emotion with your breath

This can be the scariest step because it involves expanding negative emotion, which may feel counter-intuitive. However, we must feel it to heal it. And when we’re totally present with the emotion, it’s actually not as bad as we think it’s going to be.

In this step, breathe deeply into the emotion, allow it to expand, and be with the sensations. Feel any discomfort in the body, and just acknowledge that it’s there.

Step 5: Stay present and witness the emotion dissolve

At this stage you’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As you breathe and bear witness to the emotion, you’ll notice it dissipates rather quickly.

What’s left behind is typically a sense of peace and spaciousness because you’ve cleared the energy. If you don’t feel this way, there may be more layers to work through. You can repeat this process later on until you feel lighter.

All 5 steps should be done within 1 minute or less. If it takes any longer, it means you got lost in the story—and that’s okay. This is a practice! Have patience with yourself and your unique healing process.

I would love to hear from you in the comments below!

How does this technique resonate with you? And how did it go when you put it into practice?

Do you have any other techniques you use to process emotions that you’d like to share?

With love & gratitude,

Sara