What happens when you numb your emotions?
Blocked emotions can change the way you function in your life. They can cut you off from being authentic and cause you to act and think in ways that can be less than helpful.
On an energetic level, trapped emotions in the body can block the healthy flow of energy and leave us feeling lethargic, uninspired, and dull. If this continues for long enough, it can have a real impact on our lives, our self-perception, our relationships, and our work.
It can be hard to feel our emotions sometimes but resisting feeling them doesn’t dispose of them. Rather, they live on in the body.
After enough time, they can be felt as physical sensations, pain, or numbness in certain parts of the body.
Where these feelings are felt will almost certainly align with the particular brand of emotions you are fleeing from.
For example, if you have feelings that your sexuality is bad, you may store emotions in the hips and groin. If you feel that your opinion doesn’t matter, you might feel numbness around the throat and collarbone (representing your ability to voice your thoughts and feelings). Alternatively, you might feel tension in one side of your body like a leg or foot.
But for many, they may rarely be aware of the energy they are keeping in their bodies. Their minds are so dominant and busy thinking that there’s rarely a chance for the mind to take stock of the physical energy of the body.
The key is to feel our emotions but how can you do that? How can you create the space to go into the feeling?
How To Feel Your Feelings
One of the most common approaches is to use meditation as a way to quiet our minds and go deeper into our own experience.
Through meditation, we can bring our attention to the various parts of the body – particularly, the parts that are most numb – and use our attention to feel into those areas.
With attention, we can begin to draw out the feelings that have been blocked for so long, and in the gentle embrace of our awareness, allow our body to be felt more fully.
You may notice physical shifts in the body as you do this, such as a release in tension, a straightening or relaxation of the spine and muscles, and a sense of inner calm.
You may also experience thoughts arising. This may throw you off your feeling-awareness and that’s okay. You can also return to the body with your attention.
Finding Acceptance Through Awareness
Ultimately, the way past stuck emotions is by learning to accept them. Self-acceptance is allowing all things to be as they are in the moment including uncomfortable emotions or numbed-out feelings in the body.
We can live for years avoiding feeling our emotions but we’ll likely never be able to reach our fullest potential until we do, and we’ll continue to suffer from our repressed emotions and the energetic blocks that they create.
Meditation is one of the most direct ways to bring acceptance to the body and the energy stored there. With practice, the piercing depth of our awareness will break up these blockages and restore the body to wholeness.
It can be challenging to find the will and energy to sit in meditation and practice somatic awareness but numbing our feelings will only extend our time feeling disconnected.
If you’ve determined to help restore balance in the body and unlock your deeper, truer self, committing periods of time each day will go a long way in getting you there.
Quality is more important than quantity, so bring your fullest attention to your practice, and continue bringing your attention back to the body whenever you lose touch.
