undestand your emotions 1

Some people make a distinction between emotions and feelings saying that a feeling is the response part of the emotion and that an emotion includes the situation or experience, the interpretation, the perception, and the response or feeling related to the experience of a particular situation.  In this article the terms will be used interchangeably.

Emotions affect your physical bodies as much as your body affects your feelings and thinking.  People who ignore, dismiss, repress their emotions, are setting themselves up for physical illness.  Emotions that are not felt and released but buried within the body can cause serious illness, including cancer, arthritis, and many types of chronic illnesses.  Negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, negativity, frustration and depression cause chemical reactions in your body that are very different from the chemicals released when you feel positive emotions such as happy, content, loved, accepted.

There are only two basic emotions that we all experience, love and fear.  All other emotions are variations of these two emotions.  Thoughts and behavior come from either a place of love, or a place of fear.  Anxiety, anger, control, sadness, depression, inadequacy, confusion, hurt , lonely, guilt , shame, these are all fear-based emotions.  Emotions such as joy, happiness, caring, trust, compassion, truth, contentment, satisfaction, these are love-based emotions.

There are varying degrees of intensity of both types of emotions, some being mild , others moderate, and others strong in intensity.  For example, anger in a mild form can be felt as disgust or dismay, at a moderate level can be felt as offended or exasperated, and at an intense level can be felt as rage or hate. And the emotion that always underpins anger is fear.

When we have an experience that we find painful or difficult, and are either unable to cope with the pain, or just afraid of it, we often dismiss this emotion and either get busy, exercise more, drink or eat a bit more, or just pretend it has not happened.  When we do this we do not feel the emotion and this results in what is called repressed, suppressed or buried emotions. These feelings stay in our muscles, ligaments, stomach, midriff , auras.  These emotions remain buried within us until we bring that emotion up and feel the emotion, thus releasing it.  Emotions that are buried on the long-term are the emotions that normally cause physical illness.

The following are a few examples of the methods people use to avoid feeling their emotions.

• Ignoring your feelings
• Pretending something hasn’t happened
• Overeating
• Eating foods loaded with sugar and fat
• Excessive drinking of alcohol
• Excessive use of recreational drugs
• Using prescription drugs such as tranquilizers
• Exercising compulsively
• Any type of compulsive behavior
• Always keeping busy so you can’t feel
• Constant intellectualizing and analyzing
• Excessive reading or TV
• Working Excessively
• Keeping conversations superficial
• Burying angry emotions under the mask of peace and love

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