Personal Growth Through Emotional Responsibility & Breathwork
Every Strong Emotion Is An Opportunity For Personal Growth
You have the power to harness your emotions, transforming them into a source of personal growth and profound self-awareness, rather than allowing them to take the reigns and create chaos and drama in your life. In this article, we will examine a two-phase process which allow you to alchemize strong emotions into profound personal growth.
Harnessing Your Emotions for Personal Growth, Step 1:
The first step of this process is to leverage your online breathwork sessions to instill the belief within your psyche that it is perfectly acceptable to fully feel and release your emotions, thus making you more comfortable with releasing them in your daily life. This doesn’t imply recklessly expressing or projecting your feelings onto others without taking responsibility for them. Instead, consider expressing your emotions, like anger for instance, by screaming into a cushion or employing another appropriate method that doesn’t negatively impact other individuals.
It’s also important to not label your emotions as good or bad, and to embrace all of them! Once you make a practice of wholeheartedly feeling and expressing all of your emotions, you gain the capacity to harness them as opportunities for personal growth, rather than fearing or resisting them. This is pivotal, as suppressed emotions can fester within us, creating energetic blocks in our bodies. And when emotions are trapped and unable to find an outlet, it prevents new things from coming in – creating stagnation and numbness.
If you are unable to release your anger, for example, you may become emotionally closed off. As a result, you may struggle to fully embrace love, and genuine gratitude may remain elusive within you. Your existence will then become desensitized. Conversely, when we permit ourselves to fully experience and release our emotions, we become sensitive to life. We can cleanse our bodies of energy blocks, and we can work with our emotions as tools to do our inner work.
Harnessing Your Emotions for Personal Growth, Step 2:
Once you bring more awareness and openness to your internal emotional states, the second phase begins. This phase is all about taking personal responsibility. In everyday life, we tend to project the cause of our internal states and emotions onto something that has happened in the outside world. When you think about this more deeply, it is obvious that that is never the case. For example, if somebody cuts in front of somebody else in traffic, one person may not be bothered at all and another person might be furious. So, it is not what actually happens in the outside world, it is what the event triggers from our past and the story we create around what happened in the past that creates the emotion.
In breathwork sessions, it is critical to do what we call “taking it vertical”. For instance, if a piece of music comes on that you dislike, or there is an unexpected interruption and you get angry, instead of projecting the cause of the anger on what happened in the outside world, just allow it to fully express itself without any judgment or suppression, and see what happens. You can then open a pathway to get insight into what is really being triggered from your past and start to work with it. Every emotion serves as a signal from the body, indicating a need for release, and offers a doorway to delve further into the transformative journey of breathwork and personal growth.
In order to make use of this principle in your everyday life, try the following exercise:
When you experience a strong emotion, pause, take a few deep breaths, and examine the narrative you’re constructing in your mind that’s giving rise to that emotion. Remember that nobody can create an emotion in you, emotions are created by the stories you weave around your experiences. For instance, your story might be that somebody is disrespecting you, that they are making you feel unworthy, that they are making you feel incompetent, etc. The first step is to see the story, try and look back into your life, and get to the bottom of where that story came from. It is usually from childhood. Once you get to the bottom of that, you can consciously change the story to one that is more accurate and empowering to you, and one that creates a different emotion.
Here’s an example: You feel like your partner never helps around the house and you get angry because your story is “My partner does not appreciate me” or “I don’t feel loved”. This story may have its roots in a childhood experience where, for example, you went from being the only child to having a younger sibling, causing your parents’ attention to shift away from you. This left you feeling unvalued and unloved. Therefore your anger is not really about your boyfriend’s current actions; the situation is triggering the feelings you felt when you were young.
Once you get to the bottom of this, you can change your story about your childhood – e.g. “My parents had every right to divide their attention between me and my younger sibling, they loved us both”. And then change your story about the current situation e.g. “My boyfriend is focusing on his work to bring home money to pay the rent, that is how he is showing his love and appreciation”. By consciously using your emotions to do your inner work, it changes the energy of your relationship from one of blame and being “right” or “wrong,” to one of gratitude.
Allow Anyone Who Evokes a Strong Emotion in You, to Be Your Teacher
As you navigate your daily life, always remember, anybody who evokes a strong emotion in you is not “the enemy”! He or she is your teacher in that moment. I call this taking responsibility for your emotional states and it is one of the most important personal growth practices you can take from breathwork, into your life! (For more information on Breathwork & Personal Growth, Click Here)
Closing Thoughts on Strong Emotions, Personal Growth and Breathwork
Breathwork is one of the most potent methods for processing and releasing stuck emotions from the past that might be subconsciously running your life. Additionally, a personal practice of emotional responsibility can be a valuable tool for dealing with current emotional challenges, allowing you to both clear past baggage and expedite your journey toward personal transformation. The synergy of these two practices is remarkably powerful and because the brain learns through repetition, a consistent breathwork practice serves to firmly engrain this learning into your psyche.
Make a Deep Commitment to Your Personal Growth with a FREE Month of NeuroDynamic Breathwork Sessions
We offer 2-hour online breathwork sessions several times throughout the week so you can take a deep dive into your healing and personal growth with a consistent breathwork practice. If you would like to join one of our sessions, and partake in faster, deeper breathing to quiet the egoic mind, foster emotional responsibility, and step into your fullest potential, we invite you to register for free! After your first free online breathwork session, you’ll receive an email with access to a whole month of free breathwork plus other membership perks such as FREE Breathe&Reset™ sessions, and monthly EFT classes.
Click here to find out more about our online breathwork process.
