Surrender yourself to emotional freedom

The bestselling author and health coach gives a remarkable insight into human emotions and how they shape every aspect of our lives

Are you feeling a little stuck in where you are in your life? Do you find yourself dwelling in unhelpful emotions like fear, anger and guilt while endlessly chasing something intangible to help you feel more successful or ‘enough’, and losing sight of the incredible gifts you already have? Maybe you are simply tired of chasing.

What if the life you dream of is possible and that a life of greater inner ease and joy is available to you? In my book The Freedom Within, I endeavour to share with you simple but powerful examples and methods that will lead you to a whole new level of emotional awareness, emotional regulation and good emotional health. TIME TO THINK ABOUT OUR EMOTIONAL HEALTH

Emotions, as we know, can be uplifting, joyous, life-giving, or they can be debilitating and lifedisabling. They can hold us in the past, through shame and guilt, they can propel us into the future with passion and enthusiasm and they can centre us in the present moment with joy and gratitude.

Over recent years there has been so much focus on mental health and understanding our thoughts and now I believe the future of health also requires us to look more deeply at emotional health, what good emotional health is and how we can all experience far greater levels of it.

SO WHAT IS GOOD EMOTIONAL HEALTH?

Good emotional health ensures that we have the ability to refocus ourselves, to live within a state of inner calm and with resilience, empathy and awareness of our own needs and the needs of others. It’s like our inner compass.

When we begin to know ourselves more, to understand where our emotions come from and the reason we react in an emotional way to certain situations and triggers, we are on the path to good emotional health and to living a life that is more committed to peace than anger, to love than fear, to nonjudgement than judgement.

Our emotions fluctuate less and we begin to live with this inner freedom, this inner emotional bliss. When we are in emotional dis-health, however, we can operate from a place of fear, worry, anxiety and stress, where we catastrophise about what is happening in our lives and the future. We find ourselves stuck in negative thought patterns that can be difficult to break free from.

Operating from a place of strong or good emotional health is fundamental to our long-term health and happiness. By obtaining optimum emotional health, we are able to navigate and recover from the challenges life throws at us. Our stresses and worries are put into perspective and we can begin living according to our true purpose. We also begin to develop a heightened awareness where we realise that the way we focus on something, the words we use, the narrative we use to describe the situation, either magnifies the problem or magnifies the solution.

When we begin to let resistance, anger and judgement go, when we take away our attention from the things we can’t control and focus only on the things we can control, when we move from emotional reactions to emotional responses, we become emotionally free. By ‘free’, I don’t mean that sometimes we won’t suffer negative emotions. Emotionally healthy people will at times suffer anger, judgement, sadness. But they are empowered to move out of these emotions with more ease and, ultimately, begin living with an inner state of peace, calmness and love.

SUPPRESSING EMOTIONS DEPLETES US OF ENERGY AND VITALITY

Suppressing or denying an emotion is like pushing an airfilled ball underneath the water in a swimming pool.

You may hold it down as long as you like, and as long as you maintain a conscious intent to hold it down and put active pressure on it, it will stay beneath the water. However, as soon as you let it go, as soon as you release the active pressure, it will pop back to the surface.

Emotions are the same; if we simply suppress them or deny them or try to drown them out with distractions, we are not dealing with them and they are not going to go away. They will simply wait, and the moment we stop being distracted or the moment we stop suppressing them they will come to the top. Suppressing an emotion requires active energy and conscious or unconscious attention. This means that for as long as we are suppressing an emotion our vital energy reserves are being depleted, and with suppressed emotions come suppressed immune systems. Holding or suppressing emotions can cause fatigue, chronic stress and illness. The amount of energy that is required to suppress an emotion is so great that our body has to prioritise its available energy

for this task and so it starves our brain and our nervous system of the energy they require to function with vitality.

Fatigue and tiredness can of course be caused by the presence of something — for example, a challenge or a new baby or a project that requires all our attention. But we must be aware that fatigue and tiredness can also be caused by the lack of something. If we are suppressing emotions such as fear, frustration, jealousy and so on, then we are depleting vital energy reserves in doing so, and because these are the emotions that we are really feeling, there is little or no space for the emotions of love, joy, gratitude, adventure.