Author Topic: Struggling to Access/Feel Emotions  (Read 457 times)

charlieo44

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
    • View Profile
Struggling to Access/Feel Emotions
« on: January 03, 2025 »
Dear John,

I've found both of your books deeply insightful, and they've been valuable guides on my personal journey. However, I'm struggling with accessing and experiencing my emotions and feelings.

Despite knowing that I carry significant pain and suppressed emotions (which is reflected in my current life circumstances), I find it difficult to connect with these feelings. I'm practicing all the recommended techniques - maintaining a calm mind, breathing slowly, and cultivating witness consciousness through meditation. Yet when I try to access these emotions, it often feels like there's nothing there to find or feel.

I'm wondering if I might be doing something wrong in my approach. Could you offer any guidance on this? Could this just be part of the learning process? Maybe I need to be patient as I develop my emotional awareness over time?

Best regards

Charlie

John Ruskan

  • Administrator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 179
    • View Profile
Re: Struggling to Access/Feel Emotions
« Reply #1 on: January 03, 2025 »
This is a common problem. I don’t think you are doing anything wrong. I think it does get better over time as you continue with meditation, breathwork, and bodywork if that appeals to you. In our terminology, we would say it relates to dormant right-brain capabilities. I briefly discuss how to, over time, stimulate the right-brain with general activities in the beginning of the Deep Clearing book, but one of the best ways is to develop a dedicated Hatha yoga practice, which of course I also talk about in the books. If you are overlooking yoga, I would recommend this to start developing feeling ability.

The essential point of a yoga practice is to keep your attention focused on BODY SENSATIONS as you hold the poses. It's not about doing the poses correctly as much as feeling in the body what’s happening as you do them. These body sensations are a type of feelings that are generally easily accessible. As you focus on them, you are training and developing your capacity for feeling in general and this starts to tie into emotional feelings. The poses can also contribute to emotional releasings.

There is a page on the emclear.com site about the yoga connection, where I explain how to proceed and have a suggested sequence. You don’t need yoga studios, except maybe for a ‘Yin’ class.

As you are feeling body sensations, you should be conscious of whether you are in ‘the moment’ or not. Being in the moment is what you develop with meditation practice. It’s where the mind / thinking / left-brain completely stops, and you are focused completely on a body or emotional feeling or maybe nothing. That’s when suppressed feelings can pop into view and then you apply the EC Process to them. If you are still in the left-brain, perhaps even unconsciously, that can keep the right-brain unaccessed and prevent emotional feelings from coming forward. So that’s another way of looking at the basic problem – left brain is still dominating.

charlieo44

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 2
    • View Profile
Re: Struggling to Access/Feel Emotions
« Reply #2 on: January 04, 2025 »
Thanks John, I appreciate your response