According to the Enneagram there are three instinctual centers: Intellectual, emotional and instinctual or mind, heart, gut. In the same way we have many different bodies, a physical body, an emotional body and an energetic body. I could probably list more but lets stop there.
Let’s have a look at the heart and the emotional body. Our emotional body is where we access our feeling and emotions. The emotional body wants to feel everything deeply. Unfortunately in our society it is not entirely PC to feel and to display our feelings. Especially if you are a person in a male body, then breaking down crying is out of the question, walking around smiling like a fool or laughing hysterically will also rub people the wrong way. For persons in male bodies anger is about the only feeling that is allowed and in a country like Sweden you better put a lid on that as well. If you are in a woman body you are expected to be somewhat emotional, crying is ok, but you are not expected to show anger or lust.
So we suppress our feelings, push them deep down and do not really feel them. When we do they are stored in our physical body as tension. And at times when we feel something it triggers this reservoir of bottled up emotion and by then it has fermented and grown into an unmanageable overwhelming thing. We blow up and out comes an emotional response that is completely out of proportion to what happened in our life. Often when we blow up like this we end up hurting ourselves or others around us.
Now feelings are energy and energy needs to move. For those skilled in meditation and other techniques that move and refine energies there are ways of taking strong emotions like lust or anger and refine them, make their vibration higher and transmute them into willpower, direction or even love. To sublimate feelings in this way we must have an energetic system that is open and where energy flows freely and it must be done right away when the feeling is actually being felt and the energy is moving in our emotional body.
What I see happening though is that often we say that we are elevating the feeling, loving instead of raging but what really happens is that we shut down the feeling, tuck it away and pretend that we have elevated/sublimated it, we act as if we where better, more spiritual, more evolved and we add the feeling to our ever growing repository of stored emotion ready to blow when we triggered.
To clear these stores of bottled up emotion we need to use a different tool set. We need to find ways of accessing the emotional body by moving and shaking our physical body, where these emotions are stored. We need to express these emotions and as we do release them and we need to learn how to do so without hurting ourselves, anyone or anything. This can get both loud and messy but it is necessary to clear our emotional body. Once clear we can feel our feelings deeply without the added emotional baggage and we can express them honestly and clearly in the moment or sublimate/elevate the feeling into a higher energy and loving action.
