Emotional movement is the process of allowing yourself to feel and subsequently move emotional energy, enabling you to disengage from the potential "neural hijacking" by your emotional brain. It emphasizes experiencing and processing emotions rather than trying to intellectually suppress or analyze them.
Essentially, it's about actively working with the purpose of your emotions, not against them. It recognizes that emotions are energy in motion and need to be expressed or processed in some way.
Key Aspects of Emotional Movement
- Feeling and Acceptance: The initial step involves acknowledging and allowing yourself to feel the emotion without judgment. Resisting or suppressing emotions can often prolong or intensify them.
- Energy Release: Emotional movement allows for the release of emotional energy. This could manifest in various ways, such as crying, expressing anger in a healthy way (e.g., through exercise), or talking to someone.
- Disengaging from Emotional Hijacking: By allowing the emotion to move, you prevent it from taking over your thoughts and actions. When emotions are repressed, they can lead to reactive and often unhelpful behaviors.
- Focus on Experience, Not Analysis: Unlike cognitive approaches that focus on thinking through emotions, emotional movement emphasizes direct experience. Thinking alone cannot resolve deeply felt emotions.
- Action-Oriented: It's not just about feeling, but also about moving the emotional energy. This might involve physical movement, creative expression, or taking action to address the underlying cause of the emotion.
Examples of Emotional Movement
- Feeling Sadness: Instead of pushing the sadness away, allowing yourself to cry and grieve. Perhaps writing in a journal or listening to sad music can help facilitate the emotional release.
- Feeling Anger: Engaging in physical activity like running or hitting a punching bag, or expressing your anger assertively (but respectfully) to the person who triggered it.
- Feeling Anxiety: Practicing deep breathing exercises, going for a walk in nature, or engaging in a calming activity like meditation to regulate the nervous system and release the built-up energy.
Why is Emotional Movement Important?
Emotional movement is crucial for mental and emotional well-being because it helps us:
- Process and release difficult emotions
- Prevent emotional build-up and potential emotional outbursts
- Develop emotional resilience
- Improve self-awareness
- Enhance relationships
- Reduce stress and anxiety
In conclusion, emotional movement is an active and experiential process of allowing, feeling, and releasing emotional energy, which facilitates emotional regulation and overall well-being.
