The Emotional Body
The stability of the emotional body, is pivotal for our health. It is difficult to attain wellbeing or states of happiness and relaxation from a stressed, fearful or anxious emotional space. Learning to calm the emotions is not something we are generally taught. Our emotions exist in the midbrain, called the Limbic System. When we make decisions from an emotional space, we cannot think straight or imagine the long-term consequences for our actions. This is because we are in our emotional brain and when this part of our brain is activated, during times when we may feel threatened, our main concern is to survive in the present and to react fast.
Our emotions are meant to protect our physical body for the purpose of survival. While acting fast may do us good when we are in physical danger, reacting without thinking may not serve us best, when we are feeling emotional during an argument with a close friend or handling a stressful situation at work. This is because our emotions not only serve to protect our physical body, but also our sense of self. The emotional brain sends signals of fight, flight, freeze, hide or fawn in situations of stress. While our heart beating rapidly, sweaty palms and the need to fight or run and hide might have served us in the ancient past, in the modern world, these bodily reactions make it difficult to know how to handle conflict in the modern world effectively.
​
Our body cannot tell the difference between signals of being threatened, physically in an altercation or if we are simply having a disagreement or are being misunderstood by someone we really care about. When our mind and our ideas are being attacked or encroached upon, our threat system is alerted the same way as if we were face to face with a tiger. Our emotional brain can also be activated and become imbalanced during times of chronic stress, pain or illness creating unstable moods and behaviors, making daily life difficult to manage.
​
While our emotions are located in the brain, they serve to protect our entire being. Using this outlook, we can see that our emotions are made up of an invisible body, what I call the emotional body, that overlays the physical body and is always alert, aware and intuitive for any threats, real or imagined that are coming our way. This is because the emotional body serves more than just to protect our physical body and our mind. It also serves the very important job of protecting our sense of self, represented by our autonomy and boundaries.
Beneath the layer of the emotional body lay our feelings, the delicate connection we have with our Soul when it tries to communicate with us. Our Soul, is our authentic self, how we really feel about our experience in life, what we truly want and need in order to feel fulfilled. When this part of us is intruded upon by others, the emotional body is signaled that something is wrong and we may feel angry, sad, confused or reactive to a situation and not fully understand or be able to communicate why.
When we learn to work with the emotional body, to listen to the signals it is trying to send us, instead of reacting without thinking, our lives can become more manageable during times of intense upheaval and stress. Working with the emotional body is the first step to getting into contact with our true feelings about things, and looking at the layer of our reality beneath the defensiveness, the anger and the need to avoid certain people and or control situations in our life. When we can get to a space where our emotional body and our feelings can have contact with one another and we can be present with them, we can begin to live our lives from a state security and calmness and respond to moments of duress instead of merely reacting.