Integration

Strategies for Calming the Emotional Body

Hi friends -

I had a client yesterday who has done tons of work on herself. She has spent years meditating and calming her mental and physical bodies. But she had neglected her emotional body. When I asked her to tune into it, we discovered that it was literally writhing in agony. She had noticed that plane of her experience before, but simply hadn’t known how to integrate it.

So many of us out there are having similar experiences. We go to work. We take care of our kids. We function. But we are ignoring a vital aspect of ourselves that is screaming in pain, un-integrated.

In my opinion, the collective response we’ve had to the viral spectre du jour implicates unintegrated emotional bodies. Rather than face our mortality—and process and integrate it—we make bargains with it. Two weeks! The magical shot! Blame them! Those are all examples of the tinder the emotionally unintegrated throw in front of the conflagration in an insane effort to appease the demon. Never mind that it grows hungrier on such a diet.

When messages from the emotional body remain unintegrated, the physical body tries to help by communicating with pain. The mental body doesn’t do this, though. It seems to find it necessary to maintain the status quo for as long as possible, and will go to great lengths to rationalize it’s way out of uncomfortable messes.

You can tell when your mental body is doing this because it drops logic, common sense, and kindness first. Think of the people injured by the thing they’ve taken coming up with reasons why it wasn’t that, or why maybe it was but it was worth it. People maintaining allegiances to predatory industries. People cutting off precious parts of their communities instead of facing the failure of their strategy.

One wonderful tool for integration is Thomas Hubl’s 3-synch method of preparing for meditation. It’s quite simple: One by one, pay attention to the physical body, the mental body, and the emotional body until they calm down. Then sit in loving awareness, holding them all.

Another great tool is Karla McLaren’s deeply wise book, The Language of Emotions. Her method is more involved, and I won’t paraphrase it here, but I do highly recommend it, especially the audio book. I tell at least one person in my clinic about it every week.

Love,

Stella

PS - A Resonant Attention Skill Share is coming! As is a two-day evening class. LMK in the comments what would be ideal in terms of time and days of the week. I’m thinking end of March or early April.