Releasing negative emotions

What do you do when you experience a negative feeling such as anger, sadness, hurt or fear? Do you try to avoid them as you consider them bad? Do you try to focus on something else?

I tried this method, but only to recognise that the feeling returned when I was triggered. I realised that it is a deep-seated emotion from a memory, an experience of the past. This emotion is manifested in our subconscious mind and cannot so easily manipulated in our conscious mind.

Instead of avoiding the feeling, try to sink into the feeling without any judgement. Just observe and feel the emotion coming up. When you observe the feeling, it becomes more manageable and can be released more easily and quickly. The more often you observe and let this feeling emerge, the more it will come into proportion in your imagination. With acceptance and acknowledgement comes understanding and the negative emotion loses its power.

When you process your negative emotions in that way you will realise what it is teaching you about yourself and you can make changes accordingly.

The following steps will help you to process any negative emotions:

1. Let yourself sink into your feelings and see what you can learn from them. Ask yourself what caused this feeling? Where does it come from? What can I do to address the issue? What does it teach me or what can I learn from it?

2. Learn to love yourself in that moment. Recognise what you may need to help you to release the emotion. Seek help from a trusted friend or just nurture yourself by doing things you like to do. Let the feeling flow through you and give yourself warmth and compassion in the process.

3. Practice gratitude by looking at the good things that are happening for you. This may also come as an insight of what you learned from the circumstance that caused the emotion.

My own experience

I want to give you an example on how I overcame the negative emotion of sadness.

Several years ago, I experienced sadness every time I thought of my past relationship break ups. Whenever the feeling of sadness started to come up instead of being overcome with the emotions, I was looking at the issue that caused the feeling to come up. Most of the time it was loneliness and the inability to change the outcome.

I then looked at this feeling more deeply and thought about the past partnerships. I gained a lot of learnings about the good and bad things that happened in the relationships. I realised what went wrong and realised what good things I learned in those relationships. I then looked a bit further and realised how they helped me to grow and to make changes for the better in my life.

Then I felt this immense gratitude of having had those experiences and the emotion turned from a negative feeling of sadness or loneliness to a feeling of self-empowerment.

What helps you to release a negative emotion or feeling? Just observe the feeling and try different methods of letting go. Start by deep breathing and observe.