Releasing Emotions Trapped in your Tissues

I discovered this several years ago when I was going to school for massage therapy, yet for centuries, people of Asia, the Middle East, the Baltic regions and many island nations have known the signs of trapped emotions and have practiced various forms of release.

These days, it’s more important than ever for practitioners who use their hands to understand the methods for allowing these emotions to release. Emotions create a powerful effect on our minds, as well as our bodies. Positive emotions generate a sense of lightness and ease of movement. Negative emotions also create responses in the body. They cause shoulders to slump, nervous ticks and our muscles to contract and our blood pressure to rise. Stress can create elevated periods of muscle cramps that are quite debilitating, if anyone who has experienced this first hand will agree.

The emotions become lodged in the tissues are the culprit in many cases of emotion-generated ailments. Emotions are meant to move through the body. When someone tells you a good joke, your tendency is to laugh. The feeling it creates moves through your body and out of the diaphragm and vocal chords. In the same way, if you roll your foot while walking, you might experience anger and then curse or pound your fists into a pillow nearby. These are all responses that allow emotions to effectively move in and then out of your body.

When looking at the experience of positive emotions its easy to see there is a major difference in the bodies ability to let them flow through without getting stuck.

Negative emotions aren’t welcomed to the party we call life! lol When we experience sadness, anger, resentment, loneliness, jealousy or sorrow, we feel it deep in spaces we have not invited them to be. And this experience hurts, we oftentimes suppress those parts of ourselves to keep the pain from intensifying. Most of the time I think we could handle them moving through if we were alone and experiencing them in the right setting. But most of my life experiences have included having emotional pain during awkward times where I needed to suppress all emotion immediately or be fired or embarrassed by a crowd of witnesses. Imbalances in our tissues often occur when we resist emotion and its natural path through the body (…through the eyes!). Resistance can cause emotions be suspended into body tissue, eventually causing further physical ailments.

Massage therapy is one of the ways the body can let go of suspended emotions. All this without having to re-experience the emotion in full. Actually most of the time it happens while being relaxed during a massage.