One of my favorite exercises I learned while working with my coach in the last few months was around releasing emotions that were building up inside of me.

I didn’t realize how many emotions I was carrying, but when I started doing this practice, I learned just how heavy these emotions were and how much they were affecting my life.

Based on books I had read, I thought the path towards a life I loved living was only letting myself feel positive emotions. I thought had to be happy all of the time to attract the things I wanted into my life.

However, I quickly realized that not only is this not possible, but it’s not true. We are human, and we’re meant to experience all aspects of being human, which includes feeling emotions on every end of the spectrum.

On the flip side, this doesn’t mean losing ourselves in these emotions and staying stuck in them forever, but rather allowing ourselves to feel them fully and then releasing them.

My coach had a wonderful comparison to help me fully understand the impact of ignoring emotions I didn’t want to feel and trying to only focus on the positive ones. She described it as trying to run to move quickly in the direction I wanted to go but trying to do so while wearing an extremely heavy backpack that kept getting heavier and heavier as new emotions were added to it. I’d keep trying to run faster, but without pausing to empty the backpack, it would always be slowing me down.

This visual helped me understand the importance of incorporating a little routine into my life around “emptying the backpack” and taking time to feel these emotions and then release them.

Here’s the process you can use to release these emotions as they arise:

Start by closing your eyes and focusing on your breath for a minute or two. Follow your breath as you breathe in and follow it as you breathe out. It’s okay if thoughts pop into your mind, just allow them to come and go and continue to return to the path of your breath.

Next, locate your heart center. Starting at the top of your head, scan down your body until you locate the feeling of where your heart is. Feel into the top of your head, your cheeks, your neck, your shoulders, your chest until you’re able to feel the energy of your heart.

Once you’ve found your heart center, imagine there is a door on the front of your heart. Open that door as wide as it can go to allow your emotions to flow through.

With each breath you take, imagine that an emotion is tied to your breath, and as you breathe, you’re able to take that emotion and guide it out the door. Take a deep breath to pull the emotion you’re ready to release into your chest, then with a big exhale let the emotion flow out your heart’s open door.

Continue to breathe as each new emotion comes up. Release the anger, disappointment, fear, loneliness, regret, pain, sadness, jealousy, self-criticism – any emotion that is coming up for you in this moment.

Breathe each emotion up and out through the door on your heart.

Continue this process until you come to a point of feeling neutral. Once you feel that you’ve released everything you need to for the day, take one more breathe and then come back to your body and open your eyes. 

I make a point each week to set aside a few minutes to release any new emotions that have built up over the past week, and each time I come back to the neutral state after releasing the emotions I feel I can see everything a bit more clearly, hear guidance from my intuition, and guide myself back in the direction I want to go.

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