What Do We Do With Emotions?

It’s tricky to figure out what to do with our emotions. There is a lot of consensus in self-improvement with different people saying the same thing in different ways. Emotions are different though, and there's more variety in recommendations.

On one hand, there’s the Stoic side of self-improvement that talks about being in control of your emotions. Often misunderstood as emotional repression, Stoic philosophy very much encourages you to acknowledge and feel emotions, but to not let them influence your decisions or behaviors. Stoicism is about having a fortified mind that is stronger than the environment, whether that be emotions internally or unfair externally. 

Then there’s the somatic side of self-improvement, which encourages you to fully embrace and embody your emotions. It suggests that if you feel something, let it be expressed because otherwise the energy will be stored in your body. Somatic exercises encourage you to uncover past emotions so that you can heal the traumas associated with them and free up your meridians and energetic pathways.

And then there’s the more biological approach led by people like Joe Dispenza who talk about how emotions are meant to be observed because they’re the body’s way of communicating something to us. The line of thought suggests that emotions play an evolutionary purpose to help us self-regulate and survive. And Dr. Joe talks a lot about how we can train ourselves to replace the emotions we feel with new emotions that are representative of who we want to become rather than who we are.

With that brain dump complete... What do we do with emotions? What’s the right, healthy thing to do with emotions?

I can’t possibly answer that and I see value in all of these approaches. My basic encouragement is to be intentional about it. WIth your needs and your desires for who you want to become, find the points on the spectrum that serve you. 

If you want to be more resilient and less reactive, try the Stoic approach. If you want to be more emotionally available, try somatic. If you want to create more alignment, congruence, and manifestation, try biological.

No matter the path, emotions are a part of our human experience, so it suits us to find our ways to navigate them.