Have you found yourself experiencing an overwhelming emotion, but don’t quite know how to cope with it?

Maybe you find yourself in an emotional loop of distractions and unhealthy habits that continue to reoccur – the moment the distraction subsides, the emotion intensifies and floods your mind again.

You can’t stop negative thoughts or emotions from entering your mind, but you do have a choice.

You can make the choice to take action and develop impactful ways to properly manage the underlying issues and regulate how much time, and to what extent, these emotions interfere with your mental state.

“To let go does not mean to get rid of. To let go means to let be. When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own.” – Jack Kornfield

Suffering emotionally is different to everyone and is not one size fits all.

Chances are, you are carrying around emotional baggage to some extent. It’s important to get real and lean into your pain and let it go. Wishing away or ignoring your pain will only take you so far and create more damage along the way until you hit the inevitable roadblock. It is important to address these roadblocks because if left unmanaged, these emotions will eventually spill out and take over multiple avenues in your life; careers, relationships, self-doubt, etc. The end result is misalignment of your feelings – the negatives can begin to outweigh the positives.

Your emotions come in a variety of shapes and sizes and are the direct result of an event.

Some of these events are small and somewhat insignificant, while others are large and life changing. In addition to the size of the event, emotions can be positive or negative. Although emotions at times can be overwhelming, it is key to recognize that we are not our emotions. We have them, we feel them, but we are not them. Emotions are energy in motion. Have you ever noticed that whatever emotion you give your attention to tends to amplify and grow? Unfortunately, for most of us, it is human nature to focus and dwell on the negative. This can lead to blocked, or stuck energy, which is simply unwelcome emotions.

Look at the news – what typically makes the headlines? Generally, it is not something positive, but rather the negative and more emotionally triggering incidents.

Coronavirus, stocks down, unemployment up, another crime committed… For some of us, these combined destructive emotions lead to emotional suffering. While it is important to feel both positive and negative emotions, negative emotions that are not processed will ultimately limit your ability to act and feel the way you want and truly deserve. In extreme instances these negative emotions can result in anxiety and even depression, and may even begin to shape how you perceive events before they even occur.

How? By clouding and distorting your judgment and influencing your reactions in the “now”. It is the heavy weight on your shoulders that you carry into a new experience or relationship. It is the unnecessary emotion you feel on a daily basis impacting your self-worth that inhibits your ability to show up as your best self.

It is key to give yourself permission to acknowledge your emotional state, not to ignore or block the emotion.

As the spiritual teacher and author Eckhart Tolle said:

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.

You will probably notice that, by becoming more aware of your toxic emotions and limiting beliefs, the heavy weight you once carried on your shoulders will begin to lighten. Recognize what is holding you back and why it has a strong authority over you. Knowing this will serve as an anchor in reminding you why you began the process of letting go in the first place, and will also assist you in staying committed to your journey of creating lasting change.

Before beginning your journey, you may have some basic questions. One of them being, how did I get to feel this way in the first place? The answer to this question is universal to all of us.

First, you experience an event
Second, this experience causes a feeling
Third, this thought, or judgement makes you feel good or bad, or protected or threatened; which leads to
Fourth, an impulse of energy releases chemicals such as serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin and dopamine; intensifying these feelings, causing
Fifth, your brain to connect that feeling with that experience

An example of how an experience could result in emotional suffering would be the unfortunate scenario many of us have been through – a cheating partner. When you first experience this event, you feel sadness, rage, mistrust… These feelings are then connected to your brain through the release of energy, resulting in emotional suffering. Without properly addressing these damaging feelings, they can be carried into future relationships limiting your ability to be fully present. These negative emotions are simply the result of energy that has gotten stuck.

In my book Healing Your Heart: Rewrite Your Story with Awareness and Intention, I share guidance on self-reflection and personifying an emotion as a form of release:

Begin with a few deep, relaxing breaths and close your eyes
Identify the emotion you need to work with
Visualize the emotion as a tangible person or living thing. Who – or what – does it look like? Describe in detail.
Begin a dialogue: “What is the message I need to see, or hear, or get? What is it you’re here to teach me? What is it I need to understand? Why are you here? What is this about?
Listen for the response.
After having a dialogue about what the emotion is trying to teach, ask how to resolve the issue and what is necessary to reintegrate this emotion in a healthy way. “What do I need to know or do differently in order to shift the experience I’m having?” When asking this question, focus on the positive outcome.
Listen for the response/message.
Identify what the unmet need for this personification has been. What is the message or lesson for you here?
Identify and commit to taking an action that will heal this aspect of yourself.
Integrate the newly healed personification by accepting and honoring it as a part of yourself.
Spend some time journaling about what came up for you.
Take a new and appropriate action to respond to the unmet needs you uncovered and implement the lessons you learned from this experience.

Letting go is not always an easy task, but it is essential.

Keep doing your work – revisit the above steps as you unpack and process new emotions as they arise or when you reprocess deeper layers of a similar emotion. Each time you quiet the mind and revisit these emotional release techniques you will find your load lightening. By letting go of emotional suffering you can create a new beginning; a life grounded in awareness and compassion – for yourself and others.

Tris Thorp

An International Bestselling Author, Lifestyle and Leadership Coach and speaker, Tris Thorp is one of today’s leading experts in the field of personal growth and leadership development, specializing in emotional healing, women’s empowerment and shadow work.

Having spent a decade traveling the world, being trained by and sharing the stage with Dr. Deepak Chopra in the field of social emotional learning, consciousness and mindfulness-based practices, Tris has a real gift for integrating the ancient spiritual teachings with modern-day science and mindfulness to help people all over the world let go of their past and create an empowered new future.

During her tenure at the Chopra Center, Tris apprenticed under the Chopra Center’s co-founder Dr. David Simon, co-facilitating the Healing the Heart and Emotional Freedom workshops alongside him. Prior to his passing in 2012, Dr. Simon appointed Tris as the person to carry on his teachings in the field of emotional healing. In addition, Tris was fortunate to be mentored by the late Debbie Ford prior to her passing in 2013, which is where she continued her extensive studies of the unconscious mind and concepts of the persona and shadow. After the loss of her two mentors, Tris went on to become certified through the Ford Institute as a coach specializing in Shadow Work and reconciling mental and emotional issues stemming from past experiences. She continues to share the gifts of emotional healing and facilitating this work in the footsteps of her former mentors.

Tris is the International bestselling author of Healing Your Heart: Rewrite Your Story with Awareness and Intention. A guide book to understanding your emotions, how we create our story and workable tools and techniques to heal from the past, Healing Your Heart stewards you through the process of releasing mental and emotional baggage, forgiving yourself and others, setting and enforcing boundaries and consciously communicating your needs in a loving and effective way so you can be who you’re meant to be, do the things you want to do and have all that you deserve to have in this life.

Tris is also the co-author of bestseller Mental and Emotional Release® with Dr. Matt James. Written in a language both professionals and non-professionals can understand, Mental and Emotional Release® offers real life case studies, an overview of MER and its foundation, step by step scripts to follow, and clinical efficacy studies comparing MER to other therapies.

Clearly in her dharma, Tris’s passion and dedication to gently guide people on their inward journey through personal growth is evident in her work as a Lifestyle and Leadership coach, Trainer of Mental and Emotional Release and workshop facilitator. She teaches various courses on leadership development, personal empowerment, social emotional learning and higher states of consciousness – both in online courses and her certification programs, live workshops, VIP retreats and 1-1 clients.

Tris Thorp is Board Certified by the Association of Integrative Psychology as a Trainer of Mental and Emotional Release ®, Master Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming, Hypnosis, and Mental and Emotional Release ®, a Certified Reiki Master, and an Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher with Yoga Alliance.

Tris is devoted to inspiring and empowering others to cultivate and maintain mindfulness-based lifestyle practices that lead to greater clarity, purpose and fulfillment. Through one-on-one coaching, online programs and live events, Tris specializes in helping people to fully release negative emotions, limiting beliefs and unconscious patterns, enabling them to make quantum leaps into the life they are truly meant to be living.

Letting Go of Emotional Suffering