This simple meditation technique changed my life

The best way to quickly release emotional pain

Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash

One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve heard, even from some meditation teachers, is that meditation is not a viable pathway to release emotional pain or heal trauma.

This is the falsest statement I’ve ever heard, and exactly why I’m incredibly grateful to be so intuitively connected, so I don’t listen to other people, even so-called experts.

The technique I’m sharing with you today — the technique that changed my life — is not about simply breathing through emotional pain or spiritually bypassing it.

Instead, the technique I’ve developed, that I was guided to, cuts right to the core of emotional pain.

It helps you understand your feelings, the messages within them, and melt your deepest wounds with pure love.

If you practice this technique every day your life will completely change.

It did for me and for thousands of the people whose spiritual and personal growth journeys I’ve supported over the past 10 years.

Comments from my YouTube video explaining this process.

This technique is extraordinarily powerful for four reasons:

• Sensitive people need a daily feeling practice to process their emotions and prevent build-up. Build-up is how you become reactive, depressed, anxious and unclear about what you want. A daily feeling practice is like wiping your countertops clean at the end of the day. If you don’t do it, things get sticky.

• Feeling and healing allows you to release past pains and traumas. You don’t always need to understand emotions at a cognitive level. Sometimes feeling is enough to heal.

• Processing emotional pain creates space for you to fully experience positive emotions like happiness, contentment and inspiration. You can’t numb painful emotions without also limiting your ability to fully feel happiness.

• Creating from a place of positivity and expansion allows you achieve your goals in a more delightful, easeful and aligned way. Conversely, creating from fear, comparison or contraction kills your joy and leaves you stuck.

First, a mindset shift around emotions

No emotion is negative. It may be painful, yes, but emotions are signs from your soul with important messages.

The messages could offer insight about:

• Lingering past pains weighing you down

• Limiting mindsets giving away your power or potential

• Ways you are living out of alignment with your soul’s deepest needs and desires

This week in The Journaling Club, we’re exploring specific ways to understand the messages of your emotions and how you can experience greater peace, fulfillment and personal power through embracing those messages.

Calling emotions negative makes us war against them, and ourselves.

Instead of wondering — what is this feeling trying to tell me?, you may judge yourself for feeling it and criticize yourself for not being happy enough or good enough.

This leads to what I call the pain of pain, a second layer of pain that results from judging ourselves for feeling pain in the first place.

By removing the pain of pain through compassion and curiosity, you open the door to healing.

Emotions aren’t random, inconvenient things to repress, manage, medicate away or get rid of.

They’re spiritual experiences offering critical information from our souls to help us navigate life in more authentic, empowered ways.

(Although it is a balance. You don’t want to become so obsessed with exploring your emotional experience that it weakens you, making you a victim to the shifting tides within. You are in control. You have the power. It’s like if you were a pilot steering an airplane through a storm. You gather information from the many gauges and instruments, but ultimately you use your brain to steer your way through the storm.)

Once you honor the emotion and understand the message of it, you’ll be able to fully move through it. On the other side lies deep peace. Pure expression from your authentic self unencumbered by pain or fear.

The meditation you’ll learn today is a transformational, powerful way of fully sinking into the energetic experience of the emotion to properly release it.

I resisted meditating for years, but the Feeling Awareness meditation healed a lifetime of repressed emotion and trauma, allowing me to find my purpose.

I was led to this meditation technique after cancer treatment 15 years ago. I was losing my mind, angry at the world, and totally traumatized.

I also had a lifetime of repressed sadness from losing my dad and sister when I was younger. I managed that grief by vowing to be strong and cold and never hurt. I think that emotional repression contributed to cancer.

At first, I set my timer for one little minute, and even then, constantly open my eyes to see how much time had passed.

Some days, the anger bubbled up so much I couldn’t sit still and I’d run out of the room. I couldn’t sit still and breathe for literally one minute.

But gradually I learned how to breathe through my feelings. I noticed how they came in waves, would swell up so large I thought I might explode, but then gradually recede only to swell up again.

Over time, the swells lessened. Over time, I connected to a deep well of peace underneath the pain. And over time, the voice of my higher self spoke to me from inside that peace.

Today, I still resist meditating sometimes, but I practice most days because it’s the most powerful way to not only stay calm and grounded, but also continue walking unique path in life.

How to do the Feeling Awareness meditation

Most meditations focus on the breath. This meditation technique is different because it focuses on your heart center. It’s also a more feminine way of meditating because it gets you into your body rather than only calming your mind.

First, close your eyes and place your awareness on your heart center. Notice what's there. Notice how energy feels. Does it feel heavy or light? Notice any fear or resistance that you have around this emotion. Just notice without attaching to it, without following it, without worrying if you're flawed for feeling it, just noticing what's there.

Maybe the emotion isn't even identifiable, but just a feeling. This is all about getting into your body and noticing how the emotion feels without needing to label or investigate it.

You can investigate it later, maybe epiphanies will arise on their own, but just for now sit with this energy and breathe it in.

This isn’t about breathing until the emotion passes, but breathing into the energy of the emotion so you fully merge with it.

You are becoming totally and fully present with the energetic experience of the emotion, which allows the energy to move through you instead of stay stuck.

Wanting your emotions to go away is resistance and prolongs the pain. Accept how you feel. Breathe into it as if it was a fine mist. Shift from criticism into curiosity and compassion.

This is how you connect to your heart, your true self.

Then when you feel ready open up your eyes.

That’s the basis of the Feeling Awareness meditation. It’s a process of sitting with the energy within you, and merging your awareness with it.

This is how you feel and heal your feelings. This is how you connect with your soul to create a meaningful life as unique as you are.

This is also the gateway to shadow work techniques, which we’ll be talking about more in October.

If you want a free 10-minute guided Feeling Awareness audio, subscribe to my newsletter! Journaling Club members, you always have this available to you in Club Lounge!

This week in the Journaling Club:

You’ll explore specific ways to understand the messages of your emotions and how you can experience greater peace, fulfillment and personal power through embracing those messages. Join us!

Thank you for reading!

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Love you all so much,

Suzanne

PS — If you want to dive deeper into a meditation practice, you’ll love my Mindfulness & Meditation guided journal.