If you were to grade your ability to process emotions, would you pass? Fail? Not be sure? Let me give you some context.

The word emotion comes from the Latin emovere, meaning “to move.” So at their most basic, emotions are something that want to move.

More specifically, emotions are an energy that wants to move. And the way that energy wants to move is as a wave that crests and passes after a couple minutes.

These waves of emotion can feel big, sometimes overwhelming. But they’re here to help us survive, function, and connect. Without emotions, we’d all have been saber-toothed tiger snacks long ago.

Learning the wrong lessons

The problem is that, for all but a few, no one ever taught us how to manage our emotions in a healthy way.  

Maybe you learned to ignore and stuff down your feelings. You feel angry about something, but then tell yourself you don’t or shouldn’t feel angry because…reasons.

Or you learned to avoid your feelings. You drink, smoke, watch TV, exercise, socialize, have sex…anything to avoid feeling that.

Others learned to ruminate on the emotion, feeding it with negative thoughts until it festers. Or they learned to blindly act on feelings, letting them explode or take over.

Getting all plugged up

But tamping down the energy of our emotions—not giving them healthy channels to flow through—can have serious consequences. It can cause:

• Dulled vitality and depression
• Broken or unfulfilling relationships
• Muscle tension and pain
• Higher risk of illness

So, get them flowing

The basic steps for processing emotions are simple:

Step 1: Identify the feeling.
When you feel an emotion surfacing, the first step is to name it. What are you feeling? Is it one emotion or several?

Step 2: Feel the feeling.
Sit with the emotion, without judgment, and let yourself feel it. Try to:

• Distinguish the felt-sense of the emotion from the cause. Thinking about the cause can re-trigger the feeling, making emotions churn, not process.
• Track the wave of emotional energy. If we don’t re-trigger emotions with our thoughts, the wave will crest and pass within minutes.
• Give it a channel to move. Sometimes emotions need expression. Try moving your body, journaling, drawing, singing or any form of creative expression.

Step 3: Take action if needed or let it go.
Once the wave has passed ask: Is there any action I need to take?

Sounds simple, right? In practice, processing emotions can get complex, especially with trauma. If you try these steps and feel numb, overwhelmed, or confused, you’re not doing it wrong. You’ve just got extra challenges to navigate. The help of a skilled guide can make all the difference.

Ah, the hard-working adrenal glands. They sit like mushroom caps atop our kidneys and pump out stress hormones when we need them. And if we’re stressed all the time? They just keep pumping them out….

Even when we’re deeply exhausted but so tired-wired we can’t sleep.

Even when every little sound makes us jump.

Even when the anxiety won’t quit…or we’re having panic attacks.

The good news is we can connect to our adrenal glands—and through them our body’s entire stress response system—to interrupt this stress cycle. I learned this simple adrenal reset in a recent training with Kathy Kain, who specializes in bodywork for trauma recovery. You can do this technique on yourself.  

Here’s how it works:

Get comfortable and sense or imagine your adrenals. Hold on, you say…you don’t where those are? No problem.

Your adrenals sit on top of your kidneys, which are near the bottom of your ribcage, next to the spine. The kidneys themselves are red and fist-sized. The adrenals are their lumpy, cream-colored caps.

So, sense or imagine your adrenals…in whatever way comes naturally. You might visualize the actual organs—or see imagery, colors, or energies. You might get more of a feeling-sense…like pulses, temperatures, tightness, or softening. You might even want to hold the area with your hands to get a better feel.

Next, pick one adrenal to start with. I usually start with the one that’s changing in some way. If you’re not sure, dealer’s choice. You’re going to work with both anyways.  

Now, simply be curious. You’re not trying to change anything. What you are doing is being extra attentive to any signs of slowing and settling—here and in your whole body.

Your attention is the powerful tool here. So notice changes like:

• Softening, widening, or expansion
• Temperature changes (like cool becomes warm…or…overheated cools down)
• Soothing color changes
• Energies slowing down
• Taking a deep breath or breathing easier
• Slowing heart rate
• Feeling more relaxed overall

You may notice that these changes come in cycles. So you settle a bit, and then a new layer of activation shows up and slowly dissipates. Then you settle slightly deeper.  

Continue until you feel slower and calmer. Then do the other adrenal. You’ll likely find it goes faster than the first one. Keep going and enjoy the settling.

Congrats! You’ve interrupted your stress cycle.

This can be a great way to short-circuit a stress response in the moment…like during a panic attack. But it’s even more effective when practiced regularly over time. In this age of frazzled nerves, we’ve often got to retrain our bodies to relax.

Blessings to you on this winter solstice

Day of shortest sunlight and longest night

Outbreath between dark and light.

To the seeds dreaming beneath the ground

And those buried in our hearts,

To that first renewed spark of sun on the horizon

Hope re-ignited

That out of dark comes light

Out of death comes life

And out of the confusion and pain of our times, come the seeds for a brighter tomorrow.

~ VBW                                   

Thank you to all of my readers and clients for the gifts of your attention, presence, and patronage this year. I am grateful to you and honored by all those who allow me to walk with them on their healing journeys.

Blessings and happy holidays! Here’s to the return of the light.

Today I want to take some time to acknowledge the quiet healing miracles that take place inside us, mostly unseen and unsung. All of the times that our health wins out, sometimes against great odds…while we barely notice.

Most people think of health as something static, as a state of being, a noun. We think we are in a state of good health—or not. But health isn’t static, it’s active. It’s an action hero, a verb. Health is a living, breathing process, guided by innate intelligence. And that process is constantly in flux, monitoring all of our bits and pieces that go out of whack and bringing them back into balance.  

This constant, gentle return to homeostasis is an ongoing miracle.

Day in, day out, your health is there, repelling invaders, repairing cuts, rebuilding tissues, rebalancing hormones and emotions. It’s all of the times we didn’t get cancer, or fought off the latest virus, because our immune system roared to our defense. It’s all of the times we took an emotional gut punch and then felt better the next morning because our dreams did emotion repair. 

Does our health get overwhelmed at times? Of course it does. We’re mortal. We have limits. And our health needs sustenance and support. But it’s always there, trying to return us to balance. As a craniosacral therapist, my job is to support and stimulate your body’s own self-healing ability—its health. And I’ve felt that health do wonders. 

There’s the quiet miracle of the client who comes in stressed out and frazzled. They may not know it, but their brain and nerves are literally buzzing and sparking with heat. And for them, the session may just be deeply relaxing. But I know the health has managed to cool all that heat and do a huge nervous system and hormonal reset.

Or there’s the client whose arthritic neck is killing them. They may feel immediate relief after the session or that may take a couple days. But I feel joints that start out hot, dry, and irritated. And then the health manages to pump in fluids, discharge the heat, and realign the bones to relieve pressure. All while the client dreams.

We so often want healing to be instant and dramatic. And sometimes it is. But more often, healing is so gentle and organic over time that you hardly notice it’s happening, like a paper cut healing. It just feels like things have always been that way.

So, if you’re looking for healing, give more attention to the things that are slowly and gently—without any fanfare—going right. And remember, your health is always there.