Emotions Are Energy in Motion: A Somatic Therapist Explains the Nervous System

One Conscious Breath: Issue 07

Many of us were never taught how to feel. We may have been taught to think about our feelings: talk about them, manage them, explain them. But what’s missing and what we need to know is: emotions are energy in motion. They are not a problem to be analyzed nor fixed. They are the signals offering us the pathway back to our core self, pathway back to our heart.

Eye-level view of a serene meditation space with calming elements

One Conscious Breath ~ Before We Begin

I invite you to take one conscious breath. Feel the cool air as it enters your nostrils. Follow it as deeply as it goes. Now pause. And then exhale ~ out through your mouth. Slowly. Fully. Elongate the release as far as you can. And as you exhale, feel your shoulders drop. Feel your cheeks soften. Wiggle your fingers. Wiggle your toes. Feel your feet firmly on the ground. In this exact moment, for this one conscious breath, feel that you are safe. In your body. Right here. Right now.

Taking one conscious breath and orienting ourselves back into safety within, in the present moment, allows us to feel, really feel, what present moment safety feels like in our bodies. One conscious breath at a time. And from this place of safety, one breath at a time, allows us to engage with whatever comes next from a more resourced place within. The more grounded you are as you read this, the more your nervous system will be anchored in the present now rather than the historic then. And the more open you will be to receive what your body is signaling to you.

So, one more conscious breath.

And when you're ready ~ let's begin.

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I was going to continue writing about triggers today. That is how important and ubiquitous they are. But a client reminded me this week that one of the reasons people avoid triggers is because they activate emotions. And if we’ve never learned how to be with emotions, our body senses them as threats and moves us away from feeling and expressing them. So, before we go further into triggers, let’s understand what I’m asking you to feel into first.

Here is what the word ‘emotion’ actually means:

E-motion. Energy in motion.

Emotions are physiological signals our body sends us about what is happening within and around us, before our thinking mind can even interpret it.

They were never meant to be suppressed. Bypassed. Overridden. Or stuck in us. They are designed to signal us and then release.

They are meant to stay in motion. And we are meant to listen.

Like a wave that begins deep in the ocean. It builds as it approaches the shore and completes itself in the crash, releasing its separateness and returning to the entirety of the ocean. It rises. Crests. Breaks. And finally releases.

This is how emotions move through our body when given space. The energy of an emotion rises like a wave and within about ninety seconds, releases.

That’s it.

That is how long an emotion actually lasts when we open to meet it. Adaptively.

What keeps us feeling stuck in an emotion far longer than ninety seconds is the story our mind attaches to it. The interpretation. The judgment. The looping narrative trying to figure out why we’re feeling this. Who’s to blame for us feeling this. What it means about us that we are feeling this. And most insidious, whether we’re even allowed to feel it at all.

When we shift our awareness away from the story toward the pure sensation in our body, without narrating it, the emotion, no matter how intense it feels in the moment, will have the necessary space to rise, complete its natural arc and release. Leaving us feeling more open, calm, clear and safe.

This isn’t a theory. It’s physiology.

There is an essential distinction worth understanding here.

Emotionality is what happens when an emotion arises and, because we haven’t learned, nor developed the capacity to be with it, our nervous system moves us away from feeling it. Either shutting it down before it can adaptively release or expressing it in ways where we feel stuck in it. This can look like yelling that feels like release but actually intensifies the activation. Or rumination that feels like processing but just keeps the loop running. The grasping, the blaming, the collapsing. All of these are escape routes to not actually adaptively feel the emotion. In fact, what they are doing is everything possible to move us away from feeling and releasing the emotion.

Adaptive emotion is different.

It is emotion met with presence. Acknowledged, felt in the body, and given space to complete its arc. When emotion is received this way ~ turned toward rather than away from ~ it moves ~ like the wave. And it releases. It does exactly what it was designed to do: deliver its message and release.

The goal is not to be without emotion.

The goal is to learn how to be with them.

Many of us were never taught how.

We may have been taught emotions were to be managed. Calmed down. Gotten over. Rationalized. Intellectualized. Perhaps explicitly or through the silence that follows a child’s cries, that emotions were inconvenient, inappropriate, or even dangerous.

So, brilliantly, absolutely necessary when we were little, our nervous systems learned to stop the wave of emotion before it ever rose and released. Because when we are little, we need a caregiver to help us learn that emotions have a very short lifespan when we meet them rather than move away from them. We need to be taught how to be with them, instead of avoiding them.

As adults we can learn how to feel the rising of an emotion. We can learn how to identify it as the signal it is. Name it: anger, fear, grief, longing, even love. And instead of immediately reaching for something, anything, to pull us away from the feeling ~ a screen, a task, a drink, an argument ~ we can learn how to be with it for the ninety seconds it takes to feel it release.

If we don’t learn how to create the space needed for our emotions to adaptively release, if they get stopped mid-arc, the energy has nowhere to go. This emotional energy then gets stored in our body. Stuck. In our hips, our shoulders, our gut. It tightens our jaw in certain conversations. It constricts our chest when someone we love goes quiet. It comes out in the hair-trigger reaction when our children cry. It lives in the chronic tension we’ve stopped even noticing because it’s been there for so long and feels so familiar. We think it’s who we are.

It’s not who we are.

We are adults now. We have the resources and capacity to learn a new way of being with our emotions. Being with our bodies. Being with our physiology. We just have to learn how. And that it is now safe to do it.

This may be new information to you about emotions. And it takes courage to turn inward, toward them. And then begin to question if the survival strategies that once kept you feeling safe are still necessary and helpful today. It takes courage to update the survival strategies that are familiar.

But the truth is, what kept us safe then, is the very thing that is keeping us feeling stuck and disconnected today. We have more resources today than we did when these survival strategies protected us. And you deserve to feel. To feel alive. To feel present. Knowing that no feeling lasts forever. Not the ecstasy. Not the pain, either. Both are ephemeral.

Ninety seconds.

A Practice for This Week

The next time an emotion arises, not a thought about a feeling, but an actual sensation in the body, try this:

Pause before you reach for anything that moves you out of the felt sense. Or notice if an old survival strategy pulled you out of connection with the feeling ~ into your head, or screen, or some other distraction.

Take one conscious breath.

And instead of asking why am I feeling this, which takes you into the story, into your mind, away from your body.

Simply ask:

Where do I feel this in my body?

Place your attention there. Not to fix it. Not to understand it. Just to be with it.

Notice the sensation. It may be constriction, tension, heat, holding. Whatever you notice, give it gentle, curious attention. Let it be exactly as intense as it is without adding the story of what it means.

And watch what begins to happen.

It will rise. It will peak. It may feel, for a moment, like more than you can experience.

But take one more conscious breath. And stay. If you can.

Because on the other side of that crest, almost always within ninety seconds of arriving, it will begin to soften. The energy will move. The wave always breaks. And the body exhales in a way it couldn’t only a moment ago.

This is an adaptive emotional release. This is an emotion completing its full arc.

And this is how we learn how to be with our emotions. To meet them with our fully resourced, present-day self. To receive their signals. And to honor them. Not to hold onto, avoid or be overtaken by them. But to release them. Because after the release, we feel calmer, more open, more clear and more present. And we all deserve to feel this way.

One conscious breath at a time. And allow it to move through you.

That is the whole practice.

The deepest healing doesn’t happen in the mind.

It happens in the body. In the courageous willingness to feel what has been waiting to be felt all along.

Remembering, we are not our emotions. And we are not meant to live separate from them, either.

They are our body’s wise signal. Pointing, always, toward what needs our attention within. What needs to be felt, honored and released.

One emotion at a time. One conscious breath at a time.

The body has been signaling. Are you ready to listen?

With love and One Conscious Breath,

Jody

P.S. — If you are new here: I’m Jody Allen, a somatic psychotherapist in San Francisco and Berkeley. These letters are where neuroscience meets the heart ~ the foundation of a book in progress. If this found you at the right moment, you can subscribe at jodyallenlcsw.substack.com. It’s free. It always will be.