We are made of more than flesh and circumstance. Emotions are the luminous interface between what is seen—and what is unseen. They are how the material world gives way to spiritual truth, how our hearts remember and the divine whispers back.
The Frozen Field: A Client’s Story
One of my clients came to me feeling numb, frozen, unable to take decisive action in life. The core of it was that he was disconnected from being able to feel his feelings. When he said, “I am sad,” he conceptualized it, rather than felt it fully in hisbody.
He carried deep childhood trauma of unimaginable loss. Through that, the pressure to instantly become an adult and survive was born. Big Trauma can freeze us into inaction. It is the emotional field naturally contracting as a protective mechanism in order to move on with life.
Over time, in his adult life, he found his capacity for deeper connection, empathy, and vulnerability was muted by deep seated wounds that lived in the body, and needed to be confronted.
When doing energy work on him, I saw the telltale signs: a distended belly where the energies of guilt and shame store as inflammation, stiffness around the throat, neck, chest, and tightness through the spinal discs, ligaments and muscular system.
The emotional field is a field of energy that normally hovers just a few centimeters off the skin, and directly impacts the sacral chakra, which is the center for expressing our feelings and needs. From an energy worker’s perspective, a healthy emotional field feels like a flowing river, but in his case it was dampened, dull, almost mud-like.
Basic Emotions, Body & Spirit
There are only a few human emotions that underlie almost everything we feel:
According to Paul Ekman, the six basic emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise. Everything else is a variation of these main ones.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) correlates joy, anger, worry, grief/sadness, fear and other related states to each organ.
Expressing each one, even anger is crucial. When social, religious, or parental conditioning teaches us that being a “good kid” means suppressing parts of our inner world, the consequences are real: grief in the lungs, fear lodged in the kidneys, anger stuck in the liver, tension stored in muscles, tendons, fascia, even bones.
When I was in drama school, movement and somatic work cracked that armor for me. I had a faculty of various movement teachers that were skilled in somatic connection. One teacher was also an osteopath and energy worker, and I was fortunate enough to have 1:1 sessions at 19 years old with them as part of my conservatory training. On one occasion during a 1:1 session, I received energetic touch on my neck that felt warm and electric, while my teacher gave me something to visualize. It was as simple as saying out-loud to my neck “I am long and free.” However, there was a disconnect, my neck did not feel long and free. It felt abused and mangled. When she touched my neck, I was flooded with old memories of when my tutors would beat me with a ruler over my neck because they were given permission to discipline me with force. I had memories of my mom grabbing me by the neck forcefully when I misbehaved.
Another time, during a somatic movement exploration class using the Feldenkrais method, I was lying in a fetal position. We were instructed to use our breath to slowly explore movement through the pelvis. These were three hour intensives by the way, however I was intent on staying focused with the task at hand. After what felt like a lifetime, something within me cracked, and a wave of electrical energy surged up my spine. Later, I would understand that as a kundalini experience. But at the time, it was all foreign to me.
I was crying hysterically one moment, then laughing maniacally like a deranged clown. My body was going through an unwinding process, where traumatic experiences stored as charges of energy were being expelled through my nervous system as emotional release.
One Territory, Many Maps
Modern neuroscience, Yogic science, and Chinese medicine may speak in different languages, but they are describing the same terrain: the living interface between body, mind, and energy.
Neuroscience shows us that emotions are neurochemical messengers where dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin shape our perception and behavior.
Yogic philosophy calls this play of energy prana, moving through the subtle channels (nadis) and spinning in the chakra centers, where belief and emotion either constrict or expand our access to higher states.
Chinese medicine offers another lens: grief in the lungs, anger in the liver, fear in the kidneys, joy in the heart, worry in the spleen, etc. This ancient system sees each organ system either holding or transforming emotional energy as part of mind body health.
Together these traditions converge on one truth: when emotions are repressed, the flow of energy is blocked. The body stiffens, the spirit dims, and the mind spins the same stories. When emotions are expressed and integrated, the nervous system relaxes, the energy body expands, and higher guidance can be received.
Emotions as Guidance
When you allow yourself to feel fully (grief, anger, joy, fear), the potential is to plug into deeper inner guidance. A grief that opens your heart; anger that clarifies your boundaries; joy that aligns you with purpose. If you ask, “How can I live a more creative and purposeful existence?” the answer starts here, in emotional receptivity and expressivity versus suppressing the uncomfortable.
Society often favors logic: success, safety, reason. But that leaves out the wild, the mystical, the downloads from Spirit that require emotional readiness. Without emotion, you feel isolated and separate all of Life, falsely believing hat you are an island on your own.
How to Reintegrate Emotions So You Are Available to the Spiritual
Somatic Inquiry — tune into areas of tension in your body; track the emotion behind it; give it voice or movement.
Express — write, shout, cry, paint, dance. Even anger is okay when held with consciousness.
Witness without attachment — feel it, allow it, don’t become it. Just like weather storms come and go.
- Communal Safe Exploration — Unfortunately, when your emotional field is dampened, you cannot find it on your own. You need a more expanded and expressive emotional field to help you expand your own. In psychotherapy language the call this co-regulation.
- Somatic Energy Work
Co-regulation is fantastic – a long hug or a belly wrenching giggle with a dear friend. However, it is only a temporary fix, as you are borrowing someone else’s emotional field. This is where energy work helps you to amplify your own access to your emotional field on top of any somatic therapy you are doing.
Invitation
If you are carrying a dampened emotional field, a fear of losing people, a fear of connecting more deeply and intimately with others, an inability to express even your anger, suppression of your joy, this is a wake up call for you to reclaim your voice, reclaim your cry, reclaim your laughter. Let each emotion be a language of guidance, not a prison of shame.
You were not designed to be only an intellectual person or only an emotional one. Your potential is in embodying both fully. Allow yourself to feel all that is arising within you honestly. In authentically confronting your emotional waves head on, is where the energy comes back into all the areas of your life. All the lacklustre relationships in your life will shine once more. And you will feel a deeper connection to the infinite support that is always there, but waiting for you to become present to it.