“Since emotions run every system in the body, don’t underestimate their power to treat and heal.”
– Candace Pert.
How powerful that feeling of total bliss or joy is when we’re elated, delighted and excited all rolled into one. It gives us energy and motivation to do incredible things with ease and confidence.
Or equally devastating those depths of despair, where happiness seems unimaginable and each step a steep mountainside. Every little bump or challenge sucks our life energy right out of us.
Both these states are due to our emotions. The last months we’ve explored how emotions work and affect our mental states, and vice versa. This week it’s how do emotions affect our energy. And what we can do to reclaim that power and direct it with Yoga and mindfulness.
A Brief History of Energy in Motion
The E-word in the world of science and medicine, Candace Pert joked, for what can’t be measured, can’t be real. Remember our emotions are responses of our inner world meeting the outer world. Ultimately emotions are Love, Bliss and Clarity, according to Yoga and Ayurveda.
Candace, a passionate neuroscientist, pharmacologist and biophysicist, innovatively sought biochemical links between consciousness and body.
Twenty years ago, in her deeply inspiring book The Molecules of Emotion, Candace revealed how emotions affect the entire biochemistry in of our bodies. Her extensive research led her to discover that emotions are the link between mind and body. More to the point, we are a bodymind.
Emotions change the electricity and chemistry of every single cell in our body, affecting how we feel, what we perceive through the five senses, how we react depending on what we perceive as most important.
This affects our tissues, organs and channels of mind. These filters, the cellular memory and innate intelligence of our body responds easily to the infinite changes.
These changes are recorded within the receptors of cells. When changes and experiences are not expressed or digested healthily, they become toxins, ama in Ayurveda. Toxic emotions build up in the unconscious, clogging mental channels of perception. Our ability to receive and accept the full power of Love behind every E-motion as an expression of free flow of Prana, depends on how conscious, embodied and alive we meet the outer world each time.
Fortunately, science is slowly shifting. We now know that the body is the mind crystallized. The only sure thing in the material world is change. Science is catching up and affirms what Seers around the world have said for millennia. We have all we need within.
How We Can Make the Shift
The innate intelligence of our body, what Yoga and Ayurveda call Prana, is a conscious force that moves through us knowing what it needs and how to heal. “We have a natural pharmacopeia already within us” Candace stated. We can inherently orchestrate our own healing process through knowledge and application of the practices.
Our body heals when our cells are healthy and clear. We can create the clarity and vibrancy on a cellular level, not just through healthy food and exercise. But by being conscious in relationships and connections with others. That outer relationship is a reflection of the inner relationship. How your cells communicate with each other. How they meet and greet, respond or react.
That’s why yoga is so powerful. We learn to move our body, breath and mind with consciousness. We can connect to it, and to others. Yoga affects not just the connection with self, but with society and spirit. Connection, relations are our spiritual practice on this earth.
The connectedness we feel of bodymind profoundly changes our emotions into positive states. We’re literally removing old memories from cellular filters.
These filters affect our thoughts, perceptions and experiences. And we in turn can create new filters any time we choose to make that effort. We can awaken our e-motional state, energy in motion. This energy movement within and through our cells and organs, directly affects our bodymind, and this impacts our energy levels.
A Two-Way Stream
We can also use our body to change our biochemistry through posture, muscular engagement, to affect our emotional and mental state. We can reverse engineer, we can create the energy level we want. We can let ourselves feel down, relaxed or uplifted, anger, excitement or enthusiasm, contentment, detached or disappointment.
Emotions are the key to uplifting ourselves and our energy levels. And the way we use our body language, the parts of our body we activate, or soften, will affect how we feel and change our energy levels directly and effectively.
It does take practice. Like anything in life we need to attempt it many times to become good and feel and see its effects. But this simple technique can be used daily, until you start to integrate that mental awareness, emotional activation and bodily engagement in daily activities and life.
Try it:
Sit down, let your body relax, even slump. Let your head sit unintentionally, slightly disinterested. Don’t try to be embodied, rather be disembodied, be in your head.
Now say to yourself, “I feel alive, vibrant, I do everything with joy today!”
And FEEL IT.
How do you feel?
Do you feel alive and vibrant?
Did you feel you change in the physiological state a flow of energy?
Does this generate a good feeling or uplifted energy?
So a simple stance, or lack of it, let’s our energy run down and out, and it’s not going to give us that vibrancy or upliftment, we actually seek in our waking state.
Now to be empowered means we have power to affect and claim our part in the play of life. And for Yoga to be empowering we need to first know where we are, where we want to arrive at through our practice and what practice will get us there.
So an easy and effective way is to tune into what you’re feeling at this moment.
Stand up in Mountain pose, plant your feet firmly on the floor, connect to the Earth’s abundant energy supply. Feel the front of your body awake, alive and open, ready to receive that flow of energy. Let the back body soften but with an intent to receive energy.
Now be embodied, feel the sensations in your body, the amazing flow of life moving through you to your head.
Let the mind be reflective like a lake, awake and clear with intent. Now say to yourself, “I feel alive, vibrant, I do everything with joy today!”
And FEEL IT.
How do you feel?
Do you feel alive and vibrant?
Do you feel you changed the physiological state?
Does this generate a good feeling or uplifted energetic state?
It’s really simple.
Now if the difference wasn’t so big, that’s ok, you just need a little practice.
If we have a habit of letting or energy run down and out, we just need to swim upstream a few times and turn the current around.
With practice anything is possible.
Joy doesn’t come to a lucky few, it comes through practice and preparation, understanding and opportunity coming together like old friends.
Now its your turn to take this into the world.
Leave a comment below and tell us how it will change your current situation.
Namaste,
