029: How to Release Emotions in the Body the Simple Way

In this episode, we venture into the depths of emotional release, a topic often misunderstood and overlooked.

We challenge the conventional wisdom that tells us to suppress our emotions. Instead, we delve into the profound power of truly feeling our emotions and, most importantly, learning how to release them from both the mind and the body. For those burdened by the weight of unresolved emotions, this episode offers a path to freedom.

Join us in this eye-opening episode as we unravel the complexities of emotional release and empower you with the tools to liberate your mind and body. If you're ready to break free from the cycle of old emotional patterns and embrace a more liberated life, this episode is your guide. Let's begin the journey to emotional freedom together. 

Connect with Mike Chang:
- Instagram: @mikechangofficial
-Youtube: Mike Chang
- Website: www.flow60.com

Connect with Stephen Yeh:
-Instagram: @iamstephenyeh
-Twitter: @iamstephenyeh

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Body Over Mind, where we explore how to maximize human potential, release stress, and truly feel free. Im your host, Stephen Yeh, with your co host, Mike Chang. Today, we are going to explore how to release emotions in the body. We've often been told to hold them back, hide them away, or even suppress them.

But what if there is a much healthier way that make you feel more free? So to anyone out there tired of carrying the weight of emotional discomfort, this episode is for you. Let's begin.

One of the main areas that you help people focus on is to release trapped emotions. Can you dive into what that means? Yeah. To release trapped emotions. We have to first recognize that emotions are trapped inside the body. [00:01:00] Sometimes we feel like emotions, like this thing in my mind. And the fact is emotions is, it's something that exists in the body.

It's something that also exists in the mind. And if we want to get out of these cycles of emotions all the time, being afraid and stressed and angry, we have to be able to release the emotions from both our body and from our mind. And a lot of times I think a lot of people believe that it's just like a mindset change, but it's not just a mindset change.

It's equally mind as it is in the body. And so I'm going to cover that. So what that means is in the body, a person really has to be able to feel those emotions. When they feel the emotions, they're able to relax and let them go. But the key here is feeling. If they don't feel the emotions in their body.

They can never let it [00:02:00] go. That sounds like what everybody is doing though, because if I think about it and you're saying, okay, someone needs to feel their emotions, let's say. Someone feels angry, a situation happened, they feel it. So how is that different than what you're talking about here?

When a person feels angry, first of all, very often a person doesn't want to fully feel that anger. They know what's happening. And then from there, they either express anger, right? They yell and they do something, they hit something. They may try to feel better right away. So instead of expressing anger, they look for something that creates pleasure.

I'm going to go eat some food. I'm going to smoke a cigarette. I'm going to go do something to make myself feel better. Either one of these things is not fully feeling this anger. Fully feeling this anger means I'm not going to run away from it and try to feel better. No, I'm going to actually [00:03:00] do the opposite.

I'm going to dive into this feeling of discomfort, this feeling of anger, that sensation, and I'm going to relax my body and fully feel it. This also means that I'm not going to just express it. I'm not going to yell and do all these things because that's not fully feeling it. That's just expressing it, right?

Fully feeling it means I'm going to bring my attention into my body. And then I'm going to feel that sensation, that pressure, that pain, that discomfort, whatever that sensation is, the burning, the tightness, that knot in my stomach. I'm going to fully feel it and I'm going to feel it until it goes away. That's how we actually release.

Emotions from the body. It's important to recognize that because when we can release emotions from the body, then we're able to release it from the mind until then. It doesn't matter how much mindset practices you do, you're not going to be able to get rid of [00:04:00] that mental thought pattern, unless you release it equally from the body.

And that's how you do it. You have to fully feel it. As you describe how you fully feel angry, it also sounds terribly petrifying and it could be quite scary. You're right. And that becomes the, that's the hurdle. That is the thing, because it is scary sometimes because we're not used to feeling it. And so when we first feel it fully, we're not trying to run away from it now.

We're just actually facing it, man. It's tough. It could feel really scary. The emotions can be really intense, right? Somebody has been. Not wanting to feel this anger fully, surrender, not just feeling, they always feel it like you mentioned, but fully feel it, surrender to the feeling. That's very different than just feel it.

Everybody feels the anger, but how [00:05:00] many people are actually to the feeling of anger? Surrendering to be very clear is relaxing. Relaxing into the feeling of anger. When we do that, the emotions can be intense. And that's why a person has to know what to do to manage that. That's a lot to unpack that a bit as well.

When you say the word like surrender, surrendering, it can be very hard to do. And what does that even mean to surrender? There's even that phrase where it says no surrender, no retreat. So how, how does someone actually surrender to the anger or to the emotion? So surrendering to that is to relax in the body is to relax.

It's to [00:06:00] let go of the tension, let go of tightness to fight. When someone says you're fighting it to fight is to tense up. So that means surrender is the opposite. So on the level of the body, it's to relax, to fully feel into the sensation. To fully feel it, we have to relax. You can't fully feel it if we're tightening up.

, when you fight, when you want to fight something, are you going to relax or are you going to tense up? Of course you're going to tense up. So therefore when you surrender, you're not going to tense up. You're going to do the opposite. And that's what it takes. And this takes practice.

It's starts off with the first step, being aware that we need to surrender to these emotions, , the sensation of that emotion. If we want to let it go, if we don't care to let it go, so be, but if you want to let it go, you have to surrender to the feeling, because if you [00:07:00] don't, you can think about it night and day and make sense of it in your mind, and it will not go away.

It will just keep coming back. I'm just imagining the different emotions right now. Right. And we've been talking about anger. So I wanted to dive into that a bit more, because basically what you're saying is relax into the anger, but when I'm imagining what's the natural thing to do when you're angry is to tense up, and that is almost synonymous, when you're angry, you're tense, your jaw is clenched, how do you.

Relax when you're tense is very counterintuitive in the beginning because you're right. The most natural thing to do is to tense up. It takes changing the movement pattern. It takes changing the unconscious reaction of balling my fists, clenching my jaw, the unconscious [00:08:00] reaction of tightening on my stomach or all of these movement patterns, these reactions that we do, we have to become conscious of these movement patterns that we do.

But more importantly, we need to do a practice. We need to practice relaxing. If we don't practice relaxing, our body doesn't know how to relax. And therefore, even if we try to surrender, the body doesn't know how to do it. It doesn't know how to relax. It's relaxing is a pattern. It's a movement pattern.

Just because it's not a big movement, but it still is a movement pattern. It's like asking someone to, to walk in a certain way. Unless they have practiced walking that way, they're not going to be able to. It's weird. The body doesn't know how to move in that way. And now when you ask somebody to relax, same thing.

So a person has to practice very often on how to relax. [00:09:00] And that's the key. And they have to do it every single day. They can't just do it once in a while because every single day we're in this body and we're moving around. And we are either moving towards relaxing, retraining the body on how to do that.

Or we are moving towards maintaining tightness, maintaining tension. It's only one or the other. So therefore the people that really want to release emotions from their body with as much time and energy as they can, they're going to focus on relaxing their body throughout the entire day. So this way they can be on this fast track towards reprogramming the body.

Because remember every, literally every single waking moment we're in this body. And what are you doing with the body? Is your body trying to relax? Consciously learning how to program itself to let go. Or [00:10:00] if you aren't, then by default, you are supporting the old program, which is tension. And when you do that, whatever emotions are inside, can't go anywhere.

And when your emotions can't go anywhere and it stays in the body, now that perspective, those memories, events that happened in the past, Those will remain in your mind and they'll constantly come up. Remember that there's the emotional lenses that we see through our mind. It's our perspective. It's what allows us to pay attention to certain things.

A person who pays attention to things they are afraid about versus a person who pays attention to what they're excited about, what determines what they pay attention to is the Emotional lens, the energetic lens in their [00:11:00] mind. And when a person isn't letting go of old emotions that's stored in the body, mentally, they're always going to see through the lens of that old emotion, which means they're seeing through the lens of the past.

And this is what keeps people stuck in life because these emotions were established. They were a reaction of something that happened in the past. And now what we got, and everybody knows this, a person that's constantly repeating things that happened, they're constantly talking about what happened to them and how they were a victim of this or whatever it is.

And therefore, when a person is constantly thinking that or seeing their life in that way, they're just going to create similar circumstances of that. So we have to let go of the emotions in the [00:12:00] body so we can let go of these stories of these perspective. And now a person can look at their current life and see a different outcome.

They can see a different, perspective. And this is what allows a person to really create change. So the challenge that most people face is how to be able to feel into their body. Because everybody's feeling their body, but their sensitivity to the body is not very high. Their body is always feeling really nervous, anxious.

So they don't have a high level of access to the feelings, to the . sensations in the body. And this again goes back into the need to practice so they can go deeper. If not, they're like feeling the surface of their sensations. They're not feeling really deep. They may be accessing, , [00:13:00] 10, 20 percent of it, but that 80 percent sensation that's actually happening in the body, they're not aware of it.

They don't feel it. They have no access to it. And that sensation. Is the signature of the emotion. It is the emotion that they're feeling. It's just that they don't, because they don't feel it, they can't access it. It's just stays deep in the body. That's when it always comes up in the mind and all the thoughts.

So let me ask you, if people cannot really access it, how do you practice it? The practice is to allow somebody to access it, but they have to work on it. It's like digging a hole. If the goal is to dig. 10 yards deep right now, , we're just hitting our first six inches. We're hitting our first a hundred centimeters.

We got a way to go. So we've got to start now. And the practice is to help somebody be able to access [00:14:00] deeper. But you remember that every single day that we're awake, every time that we are engaging in the body, we're either moving towards going deeper into the body or packing the dirt back on, throwing the dirt back onto this hole, filling it up and not being able to go deeper.

It's either one or the other, which is why being very consistent and practicing on how to feel deeper in the body is so important for anybody that's wanting to change their emotional state and change their mental state or change their mindset, , sometimes people that are interested are just people that are experiencing trauma, but this is literally for every single, person that is wanting to.

Expand their mind, wanting to have access to more creativity or productivity. They're interested in having ability to solve more problems, to come up with more solutions. Everything that has to do with their [00:15:00] mind is dependent on the amount of blockages that they can release because it allows their mind to be able to expand. ok 

So with all of this, again, how do you practice it? So it's, you got to keep it really simple. Consistency is the key. When a person wakes up every morning, they need to connect deep into their body. And then every evening before they go to bed, I have to do the same. We do it in the morning time because this way we're able to clear the emotions that we can have access to.

This allows us to clear our mind and we can show up differently throughout the day. We can make different choices. We can see things slightly more clear. And then we do the same thing in the evening time before we go to bed, because we want to clear any stuff that we took on, any emotions that we took on in the body, 

any ongoing [00:16:00] stressful thoughts that we had in our mind, we want to clear it before we go to bed. What to do in the morning and what to do in the evening. This is where there's a lot of different practices out there. And the one that I teach is five methods. It's a Flow60 practice. Tapping the body, using strength training to exert, using stretching to engage.

Open up the energy up and down the spine to release the tension in the body. Breathing, meditation. And if a person does this every morning, and they do it every evening, the evening version, which is stretching, breathing, and meditation, then they're able to start to reprogram their body on how to relax, how to let go, how to surrender.

And if they do this every single morning, every single evening, depending on how much trapped emotions a person has, depending on how much emotions somebody has, this could take. [00:17:00] Months to years, but what a person would want to focus on and remember is that every time when they do a practice, every time when they are teaching their body how to relax, they're moving forward, don't focus on how long it's going to take, okay, focus on doing the practice and focus on teaching the body how to relax so we can start to release.

Because every single bit of emotion that you are able to fully feel or that you're feeling is the process of releasing it and letting it go. And therefore life is constantly going to evolve to be more in your benefit, more in your favor, more of what it is that you want. So it's important to remember that.

Don't look at this giant mountain and go, I don't know , how am I gonna get to the top. Instead, just pay attention to every single step that you need to [00:18:00] take and just focus on taking the steps. And that's the biggest thing a person runs into is thinking that so hard, I don't know where to start.

But you can't think like that. You just need to go and start. And it doesn't matter how far you go. Every single step that you take, life is improving. You're feeling better. So who cares how long it takes? Just start to feel better. And that's it. But the person just needs to start right now. Don't wait.

There's no perfect time. There's no, I'm busy right now. And let me start when I'm not busy. No, the more busy you are, the more emotional you are as well. You got your building up that stress. So start now. All right. There you go, folks. Thanks again for listening to another episode of Body Over Mind. And if you haven't subscribed yet, click that subscribe button.

If you haven't left a review, please do that. Thank you guys so much and we'll see you on the next episode.