Life has always been more challenging for highly sensitive people. We feel more of everything and that means more emotional pain as well. And who wants more of that? 

And that’s the problem. Nobody wants emotional pain, especially the highly sensitive person (HSP). We all do our best, mostly unconsciously, to avoid, ignore, resist, and suppress emotional pain. This protective survival strategy often begins very early in life and can potentially last a lifetime.

Ostensibly it makes a lot of sense to resist painful emotions, but in the human body whenever we resist feelings we create muscular tension and disruptions in our physiology. These are adaptive changes that ideally help us survive stressful or traumatic times by lowering emotional intensity. However, when these adaptations linger or become permanent their disruptive influence on the autonomic nervous system becomes the source of most chronic pain and physical illness. 

So everyone, and particularly the highly sensitive person (HSP), will benefit from learning how to experience emotions in a way that’s tolerable and safe and that does not contribute to either emotional or physical suffering.

Your Body is the Solution for Challenging Emotions

Our bodies have learned to respond to unpleasant emotional experience by tensing or contracting. While tension tends to mute emotional, as well as physical pain, when left unchecked it contributes to the perpetuation of pain and illness.

If we can relieve the tension that’s related to emotional suppression we create a more free flowing emotional experience. When emotions are free to flow through the body they tend not to linger. And less lingering means less suffering.

A reasonable analogy is to think of a free flowing river where lots of water is free to flow. When our emotional energy is more free flowing we’re less likely to become stuck or immersed in feelings.

On the other hand, if the river is segmented with beaver dams, the flow of water, and in our case emotion, is impaired and we tend to suffer more emotionally.

In the body these dams are created by protective muscular holding patterns, referred to as character armor, commonly found in the floor of the pelvis, low back, diaphragm, heart, throat, base of the skull, and around the eyes. As we learn to resolve these blockages through embodied awareness practices emotions are able to flow more freely and to resolve more readily.

Consciously choosing to safely feel emotional experience is a skill that can be learned with practice. As we learn to embody emotional experience rather than suppress it, we’re supported cognitively, emotionally, and physically.

Emotional embodiment is the indispensable key for living with more open-hearted, present moment awareness and less detrimental unconscious programming.

For the more highly aware individual we can add the potential for enhanced intuitive guidance, creativity, and spiritual well-being.

Here’s a link to a 3-minute guided self-regulation video … a mindful pause.