Where Emotions Live

This episode explores different disciplines beliefs in where certain emotions live within our bodies, including Traditional Chinese Medicine, Yogic Chakras, Ayurveda, and Somatic Mapping. Learning where emotions may live, be experienced, or get trapped within our bodies is a crucial aspect of our development of emotional intelligence and understanding of ourselves. Learning how you personally experience emotions, can help you navigate them. 

If you'd like help on your emotional growth journey, Pathway To Empowerment has several options available, there are emotional growth courses, workbooks that provide detailed assignments to guide you through, and if you'd like a more personalized approach, Cheli is a trauma-informed therapist and life coach who can guide you on a personal basis. Check out the website at www.pathwaytoempowerment.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

The chronic unexplained pain in your shoulders or stomach isn't just physical tension. It is your repressed life story screaming to be heard. I'm your host, Shalee. And I'm your co-host Sam.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

And you're listening to Pathway to Empowerment, where we believe in thriving, not surviving.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

We've all heard the phrase your body keeps the score. And the fact is that's true. All the unprocessed emotions don't simply disappear. They become stuck energy that's lodged in our muscles and fascia. Today we're going to be talking about where each emotion lives within our body and where they tend to get stuck if we don't process through them thoroughly. The concept of each emotion having its own specific home within our body is not new and spreads across multiple disciplines. Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and Yogic chakras, just to name a few. They all believe in this concept of certain emotions governing specific areas of the body. And though they do not place emotions in the exact same area of the body, they often overlap. And they do share a holistic view that emotions are embodied physical sensations. So the maps may differ based on whether they focus on organs like traditional Chinese medicine, energy centers like chakras and doshas, or neurosensory experiences in somatic mapping. While the locations differ, all these systems agree that blocked emotions lead to physical tension and illness, and that these systems can be used to release that energy. So shali. Can you break down some of the different disciplines and where they believe the emotions live in our bodies and then compare that to what you were taught in your schooling to become a trauma informed therapist?

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Absolutely. Sure. Let's get started with the yogic beliefs about emotions. Now, we've all heard of the chakras, right? We know we if you if you've been around chakras enough, you know where the chakras are. You might know a little bit about them, right? So the chakra connects emotions to seven vertical energy centers along the spine. When blocked, these areas can manifest physical issues such as stress-related stomach issues from the perplexus. So the root chakra, which is the base of the spine, it can really embody fear, anxiety, survival, security, and safety. And it makes sense because our root chakra is when when we talk about like the sex organs and that, when we don't feel safe, we have that fear, the anxiety, survival, security. All of that makes sense. Does that make sense to you? Okay. The sacral chakra or the lower abdomen and hips is the pleasure, right? The guilt, create um, creativity and emotion fluidity. So when we when we have like we talk about like butterflies in our tummy, or we talk about like having a little bit of anxiety because we're going to be dancing or recital, or maybe we're going to be singing on stage or speaking on stage or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Or the pit in our stomach from guilt.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

The pit in your stomach from being guilty or knowing that you've done something that's going to be found out, right? And then also the the the pleasure, right? That excitement feeling. Solar plexus chakra, which is you like your navel or your stomach, that actually is associated with anger, shame, confidence, and willpower. Like when you think about it, you think about like somebody saying, stand up straight, use your use your strength. A lot of times we think about and we talk about in when we're working out, that's our core, right? So it makes sense why those those specific emotions would be stuck there or associated to that place. Our heart chakra is the center of our chest, which is the love, grief, compassion, and loneliness, which also makes a lot of sense because when when we think of the heart, we think about love, we think about sadness, we think about loss, we think about you know, compassion, we think about being lonely or sad. Our throat chakra, self-expression, communication, and truthfulness. And with that one, it's really interesting that sometimes we'll have that lump in our throat, right? It and it feels like it's a rock, like you can't move. Yeah, right. If we go back to the heart, sometimes we can actually, I know I I know for me, when I had a a huge loss in my life, I actually felt physical pain in my heart. And I was fine, like it wasn't a medical issue, it's just from the the Greek. Just the ache. Yeah. So then we talk about the third eye, and the third eye is associated with intuition, insight, imagination, wisdom, calmness, and confidence. So, and that makes a lot of sense too, because our third eye is located, where it's located, is right at the frontal cortex, which is the part of our system that makes us uniquely us. It it shares our moral reasoning and all of those pieces. So, when if you think about times where you really had to be deep in thought to form some insight or gain or look inward to find wisdom, that's where we focus automatically, is our third eye chakra. And then the crown chakra, which is the top of our head, is all about attachment, wisdom, and spiritual connection, which I find really interesting because if you think about this, Sam, when you were sick or you your child are sick, when you lay your head on your mom's lap or a caregiver's lap, where do they, where do they automatically go to help you feel better?

SPEAKER_00 6:47

They play with your hair. They play with everything.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Rub your head, right? Which is that attachment piece. It's also about allowing that spiritual connection between the two of you to coexist. So now if we if we look about the doshas and how they're balanced, the impacts, they impact specific organs similar to the Chinese medicine, but they're influenced by energeticiation and and constitutes similar to the yogic belief that we just discussed. Except for they believe there are three doshas, which are Veda, which is air and ether, which is associated with creativity, flexibility, joy, enthusiasm, when balance and fear, anxiety, restlessness, worry, insecurity when imbalanced. Excuse me. And so when we look at that, we know that there is we know we can tell where our energy is flowing depending on what we're what we're expressing. Whether we're expressing creativity and flexibility and enthusiasm, that's a very well-balanced energy for our Veda. When we're in anxiety or fear or restlessness or worried, we're definitely imbalanced. And then if we go to PETA, which is fire and water, that's and it makes sense because if you think about it, fire and water are very, very strong elements, right? So that's courage, intelligence, and leadership when they're balanced, or the energy is high in that area, and anger, irritability, frustration, and impatience, jealousy, perfectionism when they're imbalanced. And that also makes sense when when we're actually very stiff or unmoving, like fire does, fire dances, but it stays static, right? It stays in one place as long as as long as we don't add something to move it, right? It can be that same way. So with Katha.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

I think it's just Katha, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Earth and water, that one is love, compassion, calm, patience, and stability when it's balanced, and lethargy, depression, and attachment, greed, possessiveness when it's imbalanced. So you can see that they're almost like two sides of a coin, right? So when we when we have this inflexibility, we're going to see our energy shift for positivity or negativity, high and low. So the sub-dosha of PETA governs emotional intelligence and the ability to process feelings. So I find that every single one of these really has substance, especially depending on each individual you work with. They are going to gravitate towards, you know, traditional Chinese medicine or soma or you know the doshas, depending on where they're where they're at emotionally. So traditional Chinese medicine connects emotions directly to specific organs, the meridian system, as well as elements. So the organ, liver, and element of wood is anger, frustration, and resentment. The organ, the heart, and the element fire are connected to joy and anxiety. The spleen and the stomach and the element earth are about worry and pensiveness. Now, pensiveness is one of those words that I think maybe we should explain just a little bit. And pensiveness is where you're kind of deep in thought, but kind of stuck emotionally in not really anger and not really sadness, but somewhere in between. Okay. So being pensive, you're thinking about it, but you're kind of stuck in in kind of a lull of not really happy, not really sad. Okay. Then the lungs and metal are about sadness and grief. And the kidneys and water are about fear and shock. Now, if we look at somatic mapping, it's more personal individually than the ones that we've just talked about. You can find your own place within those, but somatic mapping is so personalized because we might say that we experience one emotion in a part of our soma, and yet another person will say, I don't feel it there. I feel it here. Yeah. Does that make sense? So we have to be really careful when we're talking about somatic mapping, that we're allowing the person to guide that and not say, This is where you will feel it.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

Does that make sense? Yep. So when when we research shows that when we allow people to report fear, more often than not, they report it in their chest, their throat. Anger tends to be in the chest and the hands, and happiness typically radiates throughout the body. Now, those are just very, very brief emotions. So again, we're not going to go into all 25 categories and talk about what the soma mapping looks like because it's so individualized. So if we go back into what I was taught, I was taught by some of the greats about trauma and how to navigate through trauma and what it looks like in the body. And what we find is that we have corresponding things that create the emotion. So events, situations, people, places, and things that create the emotion that gets trapped in the body. And that can where it gets trapped can then allow us to identify what the trauma may have been if that person isn't aware of what the trauma is. So for yeah. So for instance, like if somebody tells me they they have migraines a lot, right, their trauma was was probably something that was created because they felt like they had to know everything to be safe, to, to get out of a situation. If and the same thing with the the neck and the shoulders. If it's stuck in the throat, again, they may have been traumatized or abused emotionally or verbally by someone and didn't feel like they can express their feelings and emotions. So where are where we feel our feel those emotions can be connected to situation, places, and things and trauma events that help a therapist or an energy worker know what to do to help move those through the system so it it's no longer stuck. Does that make sense? So it's really vital that we are very careful when we're working with individuals to not automatically say, oh, so I know you and I both suffer from migraines. And it could be from very different things. It could be from very similar things, but it's really important for us to not guess that unless we get more information.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

Okay. What are some warning signs that an emotion is building up or maybe even stuck in our body so that we can address that and and handle it before it becomes overwhelming?

SPEAKER_01 15:39

So the number one thing that's going to be helpful is understanding what you're emotionally allowing to be there and then recognizing where you feel it in your body. I know for me, there are several things that come up for me where I'm like, oof, I'm feeling ice cold. So I have to then look at am I shutting down? Is that shut down because I'm feeling scared? Is it shut down because I don't want to hurt or harm anyone else from something I might say or do? I when I when I start identifying the even the the physical feeling, I can then identify the emotional feeling, which then will lead me to do something different. So the first step really is getting really in tune with our bodies and understanding what we personally know about our bodies, where our emotions live, how they affect us, what we do with them so that we don't make matters worse.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

I've often heard that trauma gets stuck in our hips a lot. Are there areas such as the hips that trauma and emotions get stuck in more often than others? Or is it just that we process the emotions that correlate to different areas of the body more often than we process through the hips?

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Well, if you think about the hips, centrally located. If we don't have moving movement in our hips, we can't run, we can't move, we can't sit, we can't stand, we're stuck, we're completely stuck. So when we have a lot of feeling and emotion that gets stuck in the hips, it's more often than not because we haven't been able to feel like we can move, move out of the situation, move out of the pain, move out of the stress, move out of these pieces. And so it does make sense why it gets stuck in the hips more often than not. And think about it, it's central to every part of who we are. Because it's right in the middle of who we are.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

It's kind of interesting, huh? Yeah. You know, I've heard the statement that people who do not process their emotions or don't express their emotions are more likely to develop autoimmune disorders. Do you believe that is the case? And if so, why?

SPEAKER_01 18:13

So I absolutely 100% believe that that is truthful. I I believe wholeheartedly that the majority of the autoimmune diseases that we have come from traumatic experiences. That's where they start. And so when we when we don't allow them to process through, it's going to make matters worse for us medically. And the sad fact is, is by the time we recognize it as an autoimmune disease or disorder, it's more often than not too late to actually fix it. So we're going to be stuck with a lot of the symptoms. Now, having said that, we can actually do a lot of things in our healing emotionally to manage the symptoms that the autoimmune disorder creates. Research indicates that chronic stress often manifests as suppressed trauma or rage, triggering inflammatory responses, which then creates a pro-inflammatory state. The immune system is in a state of dysfunction at that point. Then we have the hormonal imbalance, and the nervous system shifts that to create an environment for the autoimmune disorder to develop within us. So if you needed more like scientific proof, that's kind of where we're at, which we know research really supports, knowing that autoimmune disorders and diseases stem from stuck trauma.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Heard that women are typically disproportionately affected by autoimmune disorders. Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_01 20:01

So again, the reality is more often than not, women are thinkers and we hold everything in. So we're we hold it in, we hold it in, we take it, we take it and take it. Because our systems, the way our systems are built, we sometimes don't recognize that it's as stressful on our systems as it really is, because we're built, we're we're built for pain. I mean, we're built to give birth. And I mean, think about those women in the field that were still working, stopped, had the baby, and continued working. Because we we are built to withstand high levels of stress and high levels of pain. And so we will stuff and we will stuff and we will stuff until we create this inability to hold it all, and our body is like, I'm done.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Yeah. I think also like women tend to be the ones that carry everybody else's emotions and try to smooth everybody in the household or whatever as well. So that probably plays a part.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Well, you think about it, they often say in past generations that the man is the head of the home, but the woman is the heart of the home. And that's because for generations the man was the one that the one and only one that went out to work together to hunt to bring home the stuff for everybody to survive physically, and the woman took care of all the emotional and and all of the medical stuff for everyone. And so it's it's hard not to continue that as we progress in time still.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Even though men and women now both work, it's still it's still. A lot of the time will fall on the women to nurture and care for the emotions and the physical well-being of everyone in the home. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

So if the lack of expression or processing of emotion can cause us major issues across all areas of our life, physical disorders, mental health, etc., why do you think we aren't really taught how to acknowledge, express, and process our emotions? Like if it has that huge of an impact, you would think that would be like one of the main areas of concern to teach people.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

The sad thing is that even in today's day and age, we don't know how vital emotions and feelings are and how vital it is for us to learn how to express them in a healthy, productive way. But we need to start somewhere and we need to gather these resources and these skills so everybody can learn them from here on out. And when we know better, we do better.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Yeah. I think there's even in the last maybe 20 years been a huge jump in the acceptance of even going to therapy.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Oh, it's only been realistically, Sam, that's only been in the last six years since COVID. When we really opened it up and said, hey, everybody, like it's vital for you to take care of your mental health.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Yeah. So I just remember there used to be such a lot more stigma around going to therapy, and now it's like more accepted. Absolutely. Most of us were never taught the fundamentals of emotional intelligence, expression, or processing in school, often navigating our early lives without a manual of our internal world. Many of us don't learn these essential life skills until adulthood, searching out this knowledge only after hitting burnout, navigating difficult relationships, or feeling overwhelmed. However, this is not a permanent state. When we take the initiative to learn about ourselves emotionally and actively cultivate the ability to process emotions, we trigger a profound transformation in our overall health, mental, physical, and relational. Learning to navigate our inner world empowers us to break old patterns, reducing anxiety and burnout while fostering resilience and deeper connection. The truth is we hold the key to our own health and happiness. By embracing this lifelong journey of emotional learning, we turn a nice to have skill into our greatest tool for self repair, creating a more peaceful, authentic, and fulfilling life. On Monday, we have our dear friend Shell with us to chat about triggers. So be sure to tune in. We'll see you next time.