Pain and Emotion Mapping
Have you ever said you had cold feet, a gut reaction, or a shiver down your spine? You probably didn’t think anything of it, but those cliches have more truth than you might think. Emotional body mapping can help you know the emotions behind your pain.
Here are a few Q&As concerning Emotional Body Mapping.
Can Emotions Be Stored In The Body?
Emotions can be stored in the body and manifest as physical sensations, illness, injury, or pain.
How Do Emotions Get Stored In The Body?
Emotions get stored through experiences, trauma, stress, and habitual patterns of movement and posture.
What Are Some Common Areas Where Emotions Are Stored In The Body?
The neck, shoulders, back, hips, and stomach are common areas where emotions are stored in the body.
How Can Releasing Stored Emotions Benefit A Person?
Releasing stored emotions can reduce physical pain, improve mental health, and increase overall well-being.
Emotions(feelings) can feel like they hang out in one or more parts of your body. Feelings are our primary way of interacting with the world, yet many don’t pause to unravel how those emotions impact us. Suppose you’ve ever had trouble naming a feeling; understanding the concept of emotional body mapping may help you become more in tune with yourself.
Body mapping might not be a concrete solution for everyone, but it could be an excellent place to start if you’ve ever needed help deciphering your feelings. Unfortunately, the research on body mapping is limited so far. Enrico Glerean, the expert for two studies on body mapping, says, “The researchers are collecting more data, and experiments are in progress; it’s a bit too early for concrete results.”
Think of emotional body mapping as a tool that isn’t one-size-fits-all. Instead, it’s a tool for learning how to communicate with your body.
Feelings or emotions can be categorized as follows:
Harmful (unpleasant), such as anger, fear, anxiety, and shame, can manifest as illness, pain, and injury.
Positive (pleasant), such as happiness, surprise, love, and pride, can manifest balance, clarity, and ease.
Why Addressing Your Emotions is a Good Thing.
The thing about emotions is that you must experience them.
You cannot think your way out of an emotion.
Connecting your mind and body is integral to your overall well-being. Ignoring, burying, or blocking your emotions may contribute to more illnesses. For example, when your mind-body connection is weak, you may neglect your emotional and physical health.
Sometimes, emotions are so subtle that it takes time to form a vocabulary to describe them, and you’ll need to slow down to feel and name the emotion. Feelings can be frozen or in shock; you may initially experience numbness instead of an emotional sensation. As you heal, the shock melts, and the underlying emotions surface. Tuning in with your body and paying attention to where you feel heightened emotional sensations is the best way to locate and describe your feelings.
These Body-Oriented Tips Can Help to Regulate and Release Emotions.
When emotions dominate a specific part of your body, such as anxiety in your stomach, it helps to decrease stimulation by going into a quiet room (if possible) and tuning in to your gut with deep belly breathing.
Deep belly breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, which is the nerve that triggers emotions and runs through every organ in the body. Deep breathing enables the calming portion of the vagus nerve; usually, by breath five or six, you’ll start seeing a shift in your anxiety level.
Once you do deep breathing and approach yourself with curiosity, compassion, and kindness, you’ll want to identify and name all the emotions to understand what’s triggering you.
Grounding yourself is another helpful tip for feeling heightened emotions in your body. Taking your shoes off (if possible) and putting your bare feet on the floor lets your brain know that the ground is underneath you. This sounds overly simple, yet it can do wonders to calm your brain down.
Move your feet gently and rub them against the floor to connect to how that feels. Take some time to absorb the experience of feeling your feet on the floor; notice how it makes you feel. What sensations develop as you ground yourself back to the earth? Gently orient yourself to being in the room with your feet on the floor and look at everything around you as if seeing it for the first time. You may want to add comforting self-touch to any area in your body that’s in discomfort.
The more you allow yourself to be in the present moment with your feet on the floor, the more your body will slowly shift its focus away from discomfort and bring a sense of balance to your mind.
When should you find a body-oriented bodywork professional?
The emotional body map isn’t to be used in place of a licensed mental health professional. Instead, it is an innovative concept for helping identify emotions, especially during difficult physical stress, illness, injury, or discomfort.
Before finding a body-oriented bodywork professional, you may want to develop your mental health by chatting with a licensed mental health professional first. Even if you believe body-oriented therapy is right for you, a psychotherapist can help you gain a foundational understanding of where your mental health is.
Once you lay the groundwork, finding a body-oriented therapist is vital; in body-oriented therapy, the focus moves away from analyzing feelings and emotions and instead encourages you to experience and sense them in your body. Moving away from examining your emotions and instead connecting them to a sensation allows space for your feelings to be released through your body healthily via specific bodywork techniques, mindfulness practices, and movement therapies.
Thanks for reading this informative article on knowing the emotions behind your pain. The more you know what’s behind your pain, the more you can tap into the infinite wisdom of what your body knows as the best way to heal yourself naturally or in combination with Eastern and Western medicine.
In other words, when you have a seemingly simple cold, it’s not just a cold—emotions are behind it, and if you’re willing to dive deeper into yourself, you may be able to nix it quicker than ever before.
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