How Emotional Baggage Causes Stress, and How to Release It
Energy healing, deep breathing, and gratitude can help relieve stress
For many of us, stress has become a daily reality in our lives, even before the pandemic added to our stress load. So where is all this stress coming from?
At its most fundamental level, stress is an imbalance of energy inside us — partly conscious and partly subconscious. The energy that we spend focusing on negativity and fear is directly proportional to our stress level. Fortunately, this is something we all have conscious control over.
There is a lot going on in the world and in all our lives that can trigger stress. Yet many of the stressors we feel today are triggered by emotional baggage from difficult experiences we have faced in the past.
When you have an intensely difficult experience, the emotions you feel should fade with time. But sometimes they’re just too much for you to handle, and your body holds onto that negative energy in the form of what many call “emotional baggage.” We call these emotional energies Trapped Emotions, and they can lead us to unconsciously choose certain feelings, thoughts, and expectations that compound rather than relieve our sense of stress.
Energy healing modalities such as Emotion Code are designed to help people identify and release Trapped Emotions. In the Emotion Code, we ask questions concerning the presence and location of Trapped Emotions in conjunction with muscle testing. Our muscles respond either strongly or weakly, indicating yes or no to the questions.
Your subconscious mind is intimately connected to positive and negative energies. By testing your muscles’ natural response and resistance to these energies, you can uncover the emotions that may be keeping you from full emotional healing and release them forever.
When you feel yourself getting stressed out, anxious, or worried for any reason, there are simple practices that you can do to help you feel better. Here is a quick calming exercise to try:
- Get in a comfortable position and put one hand on your heart and the other hand on your abdomen. You can close your eyes if you’d like.
- Inhale for about four seconds through your nose. For some of us this may feel like a pretty long breath, but do your best to breathe in slowly.
- Hold your breath for seven seconds. This also may feel like a long time, but it is important to slow your respiration and heart rate.
- Exhale from your mouth for eight seconds.
Mindful breathing exercises like this one are designed to give your nervous system a break and help to reset it. It essentially tells your body and your nervous system that you are not in any danger, and gets you out of the fight-or-flight response that is triggered when you feel stress. This is important for your physical, mental, and emotional health, as chronic stress has been linked with all kinds of health problems, including weakening the immune system and damaging the heart.
Taking a few minutes to breathe deeply when you feel tense and constricted can help you to shift out of stress mode. Adding gratitude to the practice can help even more. Research by the HeartMath Institute has shown that regularly taking time to count your blessings and feel gratitude improves health and wellness, including heart health. Our heart and our brain are connected, and practicing feeling gratitude improves the communication between the heart and brain, and the rest of our body as well.
So when you are feeling stressed out, take time to savor a sense of gratitude as you slow your breathing and heart rate. And for lasting relief, try an energy healing technique such as The Emotion Code or The Body Code to help you identify and let go of emotional baggage. Using these techniques can help restore peace to your subconscious and correct physical imbalances, too. This can lower your stress level by helping you understand the underlying causes of negative emotional choices and nagging, negative thoughts.
Removing underlying causes of stress can also help your physical body to heal and function optimally. This can provide you with more energy to fulfill your commitments, and the increased joy that comes from living in a state of acceptance, forgiveness and peace.
~Dr. Bradley Nelson
