How to Release the Merry-Go-Round of Unwanted Emotions

It can take just one minute of focused intention

It seems wired into us to feel we don’t have enough, not what we need to have, be it friends, or money, or freedom, or life direction, or soul purpose. The truth is we are missing nothing — we just think we are. No hidden wires or trapdoors stop us. Only our own mindset stops us. And this happens with our permission.

What drives that mindset? Emotions. And emotions can be prison bars or the gates of freedom — it all depends on which ones we choose to express or keep hidden and how aware we are of doing exactly that and for what reason.

The problem that arises often is we refuse to become aware a particular negative emotion is there inside us and we remain unaware it is blocking us from moving forward. It is keeping us on the merry-go-round of an endless loop, carrying us along in a non-stop repetition of feeling — feeling tied to memory.

The fact is we might have actually outgrown the emotion and the memory we associate with it. We might no longer need either. But unless we give ourselves permission to let the emotion go, we can never find out, one way or the other. We stay spinning in the circle of the familiar. We think the emotions belong to us. Not really.

An Irish friend told me in her tradition, she was taught never to think about emotions as owning her, possessing her mind or heart because they are just passing through her — they aren’t permanent guests. This is actually true scientifically — whatever triggers an emotion and brings it to the fore has a biological and physiological duration of 90 seconds in every cell of our body. The only reason the emotion lasts longer than that is because we choose to dwell on it again. And again.

My Irish friend never says “I am feeling sad,” for example. She says, instead, “A sadness has come over me.” The emotion of sadness surrounds her, but it is not who she is. It doesn’t consume her. It drifts away, a cloud dissolving.

This happens with all emotions if we give permission. But too many times, we want to possess that negative feeling to extend its life cycle. This means we are subjecting every cell in our body to an onslaught of the electrical charge of that emotion over and over again, giving each cell its own version of CNN.

The difference is that our cells exist by electrical charges, and an excess of negative emotion charging over and over again can literally shut down cells, literally, as it were, shut off the light of its electrical energy. This fact has been measured in laboratories.

You can’t live the good life — a life of heart and wholeness and love — if your cells are losing energy. That loss translates into every organ, every molecule within us. By persisting in living continuously in the loop of negative emotion, we are shutting down a force meant to inspire us and meant to bring us access to creativity and joy. We are, to a varying degree, shutting down our life force.

The good news is once we let go of that negative emotion, our cells recover, absorbing the energy as before, lighting our way literally and figuratively into and onto our path toward living the good life — a life of heart and love.

But perhaps you hesitate because in letting go of that emotion, you are going to have to enter the unknown — that inner space now free of the old emotion so familiar to you. How to act? How to react? What to do?

The answer is to do nothing. Just relax in that newly-opened space. It is already reshaping itself into something more for you to enter, a space open to possibility, to vital acceptance of your own being. And you need to do nothing to make this happen. It is who we are — this space is always available to us — the reshaping is always offered.

In this way you are allowing the unknown to arise and give you new understanding, releasing you from old patterns that no longer serve you, identifying more of who you have become and who you are becoming.

You may think you will be adrift for a while and be afraid to let go of anything, but when you do, you relinquish your demand for life to exist on your terms.

You allow the extraordinary wonder of your own life force to reveal itself to you. You open your heart and emotions to that reality, not to the old one.

It doesn’t mean you are adrift — only that if something is not serving you, you acknowledge this, that is all. Then you decide if you want to change it, to move into another frame of reference. The choice is always yours.

In truth, what you are likely to feel afraid of is the act of changing your story, that story of who you are and what you feel with any given trigger that you have carried around for a lifetime, a story you created out of the external rules and requirements of your culture and family and society. You have believed this story for a very long time.

Yet, letting go of it is exactly how you bring freedom into your being. The freedom to be who you really are.

Letting go of emotions that do not serve you gets you off the merry-go-round.

If you are not sure yet, sit in stillness for a minute. Just one minute, and think about this thing about letting go of that emotion that has beset you.

What answer has come to you?

Regina Clarke is a writer of fantasy, mystery, and science fiction short stories and books. She is the author of mysteries Hidden In Stone and Winter’s Edge, sci-fi thrillers The Visitors and Retrieval, and fantasy novels Voices from the Old Earth and MARI.

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