Emotional Magic When the World is Shaking
By Arielle Yoon
Emotional Magic Process: For when overwhelmed, numb, or overrun by emotions. Important process for our collective healing.
Notice if there is a way you are avoiding feeling your emotions. For example, by being busy or in your head.
Get in your body (like take a bath, do yoga, gentle breathing exercises, or go on a walk).
As you feel the emotions, don’t overthink but just feel them in your body. Overthinking about our emotions has us come out of our bodies. When we don’t allow ourselves to physically feel them, it blocks the process.
If you still feel emotionally blocked, you may need more nervous system nourishment because our nervous systems often need to be fully charged for emotional processing, because it can be hard! (example: sound bowl meditation, bath, tea, night of rest).
When you feel like you have connected with the emotion, express it! You can do things like dance to a song that expresses your emotion (like angry or sad music, cue Alanis Morissette “You Oughtta Know”), journal about it, or scream into a pillow.
More self-care and self-nourishing. Self care but not in the capitalistic way. Self-care by asking yourself, how can I really nourish and be easy on myself right now? Maybe watch your favorite comedy show, make an herbal face steam, or read a book outside.
After fully processing your emotion, you may arrive at a place where you receive wisdom from the experience, or you understand your truth more. You don’t need to force it, it will come at the right time.
Clearing your emotions will give you access to your spiritual truth and power, and from there, you can help heal your community. Clearing our emotions is so important for getting out of numbness, avoidance, and overwhelm, it allows us to take our power back. We have something like an emotional drain, and our drains become clogged when we do not process our emotions to clear them. You are so powerful you can literally turn the world’s dense emotions into wisdom on your spiritual journey. While we can’t necessarily be emotionally open to everything that is going on in the world, having a clogged drain keeps us stuck, with a lack of embodiment, and continuing to uphold the old ways of colonization.
In mainstream spirituality, spirituality often co-opted from indigenous communities, spirituality is practiced as completely different and distinct from social justice work, but that is wrong. It is more important now than ever not to compartmentalize our spirituality and our fight for social and environmental justice. They are intertwined. Even dealing with our heartbreak about the injustices, takes healing.
The more healing I’ve done, and the more my spirituality is rooted in the land, in this earth, the more that I believe that our spirituality, our healing, is vital for our social and environmental justice healing.
To create a world where we are freed from injustice, we must each individually heal and practice our own spirituality. One first step is clearing and processing our emotions to keep us open to our healing. Avoiding processing our emotions keeps us stuck in the old paradigm because we have no space to face the truth and the shadows that are required for our collective and individual spiritual growth.
When I go through the process of shadow work, the process of looking at my shadows, my darkness, only then can I heal. That in turn heals my community.
By processing our emotions, we have space to look at the ways we have each been colonized in spirit. Healing the way we have been molded by our society, molded to live in a way that is so counter to the world we truly want- a world where we are all accepted and valued, where we have power, where we live in interdependent communities, where our generational trauma is healed, where our needs are met, where our environment is supportive to the bees. Depending on our identity, we may have less or more power than others and may be victims of systemic discrimination. We don’t want to give those systems any more power by neglecting to do the shadow work it takes to face the truth about whether we are upholding the values we want to see in our communities. To get to the world we want, we must heal our participation so we no longer perpetuate the oppressive, colonizing, and extractive ways.
Me, as I practice land-based spirituality like my ancestors, I am spiritually fed by connecting with the living plant and animal beings around me. As I learn from them, I learn about the practice of reciprocity. As I sit with this beautiful truth, I open my eyes to the way all living beings, are connected in reciprocity and interdependence. But by seeing this truth, I am deeply confronted by all the ways I am not living that way. All the ways that I live in survival from growing up without the safety net that community provides. The safety net is taken away from us by our collective oppression, which has taken us further away from the community and nature’s abundance. But when I continue to live in survival, I live individualistically, I am not generous. I am looking out only for myself- because I am not healed. That way of functioning may have been necessary for my ancestors in the past, as colonization and capitalism put them in this survival state. But I have the space to heal that in myself, to live not in the fractured ways of these oppressive systems. I have the space to heal to live in a way that is true to my soul, and to live in a way that is supportive of my community.
May this love letter provide even a little support to live more aligned with your soul.