22/03/2023
It may surprise some of you to know that to feel happiness and joy we need to relinquish control. We need to surrender in to the here and now, the present moment. We can not feel joy and happiness if we are worried about the future nor if we are thinking or stuck in the past. Nor can we experience joy if we shut down our emotions. Our brain and body doesn’t have the ability to block out anger, sadness and fear and allow joy through. We can not choose to feel our positive emotions and not our negative ones. Like the duality of life we need to experience the good and the bad, the day and the night, the negative and positive. We need to have access and ability to feel and express all emotions to experience happiness and joy.
As Lowen is saying here, the way to do this is to release tension from the body (the blocks these feelings and keep us in the past). We know from neuroscience that trauma whether large or small is held in the body and the nervous system. This tension keeps us in our past, sometimes leads to feelings of despair as well as an inability to be present as our nervous system is stuck in flight, fright or freeze. The threat is in the past not the present. Breathing is a wonderful way to help regulate our nervous systems and bring us in to the here and now. A gate way to releasing tensions and emotions and allowing us to feel more joy in our lives.
