Emotional Hoarding.

I would like to talk about emotional hoarding. Emotional hoarding for me is when you don't deal with your emotions as they come up and you store them away to be dealt with another time. This is no different to when we want to quickly clean our home and we shove everything in the cupboards and wardrobes thinking we will clean it up later. What happens though is that when you want to get something out of the cupboard such as the shoes that were already in there but are now blocked by all the other items you stuffed in there, you are going to have to go through all the mess and clean it all out in order to get access to the shoes. This metaphor shows what happens to us when we hoard or suppress away our emotions. All our other normal everyday emotions get buried underneath the emotions we stuff on top. This means when we try to access joy we can't get to it as it is buried underneath the other emotions we hoarded/stuffed on top of it. The only option to get access to this joy is to open the cupboard of our emotions and clear out (or feel) all the mess we hoarded away on top of it. The emotions we tend to hoard away is anger, grief (sadness), fear, shame and Guilt. by hoarding away these emotions we prevent ourselves from access the good emotions (joy, happiness, love).

Unlike a cupboard which keeps all within with the walls and door, the only way we can keep all these emotions stored within us is to use our energy and life force. The more we hoard away within us the more life force we need to use and the less we have available for our life. This is not noticeable when we are in our 20's when we have plenty of energy available, however once you are in your 30's slowly over time you will notice that there is less energy to deal with life and it's complications and demands. Because of this we start to notice we have less ability to access emotions as love, joy and happiness.

During our aging process unless we have dealt with our suppressed emotions these stored emotions will keep building up and up. Not only do we have to use a lot of our life force to keep this within us we have to create behaviors to keep us distracted not remind us of all the mess we are hoarding away so we don't have to deal with it. A lot of these behaviors have become a social norm. These include rituals around drinking alcohol, coffee and tea, being a workaholic , addictions to tobacco, drugs and alcohol, shopping and spending money, avoidance behaviors such as OCD, basically anything that keeps them distracted doesn't matter how subtle it is.

We can also find that things that used to be easy in our younger life is now becoming more difficult, either with not having the ability to deal with it or having roadblocks/obstacles standing in our way.

The solution is easy but difficult at the same time. It just means that we have to clear out the emotions that we have hoarded away. To clear them out means we have to feel them and express the emotion which we didn't do in the 1st place. We can do this in our normal daily life, whenever we go to to face or do something that is difficult we express the emotion that is blocking our path in that moment in time. This tends to be very difficult as we do not like to show our emotions to other people or in public, also we to tend to not allow ourselves to get to to the bottom of the pile . The other option is to have a breathwork session with us at Inner Gateways, this allows us to access and express the emotions in a safe environment, facilitated by a experienced facilitator and clear them out so we do not have to deal with it in our normal life.

#Breathwork #Hoarding #emotions #emotional