Nothing good comes from living in the past… As much as it hurts to know, all of our painful past sometimes make an “unwanted” appearances in our mind. It’s not like we can control it, otherwise it would make things easier.
The fact that our past may define who we are is hard enough, even so we constantly had to carry them and deal with them in the future if we didn’t in the past. Now, this is what people call as “emotional baggage”. And, the thing about emotional baggage is that it’s a lot easier to see other people’s emotional baggage rather than our own.
What is Emotional Baggage?
Emotional baggage is a way to describe the experience of having emotions and feelings from the past that are somehow still influencing and limiting our experience in our lives. In a way, its general concern is with unresolved issues of an emotional nature — it is that of carrying all the disappointments, wrongs, and trauma of the past around with one in a heavy load.
What people commonly talked about is emotional baggage specifically takes the form of what are called trapped emotions. These trapped emotions are the result of having felt that emotion at some particular moment in the past, and as we didn’t process it fully at the time it got trapped. So, imagine them as balls of energy, if you will, that are resonating at the frequency of a particular emotion like grief / anxiety / jealousy, and they’re located somewhere in our body.
What do These Trapped Emotions do?
Well, one thing for sure is that they filter our insight and affect pretty much every aspect of our lives. The impact of trapped emotions will be reflected on how you experience other people and life in general, which may lead to distrusting people in general or making you even more volatile in some situation. This may cause us to repeat negative patterns, lock out love and acceptance, put up blocks to our own financial or personal success and impact our relationships.
However, even more importantly, trapped emotions have a very good chance to impact our health as well. Trapped emotions are living and resonates in our body, they may as well cause imbalances that affect our organs and other tissues at the cellular level. In fact, certain emotions tend to correlate to certain organs and glands, such as:
- Anger, frustration, resentment → to the liver and the gallbladder
- Grief and sadness → the lungs and the colon
- Abandonment and betrayal → the heart
- Fear → the kidneys and the bladder
What Can We do?
As trapped emotions have created imbalances that are preventing the person’s body from healing, it creates problems in our lives and stays with us over time. Instead of letting go of the emotions, we put them off as we’re not ready to face and deal with them. And, unbeknownst to you, you’re reacting not to just what’s happening now, but all to what happened before.
Knowing this, surely we wouldn’t want to let emotional baggage defines you — thus, the urge to heal exists. All you have to do is to identify it and clear it, and it’s gone and our bodies then respond by healing naturally. Once the trapped emotions have been cleared, the body’s natural functions can start to work properly and the body heals.
Easier said than done, so it seems, to release the trapped emotional baggage in order for us to regain freedom to be in the moment. The key is to learn on how can we all process emotions, as uncomfortable as they are, in a healthy way so that we will not be affected by it later on in life.