We are all familiar with our physical body. It produces sensations such as pleasure and pain, and we call it our body. We are also familiar with our mental body. It produces thoughts such as yes and no. We call it our mind. But how many of us know where the feelings of love and fear come from?
Our emotional body is the least understood aspect of human existence. This is why so many of us struggle to connect with how we feel. It is also the most evolved aspect of human existence, and this is why we need to discover what our emotional body is.
Remember that our goal is to live in a way that allows life energy to flood our being and pour into everything we do. This can only occur when we find ourselves in a truly supportive, nurturing space where we feel safe. The function of our emotional body is to produce these two distinct feelings of love and fear, so that we may find this space.
Love is the feeling produced by life energy as it flows through us when we are open. Fear is the feeling produced by life energy as it builds pressure where we are closed. In both cases, the aspect of self that is either open or closed is the emotional body.
When we are fully open, in all situations, there is only love. This is unconditional love, and it is our natural state of being when our human development is complete. Until we reach this state of being, we also have fear. Since both of these feelings are produced by the same energy, they are both equally important, and equally revealing.
Love shows us where we are open, and where we are actively opening places within us that were previously closed. Fear shows us where we are closed, and where we are actively closing places within us that were previously open. As we develop a deeper understanding of why our emotional body is either opening or closing, by connecting fully with the feelings of love and fear in the present moment, we naturally enter a state of heightened self awareness that allows us to live our truth more fully.
In the simplest possible terms, our emotional body opens when we feel safe, and closes when we feel threatened. This act of opening and closing produces either an increase of flow or an increase of pressure that we experience as love and fear. When we allow these feelings into our awareness, we create within ourselves the opportunity to discover why we are feeling safe or threatened. This combination of feeling and awareness is our inner sense of self.
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Using love and fear as an emotional compass is as simple as moving toward that which causes our emotional body to open and away from that which causes our emotional body to close. For those of us who have been conditioned to lead with our mind, however, this extremely simple approach to life can be extremely challenging. While the basic ability to feel is something we all have, learning to be moved by feeling is a skill that requires practice.
We move toward that which causes our emotional body to open by identifying the people we care about the most, the activities we enjoy the most, and the places we feel most comfortable, and by doing everything we can to be with these people, in these places, participating in these activities as much as possible. When we do these things, our emotional body opens even more, the flow of life energy increases, and the act of being moved by feeling becomes easier and easier.
The process of moving away from that which causes our emotional body to close is more complex, because our natural state is open, and we only close when we feel threatened. Adding to this complexity, we perceive two different kinds of threats that require exact opposite responses.
The first kind of threat is an outer world event that is happening in the present moment, such as an act of violence. Here we move away from that which causes our emotional body to close by literally walking away from the threat, creating space between ourselves and the potential for harm.
The second kind of threat is a subconscious memory of an outer world event that was too overwhelming for us to deal with when it initially occurred. These traumatizing events caused our emotional body to close, as it always does in response to threats from the outer world. However, due to the subconscious nature of this trauma, our emotional body does not re-open because it interprets the memory as an indicator that the threat still exists. As a result, many of us have lived our entire lives with partially closed emotional bodies.
We don't have direct conscious access to subconscious memories because they are, by definition, subconscious. What we do have is direct conscious access to the feelings produced by our emotional body in response to subconscious memories. This is why we occasionally experience fear even when nothing threatening is happening in the present moment. A common example is fear of public speaking.
In these situations, we don't have the option of walking away, because the source of this fear is within us, and it simply follows us wherever we go. Instead, we use this fear as a guide, and focus on the feeling as fully as possible. When we do so, life energy responds to our focus by flowing into the emotional block and the subconscious mind simultaneously, dissolving both the tension and the memory.
If, for example, we do have fear of public speaking, we can completely eliminate this fear by embracing the opportunity to speak, and by focusing fully on how we feel as we do so. Our willingness to focus on this fear causes life energy to flow into the precise location of our emotional block and dissolve it. In the absence of emotional blockage, there is no place within us for pressure to build, and fear simply disappears.