In truth, there is no high or low in this universe; but for the sake of our understanding, lets say that at the highest level in this universe, all is integrated. All is one. At a lower level however, there are different dimensions and facets of this universe that is ‘one’. And you, like the universe, are also multi dimensional and multifaceted.

At your highest level, all is integrated. Your physical, etheric, feeling, thinking and spiritual bodies are all one. They are all just energy expressing itself. At a lower level, these aspects of you are like different dimensions of you. They are overlaid upon one another. They are different expressions of the same consciousness. Your feeling body (what most people call the emotional body) is the truth of who you are at a feeling level. This layer of you contains the imprints of the emotional aspect of your memories as well as your current emotional state. It is the bridge between your physical self and our thinking self. The feeling body interprets and translates the thoughts projected forth by your eternal consciousness perspective and also by your human perspective into feeling states or “feeling signatures”. This translation is the first step that takes place in order to enable a being to have a first hand experience of a thought. This enables the thought to be actualized instead of remain abstract. This actualization of thoughts enables us to learn and gain awareness better and faster and this in turn enables personal and universal expansion. Because of the emotional body, man is able to experience their own thoughts. The thoughts are converted into feeling impressions. The physical body interprets those feeling impressions and as if translating the message, converts those feeling states into the neuropeptides and hormones that cause the physical reactions in our body that we call “emotions”; emotions ranging from fear, anger and stress to love, compassion and happiness.

The feeling body specializes in feeling. Feeling is not only about emotion. It is about sensation and perception. Even though emotion does not exist beyond the physical body, feeling does. An emotion is a physiological experience of a feeling. A feeling is a sensation-based perception/form of awareness. The feeling body is not an actual body. It is etheric in nature. But it can be understood and visualized symbolically like an actual body (in fact it often is both out of body and in dream time). You can ask to be shown the visual representation of your feeling body in meditation of you like. With practice, you will no longer need to facilitate an altered state of consciousness like meditation to switch your perspective in order to see the layer of a person’s emotional/feeling body at will. You could observe it as energy, or you could observe it as the representation of an actual body. Here’s an example of one such experience: I have a male relative that is stoic, has a confident, independent heir about him, who belongs in hard work and has a “got to break some eggs to make an omelet” attitude about life. When his feeling body revealed itself to me, it was grey blue in color. It has hunched over at the shoulders. It was leaning lopsidedly to it’s left. Its gaze was towards the floor, its movements were constricted and most shockingly of all, it was covered (especially the left side of it’s face) disfiguring raised scars, scars bad enough that it was as if they had been caused by a meat grinder. Its energy was the energy of suppression and deeply imprisoned grief. Inherent in this experience is a general tendency that has become more and more obvious since then. When there is ‘damage’ which weakens one of the levels of ourselves, another level compensates. This compensation leads to a severe a lack of integration within the self. The self becomes fragmented and fractured. The

Physical body and spiritual body are the ones that most often compensate for the emotional body. For example, say someone’s emotional body is weak and fearful and appears to collapse in on itself, often that person will exaggerate their physical posture to seem strong, confident and outward moving. Or that very same person might instead be particularly spiritually developed with a great talent for withdrawing their consciousness and perceiving things from a more objective perspective.

So why is the feeling body so important? For starters, the feeling body is the translator between physical experience and non-physical experience. It is the translator between the observer-based consciousness of the mind and the first person physical experience based consciousness of the person. It is what makes us able to experience thought as “real”. In fact without your feelings, nothing about your physical reality would seem real. Your sense of life and feeling based conclusions about life are a part of the feeling body. Your interpretations are a part of the feeling body. Your emotional trauma is a part of the emotional body. If your interpretation of life is experienced as painful and if your sense of life is painful and if the feeling based conclusions you’ve drawn about life are painful and if the feeling state of your memories are painful (and your feelings dictate what is real and what is not), your feeling body will continue to convey those painful messages to the body, which will be interpreted as unpleasant emotion within the body. This leads to an unhappy life. This leads to addiction. This leads to failed relationships. Basically, this leads to the physical reflection of any of those painful emotional states. And the worst part is, you cannot stop living and re living that original trauma. You cannot be in the present moment because the emotional trauma keeps coming up over and over again in an attempt to integrate itself. In other words, if I felt like Dad abandoned me in some way when I was young, I will keep manifesting situations that make me feel abandoned over the course of my life.

If healing must occur on the emotional and feeling level of your life, you must address the emotions and feelings themselves. You must address the causation of those emotions and feelings. Here’s the catch. The minute you say, “I need to heal” something, this implies that you have to change or fix something, which means that you disapprove of something. The best way to damage yourself emotionally is to look at yourself through the lens of ‘something needs to change’. You know how painful it is to have someone tell you that you are not ok the way you are and that you have to be different. This is how the feeling body feels when you convey that it is not ok and that it needs to be different. If you approach your feeling body with an attitude of “I need to fix you”, you have just taken a serrated knife to a wound. You have not healed anything. And so, what is the alternative?

The alternative to trying to fix or heal the emotions is to embrace the feelings and emotions entirely, no matter how painful they may be. Be with the feelings and emotions instead of trying to change them. Listen to them and what they need you to know. We can call this process integration instead of healing. Every day for 20 minutes at least, as well as any time you have a particularly intense emotional reaction to something, find a quiet and comfortable place to completely be with how you feel. Observe the sensations and feelings and emotions in your body. They will intensify as you focus on them. Breathe continuously without unnecessary pauses between breaths. Breathe in and out of your nose. Notice the way you feel. Your entire goal is to be with your feelings, which is to fully be with yourself. If you like, you can repeat this one sentence to your emotions like a mantra… “I am completely here with you now”. Keep in mind that this process is not only for negative emotional states. It is also for positive emotional states. Some people in fact find that they are much more comfortable being with their negative emotional states than with their positive emotional states.

After you have been with the emotion completely no matter how uncomfortable it is and you feel like you want to know more about the causation of the emotion, ask yourself three questions:

1. How do I feel? This is your opportunity to bring the feelings to your conscious awareness and name what is occurring within you.
2. When did I last experience this exact same feeling? Without looking for the answer, allow your being to offer up the answer, like a stream washing something downstream to you
3.  When did I first experience this same feeling in my life? Again, without looking for the answer, allow your being to offer up the answer, like a stream washing something downstream to you.

If nothing comes, be patient with that. Trust the process. Trust that you will receive the exact experience you need at this time. If you find yourself experiencing an emotionally traumatic memory, observe the memory and then mentally alter the memory in a way that feels emotionally positive. This is what they call “inner child work”. For example, if you are taken into a memory where your father left you, imagine the adult you approaching the child you, consoling the child and finding a way to meet the child’s needs. For example, you could become the stable parent for your inner child. Or you could give the child a reliable father figure of their choice. Or you could explain the whole situation objectively to the child and help them to not take the action personally. Altering the memory in this way changes the causation of the trauma. This alteration ensures that all that has transpired as a result of that trauma is altered as well. You are affecting the very blueprint of your emotional life.

Writing about your experience of ‘being with your feeling body’ is a good idea because it will not only make your emotional body feel as if you care about it, it will also help you to understand and integrate the experience you’ve just had. Keep in mind that trauma which took place before you developed the capacity for language, is not likely to be something that you can verbalize. Just remember that you do not have to verbalize it or conceptualize of it in order to integrate it.

When we have a strong emotional reaction to something, the strong reaction means that our past trauma has been triggered. This practice of being with the emotion allows us to take our attention off of the “messenger” which is the physical event or person or thing that is triggering us. It allows us to step back from the story that is urging us to react so strongly and detach mentally from the trigger. And it allows us to place our attention on how we are feeling so that we can recognize what deep unresolved past wound is unhealed within us and is thus continuing to mirror itself in our lives. It enables us to integrate our emotional body with ourselves. This is true “emotional healing”.