Exercise to Release Negative Emotions

Overcoming difficult emotions such as fear, anger, guilt, and anxiety can bring the same disguised benefits that dealing with a physical illness can bring.

Patients and clients suffering from life-threatening illness often report that their diseases have taught them to love and value the other people in their lives more deeply than before they became ill.

During recovery they learn to appreciate and understand areas of life that they took for granted before.

While anger, fear, and worry are not diseases, we can grow from them even as we process them to become the person we want to be.

By turning to our inherent intelligence, harmony, and creativity, we can create a positive outcome; but if we are emotionally turbulent, we are too agitated to access that possibility. There is a few steps to Release Negative Emotions.

Lets Get Started.

1. Identify a negative attitude or a feeling you have that is holding you back. An attitude which is preventing you from fulfilling your potential, or achieving a goal, ambition, dream, living the life you deserve. Possibly an attitude which is sabotaging your relationships, stopping you from changing jobs, setting up a business. i.e. you not good enough, never going to succeed, you can’t find a partner, you’re never going to be happy or a story from your past you keep recycling which is not productive.

2. Get a piece of paper or card board.

2 a: Write down some significant events that have happened in your past, positive and negative.

( i.e. first time you fell off a bike, being told off by a parent, getting your driver’s licence, graduating, your first kiss, breaking up with a partner, a bad holiday, good holiday).

2 b: Now write down some of the things you’re looking forward in the future. (i.e. travelling the world, writing a book, meeting someone, new job, exciting venture, getting into great shape, meeting exciting people).

2 c: Now close your eyes relax and imagine a line that represents your positive future, placing all the exciting things you’re looking forward to on a line that represents time.

2 d: Now with your eyes closed imagine the here and now-the present.

2 c: With your eyes closed imagine those past events you wrote down, as you imagine all your past events imagine place them on the line that represents time in your past.

2 d: Now imagine joining your line of the future, present and past events.

3. Now remembering that negative attitude or a feeling you have. Imagine going backwards in time identifying times in your past where you had that negative feeling before. At each time you notice those negative feelings.

Make a mental note and continue backwards to the very first experience you had of that attitude or feeling.

4. When you reach the very first experience of that attitude or feeling, detach yourself from the feeling and look at the memory from the left hand side.

See your younger self, what happened for you to feel these negative thoughts about yourself and the people around you. Next step over the timeline to the right and look at the memory from another perspective. Now imagine floating above the experience as high as you possibly can tell you can barely see it.

Now float back down and imagine going to a time shortly before the event which produced those feelings or attitude happened, you begin to realize those feelings were not always there. There was a time were you didn’t have those negative feelings. Gather all the information about what happened to make you feel this way from different perspectives, imagine walking or floating back alongside your timeline to the present.

5. As you arrive at the present, look back along your Timeline of past events to that very first instance you experienced these negative feeling or attitudes.

Determine what resources you have now at the age you are, life experience, and wisdom, you now have that would have been useful in that experience when you were younger. When you’re young you do the best you can with the knowledge you have, though you are now older and you can deal with those feelings a lot better.

6. Fully associate into resources you have now i.e. confidence, intelligence, and wisdom, notice what you see, hear and feel when you’re at your best. And Imagine filling up bag with all the positive resources you have now bringing them back to your past.

7. Now bring these resources back to your past. Imagine walking back alongside your Timeline in a place immediately before the memory of the past. Imagine passing all these resources back to the person you were when you first had these negative feelings about yourself, passing resources such as confidence, intelligence, experience, wisdom.

8. Having passed those resources to your younger self.

How is your response different to the experience you had that made you feel inadequate or negative?

How do you feel differently about yourself?

Now let those negative emotions go, let them go forever, your mind works to serve you and it may have been holding these thoughts to protect you though now it’s time to let go.

Now picking up your balloon-exhale all those negative feelings into a balloon, get rid of those feelings into a balloon, blow it as big as you can, and imagine getting rid of every ounce of those negative feelings or attitude you had, once you have got rid of the negative feelings, tie the balloon up, and burst those feelings. Now make your way back to the present having released all those negative feelings, and as you make your way back in time each time you come across the same negative feelings, release them, and replace them with the positive resources. As you make your way back to the present notice how you feel releasing all the negative energy.

9. Having released all the negative energy, imagine how you will respond differently to events and interactions with people.

Having released your negative feelings, imagine 2 weeks into the future, then two months, 4 months, 6 months, then one year into the future laying down these new positive resources at each point.

10. Now from the future-face the present and notice the changes you have now made with those new positive resources, letting go of the old negative ones. Give your present self whatever information you have that will assist you in making those changes Now gradually come back into the here and now into the present feeling positive, refreshed recharged, focused and determined.

Ref: www.gaiam.com