Emotional release work is the primary way my clients learn to support the internal part of the core healing process.  It allows them to build two critical components within the work: emotional strength and skill. 

Generally speaking, emotional release work is a learned, hands-on set of skills that’s focused on supporting and guiding the organic need of our emotional system to evacuate negative emotion that’s generated from getting torn up.   When applying release work to a core healing process, this definition changes a bit.  The use of a tool like the songs of Life boosts the core healing process, making your torn up core emotions much more available.  It then becomes your job to learn to use release work to flush out a stored backlog of negative core emotion.  This turns emotional release work into a pretty involved and powerful set of skills that my clients learn to use as they navigate the different phases of the core healing process. 

Babies are born without the ability to hold up their own heads, but they can do 4 things really well—they can poop, pee, cry, and scream.  These are all organic ways we need to release toxicity from within us, and the goal is to accept this need so we can learn to handle and direct these evacuative processes so they’re done in healthy ways.  Every human on the face of the earth does this with poop and pee, but in this culture, we’ve decided that crying and screaming are weak and unseemly.  Because we don’t learn to handle and direct even our most basic negative emotions, we never test out and learn about  the incredible value that comes from doing it.  Nor do we learn about the organic pathways of release that exist beyond crying and screaming. 

For example, fear is meant to be released just as anger and sadness are, and its primary pathway of release is called emotional yawning.  This is a repetitive type of yawning your emotional system will naturally kick into if you reach the second phase of the core healing process.  It’s a type of yawning that has nothing to do with being tired.  Most in this culture don’t know fear needs to be released, let alone that your system will want to yawn it out, because we’re so committed to suppressing, ignoring, and covering over this emotion.

Because of our general reluctance to accept the organic value of emotional release, learning how to practice it demands a sea change in how we engage with our emotions.  As we learn to practice it, we need to test out the process so we can figure out if it really does have functional value.  For this to happen, you need to understand what you’re trying to accomplish with it so you can see for yourself if release work actually creates tangible benefits.

You start Phase I of the healing process by learning how to engage with anger and sadness release work.  We’ve been crying and screaming since we left the womb, but that doesn’t mean learning how to do Phase I emotional release work is easy.  Crying is vulnerable and can’t be forced.  It’s common for people to feel lost in terms of how to work their way into it unless it’s already something they’re able to do.  And anger is seen as a dangerous and toxic emotion that should be suppressed and ignored at all costs by many.  If you want to get the chance to be healthy, you don’t get to decide that pee is OK to evacuate but poop isn’t.  It all needs to go.  You need to do it in a private, healthy, and constructive way that fits your needs, but you don’t get to decide what the core healing process needs from you if you want it to have a chance to succeed.

Every negative emotion has it’s own unique pathways of release, and each needs to be supported with different techniques.  For example, you can use an ax and a dead log, or a punching bag, to vent out your anger in a healthy way.  But sadness release work needs different types of techniques that are more passive and quiet.  The goal is to get up and running with the practice, and to build up the length of time you’re doing release work in the same way you’d start doing longer and longer workouts for your physical body.  As you build up your emotional endurance, you’ll find your backlog waiting, ready to use your emotional workouts to evacuate. 

A critical part of any emotional release work is your intent.  If you want to stew in your negative emotions, or dump them out on others, release work will only lead to the perpetuation of more negative emotion.  Your intent needs to orient towards first learning how to let go of the negative in ways that works for the larger world you’re a part of so you can do your part to heal at a core level.  As you progress, this intent will shift and broaden to include the release of the negative so you can work your way back to the positive that you’re now experiencing. 

The training phase (Phase I of the core healing process) begins with core anger and sadness because these two negative emotions are the most basic in terms of how they flow.  Anger is a purely explosive emotion, while sadness is purely implosive.  Because these emotions only pull us in one direction, it’s much easier to learn how to work with them. 

Fear is a more complicated emotion to handle because it pulls us in two directions simultaneously—it drives us to spin into a frenetic, activated state while also driving us to collapse into an avoidant stance that orients towards hiding and immobility.  By learning how to handle anger and sadness first, it paves the way to then learn how to handle the challenges that come with fear, anxiety and terror skillfully.  By learning how to handle fear, this then sets you up to be able to handle the challenges of the Phase III emotions: worthlessness, shame, feelings of defeat, isolation, and powerlessness.

Core level emotional release work is both demanding and empowering.  It takes work and skill that you need to build into, as is true with any hands-on skillset.  The more you learn, the more skillful you’ll become, the more you will heal, and the more emotional strength you’ll feel building within you.  The more your emotional skill and strength builds, the more you’ll realize how much impact you can have on your emotionally based struggles.