It is vitally important that you understand at this point in the progress of humanity that emotional freedom does not mean freedom from your emotions; it means freedom to experience your emotions – to feel them, explore them, understand them, and release them in ways that are most closely in alignment with your life’s purpose.

There are many general truths about emotions that apply to all people, but before we describe some of them it is necessary that we reinforce the sense that emotional freedom only occurs when you embrace your emotional experience as an individual rather than trying to apply your emotional experience to the lives of others or trying to define your own emotional experience based on the rules and expectations of others.

Anytime you judge or direct your emotional experience based on the needs or definitions of others, you will limit your emotional freedom. Now, of course, you will often benefit from learning from one another, and there is much to be gained by comparing and discussing your emotional experiences with others. But remember to continually return your attention to what you feel and to trust what you feel and sense is the best, most graceful way you can be with your emotions. That being said, the things that are generally true for all people in regard to emotional experience include the following. All people experience emotion. It is an undeniable fact. Even those of you who think you do not experience emotions – your experience with emotions is simply different from others’. Even the most enlightened, graceful, expansive human beings experience an ongoing flow of emotional energy. It is part of what makes you human.

It cannot be and should not be removed from your human experience, for it is what makes you human (in addition to a few other qualities, like having a physical body). That is the first a foremost generalization. The second is that emotions hold a great deal of wisdom and energetic potential for you. Emotions occur in response to every event that occurs in your life. There is emotional energy, like a current of electricity, running through your system at all times. For most of you, when you are cruising along in alignment with you truest sense of self, moment by moment you may not notice any particular emotion arise. Your emotions run like a low-voltage current through your system until an event arises or energy shifts, that emotional current spikes. It can spike in a single direction giving you a sense of a single emotion like delight or sorrow. Or it can spike in several directions at once, such as when one feels relief and anger at the same time. When that emotional current spikes, it raises itself to your awareness.

Through socialization, most of you have learned ways to repress, or hide, or set aside your emotions. At a basic level, this is a very useful process because it allows you the opportunity to navigate your social lives. Young children who have not yet learned to set aside or hold back their emotions often lose track of what they are doing when their emotions overwhelm them. Emotional freedom is not the freedom to indulge every spike of emotion each time emotions arise. Instead, emotional freedom occurs when you are able to completely embrace your emotion as it occurs but to retain that sense of self by which you continue to decide and mindfully direct your behavior, your decision-making, and your communication. In this way, your emotion is not permanently repressed, but instead you have the ability to temporarily set it aside as you bring it forth in a time and place that is most useful for you.

Those of you who are parents of young children have learned to do this beautifully. You may feel frustration with a child but choose to notice your emotion but to not demonstrate or share that frustration in the moment it is occurring, recognizing that to do so will confuse and possibly harm your child’s own emotional experience. That same lesson applies to interactions between adults in all kinds of circumstances. It is vitally important that you be aware of your emotions, and that you give them time and space in your life to be processed, but that you continually keep your lager self – that more graceful, centered, and mature part of you firmly at the helm – deciding constantly what to share and what to hold for a later time to be processed in an appropriate environment. You do this by continually noticing and embracing your emotions and simultaneously noticing and assessing your environment, your goals and objectives, and your intuition. There is no perfect way to do this.

Emotional freedom only occurs through the process of a dance. It is never perfect and it is never the same from one repetition to another. This is true for your emotions. One day you may feel anger and determine that you must step away from the situation in order to stay in integrity with your highest good. Another day you may be in a similar situation and feel anger again, but find that you are able to hold the anger separate from your response to the situation. You notice the anger, hold it in your consciousness, and make choices about your behavior based not on the reaction of anger, but on a more refined response based on what your larger sense of self determines is most appropriate given the restrictions and requirements of your situation. When you do this, it is necessary to discharge the anger at a later time and in a more appropriate space. Emotional freedom will never be a static, permanent state.

It occurs as an ongoing dance requiring your attention, requiring tenderness for yourself and for others, requiring that you remain awake and alive and open to making choices based on your genuine experience of your emotions. This is flexibility and responsiveness. It is your natural state to be flexible in this way – always willing to embrace your emotions as they arise and to decide what will be in closest alignment with your highest good and in respect and love for the situation surrounding you. One way you might think about navigating this dance is to consider the difference between a reaction and a response. As you are navigating your own personal dance of emotional freedom, consider how when an emotion arises it is quickly followed by a reaction. Anger can lead to a harsh word, either in your mind or spoken aloud; sorrow can lead to a sense of powerlessness and an urge to blame others for your situation. The instant that an emotion arises, a reaction becomes available.

Some people live in perpetual cycle of reaction, continually being tossed and turned by the events that lead your emotions to tumble into reactions. The reason that some people define emotional freedom as freedom from emotions is that it can be difficult to differentiate between your emotions and the reactions that arise from them. Emotional freedom occurs when you freely feel your emotions, but refuse to tumble into reactionary thoughts and behavior. Emotional freedom occurs when you choose to develop an intentional response based on your emotions.

A response is what occurs when you feel your emotion, the urge to react arises, and rather than indulging that urge to react you center yourself in that higher part of you that is able to see the bigger picture and maintain a sense of integrity with yourself. That higher part of you – that centered mind – will decide your response. You will collect further information by noticing and embracing the emotion and reaction that arises within you, looking for clues in your surroundings, listening to the perspective of others and considering the position of others using empathy. Through this collecting of information, which can take a few seconds or even a few days, you develop a response. You decide what actions and words you will use to best honor your emotions while staying on course for who you want to be and moving through your life purpose with as much integrity as possible given your resources. There is much more guidance you will receive about how to achieve emotional freedom.

The information most important to gain from the Akashic Records regarding emotional freedom at this time is that emotional freedom only occurs when you embrace your emotions – when you allow yourself the freedom to experience your emotions in order to discover the wisdom and power that lies within you! (November 2010)

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