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Hi, I’m Erin, an spiritual adventurer, tech marketer, and wife and mom of 2. I’m here to share the insights I learn, the joy I find, and hope to help others find a way to seek more magic in every day.
Erin McMahon: [00:00:02] Hello and welcome to Seek the Magic. Today I want to talk about something that has changed over the past year for me, and that is really getting into my emotions and feeling them in my body as opposed to just my head. And really, you know, separating what's going on in my mind from what is going on in the rest of me and kind of just navigating that and feeling more in my body than just in my mind. I think prior to connecting with a lot of spiritual works and first the work of Bella Lively, who taught me about my inner voice and then, you know, other work with Eckhart Tolle and many others, I mainly thought about just my mind as a mind doing its thing. And then, of course, after reading Michael Singer's book about, you know, looking at what is happening in the mind and then observing what is happening in the mind, I realized that, you know, there is sort of a duality in terms of what's happening in our head at all times. And so that sort of got me into speaking and thinking about the inner voice and versus what is, you know, running in my mind and the thoughts that I used to kind of let take over my emotions and everything like that.
Erin McMahon: [00:01:22] When I started learning about inner voice and how to connect with your inner voice, there's a technique associated with that where you quiet your mind and you breathe out as you try to listen to your voice, as you ask a question to your inner voice, then you breathe out. So your kind of constant chatter of thoughts quiets, and then you can hear your inner voice more. Part of Bella Lively's technique in doing that is if you can't hear your inner voice, it may be because you have an emotion blocked somewhere, and when she references that, she says, it's important to feel where that might exist in your body and to feel through it. A lot of the times it is in people's chest or in their shoulders or wherever, but just the act of doing a body scan and taking yourself out of your head and into your body was totally new to me. And this is you know, I've always been very active, like in terms of exercise, working out, so I felt like I had been connected to my body. But in terms of being mindful with my body and sort of still and understand what is happening and where different emotions were living and/or stored in my body, that was a completely new concept to me. And it was revelatory and amazing because I noticed, you know, yes, I did have blocks because I never really tried to clear them before. So of course, once I started sort of scanning my body and understanding where I felt, you know, different stress or tightness, I could, you know, identify emotions that were potentially living in one place or another.
Erin McMahon: [00:03:14] Typically it's not a completely transparent thing. I think when I first heard about this concept, it sounded foreign and it took me a while to grasp and understand it. But the idea is to feel where there's a tightness or a heaviness or something like that in your body and try to breathe through it. And typically, if you're asking yourself a question and then you are not hearing a clear answer from your inner voice, then that block is somehow associated with keeping you from connecting to your inner voice. And so the block is usually associated with an emotion that is standing between those two things. For example, like if I say I'm, you know, inner voice why, you know - well, it's hard to give examples - inner voice why do I have trouble speaking in front of an audience? And this is, you know, a question that I had and I've confronted many times in my life and now I've processed through it, but I think the answer is still blocked with the fear of judgment. And it's something that I've worked through and hopefully I'm making progress on because I'm, you know, speaking over the internet waves to, you know, whoever decides to listen. But, you know, that's something that was, you know, a tightness in my chest and a block.
Erin McMahon: [00:04:48] And when I felt that block, sometimes what happens is you start to breathe through it and you feel memory associated with it. And sometimes these memories are associated with, you know, something you felt when you were little, or there could be a trail of memories that, you know, come up as this block and/or emotion that you've felt and suppressed, as it comes up, these emotions and these feelings are stored and usually there are multiple memories associated with them. But then the core memories are when you were little. The practice is to feel the emotion, identify it, separate the story from it, and then breathe through it. And it really helps if somebody else is holding space for you and somewhat witnessing you in this, because then you can process it, express and feel heard if someone is holding a safe space for you.
Erin McMahon: [00:05:53] Express the story to a certain extent, but the point is to separate the story from the emotion, and instead of suppressing the feeling, which is what we tend to do when we're little or as we are going through life to just, you know, survive and to get through things, instead of suppressing the emotion, to feel it, feel it fully. And it really doesn't take that long. And it seems scary at first, especially when you think about the story or the event that is associated with that scary thing. Your head, your mind's, you know, protective reaction is, you know, okay, don't go there, don't think about it, do something else. And instead the idea is to breathe through it, feel through it, you know, believe it takes 90s to truly process through an emotion. And if it takes longer, then that means you are kind of looping your story in with it. But to fully process the emotion and then move on and see if you can, you know, truly connect with your inner voice.
Erin McMahon: [00:07:05] This also helps with not being as triggered when that related event comes up again. So for example, you know, speaking in front of an audience, you know, I won't necessarily resolve, you know, my entire fear after just breathing through the emotion once, but hopefully it will have subsided that feeling and the feeling won't inhibit me from doing what I need to do or won't prohibit me from, like reaching my goals or reaching other, you know, expressing my true desires, because that is really the goal of life is to move forward and fulfill your purpose and, you know, connect with others and these trapped emotions, really, they can stop us from doing what we want to do. And they can hurt us and in our emotions that we feel, getting stuck in our emotions, and they can hurt our relationships with other people too.
Erin McMahon: [00:08:10] The magic. The magic for me today is celebrating going into my body and not just living in my mind and thinking that I'm just this one thinking entity that lives in my brain. But really, I'm a whole being and my expressions and my feelings and my sentiment, it all is connected between my head and my inner voice and my body. And by listening to my body and spending time and scanning my body and understand what I'm feeling and to feel through it, it's so much better than to suppress and move on, which is what I've done for, you know, the majority of my life. So either suppress or try to, like, run it out, which, you know, sometimes that works and going on a run is great, and, you know, you feel like you get some aggression out, but it's not necessarily like processing the triggering event of what happened. And so I think the key thing is to first of all, you know, be brave and try this and go on the journey of scan your body, see what feels potentially tight or triggering. And if it's just like a tight spot and, you know, whatever you can, if it's a tight spot, then you can just breathe through it. That's an important part, too. It's not always going to be an emotion or something like that, but when you are going through life and do feel an emotion and you feel it in a part of your body, there's the opportunity to pause... breathe... take, you know, at least, a few minutes to breathe through it, try to separate an emotion from a story that is potentially triggering to you, and then, you know, connect with and try to get further in what you want to do or to get through the, you know, the trigger event.
Erin McMahon: [00:10:21] So I think this has been really revelatory for me. And I've used it not only in speaking with my inner voice, that's how I started, but now, as you know, I am processing things in real time instead of getting mad and letting, you know, riding the emotional, just getting stuck in the emotional story cycle and blaming other people, and blaming other people and getting frustrated and upset, I take a space back. I do, I try to do some sort of body scan, breathe through the emotion. If I have time, then I meditate for a few minutes and then hopefully at that point I've recalibrated and I'm in a better space to judge the situation and/or, you know, the event person that I'm dealing with. So that's been really helpful. And it's honestly been magical for me because it's like I, you know, I thought I was just one person, one thing, one mind operating in this unitary way. And it's not, there's, you know, such a separation between what you're thinking, how your body reacts to what you're thinking, and then what you do with that reaction and how that reaction can live within you and kind of stay there and really impact what you want to do, how you're feeling that day, how you interact with other people, it can change your whole vibration and how something affects you.
Erin McMahon: [00:12:11] It's impacted my personal relationships. It's impacted how I deal with work. It's impacted a whole myriad of things. So I share that in hopes that you can take the opportunity to, if you didn't know or realize this already, or if you did, then maybe a good reminder to take a moment, breathe through an emotion. Don't be scared to breathe through and process the emotion. I think that's the other key thing, because suppressing emotions is what many of us are, have been, have been taught to do, and I think that can be harmful for our short-term dealing with a situation and long-term health in our mind and body. So take a situation, feel the emotion, breathe through where you feel it in your body. If you can, take time to meditate and then, you know, move forward with what you want to do. If you're more interested in speaking with your inner voice, I have more information about that. You can ping me or go to my website and I'm happy to help with that. But for now, I hope you can seek the magic in your day to day. Thank you. Take care. Bye.