Using Guided Imagery and Guided Meditation For Emotional Release

Everyone has an inner repository of stored feelings. When we have any kind of experience that upsets us, our responses -- fear, anger, sadness and all the rest -- are typically not processed within us at the time, and we carry the unprocessed emotion until such time as we have a safe opportunity to release. That opportunity might not come for days, months, years, or even lifetimes. Guided meditation or guided imagery can help create the opportunity to clear stored emotion.

Dealing with stored feelings sounds like about as much fun as cleaning a septic system, or going to the dentist. But unfortunately, avoiding any of these things for too long tends to have a downside. If we’re sitting on a pile of anger, eventually it starts to come out in the form of doing things we regret. Lots of repressed sadness eventually tends to lead to depression. And a storage of fear causes anxiety, panic attacks, and all sorts of other un-fun behaviors and tendencies.

Normally our ego does a pretty good job of keeping a lid on fear, anger and sadness, and masking it from the world so we can get along. But there comes a point when the ego can’t do it for us, or gets so big trying that it gets in our way as well. It also tends to take a lot of our energy to suppress feelings, keeping them under the surface so we don’t have to deal with them consciously. When too much energy that needs to be used for keeping us healthy and moving forward is devoted to suppressing and sublimating stored emotion, we tend to develop psychosomatic illnesses. Fun, right?

So, like going to the dentist or cleaning out the septic tank, it’s a really good idea to do some inner cleanup, and some inner maintenance, in order keep our whole system in good shape. Then we can deal with life on the basis of what’s in front of us, and not react and respond to the present based so much on the past.

Guided imagery and guided meditation can be very helpful in doing this. Normally people tend to think of it in terms of helping us relax and feel better, but there’s a lot more potential involved. If we just relax, we’ll feel a bit better temporarily, but that doesn’t get at the stuff that’s sitting deeper, causing the stress. Pretty soon we’re right back in the same state of tension. Guided meditation programs can be designed to help us tune in to how we’re feeling, and what feelings are coming up from within. And then they can help us release those feelings. The more fear, anger, and sadness we’re able to release, the less we have to carry around. And that’s a good thing.