Guest Post By Claire Garner NBC-HWC, Intuitive Emotional Healing Guide
You'll find Claire teaching alongside Jess in workshops, multi-day programs, and in their online community Self Healing Immersion.
As adults, so many of us have a really hard time with crying. Maybe we don’t identify as criers. Maybe we do cry but when we do, we feel like we’re drowning or coming out of our skin. Maybe we feel ashamed of our tears and do our best never to feel deeply in front of others, and even when we do cry alone in the safety of privacy we still feel weak or less than because we’re so upset. Maybe we feel comfortable with crying and cry often, but still view crying as something we have to get through, not the valuable, connected, healing experience it really is.
Why is this?
In order to unpack this, let’s go back in time real quick to when you arrived on the planet. You came in as a baby, a blank slate, a deeply feeling being. We know this because you cried right after you were born, and if you didn’t the doctors were worried about you!
Crying is a sign of health in brand new humans!
As that deeply feeling New Human, you arrived to a set of parents, a family, a culture, a society, a friend group, etc that showed you how to be a person… Over the course of your childhood (especially those first seven years) you watched the people around you to see how they Peopled. You watched the choices they made and the outcomes of those choices, you saw what earned people love and what brought people judgment. But maybe more so than anything else you saw how people around you expressed emotion and then how they were treated based on that emotional expression. From watching these interactions time and time again you learned which emotions were okay to feel in your social circles, and which ones weren’t, as well as how much of each emotion it was okay to feel in different circumstances. So naturally you watched people well up in front of others, and you saw how they handled that, as well as how the people around them reacted to their tears. And you experienced this yourself. So over time you developed your own set of beliefs around crying and your own ways of coping with the deep feelings that make humans want to cry. Maybe now you think it’s totally acceptable for someone to cry at a funeral, but not at the end of a completely overwhelming day. Maybe it’s okay for women to cry but if men cry they are weak. Maybe it’s okay for someone to cry if they’re feeling worried about a loved one who is in surgery, but if someone is crying because they feel hurt by something someone else said, they’re being dramatic.
These judgments are normal, we all have them. But at the end of the day, if we want to heal, we need to acknowledge that they are just programs that we learned all the way back in childhood. These programs aren’t actually that helpful, and in fact they’re often dehumanizing, and keep us from being able to really hold space for one another and ourselves when we’re feeling deeply. They separate us.
So if we want to heal our hearts, and our relationships, both with ourselves and others, we need to shift into a new lens. Luckily, Jess and I are here to help with just that.
If you’ve been following Jess and I for a while you know that we talk alot about energy… our organization is, afterall, called Centers for Energetic Healing. You know Jess invites you to clear out and connect with your energy centers daily. She brings in the work of Eileen Day McKusick and the human biofield, which is the magnetic field of energy around our bodies. And from Eileen’s work we know that the energy stored in the biofield around our bodies is emotional energy.
Friends, your emotions are energy. They are energies that create sensations in the body. That’s it. They say nothing about us that we are feeling them.
And when these emotional sensations get really strong, our body has a built in mechanism to clear them quickly, and can you guess what that is? That’s right, it’s crying. You could even think of crying as an automatic bodily function like sneezing or throwing up. It’s not something you really even have control over, it’s just there to release large amounts of emotional energy and help you feel better once again. The thing is, when we suppress our tears, when we stifle those deep emotions, they don’t go anywhere. They actually get stored in our biofield, and wait to be triggered at a later date in hopes of getting released. So in this way, crying keeps us really energetically healthy, and can even, over time, clear the backlog of unfelt feeling we’re stored in our field.
Liberating right?! Crying is a healthy bodily function in normal Humans. This means there’s nothing wrong with you when you cry! In fact it means you’re functioning optimally! Hallelujah, you’re not defective, weak, and less than after all!
Want to know even more benefits of crying? The biggest one is it moves energy REALLY quickly, which means it’s a fast track to finally letting go of trapped emotion. How do we know it moves huge amounts of energy? Well, for one, when you have a good hard cry, and you make some noise (noise is vibration, vibration is energy, so the more noise you make the more energy you move), you may find that you start to sweat! And what did we learn in high school chem class? When energy is liberated, heat is given off! You move so much energy when you have a big, loud, cathartic cry. AND, you reset your nervous system. According to Nicole LePera, The Holistic Psychologist, we release oxytocin (the feel good chemical) and endorphins when we cry. These act to reset our nervous system, bringing feelings of relief, peace, and even the desire to take a nap! So not only does crying actually serve to release old unfelt feelings and begin to dissolve those old traumas we are ready to let go of, but it has huge benefits for our body as well.
But there’s an even greater benefit we get when we allow ourselves to really cry… we build more trust in our system that we are actually okay to be ourselves. When we cry well we are creating a new way of being with ourselves that is based in making room for our own humanity. Crying is such a human thing to do, so when you allow for yourself to cry, you give yourself permission to be fully human. Learning to catch your judgments around crying, offering yourself compassion when you do cry, and making space for your own humanity all work together to create a new relationship with you, one based in truly unconditional love and honoring. We all want love and acceptance from others, but underestimate the power of offering these things to ourselves.
So, if you want to finally let go of those old traumas, or help your nervous system rebalance, or have more comfort with your own feelings and the feelings of others, it’s time to lean into the gift of crying and watch your world transform.
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