A “Good Vibes Only” Toxic Reality
There is a growing trend of people talking about high vibratory emotions and low vibratory emotions. What does this vibration rate mean? According to quantum physics, every thought and emotion has a vibratory rate and frequency. Healthy thoughts and emotions create an expansion of energy within your cells. Unhealthy thoughts and emotions cause the body’s cells to contract which results in a person feeling weighed down and fatigued. Perhaps this is why we may feel energized when we’re happy and tired when we’re sad.
Should we aim to always vibrate high?
For the most part, you want your cells to remain in a state of expansion because your body’s cells will be able to repair, your cognitive ability will increase, and your emotional wellbeing will flourish. There is a difference, however, between lying to yourself that you’re happy when you’re actually feeling sad. There is a difference between pretending to be proud of someone’s achievements when inside you’re actually feeling jealous. Your body is not fooled by your outward expression. Your body is linked to your actual thoughts, feelings, actions, and experiences; it knows all! Lying to yourself that you’re “okay” when you’re actually hurting makes your body feel ignored and neglected.
In situations like these, it’s best to allow yourself the freedom to be human. Validate your lower emotions to see where they’re coming from. Don’t be scared of them! Use those emotions as a compass to find aspects of yourself that need love and healing. The quick tip to remember here is that outwardly expressing positive emotions when you’re feeling down on the inside could result in suppression and denial of your emotions. Suppression of emotions means that the body will continue to feel that way, but it will bury its reasons for feeling that way deep within your subconscious. Why does it do that? Because you told those emotions that they were bad and unwanted, so they went into hiding within your subconscious mind.
But aren’t lower vibratory emotions bad for you?
Emotions themselves can never be “bad.” While lower emotions can take a negative toll on your mental, emotional, and spiritual health over time when they’re not resolved, the emotion itself is not capable of being bad. When people view certain emotions as “unwanted” because they dislike how the emotion feels, they tend to engage in avoidance behaviors. The body, needing to be heard, continues to produce the “unwanted” emotion because it is trying to send signals that keep getting ignored. For example, someone may experience trauma as a child, block the emotions and memories of that trauma out of their mind, and then experience chronic depression in adulthood. Their body is screaming to be heard and helped until the signals/emotions eventually become chronic.
This is not to say that some emotions are not difficult to process. Heavy emotions such as jealousy and anger bring with them additional emotions of shame and guilt for feeling that way. We’re told that anger and jealousy are “bad” emotions, so we naturally tend to feel ashamed that we felt those emotions to begin with. This added layer of shame and guilt is often what influences us to burry the experience into our subconscious mind instead of confronting it.
When you experience shame and guilt, you may want to deny that the emotions of jealousy or anger even happened; the experience becomes too overwhelming for the ego to process. The ego wants to be likable, so — if you can’t process your anger and jealousy in a healthy way — the ego will fight to suppress the experience altogether.
For this reason, it is always healthy to acknowledge the emotion. When you acknowledge the emotion, do so with the understanding that it is perfectly normal and healthy to experience a wide range of emotions. Simply observe the emotion without judging the emotion. Next, investigate what could be triggering this emotion. Understand that emotions are just the body’s way of sending feedback to the mind.
Are you telling me to just let myself feel awful anytime I experience a trigger?
Absolutely not! Recognize the emotion. Don’t judge it. Then, polarize it! Jealousy can be understood as wanting something that you don’t already have. If you’re jealous of someone’s fitness level, perhaps you can polarize that jealousy by saying, “This person’s fitness is motivating and inspiring me to take action on making adjustments to my fitness routine.” When you experience anger, identify the anger, and then ask yourself when was the first time you felt this type of anger? Remember that the answer may be nesting in your subconscious mind, so you may have to take your time to investigate when you felt this way for the first time. Make your anger response about you and not about the person who triggered your anger response.
Because lower emotions are messages from the body, they shouldn’t be ignored. Anger, for example, could be your body’s way of letting you know that someone is crossing a boundary that needs to be enforced. Anger could be your body’s way of reminding you that there is an emotional wound that needs healing. Anger could be your body’s way of expressing that it is overwhelmed and needs some rest. Anger is not the enemy; it is the messenger.
Moral of the story?
Aiming for “good vibes only” sets yourself and others up to be superficial with a lot of unhealed emotional experiences. While, in the end you can aim for all of your experiences to be viewed and processed in a positive way, that sometimes means confronting and being at peace with lower emotions when your body is trying to communicate with you. Listen closely and welcome lower and higher vibrations equally.
Lower vibrations are an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and what our mind, body, and spirit need in order to heal. Higher vibrations can only be experienced to the fullest once those lower emotions are welcomed and resolved. If you’re someone who is looking to transmute your experiences or polarize your lower emotions, a professional life coach may be able to assist your journey. Reach out to District Coaching for more information about polarization and healing the self.
About the Author: Tracey Vazquez has a master’s in psychotherapy and trauma counseling along with undergraduate training in psychology and anthropology and post-graduate training in neuroscience, spirituality, and epigenetics. Tracey is a leading life coach in the Washington DC area and owner of District Coaching.
