“The revolution is emotional:” on emotions, empathy, and embodiment

Image description: a figure painted in black dances in the middle of a square image. In the left, lower and right, upper corner is a starry night sky. Dark blue and black lines wave their way from the upper right to the lower left. Silver glitter flows from the hands of the dancing person. Text on the left says: "I am full of feeling." Text on the right is a cut-off excerpt of a poem: “how can we know … if you never let … desire raising hairs … your arm to behind .. where the wound.” Image by Anja*Oliver Schneider.

I recently read a post by a person who defined empathy as a complete immersion or dissolving of self into somebody else’s emotional landscape. As someone who values empathy and compassion deeply, this interpretation of empathy didn’t resonate with me at all. In my experience, such empathy definitions and terms like empath are often used to justify a lack of boundaries, to glorify projections, and can, as a result, lead to enmeshment, loss of self, and resentment.

This doesn’t mean I want to dismiss empathy or feelings. On the contrary: I think our emotions are one of the most profound ways to connect with ourselves and each other. Some people may naturally experience low empathy, and everyone experiences empathy differently—and there is nothing wrong with that. However, I also think that many of us consciously or unconsciously keep ourselves from fully stepping into our emotional depths because it’s scary to do so in a world that tells most of us from a young age that emotions are weak and childish, that we are “too much” for expressing feelings a certain way, and that it’s safer to override our intuition. Many other factors can contribute to this distancing: trauma, hurt, and experiences of discrimination can all lead to emotional disconnect, which can lead to disembodiment.

I’m currently thinking a lot about somatic therapies and how I (individually) and we (collectively) have split ourselves from our bodies and feelings; how quick we are to respond cognitively and intellectualize our emotions. I don’t mean this in a shaming way—a lot of times, escaping into our brains is a coping mechanism to keep us safe from discomfort, hardship, or trauma. This can be an incredibly effective and important survival strategy. However, when we remain in this survival strategy for longer periods of time, we only have a cognitive—and therefore compromised—experience of our emotions or avoid them altogether. 

Although emotions are a nebulous, slippery field of research, studies suggest that emotions are produced in the brain (Šimić et al.) and are closely linked to the parts that influence our nervous systems, hormones, and memory. Leonard Mlodinow argues that the most seemingly logic-based thoughts, actions, and decisions are often influenced by emotions. This may be surprising to some, since emotions and logic are frequently portrayed as mutually exclusive binaries. Whether we like it or not, then, we are all influenced by emotions—in more ways than we can consciously grasp. Emotions are felt and stored in the body (Van der Kolk), so the two are intricately linked. By intellectualizing our feelings, then, we do not just bypass our emotional landscape but also our physical one.

One of my favorite artists and tarot readers, Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, posits: “We can’t think our way out of feelings. We can feel our way out of feelings.” This means that in order to examine, explore, release, and transmute our feelings, we first have to experience them in our bodies.

But how can we tune into and work through our emotions? One approach is to simply make space for our feelings and bodies and find different ways of processing emotions. If you’re able to do so, of course professional support can be incredibly beneficial. Some somatic methods of therapy include: EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), EFT (Emotional-Freedom-Technique/Tapping), Eye-Spotting, nervous system regulation, Somatic Therapy after Peter Levine, osteopathy, or Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR). Personally, after years of feeling stuck in behavioral therapy, EMDR helped me sustainably make progress and release, integrate, and transform some events of my past. The practice of the “compassionate witness”—having yourself or someone else witnessing your experiences, your pain, with compassion and affirmation rather than shame, invalidation, rationalization, or fixing can be incredibly healing. Internal Family Systems (IFS) and inner child work have helped me step more into this practice.

There are many other ways to experience yourself somatically that are more accessible. Putting more focus on your senses can ground us more in the present: what do you see, hear, smell, taste, feel both in your body (interoception) and in your surroundings (exteroception)? Moving our bodies, if possible, is also incredibly important: walks, runs, dances, intuitive movements, a 10-minute workout (not to lose weight or to conform to a beauty standard but just to feel better and access natural endorphins!), or moving the body in whatever ways you want to! Jump up and down! Shake out your limbs! Make funny faces! Belly dance to release stress stored in your hips! Do breath work to release grief stored in your lungs! Breath can be a form of movement, too!

You can do many of these lying or sitting down as well. If you can’t physically move, visiualizing these activities can be very powerful. Start small, step by step. To me, dancing intuitively (by myself, in my bedroom) has been cathartic as well as spiritual and is one of the only ways I can be in a flow-state. Another option is to explore emotions through art: write, draw, make pottery, pick up a new artform! Yes, even–especially—if you’re “bad” at it! Letting yourself be bad at something in itself can be healing. It’s not about perfection. You just have to do it and try to enjoy the process, even if it’s uncomfortable at times. Working through that discomfort can be a form of release and growth. (And, fun fact: for many people, in a culture that emphasizes punishment and overriding our capacities, even enjoyment, especially without perfection or mastery, can be uncomfortable!)

Emotional release initiated by physical or somatic practices can look like crying, becoming tired, feeling sad, inspired, irritated, euphoric. It can show up in a lot of different ways. I often tell my Yoga students that it’s possible they’ll feel more tired or sad after class, not necessarily because Yoga made them tired or sad but because Yoga can help release stored emotions and make us more aware of how we’re actually feeling. To me, this is a gift: to be closer to myself and my needs than I was at the beginning of the session. Then I can take care of myself accordingly: take a nap, cuddle my cat, drink lots of water, reach out to a friend.

You can also practice giving room to your emotions whenever they come up. Next time you have a big feeling, can you drop into your body instead of reaching for your phone or immediately analyzing your feelings? Can you let the emotion come up? Where in your body do you feel it? What does it feel like? Does it have a color, temperature? Can you name or describe the emotion?

Especially at first, this can feel scary. Maybe you want to set yourself a timer after 10 minutes or schedule a 5-minute break in which you’re allowed to distract yourself. Back in 2018, my very first therapist encouraged me to schedule a time of the day where I’d just lie down and let my anxiety come up. Initially, the sensations would get worse. My whole body felt stormy, tight, bursting outside of itself; weather that culminated in my chest. But then, it subsided to a more moderate level. The more I practiced this and the more I intentionally gave a container to my anxiety, the more my body registered that it will pass, and the less anxiety spikes I experienced. I supported this process by starting my days with 20 minutes of Yoga, physiotherapy, and going on daily walks, which allowed me to drop into the sensations of my body and of my surroundings in additional ways, grounding me and my nervous system in nature and flow.

This doesn’t mean we have to act on every feeling or that we can’t also consult our logical thinking. It just means that before we classify or analyze, it’s wise to first experience the messiness and overwhelm of raw feelings. If we deny those feelings, no matter how ‘irrational’ or contradictory they may seem to us, they will settle into our bodies and/or spill out in other ways: Making snarky comments to friends, deflecting accountability, falling into depressive episodes. Emotional blocks and suppressed feelings can even manifest as chronic pain if they are not released properly. Richard Rohr says that, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather transform than transmit my pain.

When we befriend our bodies and our feelings and practice sitting with the discomfort, we can build capacity and resilience to deal with messy emotions and physical sensations. We can receive information about our needs, wants, and limits. We can learn how to show up for ourselves, how to release hurt, encourage self-trust and practice self-love. And this, in turn, can help us show up for others. Because a loss of connection with ourselves is also a loss of connection with the world around us. As Dr. Hillary McBride says, “We can only connect with each other through our bodies.” And if we shut ourselves off from our bodies, it can make connecting to others more difficult.

Instead of rejecting empathy based on some interpretations of it, I want to empower definitions of empathy that center being rooted in our own bodies and making space for our feelings and therefore being able to witness somebody else in theirs, without jumping to change or fix them. This includes a mixture of boundaries, self-trust and also openness, connection, and being able to hold space for somebody else.

Dr. Hillary McBride summarizes the interconnections between the body, emotions, and empathy together: “Embodiment … brings us deeper into connection with each other. Because it is emotion that allows us to do empathy. Empathy is not perspective-taking. When we look at what empathy actually is empirically: Empathy is my body intuitively responding with adaptive-action tendency to your feeling in a way that brings us into right relationship. … Empathy is my body’s ability to go ‘Oh,’ spontaneously, ‘you’re sad? I’m gonna move towards you.’ ... Embodiment takes us into a kind of sustainable caring that brings us into right relationship with those around us.” 

What Dr. McBride alludes to in her last sentence is that not only do we need a connection to and presence with our emotions and bodies to be embodied, but we also need embodiment to step into caring for each other in a radical, collective, responsible way.

Her words affirm my belief that befriending our bodies and feelings is a trans and queer-feminist issue. Our dominant culture values mind over body, logic over emotion, and posits than emotions are regressive whereas logic is a sign of a more “developed” or “sophisticated” society. Especially marginalized genders and other oppressed identities have been associated with ‘unruly, wild’ bodies and emotions, and patriarchal systems have used this to other and hierarchize, criminalize, and oppress us.

Amidst these forces, marginalized people have had to fight not to be seen as “just bodies” or “ruled by irrational emotion.” We also experience higher rates of trauma and discrimination which can settle into our emotions and bodies, so it makes sense that many of us have the impulse to overintellectualize or distance ourselves from feelings—because it feels safer! But who does this serve in the long run? Ourselves or merely a culture that wants us out of touch with our bodies, our emotions, and each other?

How can we rewild ourselves back into our bodies?

I don’t have clear or clean answers to these questions. Just like our bodies and emotions, this space is messy, fluid, ebbing and flowing. In my opinion, that’s the whole point—to surrender to this messiness and to lose a false sense of control, even if it’s scary. An honorable mention to T-shirt slogans like “I’m just a mind, I am also a piece of meat” that exemplify a move towards subverting dominant ideas about body vs. mind in perfect comedy.

Of course, I don’t mean to completely abandon or dismiss your thoughts over your feelings. After all, our brains are part of our bodies. But we must find to make peace with both. Dale M. Kushner explains, “Emotions ignored become troubling emotions. Logic by itself is incomplete. Being sensitive to our emotions and expressing them as we respond to circumstances are key to developing self-awareness and represent a few giant steps toward a balanced life.”

We can find ways to be kind to our thoughts and narratives and, over time, if we let our bodies and emotions have a seat at the table, we might be able to find more room to change the way we think, feel, act; our patterns, our internalized narratives, maybe even some physical sensations or pain. Doing emotional and somatic work individually necessarily contributes to how we can show up for each other collectively. To move towards more interconnection, empathy, and solidarity, then, we must embrace our emotions and our bodies.

I hope we can break the cycles of internalizing and transmitting our pain. Let’s learn how to build capacity for unruly emotions, rewild ourselves into our bodies, and meet ourselves there: messy, present, alive. If we continue to run from ourselves, we will all pay the price. But if we find different ways to engage with, witness, and connect with our emotions and bodies—and therefore engage with, witness, and connect with others—then maybe, things can change.

As poet Yanyi says, “the revolution is emotional.” And I truly believe that it is.

WORKS CITED

Gottesdiener, Sarah Faith. “How to Feel Your Feelings.” Moonbeaming Newsletter, 3 July 2023.

“How to Follow the Wisdom of Your Body with Dr. Hillary McBride” We Can Do Hard Things, 9 May 2023,

https://podcasts.apple.com/gr/podcast/how-to-follow-the-wisdom-of-your-body-with-dr-hillary-mcbride/id1564530722?i=1000612267965.

Kushner, Dale M. “Feeling and Thinking: How Both Logic and Emotion Shape Who We Are.” Psychology Today, 29 April 2022,

www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/transcending-the-past/202204/feeling-and-thinking-how-both-logic-and-emotion-shape-who-we-are.

Mlodinow, Leonard. Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking. Pantheon, 2022.

Šimić, Goran et al. “Understanding Emotions: Origins and Roles of the Amygdala.” Biomolecules, vol. 11, no.6, 2021, doi:10.3390/biom11060823

Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations. SPCK Publishing, 2018.

Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.

Yanyi. The Year of Blue Water. Yale UP, 2019.