Happy Soul Podcast
Episode #5: Feelings Buried Alive Never Die
How to deal with strong emotions and get rid of stuck feelings in the body
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Welcome to the Happy Soul podcast. My name is Corina Holzapfel. I’m a naturopath and an intuitive
purpose coach for women desiring to live an authentic life – a life filled with joy, happiness, purpose
and meaning.
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I believe that we’re all so much more powerful than we can imagine, but to live as our own authentic
self and to use our innate power, we need awareness. I will help you understand who you truly are,
why you think and feel and behave the way you do, and how to live your best life. We talk about
naturopathy, positive psychology, human design, spirituality, parenting, relationships, the wisdom of
animals and so much more. I can’t wait to share these inspirational talks and conversations with you.
Welcome to the show.
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Hello, beautiful soul. I’m so glad that you’re here today. In today’s episode, I will talk about the
importance of recognizing and honoring your true feelings. I will show you what varied feelings can do
to your body, both on a physical and a soul level and how to uncover and let go of these stuck
feelings. In the last few weeks, I have witnessed so many emotional releases happening in people
that I got really, really inspired to create this episode today and talk a little bit about how these
emotions get actually stuck in your body in the first place.
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And also to show you some effective ways that I’ve used and that I also suggest to my clients to
become more fluent, to right away release the emotions that are manifesting through certain things
happening in your life and how to start working on letting go of the old stuff that you’ve been carrying
around in your emotional body for so long; that have almost become a part of you and that need
releasing so that you can live a more healthy and happy life.
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When we talk about emotions, we usually mean the strong sensations that we feel in our bodies when
we respond to certain situations and things happening in our lives. On the other hand, feelings are
more the habits and patterns that we’ve come to repeatedly experience in our everyday lives and that
are the result of our way of dealing with certain emotions. And these emotions that cause these
strong feeling patterns may have probably happened in your early childhood; when you encountered
things that you were not able to deal with in a healthy and in a constructive way.
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Or they can also have happened later in life and were so scary, so painful and overwhelming that you
had to find a way to get rid of them fast by suppressing and refusing to accept them. Here’s an
example from my own clinic. A client of mine was the victim of abuse during her childhood She hadn’t
been able to talk to anyone about it. So, this poor little girl buried the fear and the helplessness and
the shame that came with the experience deep into her emotional body.
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For decades, she felt very sick, but she couldn’t put her finger on where the issue came from, nor
could any health care practitioner. It took her a long time to be willing and able to access the hidden
area within herself. It was simply too painful for her to let the feelings come to the surface. That’s why
her body had decided to store these feelings deep down in the subconscious mind and,bodywork for
protection, make it unavailable to the conscious mind.
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It was only through intensive bodywork that she got in contact with the deep-seated pain and the
shame and the feelings of helplessness and desperation. And then she was finally able to allow these
feelings to come to the surface and finally let go of them. I think we all carry some deep wounds in
our emotional bodies, and they don’t have to necessarily originate from abuse; that can also be other
trauma lingering, such as from loss or heartbreak or environmental catastrophes that your sensitive
soul hasn’t been able to deal with in a way that allows neutralizing.
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Instead, these strong and overwhelming emotions became stored in the subconscious mind and
labeled as too dangerous to deal with. And although we cannot change how we dealt with trauma as
children, now as adults, we can learn better ways to accumulate more stuck feelings by learning how
to allow emotions to pass through our bodies, to really feel them and honor them, but then use certain
techniques and tools to let them go.
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Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a Researcher and Professor of Psychology at the University of North
Carolina, she writes in her book ‘Positivity’, that positive emotions broaden, while negative emotions
narrow. The problem for us is, however, that we are oftentimes not even aware of how we feel or let’s
say we are not ready to feel the emotions. Maybe you can relate. How often have you gone over an
emotion just because it felt too difficult and time and energy-consuming to face it, to deal with it, you
just suppressed it.
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Let’s be honest. If we face the uncomfortable and the painful emotions head-on, there is no escape.
They become more real. As soon as we look at them and we are forced to face the truth, how often
have you refused to accept things? And, instead, you just went on with your life in the hopes that the
problem would resolve itself; that some magical thing would happen that would fix things so that you
can live your life like you used to.
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But suppressing never works. These buried feelings will eventually come to the surface. They will
haunt you in one form or another, and they will nag at you until you finally accept them. They can
manifest as health challenges, as bad luck repeating itself or as relationships that simply won’t work
out; or as financial struggles that you don’t seem to overcome and so on. For me, it was only when I
experienced, my health crisis, that I was finally ready to look at my buried feelings and accept that I
needed to change things in my life.
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One of the several wake up moments that I had was about the topic of give and take; about being
always there for others, about giving and not allowing myself to receive anything back. What I learned
in my childhood actually, was to never ask for help without giving something in return. Because if I
didn’t give back, I was in debt. That’s why I always felt super guilty if somebody had done me a favour.
Consequently, I would wear myself out by helping others without asking anything in return, just to
have enough credit in case that I needed something back.
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And the teachings about selfless service that I received from my Buddhism training, they added even
more fuel to it. So over the years, the credit I produced by helping and supporting wherever I could, it
piled up in a big way, and I never asked for support myself because I was not ready to receive. I was
too afraid that I would not be able to give back in an appropriate manner. And although I was familiar
with the concept of give and take and that the universe will always pay you and others back in a way
that balances everything out, that we are all one, and that there is no debt or credit to be calculated.
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I was not able to live it. Then finally, after serving a group of over two thousand five hundred
mommy’s daily for over a year in my homoeopathy mommy’s online group and not allowing myself to
receive more than maybe a little fraction in return, I began to slowly crash. My health started to
decline. My body and soul were ready for me to finally learn the lesson. I had suppressed it all for a
long time and the buried feelings had to be faced and released.
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So let’s look at how we can deal with the everyday emotions first; how we can properly digest them
without them getting stuck in the body. And then after, we look at ways to deal with the deeper
trauma that’s been stored energetically for a long time. Coming back to Barbara Fredrickson’s work,
she suggests that we have to create awareness for our everyday emotions in order to deal with them
in a healthy way. First of all, and that’s something you can start right here and right now, is to become
aware of how you’re feeling in this moment.
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What is the feeling like? Is it happiness? Is it excitement? Are you feeling overwhelmed? Are you
feeling fearful or lonely or maybe peaceful? See, all of us need to work on our vocabulary, especially
when it comes to good emotions.
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Researchers in the field of positive psychology have found out that we tend to have a far bigger
vocabulary when it comes to negative feelings, words than compared to positive emotion, words.
How come? Why are we not able to express our positive feelings properly? They trace it back to a
phenomenon that they call negativity bias. We are simply used to seeing the negative more often or
bigger than the positive. But that’s a topic for another podcast episode.
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Back to naming the emotion that you feel. Do you have your word for it? Do you have the word for how
you’re feeling in this moment? Great. Now, see if you can notice where exactly you feel this emotion in
your body. Most people feel joy in their heart and fear in their belly. But for you, it could be other body
parts as well. Where are you feeling it right now? So, really checking in with yourself several times a
day to notice how you’re feeling and where you can feel it in your body is the first step in being able to
digest your emotions properly.
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What you cannot label and locate, you cannot release. And if this sounds like a lot of work for you and
you’re concerned that you won’t be able to make this a habit, I created a little PDF workbook for you,
which you can download and that will help you name your emotions and locate them in the body as a
starting point. It also includes some writing prompts for you to get clear about your habits when it
comes to dealing with emotions. You can find the link in the show notes for this episode.
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And as soon as you notice the feeling, you named it and you located it, you can decide what you’re
going to do with it. A simple way to let it go is to visualize it moving out of your body, straight up into
the sky so that the universe, God, the source, whatever you name the powerful force that we’re all part
of, so that it can deal with it for your highest good. So that is a powerful method to get more in the
flow of life and not get stuck with emotional burdens, the other way of getting rid of stuck feelings
and what I’m talking about now are the feelings that have been stored in your emotional body for
years or even decades.
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This can be done through several different ways. One fantastic way that is gentle and effective is
through bodywork. I have experienced it many times that my clients release stuck and deep-seated
emotions during a Craniosacral Therapy sessions or just recently Raynor Massage sessions.
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And most of the time, they are not seeing me to get rid of trauma, but rather they feel tense. They
have some aches and pains in their bodies.
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And with the physical release, the emotional release happens naturally. Other ways to get rid of
trauma, may be a regular yoga practice where feelings tend to surface during specific poses.
However, if this happens during yoga, unlike in the bodywork session or any other naturopathic or
therapeutic appointment, there won’t be an experienced practitioner there to help you navigate and
properly release the feelings, which most of the time is needed. What I’ve also come to realize from
the human design readings that I’ve done with people is that through analyzing and discovering their
unique Human Design, so much awareness is created in terms of what their true self is and where
they have been conditioned either by their parents or their community, their friends or other family
members, or their schools and workplaces or society at large; that these very varied feelings tend to
bubble to the surface over time after reading, especially if people listen to the recording of their
Human Design reading session and keep working on living their design.
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They work on changing one tiny habit at a time, and this is a very gentle way for people to deal with
their suppressed feelings and the self limiting habits and beliefs that they’ve created over time.
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All ready, so that’s it from me for today, my loves, I hope this episode has inspired you to take better
care of yourself; to be a little more courageous when it comes to allow yourself to feel the emotions
that are in front of you without suppressing them through things like alcohol or food or any other habit
that covers up your true essence instead of healing yourself, your body, your mind and your soul. One
tiny step at a time. If you’re local to the Interior of British Columbia, I invite you to book a bodywork
session with me.
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You can find all of the information on my website, and as always, I put the link in the show notes of
this episode. No matter if you like, deeper work in the form of deep tissue massages, like in Raynor
Massage or the more gentle way of bodywork like Craniosacral Therapy, emotional releases can
happen during both modalities.
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And if you’re a woman listening to this from the other side of the world and you’ve become curious to
learn about your unique Human Design, I invite you to visit my website also and book a reading with
me. You’ll be surprised. You may be relieved, full of excitement and empowered by learning to know
yourself in a new way and recognizing in yourself what you’ve known about yourself all along but
haven’t been ready to allow yourself to be. In any case, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and I’m
sending you all my love until next time.
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Take good care of yourself.
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Hey, beautiful soul. Thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope today’s show had great insights, soul
nuggets and wisdom for you. I would love to stay connected with you. I invite you to head on over to
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the new content and episodes go live. And while you’re there, please leave me a five star rating and a
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reviews the show has, the more women will actually find it.
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And I’m also happy to receive your feedback and showcase it in future episodes. So that’s it from me,
my loves. Feel free to connect with me on social media also, if you like. You can find me on Instagram
under @CorinaHolzapfel and on Facebook as @CoachCorinaHolzapfel. Let’s have some soul
conversations there about today’s show.
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And if you feel that your friends will benefit from listening to today’s show as well, feel free to share it
on your social media. I love sharing inspirational and uplifting content with my friends, and I believe
you do as well. Thanks again for tuning in and I look forward to staying connected to you.
