I was sitting in the most brilliant Autumn sunshine and all of a sudden a big cloud seemed to come out of nowhere across the sun and I thought about how our emotions are very like clouds. When we see clouds on a sunny day they come and they go and they’re no problem at all. Our emotions are like that – if we can simply allow them to be, they come and they go. But if they get stuck somewhere or if they start building up somewhere that’s when they become a problem to usover time, and it’s the same with clouds.

If clouds bank up they can end up being like a low blanket that hangs around (as we know in Ireland) sometimes days or weeks. It can feel very depressing. Or if they build up into a big storm with thunder and lightning and torrential rain or wind. That’s like when we’ve suppressed our feelings and we’re feeling angry or cranky all the time but don’t really know why.

When you get the real long term effects of build-up of weather like that you can end up with huge floods that do serious damage, that can destroy things that we’ve created in our world. That is like our emotional weather system inside us. If we suppress our emotions over a long period of time they can certainly lead to destructive things happening in our body.

Our emotions are like the weather. If you think about the power of lightning or torrential rain and all of these things that come through or from these weather systems and clouds, they’re incredibly strong – powerful in fact. We need to realize that our emotions are powerful too. I like to think of emotion as energy in motion e-motion.

If you look at a little child having a big emotional tantrum you can see the power there. It’s like an eruption going off. So imagine when you feel those same sort of intense feelings. Either you’re aware of them or you’re not. Sometimes we’re so good at pushing them down we don’t even allow ourselves to feel them at all. The executive function of our brain can be trained to do that, that’s also called our will. Somehow, at some time we made a decision that “I’m notgoing to feel that, because I don’t want to feel that”. It can cause you to suppress your emotions. But meanwhile huge emotional energy is building up over time, sometimes for many years. The body’s suppressed emotional energy continues to stockpile. And it takes more and more energy to keep it all inside.

Can you see how that would impact on your nervous system? Can you see how it would impact on different organs and systems in your body because your nervous system is blocked up and doesn’t allow the emotional energy to flow freely through your body. You know we really need to start allowing our feelings to rise and fall and be felt instead of always wanting only to feel the good feelings. That is, the ones that we judge are good. If we can think that all our feelings are our friends and and simply allow them, they always transform into something else. If we just allow them, but without spending all day wallowing or anything like that.

Sometimes we just need a moment to notice – Oh there it is I’m actually feeling quitesad about that. By noticing and accepting uncomfortable feelings instead of trying to fight them,making them bad, or wrong, they naturally move on and transform into something else, just like clouds always do.

And look, the sun is out again and that that big dark cloud has just moved on by.

Katie Kalin is a kinesiologist and coach with over 30 years experience working with groups and individuals. She runs a private clinic in Cork City and also does online kinesiology consultations. www.katiekalin.com