TYLER TOLMAN BLOG
Why Dealing with Emotions During Your Fast is so Important
Why Dealing with Emotions During Your Fast is so Important
Dealing with emotions is a really important part of fasting that a lot of people do not discuss. In fact, this is the essence of the real purpose of fasting. Dealing with emotions, in order to discover who you really are. Sound deep? Yep, well it is I guess. But I want to explain to you the reason why emotions come up when you’re fasting, and how dealing with them is SO important in discovering the real you.
Dealing With Emotions That Have Been Suppressed Through Food
If you’ve ever fasted before you may have experienced dealing with emotions coming up, often unexpectedly. This is a common and important part of fasting. You see in everyday life when we have an emotional issue most of us tend to turn to food. And sometimes without even realising it, we’re suppressing our emotions through the food. Most people call it comfort eating. Sound familiar?
Something most of us can relate to is going through a relationship breakup. You might be feeling sad, grieving, stressed out or even angry. These emotions arise because they need to be expressed. But rather than dealing with the emotions, often we try to bury them and we turn to food instead.
What happens here is that as the molecules of anger or sadness come up to be expressed. But instead of expressing them we eat, and by doing that we are literally burying those molecules in our fat, and holding on to emotions in our body. This is a person’s “emotional baggage” so to speak. Sometimes you can literally see a person’s emotional baggage in the form of excess weight or an illness.
Why You Can Feel Emotional When Fasting
When you do a fast, you can’t stop dealing with your emotions, you can’t suppress your emotions through food anymore. As the detox process takes place and fat is broken down and used for fuel, these old emotions are gonna come up and they are gonna come out.
Many people during a fast find themselves breaking down and crying. Men and women alike. It’s a very humbling experience, and a beautiful time of release.
The important thing here is to be CONSCIOUS that the fast is going to bring emotions up and that’s a good thing. A lot of times people are unaware of this. If you don’t know that emotions might come up you might start thinking, “Whoa! This fasting isn’t good for me! I need to eat! I can’t do this. I need to break this fast”. And the reality is when you push through these emotions you will get the real rewards. It’s like layers of the onion opening up, and you are truly digging deeper into the essence of who you are.
“Clearing out old emotions to reveal who you are is really the purpose behind fasting”.
Beyond cleaning your colon and regenerating your physical body, fasting is really about stripping away all these emotional traumas and deep-held things that have been within us, potentially our whole life. It’s often these exact same traumas that are the very reason behind illness and excess weight in the body.
Why You've Built a Shield Around the Real You
Without even realising it, from a very young age we tend to build up layers, or a shield around us. For example, the first time you go to school and you’re all excited and happy and saying, “Hey my name is Tyler what’s your name?” and maybe the response you get is, “You’re ugly. I don’t like you. You’re stupid”. It’s then that we subconsciously begin to put up layers around our heart to protect ourselves.
It’s an instinct to want to protect ourselves. And often we’ve put up a shield because of something that happened in first or second grade or kindergarten when you were just a kid, but have never taken it down.
Subconsciously you’re operating on a level that’s still afraid to express who you truly are. Sometimes based on something that happened when you were 5 years old. And those things aren’t even relevant anymore. But they’re still affecting you on that deeper level. Fasting allows you to go through a process where you can begin to strip these old patterns out.
How to Find Out Who You Truly Are
Fasting has been done for thousands of years by great philosophers to really get to ‘Know ThySelf’. Because it’s part of human nature that to some extent we all have these layers or shields up. Dealing with emotions is the key to letting go of these layers or shields that were there at one time to protect, but we don’t need them anymore.
The most beautiful thing that I find when I run my live virtual program Fast, is that people join in with different forms of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc and they also come with big blocks around emotions and personality traits as well. The cool thing is that after they strip away all these layers, they become like children again. The essence of who they truly are starts to shine through. And that’s a beautiful thing.
During my program, we use breath work and specific clearing techniques to really help shift these old emotions. Below I’ll share some other really effective techniques you can do at home.
In my Know Thyself program we do a LOT of work on healing emotionally, working closely with a Tolman Health Coach to support you doing inner work, shifting shame and other emotions, freeing yourself from negative self-talk and just really allowing your true self to shine.
Methods to Use at Home to Help Deal with Emotions
If you feel an emotion coming up, say for example frustration, then go and run a very hot bath. Put a lot of salts in the bath and either add in some grated ginger or lavender oil. Get into this piping hot bath up to your neck and lay there completely submerged just meditating. Lay there in the bath as still as you can for 40 minutes. This will not be easy but do your best.
This method allows the emotion to surface and to come out. Now because of our natural resistance, your mind will tell you, “I need to get out! This isn’t good! I could die! I could be sick!”. If you need to put a cold rag on your forehead, do it. If you need to put a little bit of your leg out every once in a while, that’s okay. Just try to lay there as still as possible, as much as you can. Only move to add more hot water when needed.
After the bath, get out and lay down on a towel, and cool off for 15 minutes. During this time you’ll be processing the emotion and you’ll find your ability to go into some maybe deep-rooted emotions is increased. Just relax and allow whatever comes up to unfold.
Identify what that emotion is, and go back to that time and recount the situation as if you are there again. But really see it with a new set of eyes. See it from your perspective now. Then see it from the perspective of the other people involved. And allow yourself to just express that emotion.
Of course, there are many ways to help you process your emotions. You may prefer to just go for long walks. You might like to just sit and contemplate the emotion and try to identify with where it’s coming from and go into it. The important thing is to allow yourself to express it. Allow yourself to cry. Allow yourself to get angry. Punch something. Yell and scream and get it out of you! You want to express it because once you’ve cleared that emotion you’ll come out of this experience an entirely new you.
This is the express train to who you truly are. It happens through processes like this, which are beautiful techniques that have been passed down for thousands of years.
Finding out who you really are by connecting with that child inside of you is one of the greatest gifts of our human journey. This is a beautiful part of fasting that I don’t talk about that much. I normally go more into the physical side of things, but in reality, it’s all related. So when we fast and start dealing with emotions that are not serving us anymore it will transform us mentally, emotionally, physically and even spiritually.
If this has resonated and you feel it’s been of benefit, I invite you to check out my Know Thyself program where you can find out more about shedding old layers and through nutrition, fasting, relationships and passion let your true authentic self shine through!
Thanks for reading!
