Psychiatrist and intuitive Judith Orloff is simultaneously passionate, endearing and down to earth when she talks about how to navigate the often rocky bramble patch that is our emotional processes. In all of her books, she offers practical suggestions on how to tap into our intuitive abilities and to negotiate the emotional journey of being human. Some of her best-selling titles include: Second Sight, Dr. Judith Orloff’s Guide to Intuitive Healing and Becoming an Intuitive Healer. Her newest book, Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life, offers a timely and much-needed message of how to productively let go of the emotional obstacles that keep us bound in order to find true freedom. Dr. Orloff is the type of psychiatrist that everyone wishes they could go see, someone who really knows how to not just talk about emotions, but to offer advice on how to transform them. Dr. Orloff invited LA YOGA into her living room where we talked about the state of the world today and how to effectively change our collective consciousness by transforming our own fear.
FMT: We don’t always realize how much control we have over our emotions.
Dr. Judith Orloff
JO: Our world is on the edge of a meltdown, people’s tempers are about to blow up and there’s anxiety and fear everywhere. I wrote Emotional Freedom to help people not get caught up in negative emotions, to have a choice about where they stand and where their power is, and to learn how to work with negative emotions and transform them as quickly as possible so that they don’t stay in the body. If negative emotions get stuck in the body, then that creates all kinds of problems like depression, anxiety, illness, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and all kinds of mystery aches and pains.
In this day and time we have to learn how to work with negative emotions quickly so they don’t get stuck in us. This is particularly true with Yoga practitioners or people on a spiritual path because their systems are getting so intuitively fine tuned and sensitive. The more people do their practice, the more they’re prone to absorbing the negative energy around them. We can’t afford to do that.
FMT: It seems like things are accelerating now, we don’t have the luxury of “I’ll deal with it later.”
JO: This is the time now. This is the time everybody’s been waiting for and practicing for. This is when we have to put our spiritual and Yoga practices to the test and we can’t afford to indulge negative emotions. The personal work that we do on ourselves in terms of clearing negativity has a ripple effect. The more inner peace we have the more it creates peace in the world. Every victory over anxiety or a panic attack or resentment or frustration affects everyone around you and the world.
FMT: People shouldn’t get discouraged by the feeling they haven’t done enough; even dealing with one emotion in the present motion is a victory.
JO: One little thing each day is a huge victory. The basis of transformation is that small victories are large victories, and to celebrate them as such. You will never deal with all of your emotions, it’s a constant practice. But what will happen is that you won’t get as hooked by them and they will come and go more quickly. The more you will be able to spend time on joy, courage, peace of mind and compassion, the tipping point will go towards those emotions rather than staying mired in fear.
Fear is so encompassing and seductive; it has a louder charge than something positive so our psyches automatically gravitate towards it. We’ll look at the accident on the freeway as opposed to the happy family going towards their destination. We’re afraid we’re not enough, we won’t have success, a relationship or our health. Whatever that fear is, it can mesmerize you. It’s important to feel free, and it doesn’t matter what’s happening externally. It is what is inside that makes you free.
Emotional freedom is a very exciting and dynamic journey. Emotional freedom lets you be in the moment. It lets you experience passion. It’s alive, exciting and wild, and you get to transform various emotions and feel victorious. Basically, you’re not hooked by what most of the population is. And then you can be the calm in the storm.
FMT: Especially now we need more people who are the calm in the storm. That’s where our Yoga practices can help.
JO: We do. Could you imagine if billions of us were the calm in the storm, how that would shift all this energy? The problem is everybody is getting so worked up by fear, that fear is getting the edge. The public needs to be educated on how to deal with fear in different ways and they’re not. They’re just glued to their television sets getting more and more afraid every day. The more you focus on fear the more it grows.
FMT: And the more we collectively become imprisoned by it.
JO: I wish we could just have some public education programs on emotional freedom and say, “Okay this is what you can do so you’re not afraid.” That’s what people need. We need to have leaders who model this. I think FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That’s true because we can’t be the darkness, we can’t put all of our attention to fear or towards anxiety. We have to put our attention towards courage, towards what’s positive, towards what’s hopeful. Even when it seems like there is no hope we must be hopeful and that’s where the attention must go. That’s freedom. You have the choice of what emotion you focus on and can learn not to be so seduced or mesmerized by fear.
FMT: It’s interesting that you say fear is seductive. We both avoid fear and gravitate toward the roller coaster or the horror movies.
JO: In Emotional Freedom, I talk about the biology of fear. People gravitate towards roller coasters and the scary movies because they give the same adrenaline rush as in the primordial forest when running from a tiger, but you get to be safe in the end.
Could you imagine if billions of us were the calm in the storm, how that would shift all this energy?
But fear gets stuck in the body and it can create muscle tension, acid reflex, headaches, and it can stay lodged in your energy field where it gnaws and wears at you.
I’m a big believer in looking at what emotions got me down and then looking at how I have cleared them so that they don’t stay stuck. Then I can go to sleep and be in dreamtime without having to use dreamtime to work through the psychological aspects of fear. When you haven’t worked through fears and anxieties your dream life will compassionately give you nightmares and dreams to help you.
FMT: There is a difference between working through things and clearing them as opposed to suppressing them. It seems when we deny or suppress something, it gets lodged in the body.
JO: Absolutely true. Working through something lifts it so you’re lighter, freer, younger and more vibrant. Have you ever watched people who have held a lot of fear? They get old quickly, their posture is drooped, body language is constricted and their energy isn’t flowing. People who are actively working on the sacred process of working through fear are lighter.
If you have a commitment not to lead a fear-driven life to the best of your ability, that’s the basis of emotional freedom. Throughout history, governments have manipulated people with fear. It’s just so been there and done that. Everybody should know that; it’s just a ploy that they use and we can’t fall for it.
FMT: The way people are responding and the way that things are portrayed in the news today, it’s all about fear.
JO: It’s all about fear so it takes every last bit of our ability to stay centered and say, “Okay I’m not going to watch the 11 o’clock news before I go to sleep. I’m going to read some poetry or some Rumi or I’m going to do some stretches.”We have to be conscious of our actions. I go out on my balcony and look put my arms out to the moon and maybe do a little dance or movement. That’s how I want to go into dreamtime. Listening what terrorist attack happened that day and then going to sleep – I don’t want to do that.
Emotions are energy and we have an opportunity to transform difficult emotions into their counterpoint. I talk about transforming fear with courage, transforming frustration with patience and transforming anger with compassion. It’s a two-part process; it’s not just looking at what makes us afraid but transforming it with courage.
I think in terms of the little things we can do stitch by golden stitch, such as standing in line a different way, learning to be nicer to ourselves and transforming how we talk to ourselves. Those kinds of things create a lot of positive energy. I have had really big epiphanies – you know these ah-ha moments that transform life but in three weeks life is the same again. We wake up on our knees and feel like we can never do anything again. With emotional freedom, the next day you pick yourself up and move in the right direction.
FMT: Thinking about the epiphany versus daily, mundane practices like brushing our teeth. If all we did was go to the dentist once a year, if that were the ah-ha moment, we’d have some serious problems. It’s like doing practices of emotional freedom where each night we clear out what needs clearing. Most of us wouldn’t dream of going to bed without brushing our teeth.
JO: Finding freedom involves clearing emotions every day. It’s a journey of self-discovery. There’s a cosmic emotional law, that whatever you haven’t resolved in yourself you absorb from other people. The more I work on my own fears and negative emotions the less I’m going to absorb them from other people just simply because there won’t be a hook within me for it. I’ll feel it, I’ll feel someone’s anger, but it won’t go into my body. With Yoga practitioners working so closely with the body, it’s important for the practitioner not to absorb the energy of the people in the class because so much comes up in classes.
FMT: So much comes up and people don’t even realize what’s stored, but not having any vocabulary to do that can be intense.
JO: It’s very intense, and it’s important for practitioners not to take on the emotional energy of other people, especially if there are emotional vampires, people who can suck your energy dry in your class. You have to center yourself so that it doesn’t affect you.
FMT: One of the best ways to protect yourself is having a clear space.
JO: It is. Emotional freedom is like brushing your teeth or purifying your own emotional space every day so that you can take an inventory at the end of the day and say, “Okay, I was afraid here, I lost my temper here” and this is how I am going to turn it around, these are the issues I need to work on. Little by little you can do that and every day is a clearing out process.
It’s not just personal. Emotional freedom is a path of spiritual awakening so it’s opening up to a force larger than yourself; a sense of spirit that you’re aligned with in this process. It’s not just like traditional psychotherapy. As a medical student, we were never taught that part of emotional freedom and growth was opening up to a spiritual reality. In traditional psychiatry they think it is all personal and family work, and it’s not. It’s personal and family and spiritual beyond the material realm. There is a higher power, whatever you want to call it, aligned with this growth and it loves that we are doing it. It’s like offerings to heaven.
FMT: Do you find it is necessary to find some sort of spiritual practice to find emotional freedom?
JO: I believe it is, however, I work with people who never want to believe in God again because they’ve had such incredible loss, so they don’t want to hear the word God or spirit, but they love to be of service and help others. If you’re a loving, compassionate person and you don’t think you believe in spirituality, but when adversity hits and you have a positive way of framing it, I think it’s okay. Ideally, I teach in Emotional Freedom to develop a sense of something other than the material world. I couldn’t imagine healing without both and it’s so important so I encourage all of my patients to develop some sense of spirit larger than the material.
FMT: In some ways crises in a person’s life are opportunities and in some way the crises in the world today are opportunities for us as individuals or as humanity to shift our focus or to get in touch with that part of ourselves related to service and spirit.
JO: The linear mind might say, “I hate this. Why is this happening to me? Why didn’t I get what I want? Why am I living in a time of terrorism? Why is the economy falling apart? Why? Why? Why?” But then on the other hand you might say, “Wow this is such a great opportunity for me to learn how to really practice coming from my heart, stay centered, give to others, be of service and not letting dark energies bring me down.” What an opportunity that is. It’s my perspective – in my best moments.
FMT: The perspective in the best moments, but one you can return to…
JO: And I want to return to that. Not that I’m always there, and that’s to be expected. Some people seem quite surprised with this book Emotional Freedom in terms of my own emotional challenges, as if I don’t have them. Every human being has emotional challenges and the more awake and aware we are during them the more we can create more light in the universe.
FMT: It’s not like we hit some point when we’re done and we just get to coast.
JO: No but we don’t get hooked in as much. You go, “Ah, that’s my friend again, fear, that’s anxiety, I’m not going to be enough, I’m never going to find my soul mate”– whatever your particular weapon is. It’s an opportunity for purification because the more you can work on whatever buttons are being pushed and get through it quicker then the next time that happens it just doesn’t have the same effect. That’s the goal of emotional freedom: things happen, but we are not brought down by them and then we rise up quickly if you are. All the emotional challenges and disappointments are a spiritual exercise. “Rejection is God’s protection.” It doesn’t seem that way to the linear mind, but if you look at it in perspective it is.
FMT: In those moments when we are heartbroken it doesn’t seem that way.
JO: That’s where faith is important. I have learned to have faith in the integrity life brings. What I love about practices of emotional freedom is that as you get freer, the same things don’t get to you. There’s more joy and lightness, and the body gets looser. Then it gets to dance the emotional dance. To do this, as a psychiatrist I often suggest people get bodywork when dealing with fear or anxieties because emotions get stuck in the body. Bodywork, energetic work and talk therapy are a good combination. Without doing some kind of bodywork, I think it’s very difficult to clear emotions 100 percent.
FMT: You can only get so far because you can only think through so much.
JO: You can only process with your head so much. That’s only a fraction of it. And that’s where psychiatry is off-base because they don’t have a term for subtle energies, whereas every cross-cultural healing tradition has a name for it: qi, prana, shakti. How are you going to deal with absorbing energies around you if you don’t believe the energies exist?
FMT: Especially something like depression where there is a clear biological component as well as so much wrapped into it that is spiritual and has to do with our relationships.
JO: Depression is a very spiritual transition, as are all these emotions. If someone is going through serious depression, I frame it as the dark night of the soul. We can learn from that and learn to transform it with hope, and how to open up to a larger spiritual reality. Why would we be depressed? Is it to torture us? No that’s not the reason. It’s because that is the particular energetic frequency we need to learn from.
FMT: That understanding can be liberating.
JO: It takes enormous faith in life to see it that way. I am so passionate about teaching emotional freedom so people do see it that way so that whatever they go through has meaning and integrity even though it may be painful. We want to break through to the light. The more light there is in whatever form we can create, the better off everyone is. Emotional freedom is an inner peace movement, the more inner peace we can have the more outer peace we can have.
If we don’t have inner peace it’s very hard to create global peace because of all that dark material floating around that is disowned. Can you imagine millions of people dealing with their dark emotions and not being stuck in them, what affect that can have on the world and our attitudes towards our human family? Huge. That’s why each person’s individual work means a lot. You know it’s very important to help each other. We’re not in this alone.
For more information on Dr. Judith Orloff visit: drjudithorloff.com.
Felicia Tomasko has spent more of her life practicing Yoga and Ayurveda than not. She first became introduced to the teachings through the writings of the Transcendentalists, through meditation, and using asana to cross-train for her practice of cross-country running. Between beginning her commitment to Yoga and Ayurveda and today, she earned degrees in environmental biology and anthropology and nursing, and certifications in the practice and teaching of yoga, yoga therapy, and Ayurveda while working in fields including cognitive neuroscience and plant biochemistry. Her commitment to writing is at least as long as her commitment to yoga. Working on everything related to the written word from newspapers to magazines to websites to books, Felicia has been writing and editing professionally since college. In order to feel like a teenager again, Felicia has pulled out her running shoes for regular interval sessions throughout Southern California. Since the very first issue of LA YOGA, Felicia has been part of the team and the growth and development of the Bliss Network.