Body, Breath, and Mind Magic

Seek the Magic

Erin McMahon opens up about the inner voice work that has helped her sort through emotions in the past year. Connecting to her spirituality taught her about her inner voice and how emotions and the feelings associated with them don’t simply live in the mind but manifest in the body. She shares her technique for learning how to feel emotions and work through them with intention. It’s the magic of understanding mind and body and the way memories and emotions live between both.

Inspired by the teachings of Bella Lively, Eckhart Tolle, and Michael Singer’s writings, Erin learned how to identify where different emotions were living in her body, which was a completely new concept for her. She understood then how blocks would form in processing the emotions because they were held in stress or tightness. What she shares is the process of understanding the story of an event in life and the memory of what occurred and then identifying the emotion attached to it and separating it. In separating the emotion, it can truly be felt. Once felt it can be worked through. Join Erin for exploring the revelatory process of scanning body and mind for blocks and learning how to release them to move forward with a lighter feel and a calmer mind.

Resources discussed in this episode:

• Bella Lively
• Eckhart Tolle
• Michael Singer’s books

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Contact Erin McMahon:

• Website
• Instagram

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Transcript

Erin McMahon: [00:00:02] Hello and welcome to Seek the Magic. Today I want to talk about something that has changed over the past year for me, and that is really getting into my emotions and feeling them in my body as opposed to just my head. And really, you know, separating what's going on in my mind from what is going on in the rest of me and kind of just navigating that and feeling more in my body than just in my mind. I think prior to connecting with a lot of spiritual works and first the work of Bella Lively, who taught me about my inner voice and then, you know, other work with Eckhart Tolle and many others, I mainly thought about just my mind as a mind doing its thing. And then, of course, after reading Michael Singer's book about, you know, looking at what is happening in the mind and then observing what is happening in the mind, I realized that, you know, there is sort of a duality in terms of what's happening in our head at all times. And so that sort of got me into speaking and thinking about the inner voice and versus what is, you know, running in my mind and the thoughts that I used to kind of let take over my emotions and everything like that.

Erin McMahon: [00:01:22] When I started learning about inner voice and how to connect with your inner voice, there's a technique associated with that where you quiet your mind and you breathe out as you try to listen to your voice, as you ask a question to your inner voice, then you breathe out. So your kind of constant chatter of thoughts quiets, and then you can hear your inner voice more. Part of Bella Lively's technique in doing that is if you can't hear your inner voice, it may be because you have an emotion blocked somewhere, and when she references that, she says, it's important to feel where that might exist in your body and to feel through it. A lot of the times it is in people's chest or in their shoulders or wherever, but just the act of doing a body scan and taking yourself out of your head and into your body was totally new to me. And this is you know, I've always been very active, like in terms of exercise, working out, so I felt like I had been connected to my body. But in terms of being mindful with my body and sort of still and understand what is happening and where different emotions were living and/or stored in my body, that was a completely new concept to me. And it was revelatory and amazing because I noticed, you know, yes, I did have blocks because I never really tried to clear them before. So of course, once I started sort of scanning my body and understanding where I felt, you know, different stress or tightness, I could, you know, identify emotions that were potentially living in one place or another.

Erin McMahon: [00:03:14] Typically it's not a completely transparent thing. I think when I first heard about this concept, it sounded foreign and it took me a while to grasp and understand it. But the idea is to feel where there's a tightness or a heaviness or something like that in your body and try to breathe through it. And typically, if you're asking yourself a question and then you are not hearing a clear answer from your inner voice, then that block is somehow associated with keeping you from connecting to your inner voice. And so the block is usually associated with an emotion that is standing between those two things. For example, like if I say I'm, you know, inner voice why, you know - well, it's hard to give examples - inner voice why do I have trouble speaking in front of an audience? And this is, you know, a question that I had and I've confronted many times in my life and now I've processed through it, but I think the answer is still blocked with the fear of judgment. And it's something that I've worked through and hopefully I'm making progress on because I'm, you know, speaking over the internet waves to, you know, whoever decides to listen. But, you know, that's something that was, you know, a tightness in my chest and a block.

Erin McMahon: [00:04:48] And when I felt that block, sometimes what happens is you start to breathe through it and you feel memory associated with it. And sometimes these memories are associated with, you know, something you felt when you were little, or there could be a trail of memories that, you know, come up as this block and/or emotion that you've felt and suppressed, as it comes up, these emotions and these feelings are stored and usually there are multiple memories associated with them. But then the core memories are when you were little. The practice is to feel the emotion, identify it, separate the story from it, and then breathe through it. And it really helps if somebody else is holding space for you and somewhat witnessing you in this, because then you can process it, express and feel heard if someone is holding a safe space for you.

Erin McMahon: [00:05:53] Express the story to a certain extent, but the point is to separate the story from the emotion, and instead of suppressing the feeling, which is what we tend to do when we're little or as we are going through life to just, you know, survive and to get through things, instead of suppressing the emotion, to feel it, feel it fully. And it really doesn't take that long. And it seems scary at first, especially when you think about the story or the event that is associated with that scary thing. Your head, your mind's, you know, protective reaction is, you know, okay, don't go there, don't think about it, do something else. And instead the idea is to breathe through it, feel through it, you know, believe it takes 90s to truly process through an emotion. And if it takes longer, then that means you are kind of looping your story in with it. But to fully process the emotion and then move on and see if you can, you know, truly connect with your inner voice.

Erin McMahon: [00:07:05] This also helps with not being as tr...