Physical flexibility helps support emotional flexibility.
I have historically been fairly emotionally rigid – both in my physical body and my mental and emotional life. Rigidity is defined as the quality of being stiff, fixed, or impossible to bend.
In my physical body, my hips and lower back often felt stiff and tight. Emotionally, I have been a creature of habit. I tend to be particular about what I eat, where I eat, how I spend my time, and the structure of my day.
This emotional rigidity can make it difficult for my family and friends especially when they want to try an activity that falls outside of my rigid comfort zone.
That said, I have been working incredibly hard to be less rigid so I am better able to accommodate other people’s needs and requests. It has been a struggle. Even though I am extremely resilient and strong, my attempts to try new things and release my rigidity left me feeling very anxious and very vulnerable.
In other words, some of these rigid behaviors were a long-established coping mechanism that seemed to be anchored in my body and keep me stuck.
As I started releasing fascial adhesions and restrictions in my physical body, I was surprised to notice that the more I unravel physical tension in my tissue, the more I enhance my emotional flexibility and capacity for emotional regulation in my personal life.
What is Emotional Flexibility?
Emotional flexibility is the ability to recognize, release, regulate, and move through your emotions in changing situations.
Emotional rigidity literally means that you stay stuck in your emotions which can prevent you from being able to be flexible or accommodating and limit your problem-solving abilities, especially when adapting to new or unexpected events or situations.
Emotional Rigidity compromises your ability to accommodate the needs of others or have compassion for the perspective of others, their needs, and requests.
Rigidity may present as an inability to take risks, controlling or compulsive behavior, difficulty dealing with ambiguity, and inability to accept or prioritize other people’s viewpoints or needs.
In your physical body, flexibility can present as the ability to move through an unrestricted, pain-free range of motion which can be influenced by the mobility of the soft tissues, like fascia. Physical rigidity can also be experienced as the inability of the muscles to relax — staying contracted or partly contracted for an extended period. Chronic or prolonged stress may prompt your brain to send continual nerve signals telling your muscles to contract even when the muscle is no longer needed for movement.
Like physical rigidity, emotional rigidity may keep you stuck in old patterns that limit your adaptability and impede your ability to flow easily through life.
Flexibility empowers you to move through your mental and emotional landscape without getting fixated or stuck. Emotional flexibility is the ability to experience your emotions as opposed to avoiding them or pushing them away.
Emotional flexibility helps you show up to the emotion and be willing to experience it with self-compassion. By being flexible, you can simply notice what is going on without making judgments about whether the emotion is positive or negative, then respond in ways that are aligned with your values.
This flexibility prevents you from self-identifying or getting “stuck” in the emotion or the stories you associate with an emotion. This allows you to be in control of navigating your emotions instead of being controlled by the emotion.
Emotional flexibility allows you to shift your focus from agonizing over what you cannot control to focusing on what is within your ability to reasonably control.
Symptoms of Emotional Rigidity
Emotional rigidity may include:
- Trouble trusting people
- Need to control situations or events, leading to high levels of stress when they can’t be controlled
- Sticking to a defined set of rules or routines, even when they no longer serve a useful purpose
- Ignoring other people’s ideas and thoughts, believing your own way is always the right way
- Resisting change, even if it would lead to a better outcome
- Feeling compulsions to do something, such as counting or checking, in order to reduce anxiety or feel a sense of control
- Need to be right
- Get super angry over little things
- Obsessing over details, even insignificant details
- Being critical of others
- Distaste for change and don’t like surprises
- Assuming your perspective is correct and everyone else is wrong
- Clinging to the past and refusing to move on
- Wanting to know what’s going to happen, how it’s going to happen, and when it’s going to happen
- Rejecting the leadership of other people, feeling the need to be in control at all times
- Black & White thinking or seeing things only as good or bad, with no in-between
- Over-planning, micro-managing, and getting upset when things don’t go according to plan
- Feeling chronically stressed and anxious, even over little things
- Inability to take risks
- Compulsions to take certain actions based on existing habits and attitudes
- Overreacting: Small things make you super mad or sad
- Fear of Change and avoiding new or different things because they feel scary
- Perfectionist tendencies, which can lead to unrealistic expectations and a fear of failure
- Stick to a set routine or way of doing things, which limits your ability to adapt to new situations
- Stuck in fixed ways of thinking, which limits your ability to generate new ideas.
How Fascia Supports Emotional Regulation
Releasing fascia helps to “unstick” emotional energy and release tension in areas of your body that correspond to difficult emotions which may help create space for you to gently release your emotions without having to relieve them.
This gentle process of cultivating physical flexibility opens the space for enhanced mental and emotional flexibility. This means that you experience the full range of your emotions without getting stuck in any mental or emotional state.
Fascia appears to act as a mediator between the autonomic nervous system, emotional regulation, and immune regulation, according to research on “Fascia as a sensory and emotional organ”.
Fascia is the tissue that surrounds, supports and protects every organ, blood vessel, muscle, and nerve in the body. As such, fascia is highly innervated and rich with blood vessels, lymphatics, and hormonal and neurotransmitter receptors and appears to play a role in the storage of emotional memories.
Fascia is believed to house 25% more nerve endings than skin, and 1,000% more than the collective innervation of muscle, so fascia could very well be considered our richest sensory organ, and your senses are highly correlated with the storage of your emotional memories. This may explain how releasing fascial adhesions helps to release stuck emotions that keep you stuck in emotional rigidity.
Essential Oils for Emotional Flexibility
Essential oils can be powerful tools to help you surrender into your “flow” so you can release stuck energy, control, and stagnation. Connecting to nature can help you connect to your ability to increase flexibility, reduce rigidity, and be better able to surrender to and flow with life.
Oils derived from plants can help support flow and gently break up stagnation and increase movement on both the physical, mental, and emotional levels.
In fact, Chinese medicine has long incorporated essential oils to clear blocks in specific acupuncture channels and activate the related energetic organ systems. This is one of the reasons that I attempt to be super specific about application points. I have repeatedly found that using essential oils to activate acupressure points has a synergistic effect that is more powerful than using pressure points or aromatherapy as independent self-care modalities.
What’s more, willow trees and other plants with deep roots in the earth and flexible branches and leaves are known for their ability to bend without breaking, signifying flexibility, adaptability, and strength. The willow tree has flexible branches that twist and turn in a storm but do not easily break. The tree also has robust roots that keep it strong and standing against strong winds.
Essential oils derived from flexible plants may help support physical and emotional flexibility that allows me to be more flexible and less controlling and rigid in my life.
READ THIS NEXT: Releasing Control
Fascia Release™
Fascia Release helps you unravel deeply held tensions and mental, physical, and emotional constrictions to promote physical and mental flexibility in all areas of your life.
Fascia Release helps release adhesions and constrictions which creates space to allow you to feel and release your emotions without getting stuck in any mental or emotional state. This state of fascial flexibility or coherence empowers you to move through your mental and emotional landscape without getting fixated or stuck in any pre-existing rigid patterns.
Formulated with essential oils derived from flexible plants with deep roots in the earth like Frankincense, Fascia Release helps support muscle relaxation, reducing muscle tension, and promoting a sense of ease in the body, which may support improved mental and physical flexibility.
Fascia Release™ blend contains Lavender oil which is known for its calming and soothing effects. Lavender is known to help relieve muscle tension and promote relaxation, which can indirectly support flexibility. Cypress allows for improved flexibility and resilience. Frankincense helps calm your nervous system and supports mental flexibility. Black pepper and Rosemary oil are stimulating and invigorating which may help improve circulation and alleviate muscle tension, which can support flexibility.
Apply on the back of the neck and back of the heart to improve both mental and physical flexibility.
READ THIS NEXT: Essential Oils for Fascia Release
Attention™
Attention™ blend was designed to support children with ADD/ADHD and it works because it helps ground these kids into their bodies and when they are grounded, they are less distracted, impulsive, and more focused. Grounding your body by topically applying essential oils to the bottom of your feet can generate a sense of internal balance so you can witness your thoughts and emotions without getting stuck or overtaken by them.
Grounding enables you to move through various mental and emotional states while remaining grounded. Connecting your energy to the earth and your feet may help prevent you from getting rigid or stuck in your head because it brings your awareness into the body.
Attention™ contains Vetiver, a perennial bunchgrass with very deep roots that help ground it to the earth. Vetiver essential oil is extracted from these deep roots and is known to ground you mentally, physically, and emotionally, often helping you explore the root of your emotional issues. Attention™ also contains Frankincense™ and Cedarwood which helps us ground and feel connected to the planet and each other. Apply 2- 3 drops of Attention™ on the bottom of the feet and back of the neck to help with grounding.
READ THIS NEXT: How Grounding Supports Emotional Release
Parasympathetic®
Regulating your nervous system with the Parasympathetic® blend can shift you out of fight/flight/freeze mode, allowing you to release stress and process pent-up emotions so you can think more clearly.
Parasympathetic® blend may help calm your sympathetic nervous system and ground your body which further benefits your nervous system and supports emotional regulation. Further, the Lime oil in the Parasympathetic® blend can help promote emotional grounding, encouraging a balance between the heart and mind, the connection of which helps you ground. Apply Parasympathetic® over the vagus nerve (behind the earlobe on the mastoid bone).
READ THIS NEXT: 5 Essential Oils for Grounding
Featured Oils:
- Fascia Release™ available here
- Attention™ available here
- Frankincense™ available here
- Parasympathetic® available here
References:
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319182467_FASCIA_AS_A_SENSORY_ORGAN_Clinical_Applications
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/releasing-control/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/essential-oils-for-fascia-release/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/how-grounding-supports-emotional-release/
- https://vibrantblueoils.com/5-essential-oils-for-grounding/