All pain and suffering we experience in life are a direct result of the repressed and suppressed emotions that we hold in our bodies—in our energy field.

The more resistance we have toward feeling, the more challenging emotions we need to process—like guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, worry, doubt, anger, confusion, and grief—and the more stress we accumulate in our bodies.

Stress is a direct result of unprocessed emotions. This stress is then carried with us into our sleep. Carrying tension in our bodies causes our energy to stay stuck in our heads at night, resulting in endless thinking, unable to ground down into our bodies.

The reality is that it takes more energy to hold down an emotion than it does to simply feel it. That’s why learning how to actually process our emotions during the day when anything unpleasant comes up can sincerely change our life. We will walk around feeling lighter and freer. Many of us think that things in the external world are causing us stress, but really it is all just internal. Absolutely nothing in the material world has to cause us stress.

So how do we free ourselves of endless stress, sleepless nights, chronic tension, and unnecessary suffering?

Simply through the process of learning how to truly let go in the moment and becoming obsessed with increasing our awareness to what feelings come up throughout our day, allowing them to arise and move through our body. If we allow them to simply pass through, we are then able to move onto the next thing in our day and release whatever disturbance that may come up. If we are unable to master this skill of letting the energy move through our vessel, we can get stuck in an emotion longer than necessary.

This is what is known as resistance. Resistance is being stuck in any uncomfortable emotion that we don’t want to feel. People can spend their entire lives stuck in anger. Most of the time, the longer we hold onto an emotion, the harder it is to release it, making it become like a bad habit.

That is why it is absolutely imperative to learn how to stop and process a challenging feeling that arises before moving onto the next thing in your day.

For example, someone annoys you at work and causes you to feel frustration. Notice you are frustrated, acknowledge it, feel it, and then move on! What happens is that if we don’t acknowledge the frustration and give it space to be, we might end up walking around the rest of the day with frustrated thoughts, carrying this energy with us into the evening and then into our sleep. If we’re lucky, then we will subconsciously process emotions that we couldn’t process during the day in our dreams. Fascinating.

However, most of the time, these emotions stay stuck in our nervous system and build up, and then we have to constantly seek support from external sources to try and ease all that we’ve accumulated. That’s why learning how to actually let go of emotions throughout my day has changed my life. I don’t really need anything external at all anymore. Just myself. Less massages, zero medication. Less cravings, no addictions. More joy and true freedom.

Another key reason we can’t sleep is because of the constant doing. Many of us are moving way too fast in this modern world, filling up our schedules with too many things. If we don’t have any space in our day to simply breathe and just exist, we will carry the “doing” energy with us into our sleep. We’ll still be feeling like we need to be “doing something” once we lie down at night if that is the energy that carries us throughout our days.

This is why it is exceptionally necessary to take space in our days to do nothing and simply be (meditation is another option). This stops the propelling forward movement of the “doing” energy and helps to reverse it in the opposite direction, helping our nervous system be more relaxed once we enter into bed.

This was a game changer for me in terms of healing my relationship with sleep. I suffered from pretty significant insomnia for years. I once had a two-week period when I only slept for two hours every night for 15 days. I reached literal hell.

The less we sleep, the more challenging it is to stay in our body throughout the day, making it harder and harder to take the necessary space to be, simply due to feeling ungrounded in our body as a result of not sleeping. This makes us even more susceptible to eating unhealthy, looking at our phone more than necessary…or anything to distract ourselves from the discomfort.

This is exactly what happened to me during this two-week period. One night of insomnia spiraled into over two weeks as I revved up my parasympathetic nervous system and could not turn it down. I continued to do my HIIT workouts, worked full time, sincerely just went about life.

My new approach, however, if I happen to not sleep well one night is to make it a priority to add space the day afterward to do nothing. Taking whatever I can out of my schedule. Creating space to actually feel the discomfort in my body that results from not sleeping by meditating, relaxing, staring into space…doing some light yoga instead of running.

This approach helps ground and calm my nervous system enough to actually sleep the next night and not get into a spiral of insomnia. It’s definitely not fun and the more challenging option when we haven’t slept, but it’s so beyond worth any initial resistance that may come up.

We already spend too much time as it is filling the void, the empty space of life. The in-between. The not-knowing. So applying this mentality of adding space in life, even when we are sleeping, is insanely beneficial. Once we can embrace the emptiness and surrender to the void and let ourselves feel it, we are free to truly live.

What we all could really use is a lifetime chilling on the beach like sea lions, recharging our souls.

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