How to Raise Your Vibration (Part 3: Inner World)
Untangling our inner world is how we access a higher consciousness. 7 ways to increase your self awareness and raise your vibration emotionally.
*For your listening pleasure there is also an audio version of this article read by the author. It may include a few sidebars ;)
Updated April 2024
Imagine You Are a Gum Ball Machine
As humans go through life we collect gum balls every time we stifle emotions. Let’s pretend anger creates red gum balls. Sadness makes blue, grief is green, rage is purple, shame is yellow, guilt is white, resentment is pink…you get the idea.
All the gum balls collect inside us until one day we give ourselves space to feel shame about something we said to a sibling- and three white gum balls come out and roll away. This is how to elevate your emotional vibration.
Welcome to the emotional layer of our being. The third we will discuss in this multi-part installment on how to raise your vibration. I imagine some people may stop reading here because the thought of having to do everything we already juggle in our lives, and deal with emotions, can be overwhelming.
I used to go through life wondering why people bothered to feel things at all because it seemed to really slow people down. How was I supposed to be efficient, excel at work, and remember to buy aluminum foil at the grocery store if I stopped and cried about something? Seriously. I did not have time for that.
I believed crying to be an indulgence, and something that got you nothing in the end, so why bother?
I was lucky enough to land a therapist who helped me understand how emotions get stored in our bodies. She brought to my attention that my attempts to stuff feelings down were not only taking my body a ton of energy to suppress, (imagine holding the lid on a boiling pot) but also likely responsible for how tense I was feeling in my body.
Emotions are also our indicators that guide us toward a higher consciousness. As we learn to feel emotions our consciousness expands. It’s able to experience more of the world when we aren’t avoiding situations containing emotions we think we can’t handle. Expanding into emotionally unchartered territory is one reason elevating vibration is so damn uncomfortable.
Yet, I learned that crying releases oxytocin, endorphins and stress hormones. I was willing to look at crying differently knowing it served a purpose. Had I actually been passing up chances to provide my body with relief?
“The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself, the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us, that’s where it’s at.” ~Gold Medalist Jesse Owens
This is the emotional layer of our being. The more stuffed our inner gum ball machine is with low vibration emotions that ruin frequency, the more vibrational competition there is for rapidly vibrating emotions to influence our vibrational frequency.
Finding a higher consciousness comes partially from the courage to feel low vibe emotions, and creating space in our bodies for expansive high vibration emotions. The emotions we tend to store (it’s pretty rare for someone to suppress joy) tend to have a low vibration. Reference the emotional vibration chart here if you want to see the vibratory range of emotions.
Frequency is just a way of saying cycles per second, which are measured in hertz. So a frequency of 20 Hz means 20 cycles per second. It’s theorized emotions like anger oscillate slowly giving them a lower hertz, whereas higher vibe emotions like empowerment oscillate rapidly and have a faster hertz.
It makes sense to me that if our inner gum ball machine is full of emotions that vibrate slowly it’s going to be hard to grow in to a high vibration person until we get the gum balls out of the machine. What to do?
What Pearl Jam Can Teach Us About Finding Stored Emotions
Before I answer what to do, let’s look at what stored emotion looks like. The most blatant example that comes to mind are the raw emotions in Eddie Vedder’s voice when he first sings “Alive”, on Pearl Jam’s 1991 album Ten.
Sam Law from British magazine Kerrang! called it a, “Depthless display of pain and existential angst.”
Guitarist Mike McCready told Rolling Stone Eddie camped out in the studio all night furiously writing the song. It details how his mother told him at 17 that who he thought was his father was his stepfather- and his real father died a few years earlier.
(While you were sittin' home alone at age thirteen / Your real daddy was dyin' / Sorry you didn't see him, but I'm glad we talked.”)
He learned why people who knew the family stared at him as a teenager. He looked just like his father. The manic overnight writing of the song, and the ripping emotion he sings with, exemplify what’s inside him.
His voice is saturated with emotion. I suspect that’s why the song is magnetic. It’s raw unfiltered emotion in a world of people who edit themselves.
Though not usually this obvious, if we pay attention to ourselves it’s easy to see what’s stored inside. It reflects back in our voice, our thoughts, our actions, what upsets us… and what we create.
While stored emotions can create searing art, if we hold them too long they seriously diminish vibrational frequency. As far as how to find stored emotions, all I can speak to is my own experience. Here are ways I’ve been able to find mine:
Looping thoughts. When I catch myself getting obsessive it’s a sign I have some low vibration emotion(s) I’m not feeling, and it’s causing my brain to bring up a thought to point me to what I need to feel. Once I find and feel the emotion the looping thought stops.
I feel emotionally charged talking about something from a long time ago. Classic storage pattern. Often from unresolved experiences I didn’t allow time for, or didn’t know how to feel in the past. Seems to correlate with childhood memories where I didn’t really understand my own feelings at the time, so they got stored. Letting this stuff go is key to elevating in to a higher consciousness. It’s like dropping weights from a hot air balloon.
I talk about something I hate. Really? Do I hate it? Is that a bit strong? Usually for me it is. I’m typically upset about something else and transferring it to a situation where I feel more comfortable the expressing anger.
Waking up in the middle of the night, or having poor sleep. What happened that day? Usually there’s a strong emotion that came up and I buzzed right by without taking ten minutes to just feel it. This can even be from a movie or the news; it doesn’t need to be personal. This awareness has made me soooo much more careful of the media I consume. When I realized it came with the responsibility of added emotional processing to not feel like junk, and maintain a high vibration, I dropped a lot real quick.
Seeing, smelling, or hearing something makes me emotional. Otherwise known as the classic trigger. If I want to avoid it, shove it away, get it out of sight, not talk about it anymore, it’s gum ball releasing gold.
I find myself repeatedly telling a story from the past, or complaining about the same thing over and over. Usually the story or complaint is coming up because I have big feelings under it. I don’t tend to revisit things that carry little emotional impact. These tend to indicate huge unresolved patterns, or events in my life that take extended time to work through. I appreciate professional help with these. They have also provided the biggest boosts to my mental health, and I suspect my vibrational frequency, when resolved.
The pitch, tone, and/or intensity of my voice changes. When I talk about something and find myself getting riled up it’s usually a sign I have a lower vibration emotion wanting to be acknowledged bubbling away under what I’m saying. Easy to observe in other people, harder to catch when I do it.
Releasing Emotions to Elevate Your Vibration
I could keep going, but let’s call it good for now. What do I do when I’ve found the emotional gum balls? The proverbial money I put in the machine to release them is my attention. I sit down. Maybe put on music that helps me emote. I feel the feelings behind the memory until they evaporate.
Maybe a song makes me think of sad memory. Once I’ve felt the memories behind the song (read: hit repeat enough for others to find me obnoxious) there will just be a moment where the feelings are gone. I can play the song and it’s just a song.
It’s like putting a penny in the machine and the gum ball rolls away. Freedom from emotional triggers and the behavior patterns they create is higher consciousness.
More about how this practice can benefit us (and society) in my article on polyamory, where I speak about how feeling jealousy can be beneficial.
“Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” ~Elizabeth Gilbert, Author Eat Pray Love
I feel empathy for men writing this article. Feeling things we would rather avoid is hard for anyone. I imagine it’s especially hard for people who may carry additional burdens of not just releasing the original emotions, but struggling with feeling they could look weak doing so.
More men than women seem to be taught they aren’t supposed to cry, or are supposed to be impervious to hard life events. I’ve always puzzled how society (accidentally?) set men up with such a disadvantage. Imagine aliens camouflaging themselves for a day to observe our species.
Alien 1: “Yes, that’s correct, they are all humans on this planet and their bodies all create big emotions in response to life.”
Alien 2: “But the ones born of the male gender are usually taught not to acknowledge or suppress their emotions?”
Alien 1: “Exactly.”
Alien 2: “Won’t this create stress in their bodies, lead them to react impulsively, avoid talking about things, and make it generally hard to express themselves?”
Alien 1: “Absolutely correct.”
Alien 2: “But why would they do this to half the species? That makes zero sense.”
Alien 1: “Dunno. We’ve never figured out eyeshadow, licorice flavored candy, or asking each other how they are doing, only to expect a lie in return. Wait until we visit some other holidays. On Easter, they get excited about a giant white rabbit who enters houses while people sleep and hides colored eggs.”
Alien 2: “WTF?”
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.” ~Irish Poet William Butler Yeats
All this to say, I hope anyone rolling around the idea of releasing emotions being somehow showing weakness can also acknowledge the courage it takes to face what’s inside ourselves.
Facing deep sorrow takes straight up grit and fearlessness. Acknowledging anxiety can raise our vibration if we feel it takes courage. Someone facing, and feeling, their life’s emotions looks far braver to me than someone avoiding them. When we avoid we subconsciously send ourselves a signal we aren’t strong enough to face X. I believe we are all strong enough if we try.
If you want to elevate the vibrational game of your inner world I’d love to connect with you! Visit my website and see if you feel like scheduling some 1:1 time.
I also highly recommend Annika Knepper, an embodiment coach I’ve worked with who will definitely make you a badass emotional alchemist.
To keep reading in this series head along to How to Raise Your Vibration Part 4.