Emotional baggage.
We’ve all got some.
It’s impossible to make it through your childhood – let alone your adult years – without picking some up along the way.
I’m Evelina Hovich, a manifestation coach in Toronto, and let me tell you that if you feel like your emotional baggage is weighing you down, you’re not alone.
Whether it’s in the context of dating and relationship coaching, wellness and lifestyle coaching, confident mindset coaching, wealth and abundance coaching, or any other type of coaching, emotional baggage is often a factor to work through.
The good news though is that your emotional baggage doesn’t have to weigh you down for the rest of your life.
We can’t change the past, but we can change how we feel about the past now.
This way we change our present – and therefore, change our future.
Let’s take a closer look.
What Is Emotional Baggage?
When people talk about emotional baggage, they’re usually referring to any unresolved emotional issues from the past.
This can be a result of all sorts of experiences, like:
• An abusive or neglectful childhood
• A lack of emotional intimacy
• Guilt tripping parents
• Experiencing a traumatic event
• Parents who don’t respect boundaries
• Intense fear, guilt, or regret
• Relationships where you constantly fought
• And much more
Like many past traumas, the emotional echoes linger long after the event itself.
But we often don’t realize the effect these emotional echoes can have on us.
Here are some of the more common feelings behind emotional baggage, and how mindfulness can help you work through them.
Feeling Guilty
We all know what guilt feels like, but what’s the root of guilt?
Essentially, it comes from two possible sources: either you think you did something you shouldn’t have, or you think you didn’t do something you should have.
In extreme cases this can be due to having done something criminal or harmful to someone else, but that’s usually not the case.
Perhaps you decided you wanted to learn to play the ukulele, so you bought yourself a cute ocean blue uke and a songbook, but only played it once or not at all.
Now these items stare at you from their dust coated corner, reminding you of what you didn’t do, filling you with feelings of guilt.
Or maybe you made a commitment to manifest a healthier lifestyle, but now the exercise equipment or the fancy blender you bought only serves to remind you that you haven’t made progress there.
What can you do with these items?
Certainly, it’s not a bad idea to pursue creative hobbies or improve your health.
At the same time, these items clearly aren’t motivating you.
Instead, they’re just making you feel guilty.
Your thoughts may spiral as you begin catastrophizing about the implications.
Why didn’t you start playing the ukulele? You love it when other people do. Maybe you’re just not a creative person. Maybe your entire aesthetic of being an interesting artsy type is just a fraud. Maybe you should just give up on living an interesting life and just settle for a boring, unfulfilling job and lifestyle.
Slow down!
There are plenty of reasons why these items aren’t inspiring the action you hoped they would.
Perhaps the ukulele isn’t your instrument of choice, and you’ll take better to playing the drums or saxophone.
Or maybe your creative itch would be better scratched by drawing, painting, sculpting, writing, or photography.
You might not like running on a treadmill or drinking smoothies, but I guarantee there’s a physical activity and nutritional approach you’ll enjoy.
Don’t let these items fill you with feelings of guilt – this will only hold you back.
Get rid of them!
Return them to the store, sell them on Marketplace, give them to a friend, or drop them off at a thrift store – whatever.
It may feel like you’re saying goodbye to a version of yourself you quite liked – the version who plays ukulele while lounging on the beach, or the version who gets up early to drink smoothies and go for a run.
But while those ideas may have a certain romantic quality to them, this isn’t what your dream life actually looks like.
If it were, you’d have taken to it much more naturally.
That’s not to say your dream life doesn’t involve creativity and wellness – it just won’t look exactly how you pictured when you bought those items.
As you get rid of these items, you may notice you get rid of the feelings attached to them as well.
Clearing away these items can help you clear space for manifesting your dream life.
Feeling Ashamed
Have you ever walked into a room and felt like the vibe was off?
You can’t quite explain why – it just doesn’t feel right.
That can have a lot to do with the vibrational frequency of the emotions of the people in that room.
Emotions like joy, peace, enlightenment, and love, create high frequency vibrations.
On the other hand, guilt and shame are the lowest vibrational emotions.
These two are closely related, but they’re not quite the same thing.
Guilt is rooted in empathy for others – you said something that hurt someone’s feelings, and you feel guilty about it.
In certain ways, it can be useful, even healthy.
After all, if you do something that causes harm to another – even accidentally – guilt pushes you to make amends for that trespass.
That’s a good thing, right?
Shame, on the other hand, is more self centred.
Feelings of shame are rooted in the idea that you yourself are fundamentally damaged, bad, or wrong.
It’s not the idea that you made a mistake, it’s that you yourself are the mistake.
And there’s a whole lot in our homes that can lead to creating feelings of shame.
Maybe you’re ashamed of your body, so you keep your “skinny clothes” for when you finally lose that weight you’ve been struggling with.
Several years later, there they are, still waiting, still filling you with shame every time you look at them.
Maybe you’re ashamed of your intelligence, so you bought a bunch of thick and complex novels and art films.
You read one, get overwhelmed before the end of the first chapter, and end up feeling worse.
Or maybe you’re ashamed of your gender or sexuality, so you work to suppress your true self in order to conform with what’s “normal”.
But here’s the thing: none of this will make you any less ashamed.
And while shame, to a certain extent, can be a motivator for self improvement, keeping these items around will only hold you in these feelings of shame.
Because if shame worked, the things in your house that make you feel ashamed would already have motivated you to change your habits, and therefore change your future, wouldn’t they?
Besides, when you take the time to visualize what your dream life looks like, what do you see?
Take some time to meditate on it, build a vision board, or whatever manifestation technique resonates best with you.
In the end, though, what sort of feelings do you have that are associated with your dream life?
If you’re like most people, you’re after things like love, acceptance, courage, peace, abundance, enlightenment, and gratitude.
Do you see any room in the life of your dreams for shame?
If not, it’s time to get rid of the items in your home that create such feelings.
Book Your FREE Connection Call With Evelina Hovich Today
Of course, there’s more to emotional baggage than just getting rid of the items in your house that can trigger some unpleasant feelings.
Will getting rid of your “skinny” clothes undo the emotional wounds you experienced when you were bullied and called fat as a kid? Of course not.
But they do serve as emotional anchors, keeping your emotional baggage weighing more heavily than they need to.
And clearing up triggers for your emotional baggage can be the first step toward healing, toward lightening the load.
Conscious reality exists far beyond the items in our home, but the vibrational frequencies they inspire can reverberate far more broadly through our lives.
Where there is stagnation, our true power cannot be unveiled.
Don’t let these emotional anchors keep you from sabotaging your purpose.
Your dream life awaits, but the crossroads at which we stand doesn’t always seem obvious.
Do you feel like you’re capable of something greater, but it feels out of reach?
Are your emotional anchors weighing you down heavier than they should?
It doesn’t have to be that way – I can help.
Book your appointment with me today, and let’s get started on manifesting the life you’ve always dreamed of, but thought was out of reach.