Resentment is anger turned inward where it smolders, festers, and eats away at our lives from the inside out. It robs us of our ability to create what we desire because it takes so much of our energy to keep it under wraps and inside.
Resentment dulls our experience of joy and happiness by creating blockages that impede our ability to feel these things fully. When we’re carrying resentments, we’ll notice that things are not changing or manifesting in our lives, no matter what we do.
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But how does this happen?
We store unresolved emotions in our bodies. Each emotion is attracted to a certain area or organ. Since resentment is hot, festering, passive, and internalized, it’s attracted to the spleen, a pitta organ on the left, or feminine energy, side of the body. This falls in the domain of the 3rd chakra, so energy stored here has a negative impact on our relationship to power—both within ourselves and in the outside world. It has a direct effect on our digestion and, as a result, our immune system.
Though resentment is considered a feminine emotion, you don’t have to be in a female body or feminine-identifying to experience it. It’s universal and it generally begins when we haven’t digested a feeling of powerlessness or victimhood.
Sometimes, this can look like physical or sexual abuse, a problematic encounter with a friend, or having to take care of another all the time. There are a million reasons we could feel resentful.
As the caretakers of the world, resentment is a common part of our experience. We set impossible standards for ourselves, which usually require that we override our wants, needs, and intuition. This leaves us with little to no energy, resentments that our desires and needs go unheard and unmet while we are endlessly fulfilling those things for others, as well as frustration that we once again didn’t listen where we “knew” better.
The key to working with a resentment is to acknowledge it, which is usually difficult. It’s often more comfortable for us to laugh it off, bypass it, or touch on it through feeling a more “acceptable” emotion like sadness. Sometimes, we even focus on something outside of ourselves like current events or the drama of another to avoid the feeling altogether.
Having resentments causes us to move into self-judgment mode, feeling like a “bad” person. When this happens, we often seeking to convince ourselves that we shouldn’t be upset at the situation or that we did something “wrong” and deserve it.
So what can we do about it?
There are so many tools that can help us release resentment—meditation, movement (think twists and chest openers), breath-work, talk therapy, confiding in a friend (preferably over coffee), the arts, and journaling—just to name a few.
The Angels are also fantastic at helping us with this issue, especially Archangel Daniel. All you have to do is call his name from your heart, mind, or out loud and ask for help.
Before working to release a resentment, we need to remember that it contains valuable information related to our growth. It will show us exactly where we’ve over-sacrificed ourselves, given away or lost our autonomy and power, and overridden our own needs and intuition!
Once the message is received, it's time to release the feeling. If we go out of order, we’ll find ourselves creating the same situations over and over in our lives until we finally listen to the message and act accordingly.
When we let go of the resentment, forgiveness takes over. We probably won’t forget what happened to cause the resentment, but we will lose the energetic connection to it! We go from getting all tense around a situation to a to a feeling like, “So what?”
When we forgive others, we truly set ourselves free, and working through and releasing resentment is the perfect way to do just that!