Why Emotional Tension is a Portal to Power

A Sacred Merge of Motion and Emotion

Every week, I go live for two offerings: Healing Unfiltered, (link to this weeks live) where my Soul Sister Kat and I, dive into real, raw conversations around emotional regulation, sensitivity, and spiritual growth , and a private Tarot Teaching inside my subscriber page(link here), where we explore the deeper messages of the cards as tools for healing.

This week, these two threads wove together powerfully. In Healing Unfiltered, we explored how empathy, when embodied with boundaries and awareness, becomes an inner compass rather than a curse. And in my Tarot teaching, we pulled The Chariot — a card about inner tension, movement through stillness, and the integration of duality.

Together, they spoke to a deeper truth, The way forward isn’t about pushing past discomfort, it’s about learning to sit with it, to hold the push and pull, and to move from a grounded place of embodied self-awareness.

Let’s unpack that...

There is something that happens in the body before we experience a shift, a subtle tightening, a discomfort, a rising sensation that many of us have been taught to avoid, numb, spiritualize, or analyze. This sensation is what I call emotional tension. And for most of my life, I thought it was something to fix. I didn’t know it was a portal, I didn’t know it was pointing me somewhere deeper.

Emotional tension shows up when our current reality is rubbing up against the edge of a new one. It’s that internal pull between how we’ve learned to respond and the new awareness trying to land. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong. It doesn’t mean we’re broken. In fact, emotional tension is often the first sign that something inside of us is waking up. That we’re ready to move forward without abandoning ourselves.

The Chariot in Tarot speaks to this exact moment. At first glance, it’s a card about movement, momentum, direction, willpower, But beneath that, The Chariot is about alignment. It’s about integrating the inner conflict so we can move forward with intention rather than urgency. It’s not about bulldozing through discomfort or bypassing our fear, it’s about bringing the parts of us that are scared, tender, angry, and tired into the vehicle with us, instead of leaving them behind.

This is what real power looks like.

I used to think power was about confidence, clarity, control, now I understand that power is the ability to stay present when everything in you wants to run. It’s the capacity to breathe through the internal tug-of-war without choosing sides. The Chariot doesn’t race ahead because it’s figured everything out. It moves forward because it has learned to hold tension without collapsing under it.

Empathy Without Collapse: Learning to Stay With Ourselves

For most of my life, I felt like empathy made me weak. It felt like a curse more than a gift. I absorbed everything. I didn’t have boundaries. I felt everyone’s pain and mistook it for my responsibility. Empathy without regulation will do that. It will make us hyper-aware of what others feel while staying disconnected from our own needs. I had to learn that empathy is not about merging. It’s about witnessing. It’s about staying rooted in myself while acknowledging someone else’s experience.

Empathy has become one of my greatest allies because now it’s rooted in embodiment, not enmeshment. That shift came through years of dismantling old patterns and meeting the emotional body with something deeper than analysis. I learned to offer empathy not just to others but to the places within me I used to ignore. That’s where real healing began.

This is part of what I offer inside my Voice Note Support. I meet you inside your process, not from a place of fixing, but from a place of presence. I hold the mirror as you navigate your own resistance, and together, we learn what it’s trying to protect. The work is not to bypass these emotional responses, but to understand and alchemize them, moment by moment. This is also why I created the Emotional Alchemy Journal (subscribe to mailing list to receive free ebook), a resource to help you pause and reflect when your nervous system wants to bolt. You don’t need to go on this journey alone. Having someone reflect your truth back to you without pulling you out of your body is part of what makes emotional transformation sustainable.

Resistance is not sabotage. It’s protection. It’s the body saying, “I remember what happened last time we moved forward like this.” We don’t overpower that message. We sit with it. We create stillness around it. And we ask the questions that no one ever asked us. What do you need right now? What would feel safe? What are you ready to let me hold with you?

Stillness as Momentum: Reclaiming Safety in the Body

Stillness became a practice, not a freeze response, not a void to fill, a real-time act of love. The more I practiced stillness, the more I began to feel where tension was actually living in my body. Not just in theory, but in breath, in posture, in the way I held my shoulders up near my ears. These were all messengers asking the same thing, can you stay?

The Chariot doesn’t move forward by dragging parts of us that aren’t ready. It waits until there’s enough internal safety for movement to occur. When we stop rushing our healing, when we pause long enough to hear what our discomfort is trying to say, something shifts. And it shifts from the inside out.

This is exactly what my new offering, Initiation into Transformation, is built around. It’s not another crash course or quick-fix coaching model. It’s an immersive container designed to walk you through the contractions and expansions of emotional evolution, where spiritual awakening meets the embodied work of breaking cycles. Where we look not just at the patterns, but at the unmet need underneath them. We begin at the root. We address the nervous system. We work through the stuckness. And we walk forward with your body as an ally, not an obstacle.

Emotional tension will never fully disappear, but our relationship to it can evolve. I don’t fear these moments anymore because I’ve lived through enough of them to know they’re not the end, they’re invitations. They’re the moments before something deep clicks into place. This is what I help others do every day, hold steady when the mind wants to collapse and trust that the discomfort is not punishment, it’s preparation.

The Chariot is Not About Speed. It’s About Integrity.

This card doesn’t ask you to push harder. It asks if you’re ready to bring all of you on the journey. Not just the parts that feel powerful, but the parts that are still unraveling. It’s not forward motion that defines transformation. It’s whether we are integrated in the process.

When I work with clients, I often remind them that their emotional reactions are not blocks. They’re entry points, they’re portals. The goal is not to eliminate resistance but to understand its wisdom. The goal is not to become unshakeable. It’s to become reachable, by yourself, by truth, by love.

If you’re in a moment of emotional tension right now, I invite you to pause. Not to numb, not to spiritualize, but to pause long enough to notice where your body is gripping. To ask yourself if that part of you has ever been met with compassion. To recognize that power is not the absence of fear,it’s the presence of self-trust.

You’re not broken because you’re tender.

You’re not behind because you’re still learning how to stay.

You are in a sacred space of becoming.

And the discomfort you feel is not the signal to stop,it’s the signal that you’re arriving at the next threshold of your own transformation.

You don’t have to walk this alone. Whether it’s through the Voice Note Support, Emotional Alchemy Journal, or Initiation into Transformation, there are spaces here for you to land, reflect, and rise. Power doesn’t come from pushing through. It comes from turning inward. And choosing, again and again, to meet yourself fully.

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Elaine Elizabeth is a writer, guide, and generational pattern breaker whose work bridges the emotional, ancestral, and spiritual realms. Rooted in lived experience, she weaves together trauma healing, emotional alchemy, and soul remembrance to help others reclaim their truth. Through storytelling, somatic insight, and sacred inquiry, Elaine invites you into deeper intimacy with yourself—where healing becomes a return, not a destination.