difficult emotions – Page 3

How to Release Pain and Reduce Difficult Emotions

Deepak Chopra on discussing how to release pain and difficult emotions stressed the connection between our physical bodies and our emotions and also the interconnectedness of all living things. He maintained that “there is no mental event that doesn’t have a biological correlate” – that is to say, that our every thought and related emotion finds expression in some form in our body. He stressed that our brain serves to integrate everything we experience – our thoughts, feelings, emotions, social interactions and the ecosystems that surround us. Deepak talked too of our entanglement with each other – how we influence each other energetically and emotionally through “limbic resonance”.

In speaking of ways to reduce physical pain in another video presentation, Deepak strongly supported the idea of regular exercise to release endorphins, meditation to take us beyond our limiting perceptions, music to reduce stress and pain and social connection and interactions to provide support. He maintained that, contrary to popular belief, alcohol and smoking increase pain rather than reduce it. He also highlighted the powerful role of biofeedback, employed by various health professionals including the Chopra Center for Wellbeing.

A seven-step process for physical healing and emotional release

In his presentation for the You Can Heal Your Life Summit, Deepak offered a seven-step process for physical healing and emotional wellbeing. The seven steps serve as an integrated approach to individual mindfulness practices that we have previously discussed on this blog.

You begin by reflecting on an interaction that made you upset or left you having to deal with difficult emotions. Then you follow the following seven steps:

Accept responsibility: accept what you are feeling as your own, not blaming others for the way you are feeling. Without accepting responsibility, you cannot gain control over your feelings, nor can you wait for the other person to change so that you can be released from your feelings, because this will not happen.
Feel the feeling in your body: Deepak maintains that any feeling relates to one of the energetic centres of your body, one of the seven Chakras. The location of your pain is an indicator of the Chakra involved and the unfulfilled need finding expression in that Chakra, e.g. pain around the heart region (the Heart Chakra) can signal a need for love and belongingness, while pain in the stomach region (Solar Plexus Chakra) can indicate an unmet need for stability and strength. To feel the feeling you can close your eyes and focus on the area of your body where you feel pain – and bring your awareness to it without doing anything other than being with the pain wherever it is being felt in your body.
Name your feeling: Deepak describes this step as “labelling your feelings”. By naming your feelings accurately, you can learn to tame them. He calls accurate naming “labelling intelligently” – the more specific you can be about what you are feeling, e.g. resentment, anger, shame, the better you are able to deal with it.
Write it down – here the aim is to express what happened from three different perspectives – your own, the other person’s perspective and a third person’s perspective – the independent observer. Deepak maintains that using this 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd person approach reduces the emotional energy you have invested in the conflict, improves your immune system, and lightens your emotional load because “you are not weighed down by the emotion”.
Share it with someone: here you share both the process you used and the outcome for you with someone that you trust. It is important to accurately share the three perspectives that you have developed – avoid excusing your own behaviour and blaming the other person.
Use a ritual release: Deepak suggests that a ritual activity that symbolises “release” reinforces your new state of equilibrium and equanimity. It can take many forms but needs to be a personal way of expressing release, e.g. using a mantra meditation, scrunching up the paper you have written on or throwing it in the river.
Celebrate the release: again using something that is meaningful to you, e.g. a long forest walk, or mindful walking by the bay – some activity that manifests your joy and the realisation that you are moving on, no longer trapped physically or emotionally.

Reflection

The wisdom of this approach is the recognition throughout of the profound mind-body connection – In releasing our emotions, we can release pain in our bodies. It takes time to develop the self-intimacy and honesty required to defuse these emotions and the related physical pain. Persistence brings its own rewards in this endeavour as in many other endeavours. As we grow in mindfulness through mindfulness practices, meditation and reflection, we can achieve a level of consciousness that creates emotional freedom and physical ease. Deepak maintains that “all healing is consciousness”. To deepen our level of consciousness, we can make a habit of self-observation, naming our feelings and related unmet needs, and exploring creative ways to respond.

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Image by Nika Akin from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Managing Yourself in Times of Crisis

Susan David was recently interviewed as part the Ted Connects© series of talks. Susan spoke on the topic, How to be Your Best Self in Times of Crisis. She maintained that “life’s beauty is inseparable from it’s fragility” and provided a number of ways to manage yourself in times of crisis. She emphasised the importance of facing our difficult emotions, naming our feelings, being curious about what our emotions are telling us, developing our sense of agency and finding ways to help other people. Susan stressed that underpinning her approach is the concept of “emotional agility” – the core of which involves “radical acceptance” of our emotions and self-compassion.

The fragility of life

Susan reminds us that the Coronavirus highlights the fragility of life. This fragility, however, is part of our everyday life experience. We love someone then lose them, we enjoy good health then experience illness, we savour time with our children only to watch them grow up and leave home. The problem for us is that our social narrative, the stories we tell ourselves as a society, is so focused on the importance of always achieving, being fit and happy and appearing to be always in control. There is an inherent denial of the reality of death and the fragility of life – we have to appear to be strong and deny our difficult emotions.

Facing our difficult emotions

Susan stressed the importance of overcoming our habituated way of responding to difficult emotions. We typically deny them, turn away from them and, yet, end up stuck in them or “marinating in it” as Rick Hanson, in his Being Well Podcast, describes the resultant state of self-absorption. Susan maintains the critical importance of facing our emotions and owning them, not letting them own us. This involves naming our feelings not in a broad way such as “I’m feeling stressed” but in what she calls a “granular” way or fine-grained identification of exactly what we are feeling, e.g. disappointment, resentment, anger, fear or anxiety. It is only by truly facing and naming our difficult feelings that we can tame them, stop them from owning us. Susan points out that this self-regulation is a key facet of mindfulness.

Being curious about our difficult emotions

This is a form of self-observation and self-exploration. It’s being curious about what our difficult emotions are telling us about ourselves and what we value. Strong emotions are indicators of what is important to us but, at the time, perceived as lacking in our personal situation. Loneliness, for example, is experienced as disconnection from others and tells us how much we value relationships and connection. Social distancing and social isolation, as a result of the Coronavirus, have compounded our feelings of loneliness. So, it’s important to move towards ways of re-connecting, if not face-to face, by phone and online communication.

Developing our sense of agency

Susan argues that in these times when everything seems out of control, it is important to develop “pockets of control” to enable us to develop our sense of agency – our capacity to control some aspect of our life and our immediate environment. These arenas of control can be minute things like deciding what three things you want to do today, developing a menu plan for the week, setting up a daily routine (especially when you are working at home with children present) or changing the way you normally do things to adapt to changing circumstances. It may be that you decide to master the skill of online communication – developing new capacities as well as gaining control. Some people look to regain control and appreciation over their own yard or garden. My wife and I have recently bought a coffee-making machine so that we can better control our expenditure on coffee, increase our control over how our cappuccinos or Piccolos are made and limit our time and social exposure by avoiding having to go out and queue up for a take-way coffee.

Sense of agency can extend to appreciating what we have and savouring it. The Coronavirus attacks our respiratory system, quite literally taking our breath away. We can begin to really value our breathing through various forms of meditation which can ground us in our body in these times of uncertainty and anxiety. As we learn to control our breathing through meditation, we can develop ways to calm ourselves in times of crisis and stress. Our calmness is reflected in our breathing, as is our agitation.

Helping others in need

Besides showing compassion towards ourselves (in owning and accepting our emotions and what they tell us about ourselves), it is important to move beyond self-absorption to thinking of others and undertaking compassionate action towards them. This may mean a simple phone call to an elderly relative who is in lock-down in a retirement village or contacting someone you have not spoken to for a while. Everyday we hear about people showing random acts of kindness and generosity towards others.

For example, our weekend newspaper reported about the wife of a doctor on the frontline of the fight against the Coronavirus. He has decided to live apart from the family for six months to protect them from contracting the virus. Despite her resultant loneliness, his wife is creating homemade meals for him and his fellow health workers and enlisting the support of neighbours, friends and anyone else to do likewise so that these frontline workers don’t have to rely on unhealthy take-aways to sustain them during their very long hours of courageously caring for others. Susan challenges each of us with the question, “How can we help in little and big ways?” – how can we demonstrate being part of a community and being “values-connected”?

Reflection

In times like the present with the Coronavirus impacting every facet of our lives, we begin to wonder how we will all cope. Susan expresses great optimism that the crisis will enable people to be their “best self” and daily we see evidence of this. Susan points to the history of people handling crises with courage, wisdom, compassion and mutual kindness (witness the recent wildfires in Australia). As we grow in mindfulness and learn to face our difficult emotions through meditation and reflection, we can understand better what our emotions are telling us, regain our sense of agency and begin to show compassionate action towards others in need. Mindfulness helps us to be calm, resilient and hopeful.

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Image by ShonEjai from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Saying “Yes” to What We Are Feeling Now

Tara Brach highlights the fact that we spend a lot of our time in a belief trance, lost in thought and focused on going somewhere – looking towards what is coming up in the future. We overlook the present which is the real source of happiness, creativity and calm. She tells the story of the Dalai Lama being interviewed and being asked “What is the happiest moment of your life?” He responded, after a thoughtful moment, “Now”.

Tara suggests that we are strongly conditioned to not be present but to be “on our way to somewhere else”. We view some future moment as the most important in our life when the present moment is really the most important – it is what really matters. This leads to an honest inquiry, “What is it that takes us away from the present?” We can check in on ourselves as each day progresses and become more aware of what is consuming our thoughts.

What is going on for us in our virtual reality?

Tara points out that we are effectively living in a “virtual reality” – disconnected from our senses and the world around us as we become totally absorbed in our thoughts. Underlying this state of “lost in thought” are our embedded wants and fears – what we think we want and what we fear . We become preoccupied with the thought that something is not quite right, that something that should be here is missing. Invariably, this leads to the conclusion that there is “something wrong with our self”.

This preoccupation with deficit in our life leads to a sense of unworthiness. Tara maintains that meditation is a way to wake up from this preoccupation with negative self-evaluation. She explains that meditation has two “wings” – the awareness wing that notices what is going on for us and the kindness wing that treats us with self-compassion. In the final analysis, meditation leads us to accept ourselves non-judgmentally.

A guided meditation – coming home to “yes’

Tara provides a guided practice which she calls, Coming Home to Yes. After becoming grounded through your breathing, you are encouraged to focus on a conflict that is current in your life that generates “difficult emotions”, but that is not overly dramatic. The practice involves exploring the two wings of meditation – awareness and self-compassion.

The focal situation needs to be something that created strong negative emotions such as resentment or envy or that resulted in your acting in a way that you wished you hadn’t – that led to some regret. The meditation involves visualising the catalytic situation and revisiting the strong emotions generated – experiencing them in their full depth and breadth.

When you are able to name your feelings, you can focus on the nature of your reactivity – is it reflected in fight, flight or freezing? Tara encourages you to notice what you are doing when you are trying to resume control – to prevent the reactivity by saying “no” to your emotions, disowning them because they make you feel “less”. You can sense the “no” in your body, mind and heart – opening to the very real experience of your resistance to these negative emotions.

After interrupting the reflective process with a few deep breaths, you can revisit the situation, the triggers, the emotions and instead of saying “no”, you can say “yes” – letting the strong negative emotions “just be”, not denying or acting on them. This gives yourself permission to own these feelings – to allow what is. It does not mean that you automatically accept the actions of the other person, but that you allow yourself to feel anger or hurt, to be real in the situation. You can sense the experience of “yes” in your body so that you can revisit this sensation when a situation in the future engenders strong negative emotions. As Tara points out, in the process you are experiencing the two wings of meditation, awareness and self-compassion.

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection on our strong negative emotions, we can learn to own the emotions rather than denying them or acting on them. We can say “yes” to their existence.

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Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.