Being with Emotion
What arises when you reflect on moments of having intense emotions? Do you recall feeling clear, empowered, validated, or understood? Do you have a sense that your feelings have been too much for those around you? Are big emotions unsettling because they remind you of a parent, sibling, or spouse whose intense feelings led to an unsafe environment for you?
Our relationship with emotions can be complex. We may be disconnected from certain emotions that we’ve deemed unsafe either because we have witnessed emotionally-charged unhealthy behaviors or because we have learned that other people do not respond in the ways we want when we express our feelings.
Whether or not we are comfortable with our emotions, they are occurring even if they are beyond our awareness. If we are continually trying to suppress our feelings, the outcome may be depression, anxiety, or periodic angry explosions.
Our emotions can actually be messengers of important information, and we can learn how to be with our feelings in a skillful way. We can begin to practice being with and regulating our emotions by slowing down and noticing the experience that surrounds the onset of strong emotion. We may become aware that the emotions were stirred up because of our thoughts about the situation. To create space to be in the emotions, we can redirect our focus from the narrative to the physiological response of our body. As we allow ourselves to explore the felt sense in our body, we may eventually be able to name the authentic emotions and needs that are surfacing.
When we are distressed, we may notice muscle tension in the body. We might breathe into any physical discomfort as a way to make more space. Inhaling, we can breathe into the sensation of our body and emotional state. Exhaling, we can imagine a softening of our experience, allowing the sensation to just be, or perhaps to allow the sensation to shift. Breathing in, we can bring awareness to our physical experience of the emotion, and breathing out, we can soothe ourselves with compassion. If staying with the body or emotion initially feels too uncomfortable, we can allow in a little bit of our experience at a time. We can practice alternating our attention between briefly feeling the emotion and then briefly noticing a neutral or positive sensation in the body.
By bravely and vulnerably allowing our emotions to surface, we begin to increase our capacity to stay with our emotional experience. In doing so, our emotions can reveal to us information about our experience, needs, values, and perspectives. We have choices in how we respond to this information. As our capacity to be with our experience increases, so does our self-awareness. When we’re connected to our feelings, we can access a genuine, embodied sense of our experiences and engage with life more authentically.
