Mindfulness Meditation Intro For Parents - 4. Emotions Talk

In this talk, I will discuss the importance of mindfulness of emotions through sharing my parenting experience, quotes from beloved teachers and authors, science and psychology, and give some guidance on how to practice Mindfulness of Emotions. Don't forget to listen to the meditation that goes with this talk!

Transcript

Hi,

In this talk I want to introduce you to the mindfulness of emotions.

I will share a personal story and why I believe that mindfulness of emotion is a key skill to develop as a parent.

I'll also share with you some of the quotes from my beloved teachers,

How feelings can be categorized,

Some science and some psychology around them,

And finally how you can practice with them.

If you listened to the previous track you should already have practiced.

So I'm going to start you with a piece of poetry from the poet called Donna Hashworth and her book called I Wish I Knew.

The poem is called Roller Coaster.

This life is the biggest ride you'll ever go on.

An up,

Down,

In,

Out,

Over,

Under,

Roller coaster.

The moments of joy the ups are truly technicolored.

Let go of the bars,

Feel them,

Let them in.

The moments of loss the downs are devastatingly terrifying.

Grab the bars tightly,

Feel them,

Ride it out.

Every day is a new twist and a new turn,

But nothing,

Nothing lasts forever.

Just as you think the worst part is here to stay,

You slow down and catch the view,

And it's a wonderful view.

This life is the biggest ride you will ever go on.

Let it be so.

So like she shares in this piece of poetry,

Part of being fully human is skillfully working with the highs and the lows of life.

And when you're a parent,

Not only do you have to deal with your own highs and lows,

But also those of your children.

Just in the past week,

I've probably weathered more than 10 tantrums,

Calmed more than 20 siblings' fights,

And comforted so many meltdowns.

And just last night,

We were having dinner when Charlie,

My six years old,

Started saying that his tongue was stinging and his chin was itchy.

And within three seconds of me saying to him,

That's okay,

Darling,

He shouted at my face,

No,

It's not okay.

And in that moment,

There were his big emotions and body sensation,

As well as his thought about it.

And then around the table where his brother,

Eight-year-old Gabby,

And his dad,

With their own reaction to that.

And then obviously there were mine.

It would be easy for me to start shouting back at him to stop,

And just say to him,

Stop overreacting to everything.

And then proceed with standing and telling him to calm himself down or get off the table.

His brother was bracing himself,

Trying hard not to feel anything,

I could see it.

And so I started my process,

Focusing on myself,

Feeling my emotion first,

And grounding myself in my body.

The sacred pose,

As Tara Brack calls it,

That allowed me to continue talking to Charlie calmly,

Despite feeling the knot in my tummy,

The clenched jaws,

And the tension on my forehead.

I was able to both feel the emotion,

Yes,

Respond with the calm that I was still able to access.

He calmed down little by little,

Not so fast,

Really,

Don't get me wrong.

And I could still feel that he was on the verge of another explosion.

But I could say I'm used to this reaction from Charlie,

Because from getting dressed in the morning,

And the clothing feeling slightly uncomfortable,

Or him feeling he's being wronged because his brother got to the door of the house first,

It doesn't matter.

The high-pitched screaming means that it's very natural for any carer to react to it,

Rather than respond.

And the only difference between the version that I am today and my old version is that I practice mindfulness meditation,

And I believe my response will be more regulating for my children when I am grounded.

Jack Kornfield,

In his book,

The Wise Heart,

Says,

It takes courage to experience the full measure of our feelings and emotions without reacting to them or cutting them.

With mindfulness,

We can learn that even powerful feelings and emotions are not to be feared.

They are simply energy.

When they are recognized,

Acknowledged,

Investigated,

We are liberated from our clinging.

So let me tell you a little bit about feelings and emotions.

What I've learned is that in Buddhist psychology,

Feelings are split into a hierarchy.

You get primary feelings that we split into unpleasant,

Pleasant,

And neutral.

Unpleasant,

Being the screaming of my child in my ears.

Pleasant,

The lovely curry that we were having for that dinner.

And neutral,

Let's say,

My bottom sat on the chair in the dining room.

Then under these,

You get the granularity of all the feelings.

Those are secondary feelings.

There are so many that we can often refer to them as the river of feelings.

There is a list of 500 emotions that for my training,

I had to go through.

And I can't say I understand them all or have experienced them all.

But here's a sample of the ones starting with D.

Daring,

Dazed,

Dazzled,

Deceitful,

Defeated,

Defensive,

Dejected,

Delighted,

Demanding,

Dependable,

Dependent,

Depressed,

Desirous,

Desolate,

Despair,

Depleted,

Despondent,

Destructive,

Detached.

And I'm only one third through.

So what do we do when we experience feeling?

Well,

We react in three main ways.

We cling,

We resist or we reject,

Or we are just bored and we try to numb or distract ourselves from it.

I think in a fun way,

Our reaction to feeling can look like the marshmallow experiment.

So if you're in the UK like me,

The BBC had a program a few years back where you could see children doing the marshmallow experiment.

They were sat at a kitchen table with the presenter giving them a marshmallow each and saying,

I'm going to leave the room and if the marshmallow is still here when I come back,

I'll give you a second marshmallow.

And the children must have been something like four and six maybe.

And just looking at their little face while they're waiting in front of that marshmallow,

You could see that reverse feeling.

You could see the pleasant idea of eating the marshmallow and their really big eyes.

You could see how bored they were waiting doing nothing and how they tried to distract themselves from it.

And you could see how they really wanted that marshmallow and they really wanted to put it in their mouth.

And some of them started licking it and then just gobbled it up.

And really,

This shows how the feelings that we get in our human life.

Another thing that is important to note is that we perceive our feeling differently from person to person.

Some people sense their feeling with their mind and they associate that with thought.

I was one of those.

Some also sense their feeling with their heart and others with their body.

To try and find out who you are and how you process your feelings,

I'd say pause tomorrow morning when another mom or dad asks you,

How are you today?

And as you're replying,

Acknowledge,

How are you checking how you are?

I think I'm good.

Are you finding your answer in your mind?

Or do you tune directly in your body or in your emotions?

As you develop mindfulness,

You'll be able to sense in many more ways.

Like I said,

I started with my mind and I thought that my emotion were located in my brain.

But now I pick up my emotion from my body much more.

It is very important to be aware of feelings because they determine very often what we decide to do.

The Supreme Court Justice William Autoglass says,

At the Supreme Court level where I work,

90% of our decisions are made on the basis of what we feel about things.

Our feelings.

And the other 10% is our rationalization,

Where we use our mind to justify what we feel.

We also pick up feelings from other people.

It's called limbic resonance,

Mood contagion.

And physiologically,

It has to do with miro-neuron.

The same neural pathway that allow a monkey in a science experiment where he was fitted with like an EEG to be able to see how his brain was reacting,

To feel the pain of a researcher who stubbed his toe in front of him.

We have that.

We know that babies have that pathway developed early on and can sense the emotion of people surrounding them.

Mindfulness invites you to feel inwardly and to invite the wise response.

A small group of American soldiers in Iraq who were surrounded by people during that war.

These people were shouting at them,

But it was a small group.

They could have opened a fire or something and instead the least soldier said,

Take a knee.

And they all turned their rifle to the ground and kneeled down.

This went in front of a great mosque in the holy city of Najaf.

And when they did that,

Everyone around became quiet.

All these people were so angry at them.

But then they withdrew without anyone being hurt.

And that was a gesture of respect.

And sometimes all your emotion wants from you is you to respect them.

They want you to look at them and give them some respect like this soldier did.

So while you're going to sit in meditation,

You will have many difficult emotion arise.

Fear,

Rage,

Doubt,

Panic.

So what do you do with them?

What does respecting them mean?

It means staying with this emotion and bringing this kind,

Not judgmental attention to them.

We don't cling to them.

We don't reject them.

We try and name them if we can and if it helps.

You know,

We heard this saying,

Name them to tame them.

This really allows them to be.

But if you can't put words on them,

You can just ask yourself a few questions.

What do you feel them in your body?

What images or stories are coming to your mind?

And often this help open to the feelings and the emotions.

You have enough space in your awareness and enough compassion to hold it all.

You have space for all of your emotion,

Fear and disgust,

Rage and grief.

The important thing is for you to learn how to increase your window of tolerance for this emotion.

Find strategies when it's hard to be directly with the emotion.

Return to your breath or to your body.

Come back to the emotion when you feel more comfortable.

Come back to the emotion when you feel more resourced or more nurtured.

And then with the practice,

You will observe your window of tolerance expand.

In my family,

I had quite young parents.

They divorced early and I think both of them were very unaware of their feeling,

Let alone mine.

They would oscillate between calm and rage or calm and despair very rapidly.

And this is all to say that most of our generation and probably even our parents and grandparents generation didn't have much support learning how to deal with emotions.

So I personally built a very good shield over the years,

Not allowing myself to feel sadness,

Fear or anger.

But when I got married and then pregnant,

It was very hard for me to understand how to navigate my emotion,

Let alone that one of my partner and then my child.

And one of the questions that really helped me is that one from Tara Brach.

What are you unwilling to feel?

So much of the stuck place that we have in us is due to what we are resisting to feel.

For me,

It was the intensity of my fear.

I had panic attack in bed at night.

And not to all but me.

And when I realized that this fear was what I didn't want to feel,

And I had the capacity to feel it and move forward,

It gave me confidence to do it again and again.

And then I managed to feel that fear fully.

And then I moved on to anger.

And then I'm continuing still moving through the wheel of feeling.

The gift that you will develop is the courage to be present with all your emotions and that of the people around you.

Courage means to be doing things full heartedly.

Like the author from The Little Prince wrote,

Saint-Exupéry.

On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur,

L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.

What is essential is invisible to the eye.