Emotional Awareness Meditation

This mindfulness exercise invites you to become aware of your emotions. It’s your chance to really get to know your emotions. By practicing emotional awareness in this way, you can build your emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict.

Transcript

Hello and welcome.

Begin by finding a comfortable seated position,

Either sitting on the floor or on a chair.

Allow your spine to be straight and long and let your shoulders drop,

Softening your face and begin to gently close your eyes.

Or if you prefer,

Simply gaze down in front of you.

As you sit here,

Notice where your body is making contact.

Noticing your feet touching the floor,

Perhaps your back on the chair,

The contact between your sit bones and the chair.

Noticing all the contact points between your body and the furniture.

Now begin to notice your breath for the next few breaths,

Following the inhalation and exhalation.

Finding where your breath is most obvious in your body.

Perhaps slow down towards the belly and perhaps higher up towards the chest.

Continuing to keep your awareness on your breath.

Now shift your awareness from your breath to your body.

And we begin to scan through the body slowly from our head to our toes,

Observing any feelings or sensations that might be present.

You might notice numerous feelings or sensations throughout the body.

For the purpose of this exercise,

Choose one feeling or sensation to focus on for now.

Notice where in your body this feeling or sensation is located.

What part of your body is holding this feeling?

How big or how small is this feeling?

Does it have a colour?

And if so,

Is the colour changing or is it remaining the same?

Is it heavy or is it light?

Is it moving or is it still?

Hard or soft?

Rough or smooth?

If you could touch this feeling with your hand,

What would its texture be like?

Now if you were to give it a name to this feeling or the sensation,

What would it be?

Can you identify it?

Can you give it a name or a label?

If nothing comes to mind,

That's okay.

Be kind to yourself and continue to observe the feeling in the body with curiosity and without judgement.

We're going to continue to get to know this feeling or sensation for a little while longer.

Slowly bringing your attention back to your breath,

Back into the room.

Whenever you are ready,

You may open your eyes.

It is highly recommended that you take a few minutes now to journal your experience of this meditation.

You may wish to come back to this practice regularly to build on your emotional awareness.

Namaste.