Making Peace With Painful Emotions

Being a person is hard. Most of us don’t get much direction on how to show up to the losses, fears, and frustrations that are a natural part of life. In this 10 day-course, you’ll learn the function of emotion, dismantle the messaging about emotions that may be keeping you stuck, and learn mindfulness-based strategies for surviving and thriving as a feeling person. You'll learn how emotions are programmed by our personal experiences, our cultural narratives, and our biology. Using Buddhist foundations of mindfulness, loving-kindness, and awareness practices, you'll learn how to tune in to the important messages our emotions are sending while staying grounded in the present moment. You'll learn how to be still with emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness, reclaiming your power and self-direction. Making peace with pain is warrior work, and the sort of intrapersonal activism we need to be of service to the world and at home with ourselves.

Leçon 1: All The Feels

On Day 1, we’ll explore the psychological background on why we feel feelings and how to make distinctions between our primary emotions. When we understand the origin story of our feelings, we increase our willingness to experience the full spectrum of emotion. We’ll begin to fine-tune our awareness of feelings, which is central to the process of emotional freedom.

Leçon 2: Avoidance Tactics

We avoid bad feelings and crave good feelings. This patterning keeps us stuck in behaviors that often perpetuate our discomfort. On Day 2, we’ll take a closer look at popular strategies we use to avoid experiencing our uncomfortable emotions including substance use, numbing through media, and overworking. Unpacking our avoidance strategies helps us tune in to the feelings we push away most frequently.

Leçon 3: Emotional Myth Busters

If emotions weren’t complicated enough, we also have layers of messaging that impact the way we experience our feelings. On Day 3, we’ll look at the social, cultural, and personal messages we are inundated with that inform how we experience and express emotion. We’ll pay particular attention to narratives based in racism and sexism that inform what we fear and how we experience anger, ultimately limiting our expression of emotion and connection with others.

Leçon 4: Connecting With Emotion

Now that we’ve examined the machinery that runs our current system of emotion, we can start to write some new programming. On Day 4, we’ll use mindfulness strategies to help us connect with emotion. We’ll take a radically different approach to emotion than we are used to - leaning in when we are used to numbing out. As we become more familiar with our emotions, we’ll grow our confidence that feelings can be felt without getting overwhelmed. We’ll also look at common barriers to connecting with emotion.

Leçon 5: Self-Soothing

Now that we know how to recognize and make room for emotion, we can increase our capacity to soothe ourselves effectively. On Day 5, we’ll learn methods for soothing ourselves at low, moderate, and severe levels of emotional discomfort. We’ll use strategies from Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Buddhist practice to decrease negative emotion effectively and without the problematic consequences that come with some of our unskillful coping strategies.

Leçon 6: Cultivating Resilience

We can’t get rid of all discomfort, but we can alter how pain impacts us. Just like maintaining a healthy lifestyle can increase our physical resilience, we can take steps to increase our emotional resilience as well. On Day 6, we’ll cover strategies for self-compassion, accumulating positive experiences, building mastery, and coping ahead to name a few. Each tool is a way to restore our reserves of strength and openness, helping us be less negatively impacted by difficulty when it arises.

Leçon 7: Breaking The Patterns: Ego & Shadow

Emotion is the fuel that keeps us stuck in problematic ways of seeing ourselves and relating to others. On Day 7, we’ll use our increased awareness of emotion to help us gain insight into our ego and shadow identities, which compromise the basic programming of our sense of self. The ego is a pattern of who we think we are, and the shadow is the pattern of what we reject about ourselves. We’ll learn how to acknowledge and integrate these often conflicting parts to gain greater coherence and peace.

Leçon 8: Boundaries

Working with emotions is largely an inside job, but relationships are where we experience some of our biggest feelings. As we grow our capacity to manage emotion skillfully, we also need tools for effective boundary setting. On Day 8, we’ll look at common issues that arise in relationships, and how emotions such as guilt, fear, and resentment can drive our choices to be authentic or avoid boundary setting.

Leçon 9: Beyond Discomfort: Mental Health & Trauma

Some discomfort is beyond our ability to meditate away or lean into. On Day 9, we’ll take a look at some indicators that our discomfort has a basis in trauma or mental illness and explore resources for wellness. We'll challenge the notion that will power and determination alone are enough to feel better, and explore the complex interconnections between individual wellness and community wellness. We'll discuss options for seeking help so you feel empowered to advocate for yourself and get the help you need.

Leçon 10: Values-Based Living

Most of us make our choices around reducing discomfort and increasing comfort. When we do the important work of making room for pleasant and unpleasant feelings, we can shift our decision-making model to be based on our core values. On Day 10, we’ll look at how to get in touch with your core values and how to integrate them into the major spheres of life such as career, relationships, and community engagement.

Reviews

This was an amazing course chock full of rich information & valuable tools. I definitely recommend this course to everyone! Thank you for the time, research, & energy used to create this course as I benefitted tremendously. Namaste. 🙏🏻

Great course, if finished perfectly: live by how you want to be rather than how you want to feel. I’ve always believed in being uncomfortable (I’m a gym junky and have taken many extra hours on educational topics out of my practice field just to feel uncomfortable). What got me this time is the impact that my choice caused on my loved ones, this was hard for me to take. Too hard, I couldn’t bear it. Although I had all the best intentions with the choice I thought was life-changing, I made my loved ones bleed emotionally. I couldn’t forgive myself. That’s when I had to learn how to live with my painful emotions. Still not healed yet, I’m a work in progress.

This class was outstanding! It is packed with valuable insights into emotions and behavior. I took so many notes and will definitely go through the class a few more times.

Lots of very useful info. I plan to listen to this multiple times. Thank you!

Excellent. This will become a resource for me to jump into next level research and applications to meet my needs.

Much content packed in a short time. This could be spread over a 20 day course. I have to go over it again. Thank you.

Excellent course. I learned so much. Highly recommend.

This course is incredibly rich in pieces of practical, applicable advice. Dr Creasman melds information from an array of therapeutic, social justice and Buddhist philosophies and methods in a really down-to-earth way. I plan to listen again and to recommend widely!

Thank You for this course. It was very helpful and I realized that I have continued work to do in this area.

Thank you very much for your information and healing words. As a health care worker and with long haul COVID experience, I benefit from your wisdom💕

Thank you so much!!!!

This was so helpful! Thank you for the guidance!

This course left me intrigued and curious. I also feel heard and hopeful for our collective healing.

Brilliant course I will do it again and again!

I have no words to describe Dr. Candice approach. Just amazing and so helpful.

Very helpful. Thank you so much.

Such an amazing dose of love and truth during such a tough time. Thank you.

Thank you for an eye opening course - many useful steps to living a mindful life

This is the third time I listen to it, and every time I discover something new or I get something I couldn’t before. Thank you

Thank you! Your course is what I need right now. My doctor recommended me DBT, and I struggled to find a good therapist. Your course make me feel easy about everything and help a lot while I'm searching. And you gave good brief introduction on DBT, now I know what I want from my therapist.
Thanks again. I will definitely re-listen once again and write down a few thing I like.