Dealing With Being "Too Emotional"

In this activation, you will be guided towards relating to your own triggers with a sense of curiosity and compassion - rather than overwhelm and fear. I will help you build confidence in feeling all of your feelings fully so that you can learn how to drop out of reactivity and spend more time in the present moment.

Lena Moxon is a certified SAH METHOD healer & transformational life coach with a special interest in self-expression, empowered action, and embodiment.

Transcript

Hi,

My name is Lena Moxon.

I am a Somatic Activated Healer,

Life Purpose,

And Self-Expression Coach.

And today,

I kind of want to deep dive into the process that I have more or less established for myself to help me process and deal with big emotions in the moment that I am experiencing them,

Right?

So many of the resources that we see are about reflection,

Which is great.

And we can learn a lot from reflecting on what we do and what we noticed.

And there's a lot there.

But what do we do in the moment that we are in the full embodied experience of the emotions that are uncomfortable and have the potential to kind of spin us off our axis,

Have us acting a little bit crazy,

Have us reactive,

Having us do all of the things that we end up having to apologize for because we were just like so disconnected.

So off-center,

So out of alignment,

Right?

We all have certain emotions,

I think,

That we have more or less a really hard time being with.

And I think we all respond to different emotions differently.

For me,

I know jealousy is one that I have a really hard time managing and processing.

It's one that appears very vividly within my internal system.

It's like my body is extremely activated and extremely inflamed the moment that it is present in my system.

And I was sharing this with one of my clients as she was kind of being really hard on herself about having a hard time processing a certain emotion.

And I said to her,

Like,

We are human.

There is no human walking this planet who is just unbothered,

Unfazed all the time if they are having a real connected present life experience,

Right?

We have to be okay with the fact that we are going to notice the way that we respond and react to things differently,

Sometimes unfavorably.

And all we can do is get really kind in the way we bring our attention and our focus to establishing these processes for ourselves and within ourselves in the moment that we are in the experience of the overwhelming emotion that has the potential to suck us away from the moment that we are in and into some kind of like hysterical,

Hallucinated state and place that simply doesn't serve us.

So my process is pretty simple and I'm not saying it's the only process.

I'm not even saying it should be your process.

I'm simply sharing what works for me on the off chance that it might give you some kind of idea,

Inspiration,

Intuitive hit for what you might be able to try for yourself.

So in the moment that I come into awareness that I'm having a really big reaction to something,

What I'm noticing is that something within my body,

There is a certain sensation that is capturing my attention,

Pulling my attention,

Right?

Most of us,

I guess,

Don't really notice when it's just a bodily sensation that's happening.

We only kind of notice once our behavior has shifted,

Changed,

Become reactive.

So for example,

Let's use jealousy as the feeling,

The emotion,

The state of being that I have a really hard time being with,

Right?

If I didn't notice it in my body at first,

The way that I might notice it is that I'm being really like snappy or critical or,

You know,

Hard,

Harsh on my husband as the example,

Right?

And being like quite snappy and I have a certain attitude about me and whatever situation,

You know,

Has,

Has prompted that jealousy within me.

But now,

Because I spend so much time in somatic practice within myself and I have such a deep understanding of my own internal landscape and what it feels like when I'm neutral and satisfied,

I pretty much noticed straight away whenever something is kind of pulling me away from that homeostasis,

That just state of wellbeing.

And so for me,

The jealousy feels like I notice it first within my throat,

There's a burning and there's kind of like,

It's,

It's hard to explain words,

Right?

Sensation is always hard to articulate in words.

That's why it's a sensation,

But it's like a constricting in my chest,

But simultaneously feels like a pulley.

It's like this.

Yeah,

This pool.

And then a constriction within my chest is really uncomfortable feeling here and a burning within,

Within my throat.

When that's present,

Right?

It's such a vivid sensation.

I can tune into it straight away.

And what I asked myself to do is just simply be with that sensation.

Now you might not be able to relate to jealousy,

But you might have an easier time relating to nervousness,

Right?

So if you feel nervous about something you're about to do,

Maybe you have to make a phone call or you have to stand up and give a presentation or you're meeting somebody new for the first time,

You might notice that you get like butterflies,

You know,

That,

Oh,

Sickening feeling within our gut.

You might notice that sensation there.

What I actually encourage you to do is bring all of your focus and your awareness to that sensation,

To fully be with it,

To not try and repress it.

The analogy I use time and time again with my clients is that if we're trying to repress anything that we have had an inkling over a glimpse of,

Or we've become aware of,

If we try and repress it,

It's particularly if it's a feeling or sensation within our body,

It's like trying to push a big beach ball underneath the water.

We might be able to do it for a little while successfully.

We might be able to push it down and keep it below the surface of the water,

But eventually it's going to pop up in a really big,

Obvious,

Loud,

Wet,

Inconvenient way.

Right.

And we're not going to be able to handle it and control it.

Our sensations are pretty similar,

Right?

Either we tune in and we pay attention while it's there and pulling our attention and our awareness,

Or we're trying to suppress it,

Deny it,

Repress it,

All the things.

And it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,

More obvious.

And it feels like something that we cannot handle.

It feels like it takes over.

We don't want that.

So we want to bring our awareness and our attention and our focus to the sensation wherever it is straight away,

As soon as we notice it.

And we want to really just be with it truly,

Even if it's uncomfortable,

Which it most likely is.

And we just bring our full attention,

Our concentrated mind,

Our focus,

Our awareness to that sensation.

And pretty much what is always going to happen for you,

If you bring your full attention to whatever the sensation is,

You're going to notice that after about 90 seconds,

It begins to shift and change a little.

It's not just like this static constant theme.

It changes.

It's shifting.

It's kind of like morphing into something else.

Maybe it's like dissolving itself,

Not as intense.

Right?

And so that's the first thing that we need to do.

Make sure we're not denying and repressing being with the sensation.

Try it.

I promise you can breathe into it.

If that feels like,

You know,

A helpful,

Supportive thing to do to just really be with it,

To calm it,

To slow it,

To be present to it,

To not be panicked by it,

To just be fully aware of it.

Right?

And if you do this often enough,

It kind of just becomes something that you understand is going to be present.

The nervousness one is a really good one.

Whenever I go to do a new presentation in front of people that I don't know,

I feel that that sick kind of like bubbling anxiety feeling there.

And I just kind of,

I know what it is.

I kind of just smile at it now.

I understand that some adrenaline is being spiked in my body because I'm nervous and anxious about what I'm going to present.

And I know that if I can just settle my body and calm myself down and breathe a little,

That that feeling is going to dissipate.

That awareness allows that to happen rather than having to exist without that buzzing within me.

Back to the jealousy.

Given two examples and we're going backwards and forwards between them,

But I hope you're staying with me for now.

So we've brought full awareness to the sensation within the body and we've just been with it.

We've allowed it.

We've accounted for it.

We accept it as part of human experience.

We know it's just our body doing its thing,

Responding to something that we have taken in some sort of information has entered our system and our body is responding in some way,

Giving us more information about how we might've perceived or received this in the past,

Trying to support us in what we might like to do in the future.

Now,

What we want to do once we have full kind of awareness of the sensation is just dropping with ourselves and ask,

Has this sensation sprouted and form some thoughts and have those thoughts created like thought babies,

Our thoughts just like populate themselves.

Or do we have one thought they think other thoughts,

Our thoughts just like do their thing in the same way that our body breeds itself,

Our thoughts create themselves.

They don't need our effort at all.

They're just kind of,

They're constantly populating ourselves.

And so I very quickly check in with myself,

Has this sensation got ahead of me and created some sort of stream of thoughts that is actually not helpful and not useful.

And if that has happened,

If my mind has got ahead of me and has started to think all sorts of interesting,

But not always helpful thoughts,

I try and bring as much clarity to exactly what it is that I'm thinking.

What is it that I'm thinking and believing right now?

Because what I'm thinking and believing in that moment is going to start creating meaning,

Which is going to compound the way that I'm feeling,

Which is just going to populate more thoughts.

We want to slow that down as quickly as possible.

And the way that we do that is if the thoughts have already been created,

We want to isolate the thought that is the most compelling in that moment.

So I get really kind of aggressive in my approach and ask myself,

What are you thinking right now?

What are you telling yourself?

Usually when we're in a kind of heightened state,

Particularly like anxiety or nervousness or jealousy,

Any of those like really inflammatory states,

There's like something that we ruminate on a thought form that is just like present.

And it's kind of just looping again and again and again and again and again.

So we want to bring as much clarity to what is it that I'm thinking?

What am I thinking and believing?

What am I making that mean in the moment?

And I get that so that I can work with it.

And then I find the work of Byron Katie really useful here.

She's got a very simple model for the way that we can work with what we're thinking and believing and pretty much disprove it or dissolve it or disempower it in the moment.

So we start to ask ourselves once we have that thought,

Once we know what we're working with,

Is that true?

Is that absolutely true?

Can I absolutely know that this is true?

We get really curious.

We become like the bad bitch lawyer and we put that statement,

That thought on the stand and we go hard.

We question it.

We get really curious about the validity of it,

The truth of it,

What's at the core of it.

And usually we can disprove most of our thoughts,

Right?

What we think and what we feel and what we believe in any moment is usually very real to us,

But it is never absolute truth.

And usually the thoughts that have been created and populated from these inflammatory States that have been so big that they've come beyond us and co-created these thoughts with our minds.

Yeah.

I usually a little more like of an over exaggeration.

It's usually,

You know,

Not the most consciously created thought it's coming from,

From whatever the emotion has been.

And if it is jealousy,

Anxiety,

Fear,

Overwhelm,

All of that,

We can only begin to imagine the types of thoughts that we're going to have.

So really questioning those thoughts allows us to just really see the cracks and the flaws and it disempowers what we're thinking.

And once we can just create a little bit of crack,

A little bit of separation in what we have been thinking there becomes space for us to come back into ourselves,

Back into our bodies,

Take the seat of observer again,

And understand who I am is having and experiencing these sensations and it is creating these thoughts,

But it's not the truth of who I am.

And from that place,

We're given the opportunity to decide now what I'm aware that I feel this way.

I'm having these sensations.

My body's responding this way.

I'm aware that there is the potential for me to think this way.

What do I want to do now?

We come back into the body so that we can take the seat of the conscious observer and make a choice from that point again.

Now,

If we have a really hard time coming back into our body and taking seats as the observer,

And we're too hooked into the sensation and we're believing the thoughts that we have to have strategies to just get us back into the body.

And usually that's when we would activate the power of breath work.

That's going to help regulate a nervous system that's obviously dysregulated in that moment.

You might like to activate the five,

Four,

Three,

Two,

One process where you're using your five senses to kind of bring you into the moment based on what you can see,

Feel,

Hear,

Taste,

Touch,

All of that.

I've probably missed one.

If you don't know that process,

Let me know and I can explain it in detail.

It's very simple.

And I like that process because it doesn't require much from us in the moment.

It's pretty easy.

It's kind of almost like a very simple method to execute.

Even if you are kind of in a manic state,

You can usually manage to bring your focus to at least one of those senses,

Which brings you back into the moment.

And we want to be back in the moment,

Back in our bodies,

Back in the state of conscious observer,

Watching ourselves being like,

Wow,

Girl,

Wow,

You are having a big reaction right now.

And as soon as we have the awareness that,

Wow,

I'm reacting to something right now,

We've created the separation between our feeling,

Our thought,

Our behavior and ourselves.

And we have the opportunity in that moment to activate agency,

To activate choice and to ask ourselves what now we're aware of what we're working with.

We're aware of what's presented.

We're aware of what's in front of us,

But we're also aware that we're back here in the state of consciousness where we get to choose whether we move forward and reactivate those things,

Or we find a way to change something within our bodies or within our patterns of thought or within the context of what we are experiencing and reenter the moment.

And ultimately that's how we deal with those big emotions.

We find a way to come back and reenter the moment as fresh as new,

As curious about what else is there for me to experience.

How else can I perceive and receive the moment that's in front of me?

How else can I co-create this?

Because of what I was just doing before,

Not ideal.

I don't want any more of that.

You have the power to do that.

And the more that you execute that power,

The more that you witnessed the power that you have to come back into the state of consciousness as the observer to reenter the moment and to make choice,

The faster that all becomes.

At first,

It might feel like a big ask.

It might feel like a heavy task.

It might feel like you're having to drag the parts of you that are just kind of addicted to the drama of it all to go through this process.

But eventually what happens is the concentrated mind and your ability to bring radical awareness and accountability to your experience,

It gets faster and faster and faster and faster.

So you're course correcting yourself in real time,

Pretty radically,

Pretty quickly.

And what you're doing is absolving yourself from having to go through all of the drama before you get back to that place that you reflect.

I don't want you to go through it all and then reflect powerfully.

I want you to be able to wake up in the moment that you're in.

When you have the sensation that's alerting you to the fact that,

Ooh,

Something's going on right now.

If you can respond to your body in that moment,

You save yourself the headache,

The nightmare,

The drama,

All of that.

And that is definitely a power that you have.

It's inherent in your body's capacity to take information in and communicate with you.

And if you devote yourself to being in deeper communication within your body,

That is a possibility for you.

All right.

If you have heard something in this for yourself today,

I would love to hear what your takeaway is,

What has landed for you today.

If you want one-on-one support in learning how to activate specific strategies within yourself,

Within your life,

So that you can deal with everyday problems without striving for perfection or looking for salvation.

If you want to know,

How can I become the leader of my own life?

How can I activate agency?

How can I learn to meet the moment with an openness,

But also a confidence,

Right?

It's about knowing that you can meet the moment with full agency,

With full self-awareness,

With radical responsibility and accountability for yourself,

But in a way that isn't trying to just like control and grab hold of everything in a way that is open,

In a way that is present,

In a way that is flowing with whatever arises and working with what's there and understanding that life is presenting as the practice for us to get to know who we are and how we move in the world and for the opportunity to change that as often as we like.

And ultimately what we're looking is to get closer to our heart,

To get closer to our heart,

To get closer to our heart,

To activate the four qualities of the heart so that we can move through the world as an offering of the innate love that is there planted within us so that we can offer more of ourselves for the greater good of all beings.

All right,

I digress.

I can't help myself.

I can never help myself,

But throw that blessing,

That aspiration,

That offering of our being to me,

Through me,

As me into everything that I produce for you.

Much love.

Thank you for connecting.

And I guess I will be in touch somehow soon.