Mindful Wellbeing Week 4: Responding With A Wise Heart

Explore a more challenging emotion and a time when you reacted to it. Allow some forgiveness for that moment and offer yourself some space where a more nourishing response could be possible. Honor the wisdom that is revealed by looking at your emotions with heartfelt curiosity.

Transcript

As we start to notice and become more aware of all of our emotional states,

It may become evident that sometimes we might react rather than respond.

So in this practice,

I invite you to settle in to your body.

Take a few breaths.

Maybe listen to a couple sounds in your environment.

Let yourself drop into your own emotional awareness in this moment.

Noticing,

Labeling,

Recognizing what you might be feeling now.

This way of opening our hearts to the broader spectrum of all of our emotions and with more sensitivity sometimes means that we can see that we have some intense emotions there.

And so I'd like you to now just allow whatever you might be feeling in this moment to be there.

But to also bring to mind perhaps a time when you felt something intensely and had a strong reaction right after.

Maybe you reacted in a way that was not in alignment.

And before you put any judgment on that or self-criticism,

Let's just start with thinking and feeling that it's okay that that moment happened,

Forgiving yourself for that.

And even if a lot of time has passed,

We can still look at that time and see what wisdom it might offer you.

And so offering this inquiry of what would it look like to meet a moment of intensity with a wise and open heart.

What it looked like to meet a challenging feeling with a little bit of space,

Even in the space of just one breath.

Imagining that now,

Imagining that maybe you had room for a breath in that moment or a short walk or something.

What options to respond could have been available to you then?

Remember that we're looking at even moments in our past with just warm curiosity.

We only bring them to the surface so that we can use them to inform how we're going to proceed in the future,

But it's not with any wrongdoing.

When we can look at our emotions in this way,

We then tap into just these incredible revelations and discoveries that we can learn from.