The Multiplicity Of Our Emotional States - Class & Practice

This is a live class at MNDFL in NYC that unpacks the “parts work” of Internal Family Systems, exploring the multiplicity of our emotional states. Following this 15-minute talk is a guided meditation where Ralph walks us gently through the steps to tending and befriending our inner worlds — listening to our emotional parts with curiosity and engaging with them in compassionate dialogue.

Transcript

So there is a kind of traditional practice of beginning any new experience by taking a moment to contemplate and appreciate really just how much had to come together in order for you to be here. If you think about all of the variables that had to come together and coalesce in order for you to have the time, The money, The energy, The able bodiedness, The intellectual and emotional capacity, The relative sanity, And the motivation, And then the gumption to follow through on that motivation. So many people have motivation to come to classes like this and they stay in bed and smoke weed instead or whatever. I thought that would get a laugh but nobody in here does that. It's said that the entire universe is present in any one object or any one moment. That the entire universe is present. I think about this as kind of my favorite fun fact of all time. That we have telescopes that are powerful enough to see back in space time about 13 billion light years to around 400, 000 years after the big bang when the cosmos was just 400, 000 years old. And these enormous, Massive, And incredibly unimaginably massive and hot and pressurized, Magnetized, Gaseous clouds were being drawn towards one another. And out of the immense pressure of their coming together, The heat, The pressure, The magnetism came all of the heavy metals in the known universe. All of the nickel and iron and silver and gold in the known universe came out of that particular moment in cosmic evolution. And we have 0. 02 milligrams on average of gold in our bodies. And in fact we need it for our neurons to fire. In order for you to perceive and take in and have an opinion about what I'm saying right now and to process it for your neurons to fire, That moment 13 billion light years ago had to happen and there needed to be that gold generated and then somehow make its way into your body. It's pretty far out man. So another way of looking at this is, You know, If we look at the cushions that we're sitting on, If we think for a moment about the cushions that we're sitting on, You know, Just the cotton alone, You know, What it took for just the cotton, You know, Somebody had to plant the seed, There had to be nutrients in the soil, There had to be sunlight and ample water but not too much water, Right? And then somebody had to come along and harvest the cotton, Right? And that somebody had to have parents that made them so that they could make the cotton happen, Right? And then cotton had to be taken probably by another person to a truck and then somebody had to drive the truck, Somebody had to build the truck, Somebody had to make the rubber for the tires, Those people had parents and grandparents and the road that the truck drove on to the mill where they made the cotton into fabric, Right? And we could go on and on and on like this forever and it would get really tedious and boring, Right? So what I'm trying to point to here is that we think that things are solid in this world, We think that, You know, The way things appear and what we perceive in the phenomenal world that we collect, That's just how it is, Right? We don't stop too often to consider how things are made of parts, Right? If not, Han would say a self is made of non-self parts, Right? You are made of parts. You are made of parts that are not you. That gold that's in your brain is not you, Right? And the cells in your body, There's 13. 7 trillion cells in our bodies on average, Are not you, Right? Like, Who are you? What makes you you? If we really sat with that question, All we would be able to do, Just like these meditation cushions, Is start pointing to variables that had to come together and coalesce to make you happen, Right? We are not a self so much as we are a process and this is good news when it comes to our emotional worlds, Which is what we're here to practice and work with, That we are, There's a multiplicity to who we are, Just like Walt Whitman in the very cliche now quote of, You know, I contain magnitudes, Right? We are. We are multiple by nature and we experience this all the time in the way that we talk to ourselves and it's not an inner monologue, In case you haven't noticed, It's an inner dialogue or sometimes like an inner, Like, Just cluster, Right, Of voices or feelings or motivations, Right? I want to go to the meditation class. Another part of me wants to stay at home in bed, For example. I want to go to the beach today but I've got all these errands that need to be run. I want to be with this person that I am developing romantic feelings for but holy shit, That scares me because it's so vulnerable and I've been hurt before, You know, And I don't want to have my heart crushed again but I'm still drawn to them, Right? So we're in dialogue, Parts of us are in dialogue with each other all the time and in a sense, Just like gold is its own entity or cotton is its own entity, Each one of these parts of us really are their own entity, Right? In that I could get hurt and experience sadness but I probably wouldn't experience that sadness or that hurt too long before I got angry or shut down and defensive in some way, Isn't it? They say that anger is a secondary emotion. It's never the first thing that you feel. The first thing is always pain of some sort and if you've ever dropped something heavy on your foot, You know what I'm talking about, Right? Because you feel the hurt of that and then what's next? Motherfucker, God damn it. You get like a little pissed off, Right? That's true physically and that's true emotionally. So if we are made of all of these different parts and these different parts are in conversation with us and we with them really, Then this is good news in that the pain that we feel, The loneliness that we feel, The longing that we feel, The fear that we feel, That's never a final situation, That's never a stuck situation. It's not as it appears to be. It's a situation that has a multiplicity to it and is therefore workable, Is therefore something that we can learn to interact with in such a way that things become clearer and less confusing and less bound up, Less hemmed in, Less claustrophobic perhaps, Because we all feel that at times, That we're stuck in a particular situation or with a particular constellation of feelings that we like hate and want to get out of, But we can't. But see there's a really good example and we're going to get down to the practice in just a moment, But there's a really good example of that sort of dialogue. That's one kind of dialogue we could have. I could be anxious and hate that anxiety. And that's one kind of dialogue, Right? There's the anxiety, It's talking to me, It's saying something, It's present. There's a communication that's happening from that anxiety and then my hatred of it and my wanting it to go away, My wanting to fix it, My maybe even wanting to meditate it away. That's one kind of response. So what if we notice that, Began with noticing it, This is our practice today, Is inviting emotions that whatever is naturally present, We don't really have to go looking for them, And then noticing how reactive we get towards them and then seeing if we can shift that reaction because what if anxiety were to arise and it were met by empathy? If we were able to relax out of the hatred of it, Out of the natural desire to want to fix it. It's natural, It's not wrong. Anxiety is deeply uncomfortable. But what if we were to offer that part of ourselves that's freaking out some understanding and compassion instead? That's a far less stuck situation and that's a situation in which even intuitively right now just as we're talking and kind of unpacking these ideas, You can sense how there would be more space to that situation, Less of like a trapped claustrophobic kind of sense and more of there's room for that anxiety to move. And there's room to maybe discover why you're anxious in a different way or the nature of your anxiety or why it seems to be on repeat. So that's what we're here to explore is not so much how do we never have negative emotions again, But how do we encounter the inherent difficulties and frankly shittiness that comes our way in life without having to be enslaved by our reactions. Just because it's uncomfortable doesn't mean you have to hate it and it definitely doesn't mean that that experience has no value or doesn't have something to show you or teach you. We are sometimes such children in the face of difficulty, Isn't it? I've been doing this lately. Last thing I'll say is I've been running on a treadmill pretty routinely more recently and I always want to back out and switch to walking like the moment there's discomfort in my legs, Like the moment my calves are tightening or my quads are tightening or there's a little ache in the arches of my feet. I'm like it's time to walk, This is too much. But I've been doing this thing of just stopping and checking in with that and am I really at my limit? Am I really in pain? Am I really in danger of injuring something here? And every time I realize like no, It's just a little uncomfortable. I'm just being a fucking baby and I can keep going. We get like this in our lives too and it really limits our options when we have, Just because I'm afraid of it means I can't do it. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean I can't do it. I can't be with that person or I have to cut them off or whatever it is, You know? I can't quit smoking because the withdrawals are too tough. I can't change my behavior because it freaks me out too much. No, It doesn't have to be that way. We can learn how to relate to the freak out in such a way that we're no longer solvable. Enough ideas. Let's dive in for a practice here. Is anybody new to meditation in the room? Cool. Welcome. It's an honor. So we find a nice upright dignified posture, Legs loosely crossed or feet flat on the floor. If at any point this legs loosely crossed business becomes too painful, You can switch to knees bent, Feet flat on the floor. Let the back round and rest. Then hands placed at mid-thigh level. I like mine facing down but if it ain't broke, Don't fix it if you have another way of doing it. Find your seat to get super heavy. Can you just notice how much you can rely on the earth to support you here so that you're rooted. It's safe to let go into the earth. And then energy and fluidity moving up the spine. And then just curious, Tuning into the neck which is where a lot of energy tends to get trapped, The neck and the shoulders. How many people just show up hands have like sense of tightness, Stiffness or pain in their necks right now? Okay. Fair number of you. So let's try this really quick just as a precursor to meditation. We're getting into the body here. We're getting into the breath. Bring your hands together like this class and then place it under your chin, The clasp fist. And then as you breathe in, Let your elbows spread out and let your head go back, Breathing in. And then as you breathe out, You're going to push down on your chin. You're going to push your chin like kind of hard into your hands. And let that straighten your neck. You'll feel like a sweet spot. We'll do this a few times. So breathing in, Head goes back and then as you breathe out, You're pushing your chin hard into your hands. You're bringing your hands down a little bit but not much just so that your head can find the right alignment. Do you feel that how it's like straightening out the neck in this nice way? Try it a couple more times. Your hands come back down to the same level. The chin is pushing in and you can feel how the back of the neck just lengthens and straightens really nicely. Keep going if you want a couple more. Do one more together. And then just bring your hands back down to your lap and notice what's different. See if you can have a longer neck. Maybe bring your chin in towards your throat a little bit. Eyes lowered, Maybe closing, Tongue removed from the roof of your mouth and resting in its palate. What is it like to be here in this body right now? And without trying to change that, We'll simply begin breathing into the body. So now taking deep breaths, Maybe through the mouth would be nice and sending those breaths all the way down to the belly and just exhaling definitely through the mouth in a relaxed way. Start taking full breaths, Not forceful but definitely full breaths and it's like your lungs extend down into your belly. The belly is going out in all directions in front of you as you breathe in and simply relaxes as you breathe out. And maybe the body starts unwinding and softening as you continue to breathe in this way. Maybe the shoulders soften and the cheeks soften and the brow softens, Maybe. Maybe the butt can get a little heavier, Sink into the cushion a little more. And then we can add to this to get an even fuller breath and really begin nourishing our system. So after you fill up the belly and it's all the way full, Now you can keep breathing in and let the breath move up into the chest. When we fill up the chest cavity, The body expands out to the left and the right. So the belly is expanding going out in front of you and then you move up to the chest and the ribs go out to the left and the right and spread out like an accordion. It should feel pretty good, Like it's both invigorating and relaxing at the same time. Maybe the shoulders soften even more. Your back relaxes, Your eyes relax. We'll do three more breaths together just for good measure. And as you are ready, Just letting go of the deep mouth breathing and letting the mouth gently close, Just switching to the nose. And then zeroing in on the heart, Center of the chest. Finding the middle of your sternum and then tracing back into the body a bit. Just for a few minutes here, Having a sense of gathering everything on the inhale into the space of the heart as you breathe in and as you breathe out, The body just relaxes. The breath just gently flows out, Expands. And you breathe in again and you're gathering your attention, You're gathering your thoughts, You're gathering your energy, You're gathering sounds in the room, Anything in your experience is just gently, Gently coming into the space of the heart with the breath. Just a nice gentle relaxed exhale. Try that for a few minutes. Listen for a bit more. . . And speaking of the heart, How is your heart? What are the feelings and emotions you've been cycling through, Wanting to get rid of, Stuck with, Running from? What's it been like to be in your life lately? Do you have a sense of some emotional part of you? It's just kind of ready to be acknowledged, Be felt in a new way. Can you allow whatever that is, Whether it's clearly identifiable like a sadness or if it's a jumble of things, It might be just pure distraction, It might be numbness or shut down, It might be even boredom or feeling like you're not getting it. But invite something in that you've been struggling with and welcome it, Make space for it for once. And what is it like? What's it like in your body to feel this? Are there sensations, Heaviness, Sharpness somewhere? Does this part of you seem to be saying something? Can you notice how you're inclined to respond? We can be honest, We most likely want to push this away, We're resisting it, We think that this isn't how the meditation was supposed to go. That's okay, That's real. But can you ask this part of you, Whatever's present for you, Is there something that it wants you to know? Just try that and see what comes, See if you get a sense of a response, It could be an image, It could be a shift in how you feel, It could be a story in your head. And then again, Notice your reaction, Are you hating this part, Are you sick of it? Now that you're hearing more of the story. And if it's a negative reaction to whatever this emotional part of you is, I want you to just ask your reaction, Just try this, Ask your reaction to it, The hating of it, The resistance, Whatever it is, If it'll just please move to the side. Will you just give me a little bit of space to be here with this upset part of me? Okay, And if you have a sense of your reaction falling back, Notice if you can find a space inside that's a little bit clear and open, Maybe even curious, Willing to get curious. Whatever's going on in your heart, Mind, Body, Can you just get curious right now? Curious to know more, Maybe curious about how to help. And if you can't get curious, Just ask whatever's in your way to please move to the side. Please just move to the side. And so now I want you to notice something. When we are in our negative emotions, It's always one of two things actually. It's either like a hurt part of us that we wish we could get rid of, Sense of unworthiness or pain or resentment or fear, Or it's a part of us that's trying to defend us in some way, Trying to keep us safe in some way, Like our anger, Our numbness, Our compulsive behaviors. It's all ways of finding safe territory again. That's about it. This is either a hurt part of you or a part of you that's like a defender. And so if it's a hurt part of you for this last little bit, Can you just notice that this part is like a child? Can you let that melt you? Can you begin to hold that child? Listen to them. Look into their eyes. Breathe with them. Place your hand on your heart so that they know that you're there with them. And if it's a defensive part of you, I invite you to just maybe express some appreciation. Maybe try saying, Thank you so much for trying to take care of me, Man. Thank you. Maybe this part of you, If you have a defensive part present, Maybe it needs something from you, Like to set a boundary or to change a behavior or something in order for it to relax and stop working so hard. Okay. So we'll just take a few minutes here. If it's a wound, It is your child. Please tend to your child. If it's a defender, Just try to be with this part of you in a really friendly way. What can we do to be on the same team more often? There's not one way of doing this, By the way. Okay. Okay. One final question. And again, It doesn't matter what's going on in your mind. There's some part of you or parts of you present. If this part of you didn't have to be this way, Weighed down by woundings or negative beliefs about your worthiness or the sense of having to protect you, Having to cover up any vulnerability. Now, If these parts didn't have to do this, If they were freed somehow to do something else, To contribute to your life in a different way, Just ask, What would they rather be doing? Another world is possible. Another inner world is possible. So we'll close with just this nice simple way for all of you to feel better. And that's by taking those deep belly breaths again through the nose or the mouth. It's a little easier to get a full breath through the mouth. Just like we were breathing in the beginning, Deeply nourishing your whole system with the breath. Maybe emphasizing the exhales a little bit so things slow down. Keep breathing. Try to breathe as big as any of the feelings that have been present for you. And here at the tail end, We're going to break totally out of our jaded, Busy New Yorker vibe. This is a real or fake smile to elicit serotonin from the brain. Nobody's looking. This isn't about how you look. This is about the brain hack involved. Just hold that for a little bit. See if that helps to shift things, Help to brighten things a little. All right? And then just transitioning so, So gently, Take your time. If you feel moved to offer a bow, Just to the space and to the fellow practitioners around you, That is welcome, But it is definitely optional. Practice is like sober journeying sometimes, You know. Really really close to hypnosis somehow. So, I have a question actually, Because this went different ways for all of us. Probably a third of you really got something from it, A third of you kind of sort of, And a third of you were like, Can't wait to get the fuck out of here. Generally how these things go. But I'm curious about the last question that we asked of your emotional parts, That if things could be a different way, How would that part of you want to express itself? I'll give you an example from my last therapy session actually with my wizard of a therapist. A really jaded, Super cool, Super punk rock part of me that loves that I wear all black every single day. We were working with that very bitter part of me and when we asked that question, That part of me said, I'd rather draw people in with love. And it didn't come in words, It was just this sense of wanting to offer love and wanting to attract people by being a more loving person and it was like, Wait, What? Like my super pissed off 14 year old self, Like is actually a hippie? Damn it. So when you asked that question, What came through for you? If anything. I have one more question. Just show of hands, Who was working with like a more defensive part of you? Maybe distraction, Numbness, Anger, Resentment. Yeah. Okay. Just check in with yourself right now and raise your hand again if you noticed that that part of you was exhausted and that interesting, Like when it comes to the ways that we are more ourselves, There is always like 100% of the time a sense of, I don't really want to be this way, But I feel like I have to be. That ought to make us really curious actually. I'm going to leave that for you to contemplate. Yeah, We got to wrap up here. I just want to say a couple more things really quick. One is if there's any questions or if anybody's like super triggered right now, Please come and talk to me. There's a little bit of time between now and the next class and I'd love to check in with you. Second of all, If you went really deep today, Please, Please, Please treat yourself. Please enter the street gently. If you feel drawn to a French macaroon from the cafe up the street, Like fucking get six. Your meditation teacher told you to, But like treat yourself. What we just did together is super deep and really earnest, Very rare, Special work and you deserve good things. All right. Have a wonderful day everybody. Thank you so much.

Reviews

🙏🙏

Amazing jour eh to touch our wounds with compassion

Thank you, Ralph! That was one of the best IFS meditations I have ever done. Excellent breath work and use of the half smile to pour on some serotonin in the end. Brilliant. I was profoundly affected; it was deeply healing and insightful for me. I plan on using this meditation again. And what you shared in the class section completely adjusted my perspective to such a healthier view of the parts I’m uncomfortable with. You have an awesomely loving personality, too. 5 stars!

Few words were / are not from my dictionary but... Overall the concept of parts that we are made of is appealing. When I asked the question to my heart part, the answer came that to let the other person know that what s/he caused shows more of their dark side. And just leave them to know.
Namaste 🙏

Thank you so much. Your meditations are fun as well as well as deep. Blessings, Luna.