Allowing Challenging Emotions

These are very emotional times. If your experience lately has been anything like mine, you have found yourself dealing with many challenging emotions. In this week's track, I remind you that your emotions are valid and that you needn't feel bad about feeling bad. I also explore how to 'sit' with your emotions without feeding them and perpetuating them so that they last longer than necessary. Love, Kristin

Transcript

Hey there everybody this is Kristen from Teaching Balance and I am here with this week's mindfulness meditation practice.

We are in the month of May and the Teaching Balance theme for this month is kind of overarching kind of big and it's the theme of allowing and of course that can take lots of different forms but for this week what I thought would be interesting to explore is the idea around allowing challenging emotions.

So let me tell you what I mean by that.

As you can imagine we all often find ourselves faced with challenging emotions and I don't like to say necessarily bad emotions but I mean we all know that no one's necessarily getting overly concerned about an excess of joy or peace you know what I mean it's it's really more about feeling overwhelmed perhaps or having to work with the emotions like and of course there's the sliding scale of severity and how you want to perceive this but things like sadness or fear and anxiety or anger and again each of them having their degrees of severity things things of that nature and of course there's many more you could add to the list but those types of emotions that when we feel them there's a part of us that would rather not be feeling them either that the circumstances that inspired them didn't occur or that the feelings themselves perhaps just wouldn't be quite as present for us as they might be in that moment even if for some reason they are not necessarily contextually related to what's happening or whatever that whatever that might look like.

So when it comes to this idea of allowing emotions I want to make sure that I make the distinction clear at the outset that this is really an invitation to feel your feelings and it's also about not perpetuating them and feeding them in a way that is not necessarily in your best interest in terms of your mental health and wellness.

So for example if you are finding yourself at any time dealing with some emotions around let's say anger and the anger itself you know is not bad it's just difficult for whatever reason because perhaps your anger is on the high end and it's really more around like rage and being incensed and you know all of those types of more intense levels when it comes to to this emotion and of course it could apply to all of those challenging emotions but let's go with something like this.

What I want to encourage you to do is allow yourself to feel it just like I said a moment ago allow yourself to feel your feelings don't judge yourself for feeling what you feel don't be hard on yourself and tell yourself like I shouldn't be feeling this way because of whatever fill in the blank like I don't have it as bad as someone else or you know I should be happy with what I have or you know like all the various ways where we begin to discount and trivialize our feelings.

If you're feeling this feeling then it's valid it just is and and how you feel is not something that can be compared to how somebody else feels or how someone else would react to a situation or how someone else would handle something they are entirely distinct and so you can't necessarily put all this pressure on yourself to handle things better so to speak or to feel things differently than you feel like you should be feeling okay and so that's the the allowing it to be that's the feeling your feelings and the not trivializing them and then the other piece is as you allow them allow them to be there without feeding them and examples of what that would look like would be telling yourself the same story over and over or telling the people in your life the story of what has upset you so much to stick with this example that I gave or you know doing something to keep the the issue going in a way that is not constructive but it's just about maybe being right or something like that because at least for anger in particular there's a quality of feeling justified if you feel angry if you're angry about something you probably feel that you're right about something and it's kind of interesting in that way and so whatever you're feeling around that whatever you're noticing around it the trick is to not feed it now this can also take the same kind of form with something like sadness like telling yourself the story about why you're so sad and what happened and why it was upsetting and you're really just perpetuating the emotion beyond its natural life cycle for lack of a better way of expressing it so so think of it that way and then when it comes to the idea of how to if it's useful how to imagine it I like to think of it as allowing your meditation to sit next to you on the bench so like that did I say meditation I meant emotion so you're sitting on the bench and you're letting your sadness be there and you're letting your anger be there you're letting your grief be there and you're not trying to pretend it's not there you know like looking away and you know it just denying its reality and you're also not you know feeding it and perpetuating it and sort of getting it all worked up and making it even bigger than it is you're just being present to it you're just coexisting with it and you're letting yourself see it for what it is not making it any better than it is and not making it any worse than it is and then last thing I'll say before we jump into our meditation is when it comes to these challenging emotions one of the best ways to sit with it is to actually notice it and be present to it when you are meditating and more specifically noticing the sensations in your body associated with that emotion so if you're feeling angry where do you feel it is it in like your eyes or the clenching of your hands or your jaw if you're feeling sadness do you feel that almost in like a heaviness and you know your posture it's always very different and it's different for everyone and from moment to moment so my invitation to you and what I'm gonna actually have us do with this practice today is to just check in with any emotions that might be present and see if we can feel where we might feel them in our bodies so let's go ahead and get started I'm gonna set my timer for 10 minutes if you would go ahead and allow yourself just to find that meditation posture that mindful posture if you're on a pillow or a cushion your legs are crossed that's fine and if you are sitting in a chair if you can just putting both feet flat on the ground with your legs uncrossed just so that you have more stability and a quality of groundedness if you haven't already either lowering your gaze or closing your eyes just resting your hands wherever they feel comfortable this is a very low pressure zone so please don't feel like you have to get it right sit perfectly none of that is important it's just general guidelines it's more important that you're here and that you're doing it if you haven't already go ahead and take some deeper breaths filling up the lungs with air from the bottom to the top and emptying those lungs of air from the top all the way down to the air at the bottom and allowing yourself just to do that a few more times if deep breathing is hard for you today then just allowing yourself to breathe a little deeper deeper or a little longer but again not feeling bad about it sometimes deeper breathing is hard for us and then when you're ready allowing your breathing to resume its natural rhythm to start us off I would love for you to just rest your awareness on whatever anchor is comfortable for you so if you're new to this the options include resting your awareness on the breath and the sensations associated with the breath noticing its wave-like quality that appeals to you you can also rest your awareness on the body either in its entirety or could be just one part like your hands or your tongue or your feet and then the third option for you would be to rest your awareness on sounds sounds inside the room or outside the room maybe even inside yourself like the ringing in your ears you might not have noticed until now so what I'd like for us to do is I'd like for us to just sit in silence for a little bit no pressure letting go of any need to get it right to crush your meditation and instead just allow yourself to take a break allow yourself just to rest for these few minutes and then I'm gonna chime in a little bit to talk about emotion so let's just sit in silence for a little bit as you continue to sit in awareness in mindful awareness your present moment experience if you'd like I'd like to invite you to just check in and just notice if any emotions are present for you right now now if there's more of an absence of emotion that's fine you can just keep going with your meditation but for those of you who do notice emotions perhaps allowing yourself to get a sense of how would you name this emotion or emotions it's a mix and then allowing yourself to in a way that is curious and interested just noticing if there's any physical association with this emotion in your body so if you're feeling an emotion like joy where do you feel joy in your body could be warm sensation around the heart maybe feeling of a smile and if you're feeling a more challenging emotion same idea if it's sadness where do you feel that sadness or disappointment do you feel it in your hands your face do you feel that in your heart there's no correct place so just noticing whatever you can notice and we're not trying to fix this or change it this is not about remedying the situation instead it's about being very present to how things are and it's that presence believe it or not that allows us to move through the emotion without feeding it so just like we observe any sensations during meditation some people like to think of it as like a scientist with a clipboard documenting your moment-to-moment sensations where do you feel whatever it is that you feel and allowing it to feel that way at least for these few minutes but again not taking a deep dive or making it bigger than it is just seeing it for what it is allowing it being present to it and then if you notice perhaps even observing how it changes how the perimeter of the sensation might move just noticing whatever you can notice let's just rest our awareness on this sensation until the final bell so if you were to sit with that observant attention to your sensations associated with the emotions for longer it is more likely that you'll actually notice those shifts so if you feel for example maybe a heaviness in your heart area a sadness but you stay with it you just you know sit with it make peace with it allow it you might notice that it's gonna shift it might move it might first feel heavy but then it might feel I don't know buzzy moving and I don't know these are all of course like you know it depends on you and what your sensations are but those are just examples and there's something I think comforting and empowering about being deeply present to those emotions in particular the more challenging ones because it means that you don't have to be this just you know helpless passenger necessarily on you know the you know the emotional rollercoaster that you can do something that you can allow yourself to be deeply present to how it is right now