Reframing Emotions

Hey everyone. It's Susan, and I wanted to just offer you something at the end of my day here... 

I run about 5 or 6 groups per week. I love groups. They’re so inspiring to me and I am always jotting down things that I want to talk about and revisit. 

One of the things that came up today was about how people are changing their relationship with their strong feelings -- and they’re meditating more. They’re trying to take space and just be with themselves and explore the feelings -- instead of mind-racing with feelings of worry and anxiety in their different conversations with people. 

Even if you’re new to meditation, I think it’s a great practice when you’re feeling a strong feeling coming in. Just give it a minute. You don’t try to analyze it. You don’t repeat all of the conversations you’ve had, or even what it’s connected to. You just feel it. 

The way I practice is that I just feel it all the way through... as if I had stubbed my toe, I would really bring my attention to the feeling in my toe. I really try to feel the whole stub-throbbing part. I would just feel it all the way through and help myself to have that sensation -- no matter how intense it was. 

I always find that when I get to the end of a feeling (especially if it’s a recurring feeling), I realize that it is usually connected to something that's still upsetting to me. It’s not just the superficial thing that might have happened. It goes all the way back -- like something that I worry about constantly or a pattern of behavior that I'm involved in that makes me feel bad, a friendship or controversy that I had before. If I really go back, I notice that I've had this feeling many, many, many, times before and then, just being able to be with that feeling and changing my relationship with it (and not personalizing it), helps me just experience it differently and show up for myself in a different way. 

I wanted to share that with you -- about having strong emotions and just trying to give yourself a chance to sit with them and not explore them so much intellectually -- but instead, to really get down to the bottom of them. See if you can see where they originate (just for your own information) and then find your way back to yourself, back to your breath, and back to being present in the world. 

A lot of the amazing things, the healing things that happen in my group, are when people just show up for themselves. Then, when they hear other people showing up for themselves,  it's just this incredible synchronicity.  It’s just people explaining their struggles openly, which helps them, but, in turn, really helps everyone in the room. 

So, that’s some of what I do in my work day-to-day; really being inspired by how people look at their lives. I hope that you got something out of what I said today. Hope you had a good day, too! I’ll look forward to talking to you again, but bye for now.