Press play to watch Zoom video above, password: EMOTIONS

Your emotional STATE is your energy. It’s the energy you feel inside, the energy you project to the world, and it’s what determines how you think, feel, behave and perceive your environment and the people in it.

It is vital that we understand our emotions in order to experience more joy, more of the time. The mastery of our emotions is key for our mental and psychological fitness. THIS DOES NOT MEAN don’t feel your feelings. Unfortunately, many of us have been conditioned to block out difficult emotions in order to mentally survive. But consistently blocking ourselves from feeling them is enormously detrimental to our well being as well as to our ability to connect with others.

Waves of emotion are exactly in accordance with nature, therefore are natural.

Think about the word “wave” - Emotions are like water, they’re meant to flow freely in and out of our bodies. When we repress, suppress, or cling to them, emotions go from water to stone, and end up calcifying in our jaw, stomach, chest, neck, and back. When this happens, we must intervene.

You have every right to feel what you feel, but the truth is, many of us get stuck in emotional patterns that do not serve us. Instead of truly feeling the emotion and then allowing it to cycle out of our body, we tend to hold on, often unwittingly. We all have an “emotional home” - that is, an emotional destination we go to habitually when we’ve been triggered by a circumstance. For some it’s sadness, for others its anger, or anxiety, self-pity, or worry. Some people live in this home all the time, overburdened by it. For some, and perhaps you relate, they visit it under stress. Even though we ALL experience all kinds of emotion, there is always, and I do mean always, a place where we go to on the regular under stress. Our work, then, is to look at our home closely, and when necessary open up the windows, and air it out.

JOURNAL

  1. On a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left, write at the top: “empowering/positive emotions”. On the right side of the line, write: “disempowering emotions”. Begin with your positive emotions: write down every empowering emotion you feel in a given week. Some ideas are: joyful, peaceful, adventurous, serene, calm, happy, etc. Then on the other side, write down every disempowering feeling or emotion you experience in a given week. Some examples are: angry, depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, negative, irritable.

  2. Circle the top emotion from each list you experience the most on average. What are they?

  3. With total honesty and curiosity: Is the top negative emotion you feel on average one that you are very familiar with? For example, I go to fear and anxiety most typically under stress. Thus, fearfulness and anxiety is familiar to me.

  4. How often do you truthfully feel this disempowering emotion? (you may be feeling it a whole lot more due to your circumstance, but be honest about how its played a role in your life even previously)

  5. Identify how this emotional pattern plays out. What has to happen for you to feel this way? What are the triggers? List every reason for it surfacing for you.

  6. What negative impact has it had on your life? In other words, how has it sabotaged your progress? Stolen your dreams? Disrupted your peace or someone else’s? Describe in detail the consequences you’ve experienced from regularly indulging in this emotion.

  7. What benefit have you received for it? For instance, sometimes we get attention, or we use it an excuse not to take action or risks. Or it keeps us safe.

OK, NOW TRY THIS:

On a piece of paper draw a large triangle. On the bottom of the triangle, write: “Physiology”. On the left, write: “Focus”. On the right, write: “Language/meaning”. In the center, write down the disempowering emotion you historically and currently go to the most when you’re triggered or stressed.

  1. When you feel this emotion, what is your body doing? Describe your shoulders, your chest, your belly, your breath, energy, jaw, etc.

  2. What do you have to focus on in order to feel this way? Do you focus on the past, or the future? Is what you’re focusing on in color, technicolor, or black and white? Is it up close, or far away? Get as detailed as possible.

  3. What are you saying to yourself? What are the key words or phrases you keep saying to yourself? Are you asking a particular question, such as “why does this always happen? Or, “why am I not enough” or _______?

  4. What's the conclusion you have about life, the circumstance, or the person that makes you feel this way? For example, do you say something like: “this always happens because they just don’t care”. (This is just an example to stimulate your thought)

  5. Draw another triangle and repeat questions 1-4 using your most frequently felt empowering, or positive emotion at the center of the triangle.

EMOTIONS

30-DAY CHALLENGE

For 30 days, get very curious about your emotions and energy. Whenever you are overcome with strong emotion - good or bad, peaceful or stressful, identify what you’re focusing on, what your body is doing, and what narrative, or thoughts you’re having about the situation, the other person, or about yourself.

Warning: This is an extremely powerful exercise of introspection and growth. Your challenge is to not go into judgment, but to stay in the curiosity, and to see if you can move towards more empowering states, more frequently by merely observing your thoughts, interpretations, and your body.