M15 Ep024: Do you know how to take care of your strong emotions?

Mindful15: Stress Management | Mindfulness | Meditation

A few months ago, I got some very bad news. It shocked me and made me scared and angry. I was so emotional I couldn’t eat, and no matter how many blankets I used, I couldn’t get warm. I had no one close by to talk, but it almost didn’t matter, because the news so embarrassed me I didn’t want to share. Then I remembered a meditation practice I’d learned... Listen to the podcast: ? Or, read the blog: I decided I had to do something to help myself, so I used a practice I learned from one of my teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh. To be honest, I had to talk myself into doing it, because I felt so bad I didn’t think anything would help. But it did help. It didn’t solve my problem or make my bad feelings magically disappear. But it helped calm those feelings and it gave me a more realistic perspective on the problem so I could get past the emotional state and begin working on a solution. I’m incredibly grateful for having learned this practice and I want to share it with you. This is the practice of sitting with strong emotions: When a strong emotion threatens to overwhelm you, sit with it. Meditate on the emotion and take care of yourself. Meditating on the emotion doesn’t mean thinking about the emotion or trying to make it go away. It means allowing the emotion to be there and noticing how it feels and how it affects you. Sit as you normally would for meditation. Maybe start with a few deeper breaths. Then, begin to notice your emotional state. Are you angry, or sad, or scared, or some combination of things? Let yourself feel the emotion. Don’t try to change it. Just give it some respect by allowing it to be there. Remind yourself that you’re allowed to have strong emotions. Sometimes, you just feel bad, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Feeling bad sometimes is a part of life. Let yourself feel bad. When we fight against our emotions, when we try to make them go away, or when we deny them, they resist us and become stronger. When we accept them and allow them to be, they begin to recede. Next, bring your attention to your body. Notice how the emotion makes your body feel. Slowly explore the whole body and just notice how it is affected. Again, don’t try to change anything. Don’t try to make the sensations go away. Just let them be. Allow them to be there. Finally, give yourself some sympathy. Take your emotion in your arms as if it were a precious child. Allow yourself to feel sorry for the emotion and for yourself. You can even say comforting words to yourself, “There, there, it’s okay. I see how bad you feel. I’ll take care of you.” Because, by sitting like this, you are taking care of yourself. Maybe talking to yourself this way will feel a little silly, but we all want a little comfort, a little babying sometimes. You can give yourself that comfort anytime you need it. And no one else needs to know how you’re talking to yourself. I’m not suggesting that you wallow in self-pity instead of solving your problems. But, in the moments when your emotions are strongest, you may not be a good problem-solver. You may first need to sit for awhile and feel sorry for yourself, and support yourself. Then, when the emotion has subsided a bit, you can move on to taking positive action. Some people I’ve shared this with say they feel like this practice is too self-indulgent. They feel like they don’t deserve to have someone take care of their bad feelings. They don’t deserve comfort. But you deserve this as much as anyone else does, as much as any small, vulnerable child does. If a small child were afraid, you wouldn’t tell her to suck it up and deal with it. You’d comfort her and hold her until her emotions subsided. We seem to feel that adults should just be able to deal with difficulties without any help. But a capable, strong adult isn’t someone who ignores negative emotions. It’s someone who has the skill to take care of difficult emotions and this is one strategy for doing so.