Mindfulness can be a fantastic tool for identifying, coping with, and even resolving difficult feelings and self-limiting behavioral patterns.
This mindfulness technique can also help when we struggle with impulsivity and anxiety. If you struggle with anxiety, it is helpful to alter the way you evaluate the experience.
We all feel anxiety sometimes, but for some it becomes a chronic issue. Anxiety is traditionally defined as future-focused worry or dread. It seems anxiety has become more prevalent in our culture.
Some anxiety is a natural reaction to inner conflict. When we feel an emotion such as sadness compounded with a belief that feelings like sadness shouldn’t exist, then we experience inner conflict and anxiety.
The theoretical framework of primary and secondary emotions also illustrates this point. Secondary emotions are how we feel about our primary emotion. For example, we may feel fear in our bodies after someone pulls out in front of us on the highway. We may have a core belief that it’s not okay to feel fear so we create a story in our mind that the person in the other car is a malicious jerk and then we end up feeling anger. The anger distracts us from the original feeling of fear.
That conflict may literally feel like friction as our thoughts argue with our feelings. The friction and dissonance often feels like anxiety in the body. Don’t you experience some swirling in your gut or increased heart rate when you don’t think you should be feeling what you’re feeling? Check it out for the next couple of days.
Mindfulness involves radical acceptance of what’s being experienced in the present moment, and detachment from the mental assessment or judgment (in this case, detachment from the belief that the feeling “shouldn’t” be there.)
Step 1. Pause and Pay Attention
When you notice that you’re feeling uneasy, start by stopping and noticing what you’re feeling.
Step 2. Acknowledge and own any judgments about your experience
It’s important to accept what’s happening by acknowledging your judgments and beliefs about what you’re experiencing. After all, it’s already happening and there’s no going back.
Byron Katie provides the “Judge Your Neighbor” worksheet before reframing judgments because she recognizes the therapeutic value of being honest about what we think and feel before trying to change anything.
It’s best not to pretend you’re judgment-free if you’re not. Own it, suspend it, and then transform it. Be judgmental first so that you don’t judge yourself for judging.
Step 3. Suspend the judgments (and even the labels) and be willing to explore in a fresh, accepting way
Suspending judgment doesn’t mean that you assume your judgments are wrong, agree with what’s happening, or that you won’t take action to make appropriate conscious changes.
Suspending judgments and labels just means loosening your emotional grip on them and setting them aside for the moment. It is essential to true exploration and contributes to acceptance. Acceptance means allowing the feeling to exist for now.
Once we’ve momentarily acknowledged and suspended our judgments about what we’re experiencing, we have the capacity to be curious in a genuine way. Curiosity is essential to learning but it gets clouded when we think we already know all we can about our experience. When curiosity is stunted, so is learning.
Keep in mind that some of your judgments about what you’re experiencing may be relatively accurate. Suspending judgment doesn’t mean that you’re deciding they’re wrong, it means that you see resistance and self-limiting ideas and you’re willing to return to the experience and ask “what (else) is true?”
Step 4. Stop the mental story line (this step may need repeated frequently)
When we don’t let go of what we think we know, we tend to circle around in the hamster wheel of our thoughts, ruminating. We often think that our ruminations are productive until we realize that we’re stuck in a loop and aren’t actually coming up with useful new answers to the problem. These obsessive ruminations can start to drive us mad.
Racing thoughts are often the mind’s way of distracting us from our actual feelings and keeping us in homeostasis, despite the need to grow. Practice recognizing thoughts and stopping them, no matter how enticing they are.
Step 5. Drop into the awareness of the body
Stop focusing on the thoughts and drop your attention into the body with pure, sensory curiosity and a willingness to feel the emotion in a fresh way. In the case of anxiety, we may have judged it as wrong, bad, unwanted or uncomfortable. By dropping awareness into the body, we bring a childlike curiosity to the feelings themselves.
Notice what anxiety or sadness actually feels like in the body when you aren’t resisting it. Notice how your muscles may tense up around the feeling and allow yourself to release that tension.
This feeling may have been knocking on your door for ages. Rather than turning it away, welcome it right now. Allow your emotion to express itself more fully by suspending the stigmatized labels like “sadness,” “anger” or “fear.”
Step 6. Roll the feeling around like a treasure, exploring new facets, perspectives, and the actual sensations involved
What you’d been calling “sadness” for decades may actually feel like sensations of gentle pressure in your gut or chest. It may feel like subtle tingling sensations. It may change or grow or move.
You may even find that when the thoughts of sadness are released, no feeling remains in the body. These subtle sensations tend to be easier to be with than the stigmatized emotions of “sadness” or “anxiety.” We may even find that we enjoy the subtle sensations when we stop resisting them.
Step 7. Practice presence and self-compassion
Allow the feeling to express itself like a dancer moving inside of you. Breathe into the feeling and offer love to it. Validate the feeling without believing the stories that come with it and might lead to irrational behaviors. This way you can be kind to yourself without falling into impulsive behavior.
For instance, if a young child is crying in a grocery store because he wants 20 candy bars, it’s necessary to nurture and validate the child’s frustration without blindly adopting his perspective and enabling the tantrum by buying the candy bars.
Treat your inner tantrums with love too. There may be moments when the feeling intensifies and you fall into resistance or discomfort that makes you want to run away from it by distracting or “fixing” it.
Rushing into “fixing” feelings can be a way we abandon ourselves in difficult times. Start to think of how you can remain present and accepting for at least a few minutes before you find a healthy distraction.
Imagine that you’re feeling sad and your best friend tells you you’re being a bummer so he’s going to the bar until you cheer up. How does that make you feel? Not great.
So try not to abandon yourself that way when you feel difficult emotions. Presence in the face of difficulty is the ultimate compassion and courage.
Step 8. Ask questions of the feeling and be willing to learn from that experience, not just your thoughts
Invite the feeling in for a metaphorical cup of tea and ask it to tell you why it’s come knocking and what it wants you to understand. Ask and then drop into the feeling and listen to the feeling.
Ask several times so that you don’t get thrown off by more of the automatic or unconscious judgments that you have come to identify with. Be honest about when answers seem to be coming from your mind and when they are coming from the feeling.
This takes practice, trial, and error. Be patient and kind to yourself as you learn to distinguish self-limiting thoughts from deeper knowing. Ask questions that help you learn the point of view of the feeling just like you‘d get to know a new friend. Assume that the feeling is valid from a certain perspective that you’re just not aware of yet.
When you’ve received some feedback from the feeling about what it wants you to understand, you may be surprised to find out that the feeling that had been nagging at you was actually more benevolent than you’d been willing or able to realize.
It may have simply been a part of you (like an inner child) begging for some attention for so long that it turned to rage in order to be seen. The feeling may have been trying to keep you safe in some way that ended up getting out of control and is no longer helpful.
Feelings are guidance systems pointing us in the direction of lessons. Unfortunately, many of us think the lesson is to just get rid of them as soon as possible at all cost because it feels different or uncomfortable. As a result, we may react unconsciously and shut down our capacity to learn and respond from a place of wisdom.
It would benefit us to rediscover how to learn the way we did as young children, to enjoy the wonder of being a part of our environment, exploring the details of life with all our senses; and acknowledging feelings without denying them.
As healthy adults, it is important to learn to express feelings in healthy ways, to respond instead of react.
This wisdom of expression cannot be discovered it we continue to resist our feelings.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) speaks of “Wise Mind” as a good place to respond from. Wise Mind is a collaboration between our emotions and our rational thinking.
When Steps 1 through 8 are practiced, you may find that feeling attentively and intentionally is all that’s needed. If not, the steps will provide you with the capacity to respond from greater wisdom and compassion.
These are the responses that can make the world a more peaceful and compassionate place to live.
*If any of this is overly triggering for you, it may be best not to use these techniques, or to seek the help of a trained guide or therapist.
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Mindfulness is foundational in all of the services with Andrea Shipley. Whether you’re interested in counseling or lifestyle coaching, mindfulness will enrich your experience.
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