Emotional Mindfulness can Lead to Healing
Our emotions can be bound in a way that can cause a lot of problems in our lives. Without release, these emotions can wreak havoc on your relationships and your life. Many times, this is because these emotions get tucked away into the background. In time, they mount up and come out in the wrong places.
All too often, we can move through our lives without checking in with ourselves, to determine what is going on within us. This is understandable in our fast-paced, adult lives that we live in. However, not doing this can lead consequences over time. People can detach from us. We can ignore the importance of taking care of ourselves.
Checking in with yourself, involves you identifying what emotion you are feeling. If you struggle with this (and many more people do struggle with this), then start with basic emotions. Content, angry, anxious, and sad are the most basic emotions that you can identify. When you identify the emotion, check in with your body and notice how you’re feeling. In time, you’ll start to notice trends that correlate with particular emotional experiences. After practicing this, you’ll also be better able to identify more specific emotions. You’ll expand your emotional intelligence beyond recognition of those most basic emotions.
After you gain some practice in identifying these emotions, remind yourself why it’s fine to have these experiences. Many people judge the emotions and feelings that they have. However, all of our feelings are there for a reason. Sometimes it’s to remind us of boundaries that we aren’t establishing. Other times it’s to help us connect. We prevent ourselves from reaching these important end goals when we don’t practice compassion and understanding in the emotion.
Many people argue for self-shaming of emotional experiences when they think about behavioral issues. Our behavior is certainly influenced by our emotions. It has been my experience, in working with clients over the years, that it’s actually a lack of emotional identification and experience that leads to behavioral problems. A buildup of unrecognized and unreleased emotions can lead to displays of behavior that are outside of our values.
But these emotions aren’t always easy to hang in. So it’s important to be compassionate with yourself while you’re working to experience and release them. With time and practice, this emotional identification can help you connect with loved ones in your life, and most importantly, with yourself.
