Your thoughts generate feelings and they are not always very accurate. You might wake up at 3 am with some vague feelings of stress or anxiety and then go on a hunting expedition for an explanation for your feelings. This can lead us far astray and create an escalation of emotion.
Sometimes, you just need to honor and lean into a raw emotion, rather than give yourself an explanation. We love our logic and justify our feelings of anger, fear, dread but this can really backfire as we reject and stiffen around our own feelings, rather than notice, accept and integrate them. It makes an interesting experiment to turn towards our raw emotion, leading to a softening through compassion, acceptance and honoring our own internal truth.
Challenge:
- Notice and recognize your own inner natural experience.
- Accept and acknowledge this is my own big emotion.
- With great compassion toward yourself, Lean in and accept your own emotion.
- After all, why would you turn away when it is only YOU that you are turning away from when you reject your own inner experience?
- Be as kind toward yourself as you might wish others would be toward you.
Just recognize that if you stiffen and reject yourself when you feel strong emotion, challenge yourself to instead become accepting and honoring of your own emotion. After all, if you are battling with yourself to not have a certain feeling or to only accept it if you have a reason for your anger, fear, etc., then you will struggle with an ongoing spiraling of emotion. Choose a gentler approach instead.
