Photo on left courtesy of zwalshphotography. That picture depicts a sad white American 20-something smoking. The picture in the middle depicts a Black child aged 3-5 with sad face resting on arms. The picture on the right depicts an older Indian woman with a sad, pensive look. The written part of this post describes a meditation/visualization exercise and what it does. There's an audio at the bottom in which I walk you through this powerful process for meeting a situation that brings up strong emotion. A Formula for Meeting Feelings Well I’ve got a sentence for you to play with—a formula, actually, with an X to plug something into, but its purpose isn’t mathematical. It’s to support you to move through any strong feeling better, with greater awareness, in a way that’s kind to yourself. It has the lovely effect of both allowing you to come closer to a feeling, while simultaneously giving you distance and perspective—thus beginning to set you free, or to disconnect overt suffering from pain or discomfort. Unavoidable Pain/Optional Suffering There’s no way to avoid feeling bad sometimes. It seems to be a reality of a human life on planet Earth. We haven’t done something wrong or failed at being an evolving human being when we feel bad. Grief is real. Depression strikes. We have angry reactions (and they’re actually useful, sometimes, to show us that something’s off and must be dealt with) or feel building frustration (which is useful to call us to a reset if we catch it and respond!). There’s truly no problem with feeling bad. The problem is that we let it get to us, hijack the mind, and take us down the rabbit hole—or to places far uglier and less cozy than I imagine any rabbit hole to be. We quickly go from pain or discomfort to overt suffering--and that part is typically optional. Think-Feel Feedback Loop You’ve seen yourself put a story to what you’re feeling, right? You’ve caught yourself reviewing details of the story that seems to be the obvious cause of a bad feeling. Absorbed in the story, you intensify the feeling, and that stronger feeling asks for more story. Redundantly reviewing its details and your assessments of it (not fair, not okay, makes no sense), you get sucked in deeper; the feeling gets stronger still. Taking off on some defensive inner response (not what I meant, not my fault, not what I usually do) or some wretched interpretation (unseen, abandoned, betrayed), you may successfully get stuck in a bad feeling and perpetuate it for some time. Come Close to Feelings You May Want to Push Away Even if you try to shove it down, you can’t quite shake it off. It colors whatever you do—certainly your sense of well-being, possibly what others around you experience. The dark cloud you carry around may dim the whole room. Or are you someone who pretends it’s all good, unaware you’re radiating something false and impenetrable that frustrates and mystifies those around you? But you could come close to the feeling instead, even magnify it for a moment, and really let yourself feel it. (By feel it, I mean feel it, not think about it.) Hey, the feeling’s here anyway (it’s present), so you may as well give it your awareness (your presence). That’s where my formula comes in. Tell yourself, This is what X feels like. Ideally, sit down or lie down with it a moment, but you could do this while working on the computer, or performing any rote task. Here you are, living your human life. And here’s this normal (painful) feeling: X. If you can close your eyes, this can help you drop fully into the feeling, even for 30 seconds or a minute. I’m going to first walk you through coming close to the feeling, then have you notice you’re gaining distance in so doing. Plug In a Feeling Name or General Description of Situation for X Your first job is to fill in the X with your best label or name for the feeling at hand. This is what loneliness feels like. This is what techno-frustration feels like. This is what worry about someone you love feels like. This is what distress over planetary problems feels like. Whatever it is, name it, plug it in for X, and take it in. This Is What X Feels Like This. This is what it feels like. The phrase itself holds an invitation to feel it, so that's your second job. Not just feel it, but feel it precisely. You could
In short, come close enough that you truly let yourself feel what you’re feeling. In this way, you get present to the feeling. By not ignoring or minimizing it, you teach yourself that you’re fully equipped to feel this painful sensation: it’s not bigger than you; it won’t get the best of you. Into the Feeling, Out of Conceptualizing It! Perhaps most important, this gets you out of transferring a bodily sensation to the mind, making a concept out of it, bypassing the actual felt, sensory experience of what’s moving through you. This in itself is powerful. It also allows the feeling X, I believe, to better move through you and move on: you know, that pesky the-way-out-is-through thing. The Simple Power of Breathing a Feeling And while you’re giving X your awareness, you might consciously give it breath, though it’s likely that will happen anyway. The breath is soothing, calming, leveling to the nervous system. The breath is kind. You might think in terms of the breath wanting to support you and get you through whatever you’re moving through. The breath, too, is a felt, sensory experience that we seldom feel at all. When you sit with this formula, tune in to the breath (no manipulations needed, though you’re welcome to slow it down and deepen it if you like—it’ll go that direction anyway if you give it attention for a bit). Gaining Distance from the Feeling by Joining the Human Race As you repeat This is what X feels like, be aware that any number of human beings have felt this way over time. Right now, some are feeling it right along with you. Connect to them. Be one with them. You might even imagine specific faces. Take these from all the continents, from various races, ages, socio-economic levels, gender expressions. We are all one. You are not alone, and in holding awareness of others in the same boat, you cast your vote that they feel relief too, that they feel less alone too. As you simply keep holding what X feels like with the gaze of the compassionate, dispassionate witness, noticing that others feel it too, welcome yourself to the human race. Take the compassion you’re able (probably more easily) to extend to others, and bring it back to yourself. (Aw, sweetheart, Ow.) And know it's okay for you to feel this: it's something that human beings, in the course of a lifetime, over the course of eons, feel and have felt. Why shouldn’t you feel it too, just for now? There’s no problem. And you don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to add in and review and get preoccupied with the story of the hour that seems to have launched the feeling X. You can just feel this pain. You can let it move through you and move on. Below is an audio version of this exercise. I highly recommend that you do it when you're in the thick of a feeling, especially if you don't know what to do with it, can't get out of the related story, or need support coming back to yourself and walking yourself through it kindly. If you're not doing it for the first time, you can begin at the 2:45 mark, when we launch the actual process. Click on left arrow on audio bar below to hear the meditation/visualization. Love & blessings, Jaya p.s. Want a list of things NOT to get involved with when you feel bad? Here are my well-loved (helpful, practical) 11 Rules for When You’re Discouraged or Distressed.
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![]() No, but can anything halt a running rumination, never mind dissolve it? I maintain that a good breath plus a good question has potent reset power. I’ll give you three footholds to this here:
In a hurry? Skip to #3 and grab some potentially arresting questions for next time the mind tries to run away with you. 1. A story I recently went to the coast of Maine for the love of sea and summer and the place itself. It’s so lovely to breathe that clean air full of salt—and consciously breathing is my favorite reset. One day, I got into a muddy line of rumination. You know when you throw a whole relationship into question? That. Reality: sunshine and blue sky. My mental space: a dank, festering atmosphere for some putrid specimen to grow unimpeded and keep spawning hands to palpate for problems. (Yeah, yuck.) Standing outside to feel my feet on the earth (I was going for grounding to move out of my head), I heard a bird call I couldn’t identify. From grounding, the simple act of connecting to one of my senses brought me more fully back to presence. That’s when I took a breath that I actually paid attention to (coming closer to presence still), and I reached for a question. Let me add that I was already aware of the line of thinking that kept reasserting itself, and I had already consciously noted some wise stuff. (It hadn’t fully taken yet, but I don’t consider that a problem; I trust the process.) These things I knew:
Nailed it. I felt an immediate and pure release. This could be a good daily question to ask the self about anyone close, and it’s especially brilliant for a romantic/primary partner. Because you already know this, don’t you? You actually don’t need anything from anybody. The best work of unsticking from what you think you need from another (certainly the beloved) really happens between you and you, and you can leave them out of it. They don’t need to show up in any way (except however they do) for you to keep letting go of wanting to control them or of expecting them to make you comfortable. (Um, and rumination doesn’t help.) The question reset me and I had a great day from there (peninsula, beach, lobster) and felt love and joy with the human being in question. The pure truth of needing nothing from another in order to be well, happy, safe, in love—anything—came in so fully for me that my mind didn’t even try to pick the rumination back up. Now, you know the mind will typically try. In my case, on that day, it had robotically picked up a small set of repeating thoughts for at least an hour with factory-set arms of steel. I just don’t let this sort of thing move in for the day, so note that I was already in my process. Most important, I hadn’t been believing those thoughts. I had been witnessing them and telling myself truer things. So this probably set me up to be more open to the power of the question. It’s a useful thing to practice, that not believing your own thoughts. A good question, even if it doesn’t just dissolve the whole thing, can throw a wrench in the works of a rumination on auto-pilot. The question creates an opening, or a sense of possibility that you could actually let it go. That’s pretty amazing in itself. You can best expand that sense of possibility through presence—not with further thinking. 2. An important distinction It helps to clearly make this distinction: yes, you can meet challenging mental stuff through clear thinking processes of inquiry or contemplation; rumination is not that! When you give full focus to straightening out your thinking in a time you’ve designated for that—perhaps with a clear helper or a tool like The Work of Byron Katie—that’s a productive, helpful way to meet the mind. Rumination just hijacks your thinking. Rumination means mindless mental chewing as you do other things. It’s no good. It robs you of presence, expands whatever anxiety or emotion matches the content, compounds confusion, and further furrows the brow. Want to play more with presence? It’s not hard. Keep coming back to the breath, and use grounding and checking in with your senses to connect to here and now. It takes rumination-thwarting focus to keep coming back to now, to what the moment is feeding you through the body and its senses. You might call it hard, but it’s not. It’s a practice, and it’s worth repeating (while the repeating thoughts that take over if you don’t do this are truly of no use to you). 3. Some questions There are so many good questions to ask yourself. Just reach for it. Try out a few (without necessarily answering them), just to see how they hit you. You’ll know in your body when you’ve got one worth keeping in view for a minute. The right question may need no answering either: the truth it points to is self-evident.
That last one can actually be fun. I call it the Here and Now game. It allows you to get curious about or fascinated by where you were in time (years away, sometimes!) and what place you were in beyond your current physical location (an ocean away, perhaps). It’s a playful way to call yourself back to the moment, your actual reality. Take a conscious breath and ask, How far away did I just go in time and space? Could be all you need to foil the rumination. Love & blessings, Jaya Go back to another post on Rumination Relief. Heart art from the incomparable (Ithaca local!) ALiCE MuHLBACK. (Alice made my logo!)
get free of 3 painful patterns in relating Attachment, frustration, rejection: 3 simple and super-recognizable relational patterns. It’s so helpful to see how they’re operative—because, simply put, they take us away from love. Note that we all have all three patterns, with one predominant. They work together: you have to be attached to something in order to be frustrated that it’s not in place and then reject what you don’t want. Note, too, that I correlate these 3 styles to Enneagram types at the very bottom of this post! This may seem more heady than my last deeply heart-based Love Overhaul post, but I promise there’s some gorgeous wow-juice in here. I’ve laid it out with simple clarity (not saying you’re slow or thick, oh, NOT-Molasses One; I know your life is full). And this may look long, but it has lots of skimmable bullet points. I’ve illustrated each pattern below with simple “I” sentences. Scan for the phrases that resonate (uh, and maybe feel cringey). I invite you to watch first for your own relational patterns, then later consider how you’ve been on the receiving end of those of others. As you read, remember there’s nothing to judge: this is just what we human beings do. We’re just trying to get our needs met because we don’t trust that’s always happening anyway. We don’t trust that life will show us how. We don’t trust that we’ll be okay if we don’t grab the reins from others (or use more subtle tactics to manage them). So read with compassion and kindness to yourself. Attachment What could I be attached to that would keep me from purer forms of love?
Frustration How do I cultivate or demonstrate frustration, thus staving off the purer forms of love?
Rejection How many ways could I feel or wield rejection to keep myself from purer forms of love?
PAUSE. Allow an integrating breath to go fully in and fully out. You can stop here and just notice and take in the ongoing story of attachment, frustration, and rejection in human (your) relating. Or read on (or come back later) to get more clarity on moving beyond them. Countering these relational patterns I’ll give you a bunch of helpful bullet points, then I’ll give you the big, most important thing, the one thing to focus on if nothing else. (Spoiler alert: It’s about presence. Boils down to NOW.)
About NOW as the key, once again Speaking of this moment, NOW can be understood as the great solution, the foil to the relational patterns, if you’re clear on the difference between relationship and relatedness. I learned this from Jessica Dibb and Russ Hudson, two brilliant teachers of the Enneagram. Relationship is about structures, agreements, and expectations. Relatedness is about active, dynamic, live, in-the-moment relating with another. You’re relating with who they are right now as who you are right now. Once again, now is your best friend. Now contains all you need in every realm of life, and certainly to express, experience, and act upon love. (It occurs to me all human relationships are love-based—even in our professional lives, even in quick exchanges with a cashier: we’re always emitting, receiving, exchanging love.) Actual relatedness requires being present right now to what’s actually happening, what’s being said, what’s being felt. I like to think of my progeny in terms of the current version of them. There have been so many versions over the years, so I get to keep falling in love with who they are now. We can apply this to anyone, and bring it to now: the beloved before you isn’t simply a current version as in this year’s version or this era’s; this is the current version right now, in this very moment. There has been and will be no other moment like it. We support one another’s becoming and our endless potential to transcend false identity by simply allowing one another to be as we are right now and drop in for that. Drop in with curiosity, awe, amazement, the sense of what a privilege it is to witness and partake of this moment, to participate in it fully, to discover someone you love all over again, to discover yourself again in the process. Does it get any better than that? I invite you to the freest love you have access to at any given moment. Breathing consciously into presence, you can witness and shift out of attachment, frustration, and rejection. If you’d like a simple, beautiful love credo (which got more responses than anything I’ve written perhaps ever), see my post Love Overhaul. If you're Enneagram-aware, note that the attachment types are 9, 3, and 6; the frustration types are 1, 4, and 7; the rejection types are 8, 2, and 5. (Still, we all have all three, whatever our core type!) Note that each of the 3 relating triads discussed here has a representative type from each center! (Example: For attachment, 9 is the body type, 3 is the heart type, 6 is the head type.) Baffled by the order I named the types for each of the 3 styles in the first sentence of the prior paragraph? I named them in the order of the 3 centers—body types first (891), then heart (234), then head (567). That's the flow of the Enneagram. Love and blessings, Jaya Lean into the *e*x*p*a*n*s*i*o*n*
(3 quick & easy bite-sized bits of big Winter Solstice wisdom) 1. Physically slow down (even some of the time).
2. Quiet the mind using presence tricks.
3. Don't rush your healing and evolution. Much more often, tell yourself kind, allowing message like this:
Love & blessings, Jaya Recipes for Sanity & Self-Honoring during the Holidays It's not just your crazy mother or clueless cousin doing what predictably makes you quietly go insane. It's you. It's that you predictably go quietly insane. This collection of simple and radical recipes should get you to more nuances of grounded, present, open, easy, humor-aware. (For a humorous angle on what normally feels like no joke, see the Recipe for Not Being Driven Insane by the Ones Who Drive You Insane. There's a radical experiment possible with the Recipe for Letting Go of Control—take it to heart.) All of this should support you to give thanks at Thanksgiving (and beyond) from a genuinely appreciative stance. Use the headings to navigate all the material below. Go to what serves you and what you want to serve. Recipes are preceded by some notes on presence. (I'm on a personal and professional mission to keep going deeper and getting more subtle with what it means to be present.) These are the recipes covered below (scroll down to "RECIPES BEGIN HERE" and sub-headings below that of specific ones that call to you):
Notes on Presence Going back to known people and places with predictable challenges and triggers doesn't require replaying the same call-and-response scenarios. How is it even possible to do it differently? In a word, presence. Presence is the how. It's the thing that allows you to have half a prayer of choosing (hey, even super-solid agency in choosing) how you want to respond, as opposed to reacting from your well-rehearsed personality strategy. It even helps you find your footing again when you catch yourself in reactive mode, either internally or externally. (Sharp tone? Rolling/glaring eyes hijacked by your inner teen?) I actually believe it's not that hard to cultivate presence and step in differently. And in fact, your quotient of ease will keep increasing as you do, then it gets easier and easier. When you're in the past reviewing or measuring the present against all you've ever dealt with; or when you're in the future (even, how will I get to the end of this day)—you've left the present. You've therefore abandoned yourself (because your actual self is here, now) and you're not engaged with your smarts, wit, potential clarity, power of choice, compassion for self and others (I could go on). You're also unable to take responsibility for self-care, never mind total self-honoring that nurtures and invites your best self. Presence doesn't require exertion. It's more about relaxing and allowing than straining. It does require a willingness to keep practicing, keep coming back, keep tuning in. It also requires allowing what is: thus, when you're present, you'll be present not only to the love and nice smells and unicorns and rainbows, but to the twisting in your gut, the painful ideologies of other human beings, your own tense body and judgmental mind, and so on. Presence means tuning in to and allowing whatever is—not setting it up so that you control what is (probably what you're up to when you can't relax). Uh, what's the point of getting present (in the midst of what could be love-fun-warm-fuzzies) to what hurts, feels bad, creates sorrow, anger, and tense resentment? I've got 3 great answers to that. Great answer #1: You're in reality and aligned with what's actually happening when you get present to all of it. This means you're more sane, and more equipped to think clearly. (Delusion is so messy.) Great answer #2: Since presence means tuning in to ALL that is, you get to choose your focus. That's actually a lot of power—just be willing to be sloppy and graceless for a minute; elegance will gradually increase. Your choice in focus will allow you to respond more often than you react, which includes responding kindly to your own reactivity when it grabs the reins. Presence means you're here in time and space, alert to what's actually happening, accepting it and responding to it authentically (including moving toward what you want more of and away from what you want less of). Great answer #3: Presence also allows you to make choices, draw boundaries, and note when you need a break, a reset button, or any form of self-care. Presence allows for swift course-correction. Swift course-correction is one of my favorite things to play with. Never beat yourself up for noticing you're not present. Then there's no pain in finding yourself off-track (you WILL sometimes find yourself off-track): with no judgment, you get to simply and quickly course-correct as awareness comes in. A neutral metaphor from Abraham-Hicks is the rumble strip on the freeway: as soon as you feel the tires go bumpety-bump-bump-bump, just veer back into your lane. No need to self-chastize or agonize over being on the rumble strip again. (One of my favorite simple phrases to go to: There's no problem.) RECIPES BEGIN HERE Recipe for Letting Go of Control (the disaster-zone metaphor that puts it all in perspective)
Recipe for Presence Use these three steps to COME BACK to presence. (They can be gone through over and over and over. If you think it's not working, this could simply mean that you're not willing to go through them one more time, now.)
Recipe for Being at Ease Know, going in, some basic things about ease. (Think of ease as closely related to personal power. Picture a large cat: ease; power.) Periodically remind yourself of these. Note that the recipe for presence pairs well with the one for ease.
Recipe for Connecting to Others You May Not Typically or Easily Connect With This one likely boils down to, Be quiet if you have little or nothing to say and be real when you speak.
Recipe for Not Being Driven Insane by the Ones Who Drive You Insane This makes a game of the whole thing. What if you were having fun with your aversions and judgments instead of by turns indulging them and feeling bad about them?
Recipe for Connecting to Source, Self, and Others
P.S. A recipe for the gratitude-intolerant also exists on this blog. |
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