Dealing with your emotions is like dealing with a two-year-old.
Logic won’t get you very far. You need to bring out your wise and loving inner parent. Easier said than done, given that no one had any good role models, your parents neither.
Imagine your two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. The wisest and most loving thing to do is not to get triggered, create a safe space so that neither your child nor anyone else is hurt and allow the tantrum to play itself out. Usually, after 2 minutes, your child calms down and has lost interest in what caused the emotional outburst.
This emotional processing technique emulates the above scenario.
Every emotion has a physical feeling attached to it. This is what we’ll focus on.
- Start by locating the physical sensation of the resistance in your body. It helps to scan your body to identify where it is. It can be a knot somewhere in your stomach or throat, or a tightness in your shoulder. It will be somewhere. If you cannot locate it, this technique won’t work. Try another method that I shared.
- With the awareness of a loving, wise, non-judgmental and non-emotional inner parent, look with your inner eyes at that part of your body where you feel the resistance. It helps to keep your eyes closed during this exercise.
- Keep being the best inner parent you can be, and then say the following to the resistance you are feeling: ‘Resistance, you are welcome here.’ – This is a challenging and counter-intuitive statement, but if you stay with the process, the emotion will dissolve.
- You may notice that the physical tension will move in your body – it does not like to be looked at.
- Your mind will also try and stop you, as feeling this emotion is very uncomfortable.
- Next, allow the physical sensation of the resistance to grow as large as possible. Again this seems counter-intuitive. You can let it grow as large as the universe.
- When you get to this point, by staying focused the whole time, you will notice that the resistance dissipates like a cloud and dissolves.
This process seems simple, but it is far from easy.
You will feel very uncomfortable facing the resistance full-on, and it requires some practice to stay neutral, aware and focused throughout the whole process. For me, the biggest help is to imagine myself as a wise parent.