Emotions are messengers, so let’s believe how we will learn from them.
In part one, we checked out how to develop your awareness of your emotions and check you concern them in a balanced way.
In part two, we covered how getting interested in your emotions helps them to undergo.
This is part three – about how emotions are messengers and have lots to inform us about our needs.
Are Some Emotions Positive and Some Negative?
In our culture, we tend to label emotions as either positive or negative. But it’s a touch more complicated than that.
It’s more useful to consider them as signals that our needs are, or aren’t, getting met.
However, it’s true that some feelings are pleasant, some are unpleasant, and a few are more neutral.
But simply because a sense is unpleasant, it doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t find it compelling, especially if it’s familiar to you.
The truth about citizenry is that we’re not all brilliant at doing the items that make us feel good.
It’s useful to note which feelings you feel more comfortable with and which you are trying to push aside. (When we get reactive, discomfort with emotion is typically at the basis of it.)
Noticing and acknowledging that you’re finding a sense unpleasant are often a part of the method of relaxing your resistance to it.
You might say something to yourself like, “I don’t just like the way this feels, but I can let myself feel it anyway.”
With pleasant feelings, bringing more awareness to them can only increase our capacity for joy and pleasure.
Emotions Are Messengers – Pay Attention
Emotions are there for a reason. They’re a symbol that something is vital to you (even if it isn’t in five minutes, never mind five years). We don’t feel emotions for no reason!
The first step is to remember your emotions and check your concern them in a balanced way. Then you’ll get interested in them, allowing yourself to feel them.
At now, it’s helpful to show your attention to whatever triggered the sensation. Once you’ve felt it and it’s died down, you’re liberal to reflect on what caused it.
Often we either attempt to ignore our emotions or take them as a call to action. But really, they’re just information, and you’re happier once you slow right down the method that goes FEEL > THINK > ACT.
Your feelings are there to supply information about what matters to you. They’re your cue to start out reflecting on what’s happening and the way important it’s.
Then you’ll use that information to decide if there’s anything you would like to try to do, either within yourself, with somebody else, or with a situation.
Creating a long way between yourself and your emotions during this way isn’t about becoming passive or resigned.
It’s about seeing clearly and making the right decisions.
Why Am I Feeling Like This?
The triggers for strong emotions are external things (e.g., something that happened or something someone said or did) or internal things (e.g., an idea or judgment about ourselves).
A good question to ask yourself to know your emotions better is: What does this sense tell me about what I need?
- Fear tells us we’d like to urge to an area of physical or emotional safety or reassurance.
- Anger tells us we’d like to re/establish limits, boundaries, or expectations.
- Sadness tells us we’d like comfort, space, or support to grieve, remember, and abandoning (when we’re ready)
- Joy tells us we’d like to try to do more of whatever we’ve been doing, relish and share it.
Most folks are wont to focusing our attention on the triggers or what we concede to be the causes of our emotions.
If you would like to form change in your life, it’s more helpful to believe what the feeling’s message is about your needs.
Sometimes it’s about something you would like within the here and now.
Other times (and especially with emotional places you discover yourself in often), it’s about unmet needs from way back, probably from your relationships together with your earliest caregivers (because that’s where you learned what a relationship was).
Usually, it’s a touch of both.
When you’re feeling strong emotions, does one notice yourself creating stories about what they mean about you or about how others see (or misunderstand, or undervalue) you?
These are often uncomfortable places to seem, but the potential for greater personal freedom when we’re willing to travel there’s immense.
Building Your Resources To Cope With Challenging Emotions
Difficult emotions are intense, challenging experiences, and support is significant in difficult times.
Here are some ways you’ll build up your inner resources:
- Meditation, including loving-kindness
- Therapy
- Self-care practices (link: https://insightconnection.uk/self-care/self-care-ideas/)
- Spending time with people that care about you, you are feeling comfortable with, and enjoy
- Healthy activities like exercise, hobbies, music, anything that nourishes you
- Practicing gratitude
- Being generous and patient with yourself
It’s much easier to develop these habits when we’re feeling good, but any time may be real-time to start.
Human beings are social creatures. It’s normal to wish things from people, and okay to invite support and let people be there for you.
Over time those external resources build up our inner ones.
Make it your goal to develop your capacity to receive the pleasure of awesome things in your life – this is often the key to wellbeing.
Self-Compassion
Most folks have a bent when we’re suffering to layer on more suffering.
So once we feel angry or anxious, we add a layer of self-criticism on top.
When you realize you’re doing this, you’ll challenge it.
Would you criticize a lover who was feeling low?
You can practice bringing an equivalent tenderness to yourself that you merely would to anyone else who is suffering until it becomes a habit.
You deserve caring attention and compassion even as very much as anyone else, and you recognize the way to offer it.
Be an honest friend to yourself.
It can help to consider someone you’ve had a direct reference to and who has been there for you. for instance, you’ll try being with yourself as your favorite grandparent was.
Emotions Are Messengers – They Tell Us What We Need
Emotions are messengers about our needs. Once we change how we relate to our feelings, we modify how we relate to ourselves, people, and, therefore, the world. This is often how:
- Build and develop an awareness of your emotions. Recognize what’s happening, name it, and begin to feel it.
- Increase your ability to be balanced together with your feelings. Don’t get trapped in them. Don’t resist or attempt to avoid them. Instead, give yourself the space to feel them in a balanced way.
- Be interested in the experience. Check it out more clearly. See how feelings come and go. Recognize that emotions aren’t personal, and therefore the way you’re feeling at any given moment isn’t who you are.
- Develop a base of inner strength and support, so you’ve got the resources to handle difficult emotions once they arise.
- Recognize that life’s challenges are developing patience, kindness, compassion, wisdom, and resilience.
- Keep practicing, and continue to grow.
