5 minute read
The Guide for Embracing Feelings
MAnaging your feelings - Emotions
Are we really embracing what is going on in our life? How to make sure we are at peace with our feelings?
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by Ezgi Güngördü
If we asked you to list the emotions you have experienced in a day, where would you start?
Probably the most important moment of the day and the feelings that developed around that moment will be the emotions that will come to your mind first. These include excitement over a promotion you received, sadness over bad news given by a loved one, or anxiety over the exam that you did not prepare well enough.
We all experience many of these situations almost every day. Of course, these feelings also change a lot during the same day.
Maintaining an emotion with the same intensity can often be challenging.
However, long-term thoughts and feelings that affect your soul may bring some deadlocks and may also affect your psychological well-being. Well, let’s take a look at some feelings one can experience on an ordinary day. Emotions that make you feel good; joy, happiness, success, pride and many more… And the emotions can poison life and destroy all your motivation and mood; such as fear, failure, insecurity, worry.
Emotional Discharge
I want you to close your eyes right now and think about a situation, a moment, where you feel the most uncomfortable. It can be anything. It is all in your mind and in your heart. Now we will try to expand that feeling you just felt. The way to do this is to feel your emotion most deeply and to question it: to embrace that emotion. Yes, embracing that uncomforting and unfamiliar feeling, deeply and affectionately.
“But how about embracing those feelings? We’re not talking about ignoring emotions, I hope?”
I can hear you asking these questions to yourselves and at this point, we get to the purpose of writing this article. Emotional acceptance. The steps I will show you in this will serve as a guide and will help you emphasize the importance of not avoiding negative emotions, but instead embracing them.
We experience our emotions on both conscious and unconscious levels. While we are aware of some of these feelings, we often fail to define our emotional state clearly. Sometimes we observe changes in our bodily responses, but we do not try to understand the emotions that cause these changes. We try to suppress our negative emotions and think that it will be good for us and will lead us to positivity. But suppressing emotions doesn’t seem like a good idea in the long run.
It’s hard to process emotions. It’s scary. There can be a huge feeling of panic, worry, and the urge to avoid the hard feelings. It can be extremely overwhelming and sometimes painful to go through the emotion.
Do not ignore yourself or your feelings
Let’s see some steps from people who works on it:
Emotional intelligence can change your life. If you want to master your emotions, you can see some essential steps:
1. Don’t ignore unpleasant or exciting emotions. Observe them.
2. Understand their cause and source.
3. Decide if you want it to overtake you.
4. Take 10 deep breaths before you react to something that makes you angry.
You can apply these as you embrace your inner experiences:
If you are judging your inner experience or struggling with it, stop doing it. Instead, give the emotion a neutral label. Say to yourself “I’m scared” or “I feel hurt”. Become aware of the sensations in your body that come with this emotion. Stay in the moment with the emotions. Notice the size, shape, color, and texture of the emotion. Drop the story of “why” you feel this way.
Journey of self discovery
Focus on sensations and feelings rather than ideas.
B e open to emotional experience. Practicing self-compassion and loving kindness helps us soften our emotional experiences without pushing them away. Put your hand on your heart and talk to yourself like you would do to someone you love.
“ This is really hard” or “It makes sense that I’m feeling sad now”, you could say. Remember, it is not only you who feel this way. Think of all the people who are feeling helpless, lonely, deprived or rejected right now. Being human comes with pain. These steps are the essence of self-compassionate care. Self-compassion is embracing your humanity.
Meditating on accepting every aspect of what life brings and trusting the power of the present helps many people. The reason for this is noticing your experiences from all their extremes and feeling their importance inside you.
Emotions can be really confusing or overwhelming at times.
Of course, the information we provide in this guide will be applied with variations for everyone and may affect everyone differently. While I was really struggling psychologically during a crazy period of life, I realized that accepting emotions healed me even though it didn’t solve the problems. Everything starts with ourselves and everything ends in the same place. Listen to your inner voice, it is trying to show you the right way. (Psychology Today)
I would like to end this article with a few words that I came across during my research on the subject.
“ We avoid processing emotions because what we feel is so contrary to our self-image, so threatening to our society’s ideas of normality and so at odds with who we would like to be.”
“ Compassion for the self, regardless of emotions is the way of untangling the mess we sometimes find ourselves in.”
“ But first we must pay for our self awareness with a period of mourning in which we gradually acknowledge that in some area or other, life is simply a lot sadder than we would want it to be.” (PsychCentral).
