Episode 02: How an emotion actually dissolves

I’d like to talk today a bit about the Inner Practice, which is literally just yoga for the mind. And it’s a direction I’m really, really interested in, because if we don’t take all the teachings from the mat into our daily lives, you know, what’s the use? We might then just feel really good after our yoga practice for maybe one or two hours, but then as soon as life hits us, we’re going back into spiralling, and too many thoughts and too many to-dos, and we start losing ourselves.

That connection we built up in the morning with the yoga practice, for example, is lost. So I started to focus really on how we can use those practices in the moments, in the moments when it gets hard. And one aspect that is really, really important is keeping that connection to your body. So there’s a reason why we feel good after the yoga practice. Because we have connected to our body. We have connected to our breath. We started to internalise the practice. It’s not something we were reading about or made an intellectual approach to. It’s something we experienced. There might have been, you know, emotions coming up or thoughts coming up during the practice, but in the end we connected to ourselves. And that is the one practice that really helps me going through my days.

So during the whole day, a sliver of my awareness is always in my body. This can be the energy of your body, if you feel it. It can be one particular point. So for example, the heart. And I’m not talking about the chakra, or the energetic heart space. It can be as simple as your physical heart. And keeping that aspect of your awareness connected to your physical body, allows you to be more observant of what’s happening.

Because you will feel the reaction of your body instantly. The body doesn’t lie. The body is always the first thing that reacts. And when we have this part of our awareness on our body, it means we become quite quickly aware. Oh, there’s something going on. There’s an uneasy feeling, or there is a discomfort, or a sensation you don’t like.

And when you feel that, then you know instantly, okay, there’s something I need to deal with. There’s something not okay in the moment. And then it’s up to you to make that decision. Something’s not right. I need to feel it, or I need to look at it. Often we ignore it, or we suppress it, and we just get on with our lives and go into autopilot. But the sensation is somehow stored in our body, and it will come back.

So, when you can train yourself to keep a part of your awareness always in your body. As I said, that can be the energy that you feel in your body, like you can feel it quite often in the palms of your hands. You feel like often there’s a tingle there. So that’s a point you can connect to. Or, as I was saying, the beating heart. And this allows you to have that check-in all the time.

I know often we don’t want to check in. Often we’re just like, oh, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to see. And that’s okay, maybe for some moments. But for some moments it’s really important to look. Because if we don’t look, all we do is we put a cover on top of it, like a blanket. It doesn’t go away. It just stays covered for the moment. But if we don’t deal with those issues, they will always come back.

And the path to it is really just through it. You can’t think yourself out of it. You can’t come up with concepts. Anything that you try to solve with your brain, it’s not going to stick, because emotionally you’re not making the change. You might have the knowledge, the know-how, the understanding, which helps to recognise patterns, but the change is not happening in your brain. The change is happening on an emotional level, and the emotions we feel in the body.

So if you want to change, you need to start allowing yourself to feel, to feel also the unpleasant emotions. And that can be very scary. So we can slowly, slowly, get used to it. So if it’s something small, things that are not really significant in your life. Like if someone annoys you, like cutting in front of you in a queue, or if you get a marketing call you really don’t want to listen to. So these are the small things you can practise on.

So you just, you know, you feel, oh, I’m getting really annoyed. And instead of expressing it, just see if you can find that annoyance somewhere in your body, and then allow yourself to feel it. Not to narrate it, not to feed it with, oh, this guy really annoyed me because he did this and this and this. All you do is you’re feeding that emotion more and more with your thoughts. You’re keeping that emotion alive.

But if you can just feel that annoyance somewhere in your body, let’s say in your chest or maybe in your belly, and you just stay with that emotion without narrating it, so literally you cut the story off from that emotion, you will see that within a short time, maybe a minute or two, that emotion goes away on its own. And this is how you can gradually build up a tolerance to emotions.

And then one day, when something bigger comes, something that’s more personal, that might feel even a bit overwhelming. Instead of escaping from it, distracting yourself from it, you stay with it. And again, same principle. Not narrating, not feeding that emotion with more thoughts. Instead, you just observe the emotion in your body, the sensation in the body, and you will feel that sensation will lessen and even disappear, if you stay long enough with it. If it doesn’t, that means you’re feeding it with thoughts again.

And this is how we go through difficult situations. This is how we dissolve patterns that don’t serve us. You know, you have to go through it. It’s having the courage to sit there, close your eyes and feel it. Feel it in your body, and then cut the thinking off from it. And the emotions will go.

I always feel it’s like, every time you’ve been triggered, every time those emotions come up, and every time you do this practice, you shave a layer off it. So the next time you’ve been triggered again with the same situation, your reaction, or the emotion, is just a little bit less than before. And every time you do that practice, you shave one layer off, one after the other. And one day you wake up and you think, wow, that person said that thing, which a year ago would have completely triggered me, and now I haven’t even noticed it.

And this is a way how we can heal, how we can make space within us again. And when we have that space, when we’re not constantly thinking about how to avoid unpleasant feelings, when we’re not putting pressure on ourselves, we should do this and this, we create that beautiful space in us. And that’s when the creativity comes up. That’s when the solutions come up. That’s when we start hearing our intuition again. But first we need to make space. So first we have to take the rubbish out.

The way forward is through the emotions, not through the brain. The brain is important to recognise patterns, to gain knowledge about ourselves. But dissolving is going through the body, through the emotion.

So just give it a try, like a little experiment. Next time you have some person who you’re not connected with and who annoys you, just try to find that annoyance, that sensation, that feeling in your body. Try to locate it, and then just stay with that emotion. Just keep the focus there, without feeding the emotion with additional thoughts. So you’re just curious about that emotion. How does it feel, the quality of it? No story attached. You cut the story off from it, and then notice how long it literally takes until the emotion is gone. And this is how you build up tolerance for the bigger ones, and trust that this actually works.

I hope it’s helpful. And if you had an experience and tried it, do let me know. Thank you for listening.