This piece comes from Episode 03 of ‘the Inner Practice’ podcast.
When the thoughts are in overdrive and the emotions are flooding the body, the first step is calming the nervous system down. There’s no chance of clarity about anything while we’re all in our head, with the mind throwing up scenarios faster than we can look at them.
What worked for me when I was in that situation was yoga nidra, every day, because honestly it was the only thing I could manage, lying down and listening to a different voice than the one in my head.
The breath was the other one, the exhale twice as long as the inhale. Neither of them is complicated to do, and what they gave me was a pause.
Once there’s a bit more calm, the work can start.
When something gets triggered in us there’s an emotion in the body, felt as a sensation, connected to that trigger. The mind normally builds a story around it, and the more we go into the story the stronger the emotion gets. We experience the two as one thing. But when we separate them, when we cut the story off from the sensation, the intensity lessens and it can disappear altogether. That’s really the whole practice.
So first, find where the emotion sits, the sensation that’s attached to the story. For me anxiety was always the stomach. Fear can be in the chest or the belly, anger somewhere else again, and it’s different for everybody, so take your time finding yours, our bodies speak to us in different ways. Sit down or lie down, close your eyes, and go and find the sensation itself, the actual physical feeling, not the thinking about it.
Then cut the story off. Just watch the sensation, stay curious, notice the quality of it and how it changes.
When we manage it, the feeling dissolves, and there’s clarity enough to make a conscious decision rather than react to the situation. It takes a bit of practice, but over time an emotion can dissolve in one or two minutes.
If it doesn’t go, that’s useful too, because it means the mind is still feeding it with the story, still ruminating about what happened. That’s what the thoughts are doing, feeding the emotion, with more prediction, and more what does that person think of me now, and more why did they say it like that.
The problem itself is still there, of course. Cutting the story off doesn’t sort out whatever happened, and the trigger comes back, and the emotion comes back with it. But by the third or fourth or fifth time round you start to notice something: ‘oh, there’s a pattern here, there’s something I need to look at’.
And when I say looking at it, I don’t mean the why. Not what happened in my childhood that I’m like this now, because that’s another story, another identification. Sometimes it’s good to know the story behind a trigger, but in this work we leave them out, because we don’t want to build another identification on top of the one we’re trying to dissolve. We work with what’s actually there. The anxiety was there, so I worked with the anxiety, not with why I had it, because the moment I go looking for the why, I’m halfway to becoming the person who is anxious.
Which brings me to the smallest change, and the one that did the most. Instead of “I have anxiety”, or “I am anxious”, I started saying, anxiety is felt in my body. Something is felt in the body, and I am that thing, are two completely different places to be standing, and the sentence puts a gap between me and it. Once there’s a gap, I stop identify with it.
These days this practice is part of my day. Some discomfort turns up, or a conversation irritates me, and I sit down, close my eyes, go into the sensation, cut the story off, wait until the emotion has dissolved, and then do what needs doing. Sometimes nothing needs doing, and seeing the pattern is enough on its own.
I don’t catch it every time, and often I’m well into it before I notice. But once I do notice I sit down and do the practice, because the emotion is still somewhere in the body to be found. It takes a bit longer and a bit more effort that way, but it still works.
If you’d like to read more about this side of the work, it’s here: the Inner Practice, yoga for the mind