[progressally_objectives]
Ahhhh…. we’ve arrived in”Calm Mama” week.
When we feel stressed out and overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood… and life… it’s hard to keep our cool. It’s sometimes all too easy to fall into the pattern of yelling, issuing threats, and parenting in a downright frazzled state of anxiety.
And while that may be “easy,” it’s certainly not joyful or nurturing!
This week, we’re exploring how we keep calm and mother on 🙂 We’ll explore our triggers, work with our emotions, and discover how we can parent from a place of insight and wisdom.
So let’s get started!
Introductory Video
Knowing Your Triggers
You may already know a lot of your triggers… but it’s helpful to do this “digging.” Often, when we are getting frustrated with our children, what we’re REALLY frustrated with is what they’re triggering in us.
Download your funsheet for tracking your triggers here.
Dealing with Emotions
Just as we’ve learned that thoughts will come and go throughout our days, for our entire lives, we must come to grasp that our emotions will also come and go.
When we are “stressed out,” it is essentially an overwhelm of emotion.
If you are stressed out, you’re emotional.
And if we’re not even aware of what we’re feeling, when we’re feeling it, we can create a lot of suffering.
Shinzen Young (who likes to make all of this really mathematical) even has an equation for this!
Our discomfort, divided by mindful awareness, equals suffering. The greater the denominator (our mindful awareness), the less the quotient (suffering). Who knew math could be so enlightening?
In this guided meditation, we will practice a technique called “noting” – which means we simply note whatever emotion is present (similar to how we noted our thoughts). As you sit in meditation, if you notice an emotion arise, simply say to yourself, in a kind voice, “sadness, sadness,” or whatever emotion is present. If no emotion has arisen, simply note the sensations you do experience – “touch,” “cold,” “breathing,” etc.
When you note the emotion, you don’t need to investigate it with your mind – “Why am I sad? When will I feel better? This is just like the time when…” or “Will this happiness last?” – because then you’ll get lost in the story, in the thinking.
Just experience the emotion itself. Where is the sadness? Is it a heaviness in the chest? A fuzziness in the head? What does happiness feel like? Use the same “watching a movie” technique that we have used with our thoughts to observe the emotion – let it ride through you, and simply be curious about what happens.
Jon Kabat-Zinn describes this technique as simply being able to recognize, “I am feeling X right now, and X feels like this.” He writes, “the intentional knowing of your feelings … contains in itself the seeds of healing…. awareness itself has an independent perspective that is outside of your suffering…. The awareness is not part of the pain. It is what holds the pain, as the weather unfolds within the space of the sky.”
In this way, we learn to be with an emotion, instead of suppressing it or avoiding it. This is what allows us to fully inhabit the joyful moments of our lives, and to heal from the devastating moments.
In Brene Brown’s latest release Rising Strong, she talks about the fundamental importance of wading into our emotions. As a culture, we can sometimes be emotion-phobic — we’re uncomfortable when people “get emotional” or when we have to talk about our feelings. But life is about FEELING ALL THE FEELS. And as Brene Brown’s research reveals, getting comfortable with feelings is something that wholehearted and resilient people do!
How do we do that???
A popular mindfulness practice for investigating emotion is RAIN, shown below:
Recognizing is simply noting that an emotion is present — what is here? What am I feeling?
Allowing means it’s already here. Sadness, anger, frustration — this is what it is like right now. No need to push the emotion away, or feel bad for feeling this way. It’s here.
Investigate the emotion, and the thoughts and sensations that accompany it — where is the sadness? What does it feel like? We do this with kindness and compassion. We don’t judge ourselves for being angry, or criticize ourselves for ‘flying off the handle.’ We observe what’s happening.
Non-identifying with the emotion is, I think, the most important step. We often DO identify with our emotions — think about how we say, “I am angry, I am sad, I am frustrated,” as if we have become the emotion. In Spanish (from what I remember from college), we would say, “Tengo miedo” — “I have fear,” not “I am afraid.”
I don’t think it’s just semantics. When we say we are an emotion, it has taken us over. We’ve completely identified with it. When we say we have an emotion, we recognize that it is present, but we can hold it. We realize we are vast and spacious — we can hold the emotion in awareness without letting it overwhelm us.
We can experience anger without becoming anger. We can feel sadness without becoming sadness.
There is so much power in being aware of emotions and not identifying with them, and in being aware of our emotions and not resisting them. One of my mindfulness teachers says that
suffering = pain x resistance
The more we resist feeling, the more we suffer.
Another practice for working with emotions comes from neuroscientist Dan Siegel. He calls it the “name and tame” (or “name it to tame it”) strategy — as soon as we name and allow the emotion, we begin to tame it.
Some of you have already noted in the comments that you’ve experienced this — just noticing “My kids are really annoying me right now!!” changes your experience. That simple act of noting — of bringing awareness to your experience — HAS CHANGED YOUR EXPERIENCE.