Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding.
The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.
Rumi
In the video below, I share Peter Levine’s practice of containment:
Levine describes this as becoming “aware of the premovement before it graduates into a full-blown movement sequence.” He further explains that “it is the ability to hold back, restrain, and contain a powerful emotion that allows a person to creatively channel that energy. Containment … buys us time and, with self-awareness, enables us to separate out what we are imagining and thinking from our physical sensations.”
Remember, this practice is not SUPPRESSION of emotion — it’s building a larger container for it. This allows us to be less emotionally reactive, which, as I’ve explained previously, is really tiring and stressful!
“Emotional reactivity almost always precludes conscious awareness. On the other hand, restraint and containment of the expressive impulse allows us to become aware of our underlying postural attitude. Therefore, it is the restraint that brings a feeling into conscious awareness. Change only occurs when there is mindfulness, and mindfulness only occurs when there is bodily feeling (i.e., the awareness of the postural attitude.)
“A person who is deeply feeling is not a person who is habitually venting anger, fear, or sorrow. Wise and fortunate individuals feel their emotions in the quiet of their interiors, learn from their feelings and are guided by them. They act intuitively and intelligently on those feelings. In addition, they share their feelings when appropriate and are responsive to the feelings and needs of others. And, of course, because they are human, they blow up from time to time; but they also look for the root of these eruptions, not primarily as being caused by another, but as an imbalance or disquiet within themselves.”
– Peter Levine