Emotional Awareness Meditation
Mindfulness can bring more peace to our daily lives. When we engage in mindful practices, we can bring greater awareness, clarity, and equanimity to our day to day experiences. This can lead to greater balance and fewer of the intense swings in mood that can throw us off kilter for days at a time.
Perhaps nowhere is mindfulness more useful than in coming to understand our emotional states. Many people simply experience emotion, without ever coming to understand where the emotions themselves come from, what their purpose is, or how we might best handle them. Too often, we allow our emotions to overtake us: they get in the driver’s seat, so to speak, and we feel powerless to change course, even when we’re not happy with the direction we’re headed in.
Mindfulness exercise for emotional awareness
In this mindfulness exercise, you’ll focus on achieving greater equanimity when it comes to your emotions. With practice, this exercise can help your emotions feel less controlling: you may be able to experience them in a more measured, thoughtful, and mindful way.
It’s important to understand that we often fail to achieve direct contact with our emotions. We might think that we understand our emotional states because we can name them, but this is not the same as direct contact. Being in direct touch with your emotions means knowing where they originate in the body.
When you practice getting in touch with your emotions directly, you stop worrying about the conceptual schemes surrounding them and focus instead on the way that you’re actively experiencing a given emotion in your physical being.
Processing Emotions
By letting go of the concepts surrounding our emotions, we may be able to process how we feel and let go more easily. When you’re able to let go of an emotional state, rather than holding onto it for hours, days, or even weeks, you may feel freer to experience your emotions without fear of them “taking control” of your life.
