Making Sense of Emotions

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What if someone told you that everything you think about emotions is wrong? As people, we like categories. Categories help us make sense of the world around us and ourselves. In an effort to help understand ourselves, we place emotions into such categories. 

Often, people will discuss negative and positive emotions. What if there are no good or bad emotions? When you focus on something being negative or positive, then you are more likely to focus on the positive aspects than the negative. This could lead to behaviors that could be damaging, causing individuals to withdraw when emotions are not considered positive. When you feel happy, you may feel social and want to spend time with people around you. When you are excited you are eager to share. However, what happens when you’re sad or jealous? Do you share those emotions with others, do you allow yourself to explore how the emotions feel in your body, or do you suppress them? 

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Posted in:

  • Emotions

Tags:

  • emotional intelligence

Finish Your Feelings

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As the holidays approach, we encounter big feelings such as excitement, stress, grief, disappointment, worry, you name it. But in this busy season, it can be so easy to stuff those feelings down and say the all too common lie of “I’ll deal with that later.” But later doesn’t come. Life doesn’t slow down. Next week proves to be just as busy as the last. And just like that, we never finished our feelings. Stress is a biological response and with all biological responses there is a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is the triggering event and the initial release of cortisol in our system. The middle is the resulting emotion. And the end, well, that’s where we usually get stuck.

Emily and Amelia Nagoski point out many ways we can finish our feelings in their book Burnout: The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle. When we encounter emotions, it is necessary to process those feelings and also to finish those emotions. There are four wa ...

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Posted in:

  • Emotions

Tags:

  • stress

Embodiment

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One of the most impactful books that I have ever read is called “The Wisdom of Your Body” by Dr. Hillary McBride. Think of this as part book review, part encouragement to go read this book and an invitation to step into wholeness, connection, and healing through embodiment. 

So, what exactly is embodiment? McBride states that “there is no unified definition of embodiment.” It is often understood as a ‘quality or idea that is being lived out.” For example, an author or speaker hopefully lives out what they write about or speak about, thus embodying their platform or message.  In the context of this book, McBride describes it as something farther reaching. That is, “the experience of being a body in a social context.” It means that to live embodied is to unapologetically take up space. 

McBri ...

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Posted in:

  • Embodiment

Tags:

  • body
  • compassion
  • compassion
  • compassion
  • feelings
  • trauma

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