How To Become Emotionally Literate

So today's talk is on emotional literacy.

And I encourage you to have a journal with you,

A journal and a pen.

And if you don't have a journal or a pen,

Then I encourage you to write on your computer.

You can write this in an email document or in a Google Doc.

But I want us to move through a process together today.

And even though this is a talk and I'm offering information and insight towards emotional literacy,

I want for you yourself in your homes or wherever you might be tuning in from to really get in touch with your emotional landscape,

Your internal emotional landscape,

And to give it new language.

When I speak to emotional literacy,

For me,

What comes up in my own journey is finding a new way of communicating things when they're not able to be heard in the way that I'm communicating them.

How many times do we get into conversations with our loved ones,

With those that we collaborate with,

With those that we work with,

And we can't seem to find a bridge or a middle ground to understand one another?

We may be speaking to have needs met,

But we're communicating in a way that feels judgmental.

It could feel belittling.

It could feel bypassing.

And so at some point,

The individual speaking or the individual listening tunes out to what the other person is saying,

And the communication is lost.

And what I find here is that that bridge between the two of us has now been,

For the moment,

Destructive.

You know,

There is a blockage here.

We're no longer able to hear each other.

Our voices get louder.

Our speech gets faster.

And we're unable to clearly communicate what's happening in our internal world without possible projection on the other side.

So something that I started to tune into on my own journey and something that I offer students that I work with and clients that I work with and myself is finding another way to communicate the same thing,

But in poetry or in dance or whatever it may be.

And so the journaling topics that we're going to do today together,

The processing,

We're going to do very short written prompts.

And maybe you've never written before and you've never written about your emotions.

And I encourage you to not tune out because you hear me say that,

But to really tune in and say,

This is something different.

If it's something different,

Maybe it leads me to the same place,

But on a different path let me see,

Let me work with this.

So I speak about emotional literacy a lot of times as finding a way to find the poetry and pain.

Because a lot of times when we're communicating,

We're both wanting the same thing.

At the base of the communication is we're wanting connection.

We're wanting to be seen.

We're wanting to be heard.

We're wanting to feel loved.

We're wanting to feel accepted.

But what might be coming out is you did this,

You did that,

You didn't do this,

You didn't do that.

And what's really desirable there beneath the surface gets lost because there's a lens,

There's a certain flavor,

A rasa as we say in yogic Sanskrit,

A flavor of what we're filtering our words out towards the other person.

And if I'm feeling hurt,

If I'm feeling disappointed,

Anything that I'm communicating is going to have that flavor,

That rasa of disappointment,

That rasa of sadness.

And so if I can find the poetry and my pain and I can go into my internal landscape and I can slow down a little bit and I can metaphorically or poetically or find new ways to communicate the pain that I'm experiencing to the person in front of me,

They might be able to hear me in a way that they haven't heard before.

So this is the beauty of emotional literacy is that semantically and linguistically,

Like our world is fueled by words.

This is what we live for.

It's how we communicate.

We're attached to the languages that we speak,

By the accents that we speak them from.

For those of us that are in nonviolent communication,

Education or inauthentic relating education,

A lot of times we can be so stuck in that language that when the world doesn't need us nonviolently or in an authentic relating way,

We can feel very offended.

We can feel very hurt because we've educated ourselves.

We have this emotional literacy or this understanding of how to use words in a way that's nonviolent to bring about that bridge,

That connection between ourselves and others.

And sometimes when we're not met in that,

And let's be honest,

Most times we're not because the world is not averagely and typically educated in these ways of communication.

A lot of times we're left disappointed and sad that we've shown up and that we've communicated in a certain way and it hasn't been reflected back to us.

And so what I offer for you today is this reflection of patience and this reflection of,

Okay,

I'm speaking in the way that I believe is the best to communicate.

I'm speaking nonviolently.

I'm speaking with authenticity and this person is not hearing me.

Can I not take it personal?

And can I go even deeper into my emotion and explain it with more poetry and with more art and can I curate it in a way that that person can get to the essence,

The true essence of what I really yearn for,

Which is connection.

And so just an example here.

If I'm communicating with somebody that didn't show up on time,

So I want to use something that's very relatable because we've all been in this situation.

Someone hasn't showed up on time and I'm really hurt by this.

I'm really hurt that this person hasn't shown up on time.

And I'm going to communicate it in a way first that maybe isn't so skillful.

I feel that it's skillful and I feel that it's authentic and it feels real to me,

But maybe the other person can't hear it because they're going to hear judgment or projection or wrongdoing on their part.

And so they can't hear the need beneath it.

And then I'll communicate it in a different way.

So first when I communicate it,

Communicating it with that reactivity,

I would say,

I'm really upset that you showed up late.

You weren't here on time.

I don't feel respected.

I feel like you didn't value my time.

You're not showing up in the time that I did.

It was hard for me to show up on time,

But I still did it.

And so I feel that you're responsible for showing up on time too.

And so I'm feeling really upset and hurt that you didn't take the time to respect the time that we chose and that you're showing up late and this is wasting my time and it's not creating a container for us to have the quality time together that I would have liked.

So even though I'm stating things that feel very true,

That feel,

And again,

If there are any thoughts on this or perspectives for those of you that are here live with me,

I encourage you to write in,

To ask questions or ask for examples.

The person on the other end could have heard,

I didn't respect you.

I wasted your time,

That I didn't respect the container for quality time here.

So there could be a lot of wrongdoing in this.

And so if I'm on the other end of this,

It might be really hard for me to receive this because it feels as if I'm being judged and what's being communicated is I've done something wrong.

So what can happen here is maybe I can go in a little bit deeper.

So this person that's on the side who feels disrespected because their time has been wasted,

Yeah,

You can feel shaming.

You can feel shaming the way that you're saying.

What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go in and I'm going to try to find the poetry in my pain and explain what it really feels like for me so that the other person isn't wrongdoing.

I don't want them to have their fault,

But I want them to understand how it feels.

So I'm going to dig deep.

Thank you for showing up.

I want to communicate with you like the process that I just went through when you weren't here at the time that we agreed upon.

And I just want to let you know that I love you and that my biggest desire here is for a need of connection.

And I want to communicate what happened for me because it felt really heavy in my body.

And I would like for you to understand that moving forward so that we can connect deeper.

What happened for me is I noticed that a fear came up for me around this is historic for me.

This has happened before and it brings up a lot of pain for parents and family members not showing up on time to things that I had when I was younger.

And in those moments,

There's this fear that the person I love isn't going to show up for me.

And so this came up and it felt like,

Oh,

It really stung.

It felt like a deep,

Like stabbing feeling in the stomach and like a racing,

Like a nauseousness in my belly and my chest felt really tight.

And I can still feel that right now.

And so I just want to speak to that because I know that that wasn't your desire for me to experience,

But it feels so heavy for me.

And even as I speak it,

I feel lighter and I can see on your face empathy because I know that that's not how you want me to feel.

And I just want to communicate this so that you understand like what it brings up for me when you're not here at the time that we chose because it's so important to me this connection that we have.

And there's just this feeling like this heavy feeling,

Kind of like a yeah,

Heavy feeling,

But also like a really sharp like nauseousness in my stomach.

And so what I would ask for us now is just to take some breaths together so that I can become more present and that we can start this connection together from a new place.

I don't want to take this into our future,

Into the present.

So if you could just breathe with me,

That would be really helpful.

And then you can breathe with them.

And maybe,

And again,

This is not going to work in every situation.

I want to be very honest about that.

We live in a time where people still will take things very personally.

And they might not be there to understand your process,

But we have the choice to choose who we communicate with.

And I think we can ask at the beginning,

Do you have the capacity to just hear and receive what came up for me when you weren't here on time?

And then if they say,

Yes,

I have the capacity,

You can say,

I just want to take two minutes,

Two minutes to clear this,

And then we can move forward.

And then you move forward.

I think a lot of times people feel that they're going to get pulled into an emotional process for 20 minutes or up to an hour.

But if we can say,

Hey,

I just have this thing coming up for me.

It feels real.

It feels heavy.

But if you can give me two minutes to just explain what's happening for me internally,

I can process that.

We can breathe together.

We can move on.

And for the person that's becoming more emotionally literate as well,

It means for you that you're able to let things go,

That you learn that poetry of the pain,

You learn how to communicate it in a healthy way,

And then you release it.

We don't have to continue to loop and just keep bringing it up during the lunchtime.

I can't believe that you were late.

Man,

I'm still really upset about that.

That was like,

Don't do that next time.

Like no joking.

We're not joking about this thing that could be tender for the other person now,

Especially if they felt like we shamed them or they felt blamed.

We speak our emotions.

We put it into that process.

We take into account what's happening somatically in the body.

We breathe and then we release it.

So we let go of judgment.

We take accountability for what we're feeling.

We see the history of it.

So generally,

Anything that's triggered is not just from that person showing up late.

It's from every other person that's done it before.

It's from your parents doing it before.

And it's not about them.

It's just being triggered in that moment.

So can we see it?

Can we breathe into it?

Can we communicate it?

And can we release it?

So that being said,

We're going to go into some journaling prompts.

So again,

Have a journal,

Have a pen or have a Google Doc or have an email open on your computer,

Whatever is available to you,

A notepad and your phone.

And this is going to just be one minute.

We're going to have a prompt and we're going to write just for one minute.

This is very quick.

And what I want to invite for you,

Especially if you've never written like this before,

Is we're going to close the eyes down first before I give you the prompts.

When I give you the prompts,

Don't think about it.

Of course,

You're going to think about it because you're in your mind.

In your mind,

You can't separate it from your somatic experience.

But do your best to not go into,

How do I curate this in words perfectly?

If you can go instead into your body and feel what those words feel like in your body,

What emotion that brings up,

Where that emotion lives in your body,

If it's warm,

If it's cold,

If it's searing,

If it has any kind of pain with it or any kind of sharpness to it or softness or whatever texture it might be,

Look for the feeling of it,

The sensation of it.

And then begin to write.

And as you write,

Don't edit,

Just write.

I'm going to go ahead and do some stream of consciousness writing for that full minute.

And at the end,

I'll share what I wrote.

And those of you that are typing it,

You can type it into the comments as well.

And we're just going to go through a few prompts like that to get a bit more creative on our internal landscapes and what's happening for us.

So I invite you to close your eyes down and take a few breaths.

So a deep inhalation,

A sigh out on your exhalation.

Again,

Do your best to feel the prompt in the body.

Let go of needing to be perfect and just write from the space.

One minute.

And when you hear the word,

This is the prompt,

We're beginning the prompt.

When you hear of the word safety,

Where does it live in your body?

Safety?

How does it feel?

What color is it?

What is the texture?

Is there a certain body part that it lives in?

Does it permeate your whole body?

What color is it?

Safety.

We're going to take just one minute here.

And you can take that in whatever way you like.

Good for you,

Safety.

Good for you.

You you you last 10 seconds So,

Pause in here and I'll share.

And again,

This is just to give you an idea of how to get more in tune with what the things that are the most important to you feel like.

When I say something that you did didn't make me feel safe,

Instead I can learn to say,

When this happened,

I didn't feel safe.

And the thing that is really complicated in human connections here is that safe has a definition.

It's in the Webster's dictionary.

There are many places that will tell you what safety means.

And yet safety has an interpretation by billions of different reflections of life.

Your definition of safety,

The texture,

The color,

The experience of safety is going to be so different than the texture of safety for me.

So when I say that I don't feel safe because of something that happened between us,

You're immediately going to interpret my expression of safety by your definition.

And if your definition says,

I did everything right in this situation for this person to feel safe,

Of course you immediately get defensive because to you,

It might mean a lot to say that you're unsafe and might feel really challenging for someone to say to you that they didn't feel safe in relation to you in a certain situation.

But instead,

If we can get really curious and say,

Tell me more about safety,

Tell me more about what safety looks like for you.

What does it feel like?

What is its color?

What is its texture?

Where does it live in your body?

When you don't feel safe,

What does that feel like in your unique expression?

And our world's become expansive when we get really curious about somebody else's definition of something that we know to be true.

I know what trust is.

I know what love is.

I know what safety is.

I know what fear is.

You don't know.

I know.

I know the definition.

I know the interpretation.

But instead,

If you can give me a definition of all of those things to you,

How much more rich does my world become?

How much more expansive does it become when you teach me the language of your emotion?

So we're learning each other's emotional language,

And this creates emotional literacy.

So safety for me,

What I've written here.

Safety permeates my body while enveloping it in an orange-yellow warmth.

It is a lover's embrace,

The divine mother,

The great nature.

The forest is deep.

The air is sweet.

To feel safe is to feel seen,

Full,

And touched by life itself.

In safety,

I can be anything and everything I need,

Everything and anything you need.

I am bathed in brilliance and comfortable.

So this is safety for me.

Safety for you might be blue.

It might be green.

It might be the ocean.

It might be the sky.

It might be solitude.

It might be isolation.

For me,

Safety could be surrounded by all the people that I love the most for you.

It could be alone on the mountain.

And so if I'm speaking of safety and you're speaking of safety,

And that's our interpretations,

How different is our interpretation and how much misunderstanding can happen between us if we don't understand the poetry of one another's emotion?

So this is an opportunity to gain more literacy and more expansion.

How beautiful is it to step into the universe that is the person that you care about?

And maybe not even a person that you,

Inherently,

That you are connected to and care about,

But if we can have that curiosity about every single person we meet,

And especially the people that trigger us,

Just imagine the brilliance that we can have from that.

Do these exercises with the people that trigger you,

You know,

With the people that trigger you.

Maybe it's your mother.

Maybe it's your father.

Maybe it's your lover.

And listen to the expression that they have with these things.

And I'm sure that you will be very,

Very surprised with,

Wow,

Your experience of this is so different than my experience.

Now I'm seeing why our languages haven't mixed up.

All right,

So we're going to do another one.

So close your eyes,

Take some breaths.

Close your eyes,

Take some breaths.

So now the word that comes up,

Or the words that come up is fear of disconnection.

This can be to multiple people,

To one specific person,

To a specific situation,

To a place,

To a job,

But fear of disconnection,

The first thing that comes up in your body.

What does it feel like?

Where does it live?

The color,

The texture,

Fear of disconnection.

You have one minute here.

Fear of disconnection.

What is the poetry of this in your body?

What is the meaning of this in your body?

What is the meaning of this in your body?

What is the meaning of this in your body?

All right.

So last minute.

Sorry,

I'll second.

I will read here my fear.

This one is big for me.

So fear of disconnection.

And I want to speak here as well in the poetry of our emotion.

So many of us are feeling this uncertainty and this discomfort from the time that we're living in right now.

And if we get really curious about what we're feeling,

If we say,

Oh,

I don't know what I'm going to do for work,

I don't know the next time I'm going to see my partner who lives in another country,

In another part of the world,

Or I don't know if I'm ever going to get to travel again,

I don't know if I have to get this vaccine,

Or I don't know this.

When we get beneath that,

A lot of times it's fear that lives there.

And fear can be so destructive.

We do so much in fear.

There's so much reactivity that comes in fear.

And when we can't understand one another,

And when we're reacting,

And we're crying out,

And we're disappointed,

And we're angry,

And we're yelling,

And we're grasping on to our loved ones and our jobs and our situations and our homes and certain promises that the world made to us that aren't certain anymore,

At the base of that is fear.

And if we can give poetry to that emotion,

And we can explain it to one another,

Then it's not your anger that's being projected at me,

It's not your sadness,

It's not that you're grasping at me.

I can understand that you're scared.

And if I can see that you're scared,

I can see like the child in you,

I can see the innocence in you,

I can feel love and empathy for the fear that you're experiencing,

Because I know fear.

And we all have such a depth of emotion that arises from feeling fear.

And we don't want one another to feel that.

When we are in the deepest of our fear,

And it is grasping at us,

And it is burying us,

When somebody else is in that fear,

And we can understand that maybe we don't speak their language of fear,

But that they're experiencing a version of fear themselves,

We can feel it in our bodies and think,

I don't want you to feel fear.

I want you to feel safety.

And so we can hear more.

And so a lot of emotional literacy is about slowing down and again,

Getting curious and learning the expansive language of the people in front of you and how they experience different emotions and not projecting your lens of fear,

Your lens of safety onto their world.

And we become cosmic travelers.

You know,

I am traveling into the universe that you are,

And you are traveling into the universe that I am,

And I am teaching you what it means to ride the wave of fear in my experience.

And you are teaching me to ride the wave of safety in your experience.

And we are becoming so much more emotionally intelligent and emotionally literate that it's so beautiful.

So fear for me in my poem.

My fear lives deep in my stomach,

Gargled by a mass of vines and earth.

The soil is dense and wet.

I am suffocating.

I am suffocating here beneath the mess.

My mouth surfaces in moments for shallow sips of breath.

My tongue is dry.

I cry out,

But my voice is muffled.

I am small.

Buried beneath the vastness of all,

My chest feels heavy.

My stomach is in ties.

My fear is bound and binding.

Release me.

So can you imagine if you are my loved one and we are in a fight and we cannot find a bridge of connection between us and we're at the edge of our connection.

And in this moment,

It is a moment of deciding if we're going to be together or we are not going to be together.

And I am saying,

I can't believe you would leave me.

I can't believe that you're doing that.

We had a promise.

We made plans.

I can't believe that you would do that.

That's so hurtful.

You don't care about me.

All of that.

If the person on the other end can say,

Are you feeling fear?

Is that what's coming up for you right now?

Can you take a moment and just tune in?

Are you feeling fear?

And if me in that moment and I'm feeling reactive and I could say,

Yeah,

I'm feeling fear.

I'm feeling a lot of fear that I'm losing connection.

Like I'm in fear of disconnecting from you.

And then you could say,

Can you tell me about that fear of disconnection?

What does that feel like for you?

And in that moment,

If I could take one minute to go in and give poetry to my emotions and read this to my lover,

Can you imagine the empathy that that person could feel for me and explain and see what it feels like to be in that fear of disconnection and maybe be like,

I don't want you to feel that.

How can we get back to a place of connection?

And we could do this back and forth and understand one another's worlds a little bit more and come to a place of deeper understanding.

Maybe just maybe then we could keep the love that we had.

Maybe we could build a bridge between the two of us and we can learn one another's languages.

So this is the rasa,

The flavor of giving poetry to your emotions and finding a new way of communicating.

Because sometimes it doesn't work that we can both communicate nonviolently or from a place of authentically relating or from a place of less reactivity.

But each of us being a human being,

A sentient human being and feeling emotions so deeply,

We are all poets.

When people come to my workshops or they work with me and they say,

I've never written before,

I don't know how to write poetry.

Reality is that you are poetry.

If you've ever felt sadness,

If you've ever been depressed,

If you've ever felt let down,

If you've ever been broken hearted,

If you've ever longed for something deeply,

If you've ever wanted something profoundly,

Then you are a poet because that feeling,

You know where it lives in your body.

You know what it feels like to feel the tightness in the chest or the butterflies in your stomach or the nauseousness of losing someone that we love or experiencing death of someone that we care about or experiencing deep sickness.

That is poetry.

And if we can dive deeper into ourselves and we can bring that out and not project it onto the person that you make me feel this,

You did something,

This is why I'm experiencing it,

But we can say,

This is what I'm experiencing now.

We can dive deeper into the richness of one another's worlds.

So that is my take on,

My small take on emotional literacy and the poetry of emotions,

The poetry of pain.

And I invite for you to give yourself these prompts when you need it.

It doesn't take me being here to signal you into this process.

Take one minute,

Time yourself and tune in and go,

Oh,

What I'm feeling right now is really uncomfortable.

Like what is this discomfort?

And then give it a word,

Give it a prompt and then write about it.

And you can do it in your ecstasy as well.

You can do it in your pleasure.

And those moments of awe and wonderment,

You can sit and just think,

Wow,

I feel electricity buzzing through my body.

I'm in love.

I feel love moving through my body.

What does that feel like?

And then,

Wow,

It feels like a thunderbolt in my heart.

I feel like my heart is going to explode.

I feel like so much energy in my chest.

My voice feels loud.

I feel excitement.

We can begin to give more texture,

You know,

More beauty to the way that we communicate with ourselves and with others.

So that is that.

And I hope that you find more poetry in your emotions.