11:11 - Becoming An Emotional Olympian

Hi guys,

I'm Rissa with Full Awakening and I'm here to bring you an 11-11 meditation and teaching.

Today is January 9th.

Yes,

On my little.

.

.

That's right,

On my calendar it says it's the 9th.

And welcome.

So we have a special teaching for you today.

We're going to just dip our first little baby pinky toe in this subject and I think I might bring you more teachings on this in the coming weeks.

But our teaching today is called Becoming an Emotional Olympiad.

So this term comes from a short little story I'm going to tell you about my trip out to the Midwest two years ago from the West Coast.

Now we're back.

So we've had two trips.

But when we were driving out,

You know,

Traveling is stressful.

Traveling with kids is even more stressful.

And I remember I had this realization,

This epiphany in a public bathroom at a fast food restaurant as a stopover.

And I was thinking,

You know,

We so honor as people,

We honor great intellectual minds,

Right?

Powerful minds that can do things and imagine things and invent things that we've never seen before.

And we so appreciate athletes and people who are masters of their body,

Masters of their ability to do a certain activity to a degree that just amazes us and wows us and inspires us,

Right?

We appreciate these things.

We can agree to that.

But where are our emotional Olympiads?

Where is the masterful emotional being that we all look up to and that we all aspire to be?

I think that that is what we need for our coming time.

I know that that is what I aspire to and it is a long,

Long,

Long journey to get there.

And it is okay if it doesn't always go the way that we want.

But there's many creative ways that we can engage this topic of emotional mastery or emotional athleticism.

Okay,

So let's even just go that far.

Emotional athleticism.

Before we get to being an Olympiad or being a champion,

Let's just go in the direction of emotional athleticism.

And just like with being an athlete or being a great intellectual mind,

It takes practice,

Right?

It takes practice.

It takes exercise.

It takes strengthening those muscles.

And in this case,

We're not necessarily talking about the skeletal muscles,

But we are actually talking about the brain in part,

Right?

There's a lot of things going on,

A lot of energetic systems,

But the brain actually becomes more well-resourced the more that we practice this.

So let's just dive in.

The first thing we're going to talk today about is just simply to be able to acknowledge the emotions that we're having and to feel them in our bodies.

This is huge,

Right?

For me,

I could be having a big kerfuffle,

An emotional moment.

I could be getting snippy at my kids or my husband or just feeling something.

And for me,

The first thing is just to be able to acknowledge a word that labels the feeling.

Overwhelm is one of my best friends,

Right?

I experience overwhelm a fair amount.

And I'm learning more about myself as I'm able to label my emotions.

I know for myself,

For instance,

A lot of sound.

I'm pretty sound-sensitive.

So when there's a lot of sound happening,

I can get pretty overwhelmed pretty quickly and that can affect all these other emotional experiences,

Which can affect my behaviors,

Which affect more behavioral and emotional experiences.

So let's back it up.

So emotions.

There are universal emotions.

You can look up on Nonviolent Communication and VC Universal Emotional lists.

There's a list of emotions that you can see and that can be really helpful to be like,

Wow,

There's more than just anger or joy or happiness or sadness or grief,

Right?

There's like a list of universal human emotions that are nuanced,

Even for our limited language,

That you can look at and say,

Circle some of the ones that you're like,

Oh,

Yeah,

Those are familiar for me.

But for today,

We're just going to pick one.

We're going to pick one challenging emotion that you've had recently that you can think of.

And we're going to explore that in our bodies because our bodies are our best allies with this.

OK,

So if you'll if you'll go with me into a little tiny exercise,

I'd love you to close your eyes and just take a deep breath.

I'm going to ding our little bell because that can help to sort of set the stage.

Here we go.

Just take a few deep breaths.

And move into your body,

Move into your heart.

And as you do,

Just notice your awareness sweeping over your entire body from the very top of your head,

Brushing along your throat and your neck,

Your shoulders,

As if your mind is just laying a soft,

Gentle hand on your arms.

Your hands.

Back to your torso,

Your chest and your back.

So you can feel all of your parts,

All of you physically present.

Sweeping down through your belly,

Noticing if your belly is feeling tight or open,

Loose,

Expansive,

Anxious.

Moving into your hips and your legs,

All the way down to your feet.

Now,

It's helpful for me to think about the emotions like a wind moving through a landscape.

Emotions run their own course.

They have their own personalities,

Their own expressions.

They produce effects inside our bodies just the way wind does in a landscape,

Moving through trees or the woods,

Through a cityscape,

Around a mountain.

So thinking of these energetic winds,

These emotional winds,

I want you to pick just one.

So I mentioned overwhelm before I might pick overwhelm.

You should pick one that you've been encountering often.

And instead of doing what we normally do,

Which is attach our feelings to thought forms,

You're just going to be welcoming that feeling in just for a moment and watching the way that it plays with your body.

So watching the way your body reacts to it.

Perhaps putting yourself back in a situation just for a moment in which you felt that emotion.

Perhaps an image comes to mind or a certain gesture or you feel a color rising in a certain part of your body.

Just focusing on that color,

The sensation of contraction or expansion,

Sense of heat or cold.

Any sort of tingling or any sort of movement your body wants to do to inhabit for a moment that emotional state.

I'm feeling a lot of tightening around my throat and my shoulders as if my neckline of my shirt is too tight.

That's just an example of how that emotion makes me feel.

And I want you to release it.

Give yourself a big deep breath in.

Big breath out and just release that emotion.

Let it begin to blow through you entirely completing its cycle in your body.

And one of the great teachings for me around Buddhist meditation is expansion and contraction,

Basically respiration.

So now one of the techniques that I might use is to respirate that emotion by reaching out and wondering who around me might be feeling that same emotion.

Are there other people in my surrounding area that are having the same experience with that emotional wind blowing through them?

And can I imagine that I can reach myself out my heart through my hands like I have big Gumby arms and then I might hold their hands with that feeling of acknowledgement.

Yes,

Whatever it is you're feeling is valid.

It's understandable.

It's a shared experience and they might be having a similar experience in their body or something slightly different.

And as you reach out with your empathy,

You might feel your heart begin to soften your body.

That feeling of togetherness can allow that feeling of isolation that comes in with that emotion to start to subside and flow away.

Whatever the case may be,

Just spend a moment focusing out with empathy and compassion.

I like to say to myself when I'm having a hard time in particular,

I'm having a very emotional experience right now.

I'm having a very human experience right now.

I am having a very human experience right now.

Because being swept up in emotion is a very human experience.

And now simply turn back,

Turn back to your body.

Turn back to your internal landscape that has been recently swept up in that emotion and just see if you feel differently than you did before.

A teacher of mine once said you'll either feel the same or different.

One of those.

And if you're still feeling that emotional energy in your body,

That wind,

You can focus in again and again become curious about how it feels in your body.

Again,

It could feel the same or different.

And try to give that feeling as much description as possible.

Try to give it a color,

A form,

A movement.

And if that emotion has left your body altogether,

You can give those same descriptors to the absence of that emotion.

Ah,

Overwhelm has left my body.

My shoulders feel relaxed.

Instead of that bright yellow color of overwhelm,

I'm seeing a cool blue color of relaxation start to spread in those same areas around my throat and my shoulders.

My heartbeat is starting to calm down and I can feel my feet again against the ground.

This is simply called somatic awareness of emotional energies.

And that's something we can practice.

Now just allowing yourself a little shake.

Give yourself a little shake.

Shake a shake a shake.

Shake a shake a shake shake shake.

Shake your body.

Shaking your body is a great way to just complete the stress response cycle,

To complete the energetic emotional response and triggering cycle.

I know I asked you guys to get into a little bit of a triggered place today.

Just shake it all out.

Shake it all out.

And the best time to do this,

The best time to work those muscles of your emotional athleticism is in the moment.

It's in the moment when you're having the experience.

Obviously,

Enjoyable emotions of joy or satisfaction or gratitude or connectivity,

All those emotions are way easier to connect to.

But sometimes we don't notice them as much.

It's like we don't notice when the wind is at our back.

We just notice when it's pushing us in the face.

And so start to become aware of that because those are great places to practice.

And when those other emotions come in,

The ones where the wind is blowing in your face and the emotions are hard and reactivity is high,

Just try to give yourself a little bit of a pause.

Just a little bit of a pause to name that emotion.

Say,

I am feeling whatever it is.

Give it a label.

And then place after that,

And it's okay.

Because acceptance,

Acknowledgement and acceptance of the emotional wind is really,

I mean,

That's a great place to start.

And then the third piece is just to notice it in your body.

To notice it in your body,

See how it's making you feel in your body.

Name those things.

Even keeping a journal,

Like an emotional winds journal would be really,

Really helpful for this.

And then the fourth part,

If you want to go real advanced here,

Is then to expand your awareness out and to connect with others who might be feeling that feeling too.

For me,

Exercising that empathy piece,

That compassion piece in my heart,

That oh my God,

This is not an isolated experience.

I am not a freak of nature.

Like,

I am feeling overwhelmed as a mother because my kids are screaming and jumping on my body.

And wow,

That is probably a really common experience.

And right now,

In the zip code,

There are probably a hundred other mothers having the exact same experience right now.

And it is okay.

So connect with them.

Feel their hearts in your hearts.

Give each other a little bit of strength,

A little camaraderie.

We got this,

Mamas.

We got this.

And then come back to yourself.

Come back to your own experience.

Notice in your body,

Has your experience changed or is it the same?

And just keep respirating,

Right?

Focusing out,

Focusing in,

And noticing if things have changed.

And you'll find your way,

Right?

This is,

We're doing this together,

Guys.

I don't know how to be an emotional Olympiad.

I'm not there 100%,

But I can tell you that I've been working on this for a few years with focus.

And it has changed my life.

And my life is a lot better than it used to be.

And my emotional resiliency is a lot better.

And my emotional literacy is a lot better.

And my relationships are way better,

Right?

So we can start taking responsibility for all of this and start noticing and becoming fluent in our own language of emotional energy moving through our bodies.

It really does impact our whole lives.

So I think the world could use a little bit of what we just did,

A little bit of emotional resiliency and emotional fluency.

So let's give it a color.

I noticed for me that blue color came in when the bright yellow of overwhelm left my body.

I got a little bit of a blue color.

Maybe you got a color too when you felt some relief.

So let's rub that color and that intention of emotional resiliency,

Emotional mastery,

Emotional athleticism,

Potential for emotional Olympiads.

I would love to see what that sort of competition would look like.

But let's give a little bit of that emotional resiliency to the world.

So create a little orb now with me of emotional resiliency.

Let's put our earth inside.

We're going through a lot of changes right now.

We are growing and we are changing as a collective,

As a planet,

And as an earth body.

And it is beautiful and hard and a wonderful opportunity for new things to bloom.

So let's push and squeeze that emotional resiliency into our beautiful blessed earth and all of her beings.

May all of her beings get a little bit extra space,

A little bit of pause where their frontal lobe stays connected to their reactive centers.

Let's squeeze that in and then scoop that wish,

That desire,

That blessing into our hearts,

Holding our earth filled and covered and saturated with emotional resiliency,

Emotional athleticism,

Willingness to engage,

And sending you so much love and blessings for your week.

We're going to be covering this in more detail in the Mama Restoration Club meeting this week.

We're going to start on a big deep dive underneath looking at emotional resiliency because I think it's got to be just one of the most important things as a parent,

Of course as a caregiver of any kind,

And any sort of caring professional for us to have stellar emotional resiliency and athleticism.

So if you'd like to join me,

I'd like to invite you to come along for a free class.

I think I'll blast that out there soon.

If you'd like to come and learn more about emotional resiliency and do some deeper work with us,

We would love to have you.

Give you blessings on your day and have a good weekend.

Bye guys,

See you next week.