Moment of Mind July 2020 – Finding Mindful Now

Image of three emoticon faces. First is crying with a downturned mouth and is yellow, second has a flat line mouth and is yellow, third has a downturned mouth and is red. Text reads “This honoring of your pain, upset, and stress supports their safe release as they move through. Silencing or ignoring them can lead to them fizzing and erupting sideways because the overwhelm takes over. This can lead to unintentional harm.”

Moment of Mind

This month I had the opportunity to convert a live webinar training for small teams to a mini-course for individuals, called Stress Less With Sensory Awareness. I created the mini-course to support people in turning toward their emotional landscape to understand how they feel and identify what mindfulness-based practices can best help them feel more centered or stabilized when there is overwhelm or stress moving through. It felt really important in this time of ongoing layered adversity that more people have more tools for emotional support.
I created this because in my opinion our society does not teach us that our feelings and emotions are normal to feel – or how to best support our systems when challenging feelings and emotions arise. Instead, many of us are often socially conditioned to turn away from ourselves when we feel bad, we may be encouraged to squelch feelings of anger, or to deny discomfort or overwhelm. And at the same time there are endless industries that profit from nudging us in a continual search to find anything outside of us that could make us feel good as much of the time as possible. And if we are taught to turn away from ourselves, how could we be expected to be able to turn towards people when they are feeling anger, pain or sadness without experiencing that same overwhelm?
The challenge with this is that a) the brain generates feelings and emotions as a form of protection for the body as it predicts what could happen in the outer world – it will keep doing this throughout life, b) life will continue to bring circumstances that the brain perceives as potentially threatening especially to the self-concept identity, c) there isn’t actually anything outside of us that can make us feel good all the time, and d) if we don’t know how to support our system when feeling overwhelm it means we have a reduced opportunity to stay engaged with life as adversity arrives. I know because I lived this way – making my thoughts and feelings wrong – for years.
I designed the mini-course so that people can find one or more sensory and mindfulness-based practices to use in the moment to help dial down the overwhelm a notch by turning to face the feelings using the built-in intelligence of the body. I want you to be able to ask for a raise and ride the nerves as they agitate. I want you to know that you can get through challenging conversations with people in your life that may involve expressing hurt feelings and staying with your center as they react. I want you to feel that it’s okay to request someone wear a mask to protect from Covid19 when they are resistant to it. And I want you to be able to take action for social change on the issues that are most important to you, knowing that pacing yourself is important as societal change is a slow process.
The relevance of this topic was brought home further this month through a course I am taking and recommend called Embodied Activism. The instructors extend the importance of what they call resourcing your capacity to be with overwhelm, specifically in the context of activism. Nkem Ndefo and Rae Johnson point out that many of us go through life having to navigate what happens when someone – especially those in positions of power or who society has privileged – are unable to manage their own emotional states and it fizzes out onto bystanders. When someone does not have the capacity to attend to their own overwhelm, when their consciousness is overtaken by shame, guilt, anger, stress, or pain, the feelings may be bottled up and erupt – with the potential to cause harm in relationships. We can see this in the example of the woman who called the police on a Black man birding in a park. The woman could not be with her own overwhelm so she turned it on an innocent bystander. It can show up in meetings when your ideas are silenced because the person in charge feels insecure. It can show up in family dynamics as attempts to control others – all the way to abuse. Notice that the harm doesn’t come from the feeling – pain, anxiety, anger, grief are normal, healthy, expected feelings and emotions in life. The harm comes from that lack of capacity to support the system and be with the feelings or emotions. Many times lack of capacity comes from lack of supports in people’s settings that are structural, for example living in impoverished communities. If you are reading this email this is an indicator that you have a certain level of financial resources and opportunities available to you.
Thankfully this capacity can be grown when people start where they are and take small steps toward learning how their system functions and what supports help expand that capacity. I see how learning about my emotional and physiological systems is part of my responsibility to regulate and manage my own emotions, in the same way it’s my responsibility to eat and to get rest. For me this isn’t about control – it’s about support and attending.
This week I invite you to notice where in your body you feel best in any given moment and see if it grows or changes when you put your attention on it. If you want to try it, you could breathe into that “best” spot. You could also bring in movement by using your hands to brush lightly -or with firm pressure from your palms- over your legs or arms imagining that you are brushing some of that pain or tension or anxiety out of your system into the living world. I like to brush in the direction of houseplants, imagining them filtering it just like they filter the air. I’d love to hear what you notice!

Love for Your Inner Science Nerd

Rather than review a research article, this month I’m sharing a few links that utilize social science in understanding emotional states for you to explore. You’ll notice that this list of resources raise awareness about individuals, relationships and settings – as all three are part of the Finding Mindful Now Awareness Framework.
Can you tell the difference between feeling shame (the sensation “I am bad,” fear of disconnection) vs guilt (“I did something bad” behaviors instead of focusing on the self) vs humiliation (I feel shame and “I didn’t deserve it”), embarrassment (we know others have done something like this and we know it will pass)? It’s important to notice the differences if we are to have transformation conversations. Similarly, it’s also important to understand what shaming is – and how it is a tool of oppression – compared to holding oneself accountable. Hear more from Brené Brown’s podcast here where she builds on an earlier topic about how important it is to distinguish among feelings and emotions.
What are your routes to emotional safety in relationships? In this article, a Toronto-based psychotherapist describes a corollary to love languages, or how you like to give and receive love, to how you like to attain feelings of safety.
In this podcast episode from When Women Speak, Sara J. Sanderson interviews Emma Case and they discuss why facilitators, teachers, and leaders need to go beyond saying “everyone is welcome here” and consider who is actually welcomed based on who is represented, who is speaking, and what is being said when creating spaces for learning and facilitating groups. There can be hidden statements of who is not welcome through who is not represented and what is not being said. In this guide, Tema Okun of dRworks (see more at www.dismantalingracism.org) shares a guide of how white supremacy can show up in organizational culture. I find this particularly impactful because individualism, one right way, progress is always defined as bigger or more, fear of open conflict, perfectionism, a sense of urgency, and defensiveness, among many other qualities, are hallmarks of it.

Today is the last day to enroll in the Stress Less With Sensory Awareness mini-course this month. Head over to the page to learn more about what’s included, the 7 day money back guarantee policy, and to register!