Befriending Emotion

Since most people have struggled with emotional repression or just a negative, having a negative relationship with the emotions of the grieving cycle, that means that when the emotion arises, they have an automatic aversion or pushing away or repression of that emotion. And what that does to the emotion, say you have the emotion of anger arising, and then you have that negative relationship with anger, then that amplifies the anger and it intensifies the anger because the anger doesn't want to be repressed. It's like if you have water moving through a hose and you put your thumb on half the hose and it shoots out even more intense the other half, it doesn't stop the water from moving.

It just makes the water more kinetic and more frenetic and more chaotic and more intense. And that's what the repression does. So we both need to learn to not repress our emotions or unrepress our emotions. And then once they're unrepressed, we need to befriend our emotions.

And so the way to befriend our emotions is we want to encourage the experiencing and the feeling of our emotions in a relatively neutral or safe environment, specifically like the guided meditation I teach, where you have a safe point in your body and then you're relating to something from that safe point. That's a good way to learn to befriend emotion. You can learn to change your relationship to emotion by first befriending it and moving from the safe place towards the emotional intensity, the part of the emotion you're scared of, and then back again.

And then also then bringing in the unconditional self-love that we talked about in the previous patterns and then bringing that into the relationship with the emotion, right? So if there's where you're looking from and then here's the emotion of anger and then having the unconditional self-love be the space between the two, the relationship, then you're beginning to change that relationship with sadness or with anger, whatever the emotion is.