How To Sit With An Emotion

Emotions are tricky and complex, to say the least. We all deal with our emotions in different ways, often not dealing with them. People tend to avoid their emotions through numbing, escaping and distracting. These mechanisms suppress our emotional energy and give it nowhere to go other than buried deeper within our consciousness. When we stuff down our emotions, we become anxious, reactive, and possibly sick. I wonder how many people in the world had someone in their life at a younger age, teach them how to cope with emotions and feelings. Looking at the world, it appears as if this was rare. Look around the world at all of the sad, angry, lonely, depressed, etc. people that are struggling every day to cling onto some small piece of hope of feeling better. Imagine feeling better, less as a final destination but more of a moment by moment experience. The reality is that we may feel good for a while and then something happens, and we do not feel good again. Learning how to sit with your emotions can give you a tool to get yourself through each of those moments of not feeling good. The real mastery is when you can bring yourself out of those pain emotions and into feeling okay or better moment after moment after moment.

As a child, I grew up in a family full of emotional chaos. There was numbing, distracting, avoiding and reacting. There was a lot of reacting. No one ever talked about emotions in my family. We avoided conversations, yelled and screamed or resorted to being passive aggressive. I struggled with this a lot as a kid. I was super sensitive, and my body would shake with fear or freeze up when someone would yell, throw things or punch holes in the wall. I would get frustrated when someone would resort to being passive aggressive, because I believe it is more effective to find a compassionate way to say what you mean. It was confusing navigating what the adults actually meant. And then there were the moments when someone would just avoid and say nothing. The empath in me felt this intensely too and would usually have the same reaction as when someone would yell.

I was always confused as a child, wondering did I do something wrong or should I be doing something about what someone was feeling? It was all terrifying and uncomfortable and heavy and so I taught myself to disconnect from my emotions. I would escape into my mind or disassociate and leave my body. I did not know what else to do. It did not help that I was often teased for being sensitive. And if I was in trouble and crying, I would often hear, “Quit crying before I give you something to cry about.” It did not feel good to be threatened. I started believing that I was safer not feeling my emotions. I did not know any other way until I began my healing journey and started learning how to face my pain. I slowly learned that it was okay to feel my emotions. I would often hear people tell me to just sit with my emotions so that I could feel them. I never fully understood what that meant. I understood sitting but that was it. I knew there had to be something else to it.

One day, I was channeling with Spirit and they helped me understand what it looks like to sit with an emotion. And then it all became clear. Sitting with an emotion means to honor the way you are feeling for a period of time without trying to change it or fix it. Sitting with your emotions is something that any person can do. This is a profound tool on the path of healing, transformation and awakening.

When you are feeling an emotion, allow it to be there and give it space to breathe within you. Allow it to be as it is rather than engaging with it and trying to change it or stop it. It takes far more energy to try to change or fix it rather than just sitting with it. Emotions take a lot of energy in their intensity. Sitting with an emotion can help first move through the intensity of the feeling in order to get you to the point of transforming it with more ease. Sitting with your emotion must come first.

Many people resist sitting with their emotions because that means we have to feel all of it. The thought of this terrifies most of us. Emotions can be overwhelming and trying to figure out how to navigate them can be even more overwhelming. Oftentimes, emotions do not need us to do anything with them in the moment other than having space to breathe. Breathing is a key factor in sitting with our emotions. Our breath has the ability to calm the intensity more than most other things.

We feel our emotions when they move up to the surface of our awareness. This happens because they are trying to move out of you. We are actually in a perpetual state of healing which causes these emotions to surface unexpectedly at times. When we suppress emotional energy through numbing, distracting and/or avoiding, we resist our natural flow of energy which causes us to get stuck, stagnant and heavy over time. Learning to sit with our emotions rather than resisting them can help alleviate the pain that many of us continue to compound on top of ourselves.

Before you attempt to do anything with your emotions and feelings, first take time to sit with them. The process below describes how to do that.

The Process

1.   Sit or lay down and close your eyes

2.   Breathe deep relaxation breaths

3.   Allow yourself to feel what you are feeling without trying to stop it, fix it, escape it or understand it

4.   Breathe more deep relaxation breaths

5.   Trust that you have the power to feel what you are feeling without getting consumed in it

***There is no set amount of time that you should do this. If you are concerned with time or intensity, set a timer. Start with 1 minute each time and then keep increasing by another minute until you reach 5 minutes. Ideally, spend at least 5 minutes sitting with your emotion, without trying to do anything with it other than breath and feel it. Feel free to sit longer if you wish.