Emotions are Welcome Here

How to keep calm when fear is here

Create Space for Fear

In my last post, I was writing on how to increase resilience in our lives. Resiliency is the ability to bounce back after difficulty. One of the ways we can increase our resiliency is by learning how to talk to and “be with” our difficult emotions.

When we experience events in our life as a threat or stressor we often have feelings of anger, fear, frustration, or overwhelm. All of these feelings encourage our lower brain and survival instinct to kick in. In other words, we feel like we are going to die.

Yesterday, I was speaking to a room of employees in Los Angeles about how to increase their resiliency to stress. This seminar is part of a larger mindfulness and well being program that I am leading & supporting this company with. I asked those in the room to name some things that stress them out.… READ MORE...

How to be responsive with BIG Feelings

Cool the flames of anger

Mood is so ubiquitous to our lives, lying just beneath the surface of any moment and any connection with another. Often times when life is challenging we can have difficult thoughts and feelings that emerge. When these difficult thoughts and feelings arise, there may be feelings of discomfort in the mind and/or body. We can either push our feelings away or lean in and listen to the wisdom they are trying to convey.

For the month of April, I wanted to give some focus to feelings in my weekly posts always to enhance greater mindfulness and well-being at work and home.

Feelings both positive and negative help us learn from experiences. Listen to the wisdom of feelings. When people feel down, it is difficult to immediately cheer up right away, hence why we may listen to sad music or want to talk about the sadness. Sadness is often telling us that something is out of balance and thus we have to turn towards to discover how to come back into balance.… READ MORE...

How to make friends with your feelings

Increase your resilience

Resilience is the ability to get back up after adversity. Due to the unpredictability of life, there will always be joys and sorrows. Resilient people are able to greet change and difficulty as an opportunity for self-reflection, learning and growing.

How do we increase our resilience?

“I bounce back from set-backs and, if things don’t go according to plan, I make another plan.”

Resiliency is mostly cultivated from within by how we perceive and then react to stressors.

Most of life’s stressors are subjective and with mindfulness (seeing things as they are in this present moment), we have the ability to respond with wisdom vs. react in a harmful way. When we see our thoughts and feelings clearly and can offer compassion for the hardship we are experiencing, we increase our resilience.

A study highlighting the link between mindfulness and resilience in the “Journal of Personality and Individual Differences” found that “Mindful people … can better cope with difficult thoughts and emotions without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down (emotionally).”… READ MORE...