Sit on the feeling and explore the thought behind it.

Embracing feelings involves acknowledging and accepting them as a natural part of the human experience. It starts with developing self-awareness and the ability to identify our emotions. Once we recognize our feelings, we should allow ourselves to feel them fully without judging or suppressing them, even if they are uncomfortable.  Sometimes, our brain prefers denying the feeling to avoid the pain, but denial only postpones the problem as the feeling always returns.

The invitation is to recognize the emotion and “Sit With It”. Sitting with an emotion means allowing ourselves to fully experience and feel the emotion without trying to change or resist it.  Then, even more important is to resist the impulse to react. Our response instead needs to be the result of mindful exploration of our options and possible consequences.

“Emotions cannot hurt us unless we grant them the power to do so.”

Either when feelings are inspired by a past event or a thought about the future, a feeling is not an external event that can hurt us.  It is just something happening within us that is not either good or bad, it’s just true. If we feel it, it’s real.

Emotions are always triggered by thoughts, and here is the most important point to remember, while feelings are real, the thoughts that generate them are not always true, in fact, many times they are false, they are just scenarios, conclusions or memories built by our brain. We must focus our attention, not in masking or denying the feeling but instead, going deeper into the thought to discover whether it is true or not.