Engaging with your Emotions

This is the Reckoning, the Rumble, and the Revolution.

In Rising Strong, Brene Brown draws on her visit to Pixar studios and Joseph Cambell’s The Hero’s Journey, to create this three-act process to rise from a face-down moment with more wisdom and worthiness.

Recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave.

'The Reckoning’ method has two simple parts. Part 1) engaging with our feelings, and 2) getting Curious about the story behind the feelings - what emotions we’re experiencing and how they are connected to our thoughts, behaviors, and perception of identity.

PART 1

In the first step, acknowledging that you’re feeling something. Like me, you may disengage with ‘negative’ feelings to protect yourself. After all, if we don’t care then it can’t hurt, right? Wrong! Admitting that you are hurt, that you are invested, that you are vulnerable is the crucial first step. After all, you can’t get up if you don’t realise that you’ve fallen down.

As Brene Brown says, ‘It doesn’t matter if we’re ready for an emotional adventure - hurt happens. And it happens to every single one of us. Without exception. The only decision we get to make is what role we’ll play in our own lives.'

This means getting uncomfortable. But being scared is an opportunity to be brave. Being brave is being vulnerable, and being vulnerable is being strong. It’s choosing to have the courage to step into your story and own your truth.

While some researchers and clinicians argue that you can change your life by just changing your thoughts, actions, or feelings, Brene says she has seen no evidence in her research of just changing one of the three. She believes all three are equally important, they must all be addressed and are connected as a whole.

Not recognizing that we’re feeling something uncomfortable is of course denying our emotions. When we go through life denying and disengaging from tough emotions, they don’t go away, instead, they fester, they own us, and they define us.

Lastly, Newton’s third law of motion states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Say it again with me, Newt … Narh I’m just kidding. Brene believes this also applies to our emotional lives. Every emotion we feel, there is a response. We feel angry, we can match that by mindlessly lashing out or shutting down, or we can do the opposite reaction and we can breathe, get grounded, and bring awareness to what’s really going on.

We don’t need to respond and be scared by defaulting to the instinctual freeze, fight, or flight mode. Just breathe, take a moment and respond thoughtfully, it’ll only give us the awareness we need to make the choices that are aligned within our lives.

PART 2

Once you’ve got an idea of how you’re feeling, it’s time to get curious. This means having the willingness to open a line of inquiry into what’s going on and why.

A study published in the October, 2014, issue of the journal Neuron suggests that the brain's chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information. Brene furthers, ‘that a growing number of researchers believe that curiosity and knowledge-building grow together - the more we know, the more we want to know’.

Figuring out what’s going on for you can take time, so don’t pressure yourself into finding answers straight away. Life is a constant journey of figuring yourself out. I’m 32 and I still haven’t figured myself out,

The bad news though, is that many of us have grown up believing that emotions aren’t worthy of our attention. In fact for men, being vulnerable is particularly hard.

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, says in her work: ‘We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.’ When we define ourselves against binaries, when we place ourselves in tiny cages, we trap ourselves in a story we can never own. A truth that will never be ours.

Approaching yourself with curiosity and empathy instead of judgement can be hard. Our emotions form such a large part of our identity and when you are facing a setback, it disrupts our identity-narrative - i.e. the ‘kind’ of person we think we are vs the person we truly are. This is, the hero’s journey.

The thing that gets in the way of reckoning with our emotions is exactly what gets in the way of all courageous behaviour: fear.

Having a supportive environment is only part of the solution: we have to take the time to look deeper into ourselves and question who we are and how we want to live.

Being curious is choosing to be vulnerable because we surrender ourselves to uncertainty. Children do this best, always reimagining themselves and the world around them. It’s a fearless sense of play and curiosity that leads to growth (funny youtube video with child). The more that life has battered us around, the less curious we have become. Fear is part of human instinct and survival, but it’s important to assess what is protecting us and what is holding us back. As Youtube sensation fitness dance instructor Keaira Lashae says: ‘Through challenge comes change’.

Another great quote is from the over quoted and often misquoted Albert Einstein, he says ‘The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing…”(read rest of quote trailing off). Basically what he’s saying is that being curious isn’t just for acquiring knowledge, it is evidence that we’re alive.

Get curious and pay attention, take a deep breath and become mindful of what you’re feeling. Take a walk, mediate, or do something so simple as a breathing exercise if you have to. Write it down if you like on a piece of paper, “I give myself permission to be…”. Otherwise you can call a friend or family member and say to them “Permission to be…”

This is all a practise of mindfulness, which means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings and surrounding environment. It also involves acceptance, not judging our thoughts and feelings by believing they’re the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to think or feel in that given moment. Practicing mindfulness allows our thoughts to tune in to what we’re sensing in the present, rather than rehashing the past or ponding what's to come.