For those of us struggling with mental health problems and addictions, one of our greatest challenges lies in figuring out how to manage our difficult emotions. We don’t have a healthy relationship to our feelings, and we haven’t learned healthy tools to help ourselves cope with them and navigate the many challenges they can create in our lives. We want to build a relationship with our inner selves and our emotions that is based on acceptance, openness, honesty and connection. We want to trust ourselves to be able to handle even our more difficult feelings, rather than reacting out of fear and panicking that we won’t be able to survive them.
Reactive Emotional Responses
When we’re stressed out, worried or anxious, when we’re triggered, bothered, hurt or otherwise challenged in some way, our tendencies are often to react with emotional responses that don’t help us come to resolutions but that instead compound the problems at hand. All of our unresolved pain, the traumas we experience, the insecurities we feel, can cause us to become self-destructive. Our subconscious minds become programmed to be self-harming rather than protective. We become self-critical and self-sabotaging, and we work against ourselves as we’re trying to heal. When we’re confronted with problems, our emotions can block us from being able to arrive at solutions.
Meditation to Move Through Our Emotions
One of the best things we can do for ourselves to help ourselves move through our emotions more gracefully and calmly is begin a meditation practice. When we meditate regularly, we tap into our innate sense of peace and wellness. We connect with our internal emotional and spiritual resources, and our strength. We feel more joyful and at peace within ourselves. Our emotions become beautiful parts of who we are, things we can observe but not be overly attached to. We begin to be less overcome, less swayed and less negatively impacted by our difficult emotions.
Gratitude Meditation Practice
For an exercise in amplifying our joy, we can combine meditation with a gratitude practice. We can list things we feel grateful for, things we appreciate about ourselves and our lives, things we find beautiful on a daily basis, all of our gifts and talents, all of our strength and power in overcoming the many challenges we’ve gone through in our lives. We can meditate on the lists we create and also on the feelings of appreciation and joy that come up for us. Doing this helps us create a foundation of wellness and contentment in our everyday lives, and this can allow us to move through even the most difficult emotions more easily and fluidly.
The caring, compassionate staff of The Guest House is here to support you as you start your journey to recovery and healing.
Call 855-483-7800 today for more information.
theguesthouseocala.com
3230 Northeast 55th Avenue Silver Springs, FL 34488