I recently experienced an insidious  form of self-doubt .

It seeped in through cracks of my sense of myself, my own inner truth, and eroded my self-trust and self confidence. And it starts with the question “What if…?”

I was trying to tell someone about how I felt about an event in our relationship and his response was "Well, if that is the story you want to tell yourself, then I can’t help it!" Then, slowly a part me, the part that knows all about cognitive behaviour therapy surfaced.  It tells me that my thoughts can generate feelings and all I have to do is change my thoughts ….. well you know the rest. Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t.  The rest for me is that self-doubt starts to seep in. It erodes my sense of what is right or wrong for me. It starts to ask:

• What if you are being unreasonable?
• What if you are being overly emotional?
• What if you have a distorted sense of the events?

The list could go on…everyone will have their own self-eroding “What if” questions. Having hooked into the “that’s the story you want so you are responsible for creating your own misery” message I start to doubt myself. I start to doubt my feelings. But this is where I get waylaid. I should trust my feelings. They are pointing me to something very important. They are pointing me to what I value for myself (and others) in my life.

I can change the questions I ask myself:

• What really matters about this for me?
• What is it that I want to stand up for – for myself?
• How am I honouring what is important to me?

I need to stay with the hurt, fear and sadness and sense into what they are telling me. They are telling me what kind of relationship I want…one in which even feelings which are hard to fathom are still respected, one in which ‘care’ for the other person is not perceived as being at the expense of oneself. One in which my feelings are given space in the relationship even when the other person “doesn’t think they are reasonable or understandable”.

So, no I don’t need to own the story about what happened or didn’t happen. I do not need to get lost in debating the content. I need to own my feelings.  I need to look to my feelings because they are telling me what matters for me in this situation. I need to connect to my values. Am I respecting my values and holding myself to account? Or am I giving them away for momentary comfort; to avoid a fight or uncomfortable discussion, to help the other person feel alright, to not be seen as selfish, mean, judgmental, unloving or needy? I am giving away my values to avoid the emotional pain which surfaces when I hear those kinds of labels which dismiss me as a human being?

Then…later…when I have explored, honoured and respected my feelings and values… if I want to… I play around with the story I had about what happened. I can have the feelings which came first (and are therefore telling me what is most important for me) and  I can walk 360 degrees around the issue looking at it from all angles. I can then see how that changes how I feel now and what values come up by taking a broader view.

But not before I have established some stability from understanding and respecting my first set of feelings and needs.

I love this post by The Urban Monk. In particular I enjoyed his move towards self-compassion both in the present moment and with the part of us from our past that feels triggered by the present moment.

In Focusing we might turn towards ourselves, as a first step, and say hello to what is there holding the space with a quality of empathic curiosity.

In NVC we might sense for the unmet needs which are our values that are not being met in this situation.

I also relish that he has drawn my attention to how much of my present moment emotional experience is part of an ongoing stream from my past.

Mindful observation of the present experience can help me “not add more to my story” and saying hello and empathically connecting with the nature of my energy stream from the past can help me heal and move forward from a needs met energy.

Please enjoy and then go check out his blog. It’s worth subscribing to.

These are qualities of practice that I alluded to in my last blog. Most spiritual or personal development practices imply “improvement” or at least some kind of movement towards something.

I know that I have swung from trying to “repress” or “avoid” particular negative emotions or actions I have labelled as harmful to myself and others, or problematic at the very least, to indulging in the emotions or actions.

When I repress I tell myself a particular kind of story – how “bad” or “weak” I am, how lost I am or how I just can’t get my act together. I wallow in a critic-fest.

When I indulge I tell myself a different kind of story. I make enemy images of the people I am affecting – how they deserve it, how they brought it upon themselves, how I am acting righteously or justly to bring them to some new awareness. I criticise them.

Both ways are just stories I make up to justify my responses.

Now, however,  I am trying a middle way, one that has 3 processes.

Acknowledging

Now, I try and notice when I am moving towards repression or indulgence. I say hello to this movement, holding myself with a kind of friendliness that one feels with an old, dear friend.

“Oh, hello my dear friend anger. I can sense you arising in my body – I can feel the tension and tightening across the front of my chest and the shortening of my breath. I acknowledge you there just as you are.”

Accompanying

When I say hello to whatever is arising – what comes is a relationship between me and it. For example a relationship between me and anger. I am not anger and it is not me but we are here, in this moment, together. I can sense how it moves through me. I can accompany its arising, its response to my acknowledgement and I, now, can accompany it as it tells me what is up for it. I can listen to it and listen for its deeper needs or the values it thinks it will protect by doing what it is doing. I can accompany it a little way down the road.

Accepting

I can accept that this is how I feel just now and as I journey with it I can notice moment by moment shifts and changes. Accepting doesn’t mean agreeing – it just means –yep, this is how it seems for me just now in this moment. I can accept that I might be experiencing suffering or discomfort. I can accept that it feels strong or overwhelming.

It may seem like accepting will be buying into the story (whichever one is being told) – yet that has not been my experience. I have found that once I accept whatever I am experiencing – no matter how subjective – a new possibility opens up for me. There comes a softening, a letting go, a relaxing of sorts.

And there, in that space I can invite something more.  I might invite some questions:

“Is this true, really true? Can I be absolutely sure that what I am telling myself  is true?”

“What needs or values are needing care in all of this?”

“Is there any other part of me that needs attention too? Is there something more that also needs to tell its story?”

“Is there something happening here that brings up old, unresolved material from my childhood? How can I best take care of myself if this is happening?”

“Can I get a felt sense of this – an image, a metaphor, a word that best captures all of it? Can I stay with this and explore my inner landscape and what it knows, in my body, about the best way forward?”

This process of acknowledging, accompanying and accepting is so helping me to connect more compassionately with myself. I am better able to stay with my present moment experiences and find such richness in them.  I sense they are the first step on a journey to a delightful self-acceptance.

If you are into NVC you may enjoy subscribing to Rick Goodfriend’s World Empathy day tips.

I love this video about accepting just how we are. I love the space it gives to what is coming up inside without trying to change it too quickly.

It gives us a chance to sense for what more is there under the first feeling that comes. For example, when I feel angry, a vulnerable scared part is usually there too, but at first it might not feel safe for that part to come out into my awareness.

In Focusing we first say hello and acknowledge what is present.

My tip  is– if accepting feels too hard – to start by:

• saying hello to what is present then
• bear witness to it – for example you might say- “I am bearing witness to feeling angry”.  Or “I am keeping my anger company”. After saying this a few times you may notice that you can sense a subtle distinction between you and the anger. You are not just your feelings and yet your feelings exist within you. You can get a little space there.
• Then, when a release comes you might go on to “accepting what is”.

This process transforms intense feelings and also gives our heart a little space to be with our suffering – neither denying nor suppressing the suffering nor “becoming the suffering”. If we can hold our own suffering compassionately it becomes more possible and even delightful to offer the same quality of holding, bearing witness and accepting the suffering of others.

Greetings World Empathy Day Celebrants:

Celebrate World Empathy Day on Wednesdays, a day of increased consciousness for  compassion, communication, understanding and forgiveness. Welcome to new participants.  Please forward
this tip to interested friends, family, and peers to help WEday expand.

WEday Tip # 101 - Transforming Intense Feelings Before Communicating Them !! !

One of the most difficult communication skills is expressing ourselves
honestly  and with compassion, especially if upset . Here is a tip to make that skill easier.

Yes, accept the moment for what it is. Before expressing to another
person, accept the situation or the emotions that are present .  This will help calm any nervousness, fear, anger … before communicating with another.

Example:
Someone has not emailed me back the information I requested. It has
been a week. My thinking is full of judgments. I want to call them and
express what is going on with me, the disappointment, the
consideration for my time, the ease of having this information …

Using this tip, I accept what is
I accept what is, the information isn’t here, yes, I accept that I am upset, I
acknowledge this feeling and say I accept  it , (4 times)

Already I am calming and become more present.  I am now ready to take action (compassionately). 

Try this tip in this way? Transform your emotions
Take some of your emotions and focus on  them, and say  to yourself   ” I accept this emotion  __________  as being present now. “  

Process one feeling at a time and say it 3 – 5 times slowly.      
Does the intensity diminish?

If you have time, let me know how this works for you.

May all your needs be met.

Rick Goodfriend
Founder – World Empathy day
805 898-9336
www.empathyday.com

Ooohh…today I was asked to contribute ideas to a workshop on “difficult conversations” and my first thought was, “Well, I’d really rather not have any of them thank you very much!”

What I really meant was:

“I’d rather not deal with the difficult feelings that come up in me when I have to face situations that I am not comfortable with.”

Hmmm. In the Focusing world they have a phrase for this.

Process Skipping.

It is a long standing pattern we have of relating to the more negative part of ourselves (remember the Jell-O parts). The difficult part is realising that these old and difficult feelings we treat as enemies are, in fact both friends and teachers! No, its true! And it is possible to come into a new, kinder relationship with ourselves instead of making war inside – holding chronic kinds of tension around relationships, situations, issues, self-judgments and circumstances.

Each of us usually develops a pattern of numbing our difficult feelings. We might exercise, we might drink, watch TV, work long hours, play computer games, talk on the telephone. This, actually, takes us away from ourselves, which seems like a good thing if we are feeling guilty, scared, angry, annoyed, confused etc. Or we might go outside of ourselves to find the solution. We might talk to someone, defer to advice of elders, counsellors, meditate into deeply relaxed states and so on.

We don’t process-skip deliberately. It’s kind of automatic. But you can ask yourself:

How, precisely, do I avoid, numb, or run away from my difficult feelings?

What to do?

However, Gene Gendlin, who developed Focusing says that while the “mind” looks for a “solution” to a problem, our body actually looks for a ‘resolution”. We can find the resolution by spending time with how our body carries this issue in a Focusing kind of way. So, “difficult or uncomfortable” feelings hold the key to resolving the recurring issues in our lives. They hold the key.

The possibility for change and growth  lies not with emotion reactions, but in your body’s  more connected sense of meaning, its Felt Sense, to any given situation or part of yourself. We stay with the Felt Sense of the situation which may show itself to us as a metaphor, an image, a feeling, a shape, a sound, a colour. A felt sense is not just an emotion. Anger, happiness, sadness, fear – these are emotions. But what is under those emotions? What more lies there?

Have you ever tried to talk yourself out of the something that lies under the emotion and found it answering back – like it has a life of its own? We can, by attending to it, let it reveal itself to us. We let it show us what it knows all about this situation and how to resolve this issue. We hold a new kind of conversation with our body.

Our body can only know something is wrong by feeling uncomfortable because it instinctively knows what is perfectly right for us. Our job is to learn how to listen, listen again and trust in its embodied wisdom.

Warp drive…

I made a Star Trek move recently. I went into warp drive creating a heated and extended argument with my husband this week in which, I am not proud to admit, I found myself diagnosing, blaming, judging and advising over something that really had nothing to do with me. Now why would I do that? Why did I go into warp drive with nary a thought?

At first I was convinced it was all about him (during the argument of course). Then later a nagging feeling started to grow in the pit of my stomach -this appears to be where my conscience lives – down deep where it is is all churned up, messy and in process!  No, not for me a conscience which lives in the clear air, with a 360 degree view, where angelic wings can flutter. Damn it.

I began to get curious and wonder if the very qualities of character, his responses to the event, the interpretations he was making and which I was bridling against so strongly were actually parts of me I have never listened to fully. After all, the events meant very little to me. It was how he was responding the events that triggered me.

So here I was making judgements about character. Hmmm. What is acceptable character and what is not. More hmmm. Now I am curious. What makes some stuff send me into warp drive and some stuff barely registers on my radar? And why doesn’t all the intellectualising about “people all having different ways of being in the world” stop the triggering? Well, I think part of the answer lies with Jell-O and part of the resolution lies with the seeming simple act of being heard.

Exploding Jell-O

Now, here, dear reader, I ask you to bear with me for a moment. We have all heard about projecting our shadow parts on to other people. That is where we least accept in others what we least accept in ourselves. These are the parts of ourselves our parents, caregivers, rule-makers in our culture showed and told us were unacceptable as we grew up, so we learned to eliminate them from our conscious life one way or another. However, they are not eliminated, they are just stuffed down into our subconscious life. They become like Jell-O. Most of they time they just sit there, wobbling in response to the normal bumps and grinds of life. But every now and again comes a big squeeze, more pressure than normal and like Jell-O, it squeezes out through the gaps between our conscious mind and our subconscious mind and appears in our life. Only it comes out fast –it flies out and splats onto the other person. Now it looks like their stuff.

So, how does this relate to my argument with my husband – who is now covered in multicoloured “Leona” Jell-O. Well, in NVC he can, if he has the presence of mind, wash it off. He doesn’t have to own it. He can check in for what is his material and what is not; he can give himself some emergency self-empathy. Secondly, he can check out my Jell-O. He can respond to it. He can say – hey Leona, it sounds like you really care about… and you are really stunned as to how anyone can respond like…. I’m wondering how you feel when you notice that response and what needs of yours are not being met. So, he can offer empathy to my exploding Jell-O.

Or

I can learn to listen more fully to myself. This is the part I like most because it feels, to me, self-empowering, self-loving, self-connecting and self-accepting. I can:

• acknowledge the rising tide of pain – a simple “hello rising tension and tightness I sense you there” and “I wonder if you are a part inside of me that has never really been allowed into the light?” and then pause and notice what comes…

• then later, when I have time and space, listen to my “shoulds” – I can take some serious time to hear how life has been for those parts of me that I have not been allowed/continued to allow into my life. I don’t necessarily need to go into the story of why that happened but rather acknowledge its pain of living in the shadows, of not being acceptable and accepted.

• listen for feelings, needs/values, to the metaphors – the intricate, unique richness of each part’s living experiences

• reflect back what you hear so that these parts know they are heard. Ask if they feel heard. Invite them to tell you more.
• Let them know that more than one conversation is possible. That this is about gently getting to know each other again – becoming friends again after a long estrangement.

This process of deep self-empathy takes some effort – actually it takes a huge effort. I reckon bungy jumping has nothing on the deep self-empathy process in terms of courage (and yes, I have jumped).

How can you do this process? Well, here are some of the ways I have tried and others I respect have I tried:

1. Journaling – writing as a dialogue – listener and speaker so each part gets heard
2. Moving between chairs – the chair represents each part and we mediate between the part that holds the “should” and the part that now wants to be heard (aka the shadow). This is a form of NVC mediation. We are helping our parts to hear and understand each other.
3. Listening partner – to reflect each part, to hold the safe energy and support you.
4. Movement – allowing the body to move and express the living energy of each part; really feeling into how our muscles, cells and body structure has held both the “should” and “the part that needs to be fully heard”.

Why does this matter? Isn’t it selfish for it to be “all about me”?

Could it be that if our inner world is at peace then our relationship with the outer world can hold space for peace?

I have a spiritual practice. Indeed, grammatically I should write I have a few spiritual practices. Why? Well, I am a pragmatic woman.

I want a practice that is given plenty of opportunity for expression in my daily life. Both through stillness and movement. Through silence and voice.

I want a practice that helps me feel good about myself – not just my mind feeling stroked – one where my body feels good about itself somehow. Both emotionally well and physically well.

I want a practice that can hold my paradoxes – that of wanting to grow and transform and wanting complete acceptance of myself all while “letting go”. A crazy-making fully-accepting, releasing of self through the attention to self.

For me this is a felt process of becoming. By felt I mean that I experience it in my body. The body becomes the bridge to Presence, to the transcendent experience. I don’t write “transcendence” because so far I have experienced fleeting experiences. Wonderful and momentary. I unfold gently and with inner wisdom at my own pace. I sense for what is alive in the here and now. I feel at the edge for needs my attention, what is new, fresh and vital. I learn to trust myself. I learn to watch and be with myself in a caring way. I learn to hold all of me with the same acceptance.

Here are some of my favourite quotes from my paths of practice which help me to stay connected to what really works for me. Mindfulness, Focusing, valuing oneself, transformation and peace. This is what I practice – literally. And practice is not the same as “this is what I do and am good at.” It is simply what I pay attention to and what I teach. Mindfulness and Focusing as a way to find one’s own unique path while joyfully watching everyone walk their own paths.

Buddhism

“There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centred on the body.” Gautama Buddha

Focusing & Spirituality

Experience is a myriad richness.
We think more than we can say.
We feel more than we can think.
We live more than we can feel.
And there is much more still.

“You need to stand again in your own experiencing – in your own felt ongoingness, which is that intricate complexity inside of life – to put into the world what hasn’t been said yet that you are carrying from your particular experiencing” Eugene Gendlin

“A subtle, bodily feeling with vague meanings that brings new, clearer meanings involving a transcendent growth process.” Elfie Hinterkopf

How do I live each day so that a felt consciousness of living in a Presence can grow and deepen right within the experiences of daily life? The habit of felt sensing (Focusing) is a practical, physical way to open my body’s consciousness to the transcendent giftedness of everything, including events that threaten biological life. Living itself can be prayer. Our body itself, which we so identify with mortality, is meant to be our conscious bridge into immortality. It is the body process that creates an experiential faith. The habit of felt sensing gives us the body-feel for how in the practical order we can live connected in this world of gift, no matter what happens to us. Rev. Ed McMahon

You – as a gift to the world

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost. The world will never have it. Martha Graham, American dancer and choreographer

Spiritual Transformation

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation. J. Krishnamurti

Peace as spiritual practice

Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart. Unknown

A few weeks ago I did an exercise from Mark Silver’s called “finding your Jewel”. This exercise is about finding out what is your unique gift in this world. In business there are thousands of massage therapists, life coaches bloggers, for example, but what is it about you that will attract particular clients.

Mark believes that  what our heart most deeply yearns, or thirsts for is the very same quality that our clients yearn or thirst for.

So, following his guided mp3 I sensed into what my heart yearns for. What came first were all the qualities that I am told are my strengths and that help my clients; clarity, insight, support, intuition.

Then, inviting still more. Going into the more vulnerable heart-felt space the word acceptance came. I yearn for acceptance; just as I am and just as I unfold and grow in the light of life’s experiences. Then, inviting still more I knew I hit upon a deep inner truth when the word trust came.

At first, my mind says, “Of course you want trust, who doesn’t want trust, how can you live in a world without trust! Obvious!”

Then, more came.  I yearn to trust my own heart. I yearn to trust my own judgement enough to be able to hear how other’s experience life. I yearn to trust my own reactions and emotions. Not to be swept away by them but to sense into what they are trying to tell me and paying attention to that responsively. Now I know when I have touched in to something essentially true for me when a sheen of tears come and my heart turns. TRUST & ACCEPTANCE.

Now, I have been sitting on this post for a few weeks. Not quite sure what comes next and yet sensing its not quite finished either. And today I saw a quote in Davina’s blog Shades of Crimson.

“Heaven and Earth can never meet as long as you hold even one person outside of your heart.” from Devrah Laval, The Magic Doorway into the Divine.

Davina asked herself “When a person can’t even hold themselves in their heart, how could they possibly attract their dreams?”

When a person can’t even hold themselves in their heart, then what?

How many people do you know who can truly hold themselves in their heart? All of themselves? In Davina’s blog her life coach asks why should she be in a lifeboat if her ship is sinking.  This brought Davina closer to the qualities she admires about herself. What about you -would you be able to let of all the parts of yourself  on to the lifeboat? Would you be able to accept all of you and bring them on board? Or would you turn some parts away? Or maybe you might not even notice some parts that need to get on?

And then who would be left on the lifeboat? Would that actually be “you” at all? Or just the you you have been told to be by your culture, your parents, your school teachers, priests, counsellors, and your inner critic to name just the obvious sources of advice and admonition we receive as we grow up. Would you really be “living” if all of you didn’t come on board.

For me, this raises the question what do our shadow parts bring to us as a gift? Do they bring energy, vulnerability, compassion? What is the jewel hidden inside our judgement of them? Why do these parts we shy away from, deny existance know they should be on the lifeboat?

How does it feel to even be considering bringing them all on board – and who is the part that thinks it gets to decide who stays behind and who boards?

When you can’t even hold all of yourself in your heart, then what does that mean for how you live “the all” of your life?

I am facing a situation at work just now in which I feel powerless and, as a consequence, infuriated. Another staff member has taken a unilateral action which detrimentally affects my section, my team and my students and I seem to be receiving no support from management. From my colleagues the only advice I am getting is to let it go because this staff member will “just make your life miserable, one way or another.”

At the moment I have no way of rectifying the situation. To add to my misery, my internal critics are playing havoc with me.

You teach NVC so how about you give yourself some empathy?

Why don’t you practice what you preach?

Why are you reacting and feeling so strongly about this – so much for your meditation, mediation and nonviolent practices.

See, the moment your buttons are pushed you are back to how you have always been – angry and stressed!

Yes, I feel angry. Some of my fundamental values are not being met right now – safety, integrity, fairness, professionalism and service. I am telling myself I feel powerless because I have no independent recourse for rectifying this situation without it creating even more punitive responses. I don’t want to let it go because I tell myself that lets this person “get away with this behaviour”.

So, have I somehow let myself down as my critics are implying. It is true that I cannot get to a state of equanimity. It is true I do imagine all the ways I would “like to get even.” It is true I do not like her behaviours and resent the impact they have on me.

However, I have not sent a reply email to her email for 2 days now as I try and wait until this “rage” inside settles. I have just tried to manage what I can manage within my section with some semblance of dignity. I feel close to tears and notice I am really needing ease and support from my managers – and I feel despairing at getting it. So, the critics may notice that my thoughts and emotions are still in turmoil  – BUT – hear is the kicker – I am not acting on them. This is new. This is a step forward. I cannot turn them off and get back into a state of comfort and out of the pain – but maybe the lesson is to learn to just be with the pain. Ride it out without action? Could that be it?

Then, luckily for me, I received this posting in my inbox by Steve Stosny. He writes wonderful blogs on anger.  I have copied part of his latest blog below. Maybe we can all relate to it.

Ego and Mental Errors
The recycling of anger to protect the ego introduces a much more complicated instigating factor to go along with the perception of threat, namely a perception of ego vulnerability to loss of value (feeling devalued or disrespected). Brain-stem reflex is enough to perceive the threat of an attacking sabre tooth tiger. But it takes a complex network of mental processes to organize the sound of an assemblage of utterances into meaningful words and then construe them to be a verbal threat to the ego – "She said what?!"

When it comes to construing someone’s indirect behaviour (e.g., not putting down the toilet seat) as an ego threat, still more complicated mental processes come into play. These include a theory of mind, which allows us to guess at other people’s states of mind (infer their thoughts, emotions, and motivations), the assignment of symbolic meaning to the behaviour, and an attribution of mal intent. The more complicated the mental processes, the more room for error.

The Neurological Imperative: Conserve Energy
In its continuous effort to conserve metabolic resources, the brain makes shortcuts of everything it does repeatedly, including complex mental procedures, at the cost of even higher error rates. Through the inexorable process of habituation, a perception of ego vulnerability, repeated over time, consolidates into a presumption of vulnerability, which requires the continual protection of anger. Also by virtue of habituation, the repeated experience of anger in defence of the ego reinforces its sense of vulnerability. The more you experience anger, the more anger you need to experience.

Inflation
In addition to needing more and more protection from threat, the angry person attempts to reduce the fear and sense of inadequacy (shame) that go with a vulnerable ego, through a process of inflation. An inflated ego is one whose value depends on downward comparison to the value and rights of others – I’m not equal, I’m better! In addition to temporarily making the ego feel less vulnerable, inflation justifies the motivations of anger to prevail and dominate. It also creates a sense of entitlement – I deserve special regard, treatment, or resources – that is certain to cause negative reactions in others and require a response of still more defensive anger. As if that weren’t bad enough, inflation guarantees cognitive dissonance whenever reality smacks against the overestimation of intelligence, talents, looks, shoes, or socks – whatever is used to inflate the ego.

Is It Natural?
It’s an arguable point whether defence of ego, inflated or otherwise, is a natural function of anger, but defence of ego is certainly a perversion of natural function of anger when it leads us to devalue that which we most value, namely, life, loved ones, and fellow tribesmen. Hence the term, "natural anger," though more accurate than normative terms, also misleads more than it illuminates.

The "healthy" way to experience anger
Normative words neither describe the function of anger nor come anywhere close to what actually happens to us when we experience anger. Yet everyone wants to know about "healthy" anger.

I enjoy giving the following accurate description of what occurs when we’re angry to members of the press who naively ask about "healthy anger."

"I am angry (or resentful, impatient, irritable, shut down, cranky, etc.), which means that I am presently in an impaired mental state that reduces my ability to grasp ambiguity and see any nuance of a situation. The adrenalin rush I’m experiencing makes me amplify, magnify, and oversimplify that which has stimulated my anger, while it degrades my interpretation and judgment of environmental cues and renders me unable to see other people’s perspectives or to see them at all, apart from my emotional reaction to them. I am probably more self-righteous than right. I am doubtless engaged in a petty ego defence that will make it more likely that I will violate my deepest values than protect them and almost certainly make me act against my long-term best interests. I am less able to control my impulses and tolerate frustration. My fine motor skills are temporarily deteriorated. I should not try to drive, negotiate, analyze an issue, or do anything important, until I have regulated this temporary state that has prepared me to fight when I really need to solve a problem."

Of course, we are unlikely to experience anger in this truly healthy way, without a great deal of practice. The point here is that the use of normative terms to describe anger obscures and distorts what happens in the experience of anger and thereby compounds problem anger – a recurring form of the emotion that m
akes us act against our long term best interests. To the extent that words are used to justify behaviour that devalues, manipulates, or dominates others, they greatly exacerbate anger problems.

Don’t Justify, Improve
The real motive behind the use of normative terms to describe anger is to justify certain kinds of anger and condemn other kinds, as if you have a right to experience some forms of anger but not others. What are mere conceptual problems for therapists and authors who try to distinguish justified from unjustified anger turn into disaster for people who use the pseudo-distinction as a guide for ordinary living. Of course you have a right to be angry and to experience any kind of anger. (You have a right to shoot yourself in the foot, for that matter.) The more important question is this:

"Is my anger helping me be the person, parent, intimate partner, friend, or co-worker I most want to be?"

This question invokes your deepest values, which are the foundation of your ego, as well as its ultimate strength. If your behaviour remains consistent with your deepest values, your sense of internal value increases, reducing the need for ego inflation. With increased internal value, you become less dependent on getting value from others. With reduced dependency as others, you are able to see them as separate people, who, like you, are often blindly and sadly protecting their own inflated egos; in other words, you become more compassionate. You perceive less internal vulnerability and less external threat, which makes you less likely to stimulate reactive anger in others. In short, you make anger less necessary in your life. You begin to see anger as not at all a bad thing but an important signal to get back to your core value. 

More later…as it unfolds.

I do not believe we can be truly empathic with others without embodying self- empathy first. 

Yes, I have drawn your attention to “embodied self-empathy”.

I have just finished co-hosting a 4 day Focusing residential and two of the trainers-in-training ran a workshop on the caring-feeling presence (from Biospiritual Focusing).

I really got an embodied sense of how my body knows when it is completely and wholly accepting (my words for describing self-empathy) of all of me and I have noticed that since that workshop I have been so excited to bring my attention back to this embodiment. It would come as no surprise to any of you, I am sure, that the more connected I am with this, my embodied Presence, the more able I am to self-empathise beyond words into my deeper pain and living experiencing AND then the  more I am able to hold a caring-wholly-accepting presence with others.

In my trainings I integrate Focusing into the NVC training by going to feelings before observations. I use, Ann Weiser Cornell’s saying hello, or acknowledging of the feelings and then a sensing into what our body knows about this. Once these feelings feel heard by my inner self then I find I have the space and inclination to make an observation that is more objective and leads to agreement.  Then, later, before making requests I use Focusing to “vision” what my body knows and can show me about how it is when my needs are met. From this space my request is more gentle and less dependent on the other person agreeing to it.

One other way I use Focusing is by using metaphors for some of the feelings. For example, when I feel “disappointed” it may be not such a big thing, when my friend feels “disappointed” it actually feels like a deep pain to her. So if she hears me say I am disappointed she interprets a higher level of pain than I may actually feel. When she tells me she is disappointed I may not realise the depth of her pain. This comes from Gene Gendlin’s TAE process and the differentiation between our public knowing and shared understanding of a word and our own individual bodily knowing of that word in our particular context.  A metaphor however, gives the listener an insight into my inner landscape. The other reason I like metaphors is that the listener doesn’t seem to take on board that they are the source of disappointment in the same way.

To be honest I am gradually coming to some sense of realising that my inner relationship with myself is critical to my NVC practice – much more so than I had realised when I started learning and practising NVC. I am moving towards developing a more extensive workshop on connecting with our inner caring-feeling presence and embodying it through a variety of experiential activities. This seems like a wonderful foundational training. The first step towards inner peace. Then, my instinct tells me the listening and expressing in NVC will flow from our inner world.

Still ruminating on this…but here are some of the ways I have heard people describe embodied self-empathy:

caring-feeling presence

radical acceptance of everything

having a good relationship with yourself

self-acceptance

Presence

spacious non-judgment

poignant stillness