Day 22: Emotions, continued

Welcome to Day 22 of the July Intensity Project!

31 Days Toward Living with More Intensity & Creativity

First, I want to let everyone know that I will be out of town for the next few days, to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday on the farm and ranch where I grew up. I had originally planned to continue to post here, especially given the current series this month, but I haven’t quite got all the posts for the next few days ready, and I decided this morning not to spend any more time than necessary distracted from this important family event (relatives and friends are coming from Florida, Wyoming, Minnesota, Nebraska, Arizona…). So the July Intensity Series will resume on Tuesday, July 27th, and I’ll tack four days on to August to fulfill my promise of 31 days toward living with more intensity and creativity.

Score: Lisa 1, Perfectionism 0!

Yesterday I had written that today’s topic would be mentors, but because yesterday’s topic of emotions is so important, I’m going to save mentors for next week and offer a couple of ideas and resources for how to experience emotions more fully or genuinely.

1. Build your feeling vocabulary. A Psychology Today article, “Name That Emotion,” suggests increasing the number of words at our disposal to identify feelings:

“[Lisa] Barrett argues that you can learn to change how you interpret internal states, and even increase your emotional granularity: ‘If people have 20 words for anger (irritation, fury, rage, hostility), then they will perceive 20 different states and better regulate their emotional states as a result.’”

One technique that can be used by both children and adults is to take a word for a basic feeling, such as angry, and to look it up in a thesaurus:

Angry, synonyms: affronted, annoyed, antagonized, bitter, chafed, choleric, convulsed, cross, displeased, enraged, exacerbated, exasperated, ferocious, fierce, fiery, fuming, furious, galled, hateful, heated, hot, huffy, ill-tempered, impassioned, incensed, indignant, inflamed, infuriated, irascible, irate, ireful, irritable, irritated, maddened, nettled, offended, outraged, piqued, provoked, raging, resentful, riled, sore, splenetic, storming, sulky, sullen, tumultous/tumultuous, turbulent, uptight, vexed, wrathful

Are you really angry? Or maybe nettled? Inflamed or sulky? Does simply considering the different options change or clarify what you feel?

2. Stay with your intense feelings just a little longer. So often when we feel a negative or uncomfortable or intense emotion, we run from it. We might eat too much or drink too much, or throw ourselves into physical activity, or maybe call someone to talk about our feelings before we’ve had a chance to know what those feelings are.

Pema Chodron in “Learning to Stay” discusses how meditation can help us “to move toward our emotional distress”:

“Experiencing our emotional distress. Many people, including long-time practitioners, use meditation as a means of escaping difficult emotions. It is possible to misuse the label “thinking” as a way of pushing negativity away. No matter how many times we’ve been instructed to stay open to whatever arises, we still can use meditation as repression. Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.”

If you like the above passage, you might enjoy some of Pema Chodron’s other writings.

I have found that when I remember to do these two things—try to name whatever I’m feeling, and then stay with the emotion just a bit longer than I normally would—I feel stronger, more whole. Whatever the feeling at the moment, I know that I can experience it without falling apart.

Have a splendiferous weekend, everyone!

Photo credit: Jacek Freyer

Previous July Intensity Project Posts

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