A Mindfulness Practice to Meet Tough Emotions with Curiosity

Curiosity is a useful software for partaking with our embodied expertise, together with feelings like unhappiness, anxiousness, or every other disagreeable emotion. Explore this straightforward train to allow you to shift your angle towards what you’re feeling.

Over the years, as I’ve studied how habits work within the mind and methods during which mindfulness may also help, I’ve discovered that curiosity is a straightforward software that may assist us, no matter language, tradition and background. It may also help us drop immediately into our embodied expertise. Curiosity helps us faucet into our pure capability for marvel and curiosity, placing us proper in that candy spot of openness and engagement, even with troublesome feelings. From this mind-set, we’re extra empowered to assist ourselves get away of those previous behavior loops and construct new habits of kindness and curiosity. 

A Mindfulness Practice to Investigate Tough Emotions

1. Find a quiet, snug place. You might be sitting, mendacity down and even standing up. You simply want to have the option to focus with out being distracted. 
2. Recall a current time once you skilled a troublesome emotion. You may even be feeling it proper now. It could possibly be anxiousness. It could possibly be feeling down or unhappy. See should you can keep in mind the scene, perhaps even relive the expertise, specializing in what you felt proper at the moment. 
3. Check in with your physique. What sensations can you are feeling most strongly proper now? Is it tightness, strain, contraction? Restlessness or burning? Tension, clenching, or warmth? Maybe a pit in your abdomen or a buzzing or vibration? Simply really feel it and get curious. What is most predominant proper now? 
4. Notice the place the feeling is in your physique. Is it extra on the proper facet or the left facet? Is it extra within the entrance, the center, or the again of your physique? Where do you are feeling it most strongly? 
5. Explore what else you possibly can really feel in your physique proper now. If the feeling continues to be there, see if you may get curious and spot what else is there as properly. Are there different sensations you’re feeling? What occurs once you get inquisitive about these? Do they modify? What occurs once you actually get inquisitive about what they really feel like?
6. Simply observe this process over the subsequent couple of minutes. See what’s most predominant in your expertise. What are the sensations? Don’t strive to do something about them. Simply observe them. Do they modify once you observe them? What occurs once you deliver a extremely stable angle of curiosity? 
7. It’s usually useful to verify in with your angle, to see should you’re really being curious or attempting to be curious. I discover it useful to merely verify to see if my thoughts goes hmm. What’s occurring in my physique proper now? as in contrast to attempting to power myself to be curious. So whether or not it’s out loud or simply an inside hmm, you possibly can verify from time to time to see in case your thoughts is really being curious or if it’s attempting to be curious or pondering an excessive amount of. 
8. If you discover that you simply’re attempting otherwise you’re pondering, you possibly can merely get inquisitive about that. Hmm. There’s a thought. Hmm. What does attempting really feel like in my physique? Just proceed this noticing for the subsequent couple of minutes. And as you observe, regardless of the difficult emotion is, merely get curious. Where do I really feel it? Do the sensations change over time? Where do I really feel essentially the most strongly in my physique? 

As we end up, I hope this quick train has helped you get a style of curiosity as a means to assist your pure capability to pay attention to what’s occurring in your physique proper now. Even with difficult feelings, we will deliver this angle of kindness and curiosity to our expertise, second to second. What do I really feel? Where do I really feel it? What does it really feel like? Hmm. And every time, we’re naturally bringing in that curiosity. 

If you’ve observed that by being curious, you’ve gained even a microsecond of being conscious of these ideas, these feelings, these physique sensations, and you could truly be with these fairly than working away from them, you’ve taken an enormous step ahead. Thank your self for taking this time to deal with your self, and spot what that looks like as properly. 

As you progress into the remainder of your day, see should you can deliver a few of this curiosity with you as you go. Each second, perhaps even simply taking a second to discover once you’re caught up in an emotion or once you’re resisting one thing. And perhaps drop in slightly hmm. What does this really feel like? And see what occurs subsequent. Onward!