When emotions take over!
Breathe…one…two…three...
As a single mother of one, I feel like life can be a heavy weight on my chest some days. If I sit in thought for long periods, the heaviness of my life can weigh me down. The stress of being solely responsible for all the finances, managing the home, working, and raising a strong girl has its challenges. It is no easy feat, and despite all my education and training, I still get wrapped up in the big emotions that come and go with life. Life can be so beautiful and pleasurable in one moment, and in the next, it can be enraging, frustrating, and overwhelming. We can swing from one side of the emotional pendulum to the other. Where does your pendulum swing? Does it go more to one side or the other?
I bring this up because I recently had a conversation about emotions with a dear friend. In this conversation he spoke directly to the emotion of anger and how easy it is to reach this place. It made me think about life in general and how we manage this emotion ANGER. I am now in my 40’s and growing up I found myself living in a home where we didn’t talk about our feelings/emotions. Did you reside in one of those homes? I think it was pretty common to not talk about feelings. However, here is the struggle with that we are now in our 40’s, 50’s, 60’s maybe even later in life with no or little capacity to regulate or express these emotions.
Anger, what a great emotion. It can be seen in a positive or negative light. Anger does have bad rap, but if you can tap into the emotion and discover what lies beneath you will be on your way to a more emotionally intelligent individual. Anger is often the surface emotion. Here are a couple of suggestions to ease yourself into meditation.
Start slow, sit in a comfortable position for a 2-5 minutes
Try to focus on your breath, taking a deep breath in, filling your abdomen and lungs for a count of 4, then take a slow exhale out, releasing all the air for a count of 6.
If you have thoughts that come to you, go back to counting one, two, three, four, and so forth.
Three easy steps to building a meditation practice. If you feel like you can handle more minutes, add them.
This is just one type of meditation practice. If your interested in learning more check out this course
