The Mindfulness Workbook for Anxiety: The 8-Week Solution to Help You Manage Anxiety, Worry & Stress by Tanya J Peterson

Author:Tanya J Peterson [Peterson, Tanya J]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Althea Press
Published: 2018-04-30T22:00:00+00:00

DAY 4

Inviting Difficult Emotions

This mindfulness meditation is another exercise designed to help you practice accepting difficult emotions rather than avoiding them. By acknowledging a difficult emotion and viewing it more objectively, you’re opening up some breathing space between it and you. Eventually, a hard situation or feeling can become just another transient event in your life, like a headache, rather than a scary beast that threatens to take over. This transformation of perspective allows you to let in more positive things and live more fully.

EXERCISE

INVITING DIFFICULT EMOTIONS (15 MINUTES)

In this mindfulness exercise, choose an uncomfortable emotion that is relatively mild. Please don’t try to confront a trauma or other deep-seated pain.

1. Get comfortable by sitting or lying down.

2. Set your timer for 15 minutes.

3. Breathe in slowly, through your nose. Hear the air moving into your body.

4. Pause briefly and feel your body hold the air.

5. Exhale slowly through your mouth, feeling the air pass across your lips as your belly relaxes.

6. Continue to breathe deeply for several breaths, feeling your body react to the air coming in and going out.

7. Still breathing slowly and deeply, call to mind a situation or person that’s bothering you. What emotion arises? If more than one emotion surfaces, choose the strongest one right now.

8. Notice how you react. Scan your body for tension, and breathe into the tense areas.

9. Invite your unpleasant emotion to sit beside you or across from you. Ask it to breathe with you.

10. Visualize having tea with it. Hear the sound the tea makes as you pour it into beautiful cups. Watch the steam rise and curl. Hand a cup to your emotion, and take a sip of your own.

11. Simply sit and sip tea with the emotion. Don’t struggle, argue, or fight with it.

12. Scan your body. Beginning with your feet and moving up bit by bit, notice how you feel. Breathe into any areas that feel tense, cramped, or otherwise uncomfortable.

13. Remain in your position, breathing deeply and noticing your whole self sitting with your unpleasant emotion. You’re letting it be and sipping tea with it.

14. When your timer dings, take several slow deep breaths, and gently open your eyes. Notice how you feel, and thank yourself for the experience of acceptance of your emotion and mindfulness of the moment.

EXERCISE

INVITING YOUR DIFFICULT EMOTIONS

Let’s take another look at inviting in difficult emotions and staying with them in the moment.

Choose a different problematic situation or uncomfortable emotion, one that is more complex than the emotion you chose for the meditation.

Describe this situation or emotion:

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How have you been avoiding it?

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How has this avoidance gotten in the way of your lifestyle and happiness?

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Now, set this book aside and close your eyes. Breathe deeply. Let this emotion come into your full awareness. Simply sit with it for several minutes, feeling it in your body and mind. How did doing this affect you?

As you work through these exercises, what difficulties do you imagine might arise? How will you move through those difficulties?

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