As I was writing up the content of my 7-Month program recently called ICOIC and I created a Nmenonic that may be useful to some of you and your capacity to reconnect with your body and your feelings. As Men, we often get accused of not speaking about our feelings or emotions. Here’s the deal:
It’s not that we don’t want to connect with our feelings and express our emotions. Believe me, we want this. We want to experience the human condition and embrace life fully. It’s just that many of us were modelled or taught that it’s not safe to connect with our emotions and we have been taught to suppress them and instead to wear a mask of toughness and a mask of “everything is ok”.
Plus, let’s face it women have been connected to their emotions for thousands of years. They have a head start when it comes to emotions. We have identified with the protector and the provider for thousands of years. Until now.
In order to reconnect with our feelings we must deepen our relationship and intimacy with our body because that where the feelings live inside of us: –
WE NEED RE-TRAINING WE NEED TO PRACTICE
Here is a simple Mnemonic that can help you to Re-Train and Re-Connect with your own internal emotional landscape: –
M – MOVE: Restrictive emotions such as anger, fear, and anxiety can be moved around the body using breath, sound, touch, movement, and our physic awareness.
E – EXPRESS: Find a safe place, maybe in the car, in nature, in a quiet space, or better still amongst people you trust where you can express emotion using breath, sound, words, touch, and movement, or a combination of.
D – DISSOLVE: Mindfully dissolve the emotion into the space of the heart. It may help to dissolve the emotion into stillness or emptiness or the compassion of the heart.
I – INTIMACY: Instead of repressing, defending, or distracting yourself from feeling youre emotion, try to be intimate with it. Slow down, find a space to really feel and enquire into this dis-owned part of yourself.
C – CHANNEL: This works well with anger and generally intense sexual energy. Simply connect with the energy of that emotion and then use it to become more creative, to work on a project or to complete a task.
A – ALLOW : Of course, this can be difficult if the emotion is restrictive and over whelming. Nevertheless, it is always useful to simply sit with the emotion and allow it to pass through you naturally. The E-Motion is derived from Energy-in-Motion.
T – TRANSMUTE: Imagine a switch inside of you. On one side is the perceived negative emotion you are feeling and on the other side is an emotion you perceive to be more positive. First, connect with the negative emotion and then imagine flicking the switch into the positive emotion.
O – OBSERVE: Through meditation and self-enquiry you can learn to detach from the emotion, and more importantly the story surrounding the emotion. This trains us to become less reactive and more neutral to our thoughts. With this method we aren’t running away from the emotion, we are learning to watch them and stop believing the story attached to our negative emotions.
R – REFRAME: Change the meaning of the story that lies behind the emotion. It can sometimes be useful to ask: what is good about this emotion? how is this feeling helping me to grow?
Let me know if any of these work for you?
Stop doing the same thing day in and day out expecting different results.
To transform you must dare to be different