Mastering Emotional Resilience: Harnessing the Power Within
I am just getting off my Monday Zoom call with my coaching group. We are professionals, mostly leadership consultants, practicing using our sensory perception as wisdom teachers.
We teach others and practice ourselves, for the sake of our children and future generations, to use body discomfort to aim it at something that matters to us instead of wasting it.
We bring our vibrant, active, anxious, depressed, sad, joyful, concerned bodies everywhere we go. We bring our bodies all day, everyday into all our literal or virtual rooms and to each human (animal) we interact with (talk about a highly effective virus!). We also know with simple practices on a micro level, we can shift the energy on a macro level and we’re all aiming at shifting our troubled culture, one that thrives for all humans (and animals, plants..).
Our group meets three times a week on various lengths of calls. Yes, we have committed ourselves to rigorous practice. It’s easy to get out of practice. Our default ways of inhabiting this life is strong, often unquestioned. But if you’re a leader, this is what it takes to interrupt ineffective habits into making them conscious choices. Isn’t there a stat where reviewing something 300 times commits it to memory, but 3000 times becomes embodied memory.
We know using our sense perception, we can shift a dysfunctional family, workplace, community and society into a thriving one. It’s a big commitment. It’s worthy work, and a lot of our results we won’t live to see the powerful ripple effect. These practices have been in use for 40+ years (and because they’re laced with Chinese medicine, it’s thousands of years of effectiveness). We know what we’ve already experienced with our families, friends and clients is big. It's effective and it’s exciting!
The Monday call is intentionally designed to be 30 minutes. Today, we review the Mother of all the twelve practices: Upset is Optional. For those who are unfamiliar with this work, keep reading, And for those in practice, keep reading…
I've been doing this practice ad nauseum.
I teach this.
I’ve been in practice for years.
Yet when I review it again, I learn something new and without fail, I go deeper. There’s power in its practical simplicity.
Our call was at 1p and when the question was asked about a recent upset, I had a fresh one! (Do you know there are hundreds of tensions you generate in your body every day?). Mine centered around a conversation where I didn’t understand something. I didn’t ask for clarity. I was weighing whether to ask or not (I mean, why not ask?) and even an hour later, thinking about that moment, I could feel I was clenching my stomach again.
The sensation was familiar yet subtle.
It was helpful to juxtapose this with the question “How do you know when your body is upset-free, your normal?”. Hm. I’m not as practiced at observing this.
As the conversation ebbed and flowed with various people describing how they generated tension (pixels or squiggles on screens was popular). And, it was interesting to insert that if an upset is too hard to access, go to something you do out of habit e.g., upset can look like going to the fridge several times an hour or withdrawing. And, what body sensations go along with it? Are there any sounds? Breath? How are your thoughts or your jaw?
Today I withdrew. Not for alone time, but for focus time. Yet, our group conversation stimulated some reflection in which I realized prior to my call, I didn’t go to my office relaxed. I already had pre-paved and came burdened with my tense body. I added to my own tension during the call.
Our call and practice wasn’t designed to fix anything. The discomfort as a teacher is useful, I say mandatory in these troubled times. Proceeding unaware causes a lot of unnecessary suffering. Being addicted to the fix without engaging how and what is actually happening is powerful. The actions that follow after become lasting because they are conscious.
As my teacher says, there’s no fix for being human. Life is all the pain and joy you can muster and be with. Do not turn away from learning from your wise body.
From this conversation and into the remaining day, I was able to observe and catch when I was tensing. I didn't practice noticing my relaxed body, but I will today!
Will you join me? Interested? A wee bit curious in accessing and wielding this power? I invite you to have a conversation.
Please share this blog if you thought of someone to whom it could be useful! Or direct them to my website to get my writings sent directly to their email!
P.S. You’re invited to attend a Night of Grief & Mystery with author Stephen Jenkinson. Why would you do that? Before you stop reading, please read on. They are on a world tour and stopping in Washington DC on 11/13/22 to All Souls Unitarian | The Sanctuary. Tickets are on Eventbrite.
The show is a walk through our troubled times with storytelling and music - how did we get here, a society without elders, bereft of skills like grief (and joy) and the tremendous fear of dying…and how to be present to all of that?
He's an amazing story-teller with a wonderful perspective and humor. This will be not like any other event you’ve experienced.
This is for you if you’re afraid of getting older, of dying, or can’t fathom why we want to go “back to normal”. Or, if you want normalcy, if you care about the ice shelves melting and your relationship with yourself or your family is troubled. Or you worry for your kids, how will they be in a culture-less culture?
You’ll be coming to an event you didn’t know you longed for.
Check out the recent reviews:
..I brought my eldest daughter and a friend to your (Nights of Grief and Mystery) show last night and I am very glad I did. In a way it was like attending a Yom Kippur service, only better. On the way home, my daughter broke out in tears, not so much because of the content of your program, but because the emotional setting opened something up for her. And for me, it reminded me of my tasks, both in navigating this last year and after, and what I need to teach my daughter. So thank you! I admire you for many reasons, not the least, your resilience. This tour would be hard on a younger person…
Thank you for last night in Turners Falls. There was part of me, towards the end of the night, that wanted to rush out into the lobby and sob. I'm glad I stayed with it...I got a glimpse into what it feels like when something deep and true in me is spoken to, is told "I see you", and we, as an audience, were pulled raw into an open field, shivering, but also knowing that love lives there too, and it always has.