The most common themes that comes up in sessions with clients is how you are feeling.
We don't often think of emotions as more than the here-and-now feelings we experience as reactions to our environment. But what if we could actually plan for emotions, build the emotions we want over time and consistently find mindfulness even in our darkest moments?
If we think about brain health as an analogy to body health, it can be easier to understand how much power we have to get (and stay) healthy, despite our individual challenges. For instance, look at these predictable parts to an average day for a relatively healthy person:
1. Breakfast
2. Lunch
3. Dinner
4. Exercise
5. Interactions with friends and family
All of these things are predictable and planned to some extent. You would never skip breakfast and lunch and claim you had healthy eating habits. You would never consistently ignore calls from the people who love you and nourish your life and claim an A+ in the friendship and love department. It'd be hard to skip four workouts a week all year and claim ignorance on why we don't feel as strong as we used to.
We know these things are important, we do them everyday, and therefore we can plan for them, experiment with what works best for us (maybe a hearty breakfast and a quick granola bar for lunch works best for our work schedule, or maybe the opposite is true), and we can get better at them over time to enhance our physical health.
Similarly, our emotions happen every day. And we can plan for them, experiment with cognitive exercises and mindful practices to find what works best for our unique situation, and we can get better at it overtime. We can develop mindful attention around the pain, trauma, grief and daily stress that we carry and build the emotional inner life that will keep our minds and hearts healthy, too.
I recommend this episode of Brain Science Podcast featuring Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made. "We discuss the evidence AGAINST the classical theory that emotions are universal and hardwired, as well as her new theory of Constructed Emotions. This new theory has significant implications for how we understand ourselves and others." http://traffic.libsyn.com/brainsciencepodcast/135-bsp-barrett.mp3?dest-id=12241