Emotions flow in and out, they don't define us. ~Julie Reed

One of my closest friends, who feels like a sister to me,
moved back to her hometown today. I have to admit that saying goodbye was never easy for me. I was never really good at letting go and dealing with the emotions that those situations bring up.

The last couple of days got me thinking about the way we view and deal with emotions. One of the first things that came to my mind was our tendency to label and judge. There are definitely some sensations that most of us would call “good” like happiness, joy, aliveness,… and our tendency usually is to hold on to them as long as we can. Then there are the other ones, the “bad ones” like sadness, anger, grief,… and we try our best to get rid of them or at least distract us from feeling them. What we forget most of the time is that there is actually nothing “good” or “bad” about emotions. They are simply moving energy, making their way through our being. The challenge begins when our mind starts to attach to these emotions. All the sudden they start to spin in our head and that´s the moment when we start to suffer. We try to hold onto the “good emotions" so tight and have a hard time to accept that our emotional world is constantly changing and adapting. On the other hand, we do or best to get rid of the “bad emotions” as fast as we can and most of us are very creative by doing that. There are definitely healthy options like journaling, painting, spending time in nature,… but that doesn´t always provide the “quick fix” most of us are looking for. Excessive behavior of any form can offer an apparently faster solution. So we eat, drink, work out, work, shop,… excessively in order to distract us from how we really feel.

By following these patterns, we do not only block the feelings from flowing freely, we actually start to store them in our bodies. Those stagnant emotions, and I can speak from my own experience, don´t get any better if they show up later in life.

This was reason enough for me to start searching for a tool that would allow me to hold space and allow the emotions to flow freely without getting attached to the usual mind-drama.
Eventually, I found the following meditation that you can use anytime during your day as short or as long as you like. I hope it will resonate as much with you as it does with me:

The moment you notice that your emotions start to rise and your mind gets super excited about the idea of creating some stories, find a place to stand, sit, or lay down comfortably. Imagine a beautiful, strong and tall tree. Allow yourself to become part of it. When you look up to the treetop, you can see that there is a storm going on that moves the crown of the tree in all directions. Now guide your awareness deeper into the trunk and the roots of the tree. You might be able to connect to a deep centered and grounded feeling and a stillness that doesn’t get affected by the roaring storm up at the crown. In order to get out of the storm that´s going on in your mind, you need to guide your awareness deeper into your center. Ground down into your core and connect with the breath in your belly. Allow yourself to take a step back, get out of the mind-storm and simply observe what´s going on at the top. Stay fully grounded and centered. Just watch your emotions and thoughts coming and going as if there was no connection between you and them. If you find yourself getting distracted and being pulled into the storm again, just use your belly-breath as an anchor to come back to the stillness in your center, stepping back into the role of the observer over and over again.

This simple exercise will allow you to watch your emotions flow freely with a good chance that they will transform and release on their own. You can use this short meditation as often and long as you like.

I can´t promise you that you will feel instant relieve but something that I can say for sure is that you might experience a sense of freedom once you notice that you don’t have to helplessly suffer through your emotions and thoughts. Once you discover that there is a stillness behind it all, even if it´s just for a second, you will notice that the mind-stuff and feelings are impermanent and that there is a deep sense of freedom behind it all.

We have to give ourselves the permission to feel. There is nothing we need to block or hide. The more we can allow ourselves to be the way we are, the more freedom we will find in observing our daily emotional ups and downs without any need to attach to the minds storytelling.