So Much Happier Blog
Living Your Best Life
“To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.”
One of the reasons why sometimes people new to Tapping have trouble getting results is that they have trouble identifying their emotions and noticing what’s going on with their bodies. For numerous reasons, in many cultures, we’re taught to deny the importance of signals from our bodies just as we’re taught that emotions are mostly useless and best ignored; often we’re encouraged to place the value of intellectual learning and displays of mental ability above all else. The body may be seen as just a sensory apparatus and a vehicle for moving the brain around in space. Only athletes are generally exhorted to pay more attention to their bodies because this is necessary to gain competitive advantage. Even then, they’re often told that they should push through pain without considering any more sophisticated methods for understanding an unthinkably complex body-mind system. The upshot is that most of us have no experience with tuning in receptively to what the body might be trying to tell us, particularly when doing so means feeling discomfort. Not only are most of us profoundly uncomfortable with feeling discomfort, but we also may not even have the language to describe physical sensations, because we’ve spent a lifetime running from them. Add in the very common knee-jerk fear reaction so many of us have about what pain might MEAN to us and our lives, and we have a tangled, heavy ball of obstructive habits that can be hard to contend with. It can also prevent our learning to build bridges to understanding our bodies’ signals in ways that only we can, and then taking appropriate action.
If you want to enjoy the best possible experience of life, here are some ideas on how to unwind this unfortunate tangle and free up energy for the creation of more synergy with your body and its innate intelligence:
Consider what an incredible thing your body is, and how much it does for you every day. It allows you to perceive the vast and varied world around you with your senses; it processes all the air and fuel you feed it and turns that into energy; it allows you to think, feel, and move around at will, and it maintains a million delicately balanced processes that allow you to all of this at all times, throughout thousands of changing internal and external conditions both seen and unseen. Do you think, just maybe, it might be possible for it to communicate something of value to you here and there if you were willing to listen?
Last week we looked at a few ways to get started with meditation. One of the reasons why it can be such an advantage to learn to work constructively with your mind rather than just letting it run wild is that when your mind is not always screaming like a banshee, you have some space to notice what’s actually happening—including with your body—at any given moment. Until you can create such space, you are at the mercy of a mind that will always try to distract you from anything it’s not creating, such as the other parts of your self, as well as opportunities being offered to you by others and the world around you
Practice challenging yourself so that you can become more comfortable with remaining calm in the face of discomfort. Just to make things interesting, we live in a world that offers endless distractions from outside of us, in addition to those that our busy minds create. It’s so easy to seek comfort constantly through food, entertainment, other sensory pleasures, and busy-ness of all kinds that many of us convince ourselves that we’re keeping our discomfort at bay. Unfortunately, suppressed thoughts and emotions have a tendency to build pressure until they cause an explosion we can’t ignore. If you become used to the fact that some discomfort won’t kill you, it’s easier to make small choices every day that are better for your life in the long term. You build confidence in your ability to grow and make progress through small challenges, which then lead naturally to larger ones. If you’re afraid to feel anything unpleasant, you’ll probably always stay stuck right where you are. Conversely, a little courage put into action will multiply until you’re hard to stop
Work on handling your fearful reactions to noticing how you actually feel. Feeling, naming, and being willing to work with what’s true for you leads to awesome power, but it takes work to build these skills, and as you do so, you’ll discover a bunch of stuff that it’s not fun for you to look at. This is ok and completely normal! Trust me, everyone experiences stress and panic when faced with the idea of injury, illness, uncomfortable emotions, restrictions, and eventual death, but all of these are a normal part of the human experience, and finding peace with them is both possible and healthy. Too many of us live our lives in an almost-constant state of stress and panic about this, that, or the other thing, and this takes a major toll on our physical and mental resourcefulness, our capacity for enjoying life, and our long-term health. States of high stress can be useful when your life is at immediate risk, but if that’s not the case right now, that stress is killing you. When you have a high-stress reaction to something that is not life-threatening, in other words, an overreaction, it’s time to lovingly dial it down, and I know of no faster, easier, or simpler way to do this than through Tapping. Lots of other tools can help, like deep breathing, exercise/movement, talking or journaling, etc., but as you probably know, Tapping’s my favorite!
With practice, you become more able to patiently and receptively confront what’s going on in your internal world, identify it descriptively, and endure the initial discomfort of doing this until the Tapping begins to bring you relief. If you can’t allow yourself to notice your emotions and how they express themselves through your bodily sensations, you may not be able to get the results (the on-demand relief and clarity) you want, and that’s waiting for you once you create the space for it to emerge.
The Limits of Logic
“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”
I talk a lot about emotions in these blogs (mostly because they constitute a maligned and often forcibly ignored area of human functioning), but since there’s a highly symbiotic relationship between thoughts and emotions, it’s important to note the role of the mind in working on emotions. I remember the first time I encountered the assertion that thoughts come before and cause emotions. It was an intriguing idea, and one that I have found to be mostly true in practice.
It’s not always this simple—for example, when you lose a loved one, what causes pain is mostly the thought of separation from that person, and possibly thoughts about what seems left undone between you, but there can be a very physical component. Physical touch creates soothing, “happy” chemicals to be produced in the body. If this was someone you lived in close proximity with, the loss of daily physical touch as well as the ease of access to a supportive relationship can also be powerful factors in how you feel.
Even so, the mind does have a great deal of useful power that can be harnessed when your goal is to clear old emotions from your system and stop generating so many of the “difficult” emotions that result from our minds engaging in negative thought loops. For instance, if you decide to watch for and consciously stop yourself from indulging when you notice that you’re harping on negative, destructive, or hostile thoughts, you’ll notice two things: One, that this is way harder than you thought it would be, and two, that when you do this throughout the day, you do actually feel better and have more energy.
Note that the goal is not to stop feeling emotions—they serve useful purposes, the most obvious of which is to jolt us, in a way that’s difficult to ignore, into noticing when a situation needs our attention. When anger rises in response to a situation, this generally tells us that we perceive an injustice or threat here that we need to get ready for or find a way to right once it has occurred. We may need to apply strategy, communication skills that need to be practiced, and set boundaries or enforce them. This is another place where the mind can kick in and help. Its job is not to “silence” the emotion, but to assist in the creation of a strategy once you’ve understood what the emotion has to say. The mind can remember past strategies that worked for you and others, as well as the Tapping techniques that you can use to deescalate your emotional responses once you no longer need them as signposts!
It is also not the mind’s job to “figure out” the emotions and what they mean. If you try to stand distant from your emotions and never engage them, your mind will try to solve everything on its own. This is partly because this is what it does—it always thinks it knows best—and partly because we’ve been taught to rely heavily on it. In most developed countries, the value of the mind is emphasized over all other parts of the self; mental intelligence and computations, logical, linear thinking, and precise memory are prized as the highest and best abilities to which humans should aspire. While the mind is immensely powerful, as my partner Andrew likes to put it, it’s not the right tool for every job! It can be great at processing a vast amount of information and distilling it down to a useful result using the filters you have in place. You may be aware of many of these filters, such as the values and beliefs you would use as examples of what’s important to you. There are also filters of which you are less aware—those held in place by your subconscious because of events and messages you don’t even remember. The mind uses its power within this framework. As with a computer, when you don’t like its results, you need to consider the underlying code, and the limitations of the system.
Only by entering the world of symbol and engaging with our emotions can we access their most comprehensive messages in ways that are suited to us. When we allow ourselves to actually feel our emotions, we can find connections to past events that would not have been evident through pure logic. We might suddenly perceive how a current situation feels the way it does because of something that happened in childhood that felt very similar. Realizing this gives us a chance to do the work of healing old trauma so that it doesn’t have to dictate our future. It allows us to think through the ways in which this situation, and we ourselves, are not the same as the past situation and person. The “past you” probably didn’t have the knowledge, experience, and resources at her fingertips that you now have.
Once you feel vividly what would need to change for you to handle your current situation better, the mind can help you hone the plan to create space for the healing you need, and fill in gaps in your resources. It helps to give it very specific tasks, though! Instead of asking an extremely open-ended question like, “How can I get what I want,” it may work better to add conditions, such as, “How can I get my money back from this chronic cheater in a way that will succeed but still allow me to feel good about myself and stay out of trouble with the law?” If you ask an open-ended question, the mind will usually spit out an answer very quickly, but it’s likely to be a bad solution that may leave you feeling judged and cornered. Even if you did add conditions, you may need to keep adding new ones when you see the flaws in what your mind initially suggests.
By identifying the valuable, unique function of the emotions, and knowing the limits of the mind in comprehending them and their non-linear messages, we clarify what is needed in each moment. Is this a time for checking in with the emotions about what is needed in a deep sense, or is this just a time to add conditions in order to refine a plan? Try to notice the difference this week and see if this clarifies your tasks.
Ripples from Within
“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.”
Sometimes, life happens. Despite best-laid plans, things come up and prevent the smooth flow of achievement we hoped for. Sometimes, disruptions come in packs, so that we feel like there’s an onslaught of resistance to our progress. This kind of confluence happens to all of us, as frustrating as that is.
More maddening still can be a similar kind of experience arising from the workings of internal factors. When what stops you is external, at least what’s happening is concrete and reasonably easy to explain to others! When it’s all happening inside you, it can be a lot harder to understand and deal with, in part because most of us have been brought up to think that we should be in control of the internal stuff—thoughts, emotions, even our bodily functions. And while we do have a lot of opportunity to optimize these through our daily choices, many aspects of the internal landscape are not necessarily within our conscious control. That’s why there’s a term for the subconscious, that which is not available to our conscious mind—and this portion of us is vast!
It’s therefore unreasonable to assume that our internal world will hold no surprises. And yet, as soon as many of us have an internal experience we don’t understand, we freak out, judge ourselves as weak or borderline crazy, and spiral down into further unnecessary stress about something that’s actually quite normal. Only if one is dead set on seeing oneself as mind only is it upsetting to deal with these other factors. Unfortunately, Western culture has emphasized the importance of mental functioning over all else for millennia, and has simultaneously vilified our more mysterious aspects. In doing so, it has discouraged our connection with our own underground stores of wisdom and intuition, and made us into an often shallow, ego-aligned culture that arrogantly insists that everything important happens in, and can be solved with, the mind.
There’s a lot of emerging scientific evidence in the field of epigenetics inviting us to acknowledge the influence of environment on gene expression and bodily function, and our thoughts and emotions are acknowledged to be a part of that environment. Given what we know about stress and its long-term corrosive effect on the body, I find this to be a pretty common-sense concept, and it seems obvious, then, that it would be smart to do what we can to see management of internal factors like thoughts and emotions as a necessary and logical aspect of managing our health and wellness.
One reason why many people never begin this venture is that, once you turn your attention inward, the amount of stored-up stuff can begin to seem overwhelming, like the lair of a lifelong hoarder! Make no mistake, it takes real courage to confront this backlog and not immediately run screaming. And yet, using a brilliant tool like Tapping can help us to take things a little, manageable bit at a time, and even enjoy and celebrate the process as we would with any other project. Things hidden in the subconscious can rise in helpful ways to the levels of your daily comprehension, allowing you to make better sense of yourself and your life. As you begin to manage your inner world habitually, you gain comfort, confidence, and skills that, like riding a bike, can serve you for a lifetime even if you take a break from them for a while now and then.
How about if we just start to notice when things seem out of balance in our internal world, and just give ourselves a little time to lovingly listen to the rumblings and express rather than repress? If you just allow yourself to Tap, breathe, and acknowledge how you feel, you might find that relief is easier than you thought possible. Everyone has to deal with challenging or confusing thoughts and emotions sometimes, but the more you make space for them and offer them some attention, the more you’ll find the value in this process and in the helpful information that accessing them will produce. When you feel unsettled, try doing just a couple of round of Tapping and see if it helps! Sometimes it really is that simple.