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Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
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4 practicesHow long you have · Twenty minutes
Approach · Body based
Some people are not frightened of a place or an animal. They are frightened of their own racing heart, their own tears, their own anger, and it behaves like any other fear: it grows on avoidance and shrinks on careful contact.
That framing is useful because it tells you what to do next. You do not have to understand where it came from before anything can change. What you…
Ask what you were taught about crying, about anger, about needing anything. Not what you believe now, but what you were told then, in the words that were actually used.
Most rules about feelings were installed rather than chosen, and once you can hear the original sentence, boys do not cry, do not be so sensitive, it…
If a movement keeps cutting a feeling short, work with the movement rather than the feeling. Stay with the dabbing of the eyes itself, slowly, and see what turns up.
The defence is usually easier to be with than the raw emotion, and it often carries the memory. Repeat it gently, notice the arm, the hand, the…
When one bit of you wants to let the feeling come and another bit is frightened of it, you are not being difficult. You are two things at once, and both of them have their reasons.
The frightened side is usually the one that kept you going for years, so shoving past it tends to make it dig in harder. It works better to turn…