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EMOTIONAL ALCHEMY

Skills for Using Fire without Getting Burned

No feeling is final.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

» BACK to the days when I was No Fun.

Like Kali, I was (and am) angry about the systemic, cruel treatment of other living beings. Like Kali, I saw (and still see) forces in this world rising up that intentionally push lives that matter into the margins where they are derailed and destroyed. Like Kali, my natural impulse is to do what I can to end all forms of abuse. Unlike Kali, however, I have a trauma history. Unlike Kali, we all have trauma histories, to a greater or lesser extent, and those histories have conditioned where our awareness goes, what stands out to us, and the ways our hearts respond. All of which is to say, unlike Kali, I don’t exist in a supernatural state wherein I can act on the impulse of my anger free of emotional intoxication. (Hopefully it goes without saying that the mythos of Kali is not meant to be taken literally—it’s not giving us permission to go on a murderous rampage.) The mythos of Kali has much to show us about the ultimate nature of anger; it is here to expand our view. It reminds me that I can indeed welcome anger as my friend. This in turn helps me to be less enmeshed in it, which then helps me to not lose sight of the compassionate spark at the root of my anger.

Reading Kali’s origin story can give us inspiration to recover the energy of compassion within a moment of anger. The story itself doesn’t show us how to enact that recovery, but in this book I’ll be sharing simple inner processes that can achieve that result. We’ll be trying some of these processes out in the practices section that follows this chapter, as a conclusion to part 1 of this book, and then we’ll do more practices at the end of the other parts of the book. But let’s try a little sampler right now.

A PRELIMINARY INTRODUCTION TO PARTS WORK

Although I won’t be explaining the concepts and theories embedded in this practice until later in this chapter and in subsequent chapters, this exercise already contains aspects of all the important practices we’ll be exploring throughout the book. I encourage you to return to it at any time. Also, this exercise is most appropriate for working with feelings that are somewhat neutral, such as the way we feel when we are reading and processing information or going about our day-to-day tasks. We will get to working with the deeper layers soon enough.

Bring your attention to what’s going on with you emotionally and cognitively as you read. Bring some attention to the body; does your mental state seem to be affecting you physically (or vice versa)? Pause and close your eyes for a moment, and see if there’s tension in the jaw, heaviness in the chest, knots in the stomach, or something else. Or maybe you’re too up in your head to do that kind of noticing right now. If so, then “listen” for a moment to your thoughts. What are they saying? What are the themes? Are there laundry lists being made? Memories bubbling up? Do you feel a sudden urge to be doing something else? Maybe there’s an effort to get this exercise “right.” It’s very likely that the parts of you that are present are trying to help you in some way, such as trying to figure something out, reminding you of things you need to do, resisting the unknown territory of this exercise, or reminding you that you need to do better in some way.

In noticing this about the sensations or “voices” inside of us, we’re engaging in something called unblending—a concept I describe later in this chapter.2 For now, notice that there are at least two aspects of your being present—an aspect expressing feelings and thoughts, and an aspect noticing those feelings and thoughts.

Now I want you to try something you may have never done before: see if you can find a space inside where it’s possible to get a little bit curious about these parts of yourself. What are they up to? Why do they make the mind so active? Is there an agenda here? It might help to take a few conscious breaths first. Then, once you feel a friendly sense of wanting to know a bit more, try expressing curiosity inside yourself. You could silently say, “I’d like to know more about you. Is there anything you want me to know?” And then just hang out and wait for a few moments.

Generally speaking, when we do this, something happens. You might have gotten more information. You might have gone blank. It might have felt like a bit of a shock. You might have felt like parts of you wanted nothing to do with you. Maybe a memory popped up. Maybe a part of you screamed, “This is stupid!” But something happened. You received a response. Whereas before you might have thought of your thoughts as an “inner monologue,” now you’ve initiated something different—an inner dialogue.

SHIFTING THE INNER DIALOGUE

Generally speaking, our emotions and thoughts can carry us in one of two directions. As they did for me in high school, they can take us to a place where we deepen suffering. But we can also relate to our mind-state in a particular way, such as getting curious about, or even compassionate toward, the troublesome energies within us. When we effect such a shift, we open up the possibility of entering into processes with our emotional and cognitive parts that bring our inner world into harmony. The difference lies in how we interact with them. Many of us don’t know that we can interact with our psychological parts—much less that we can do so to incredibly promising ends. Our sense is that our feelings are final, and hence there’s no point in opening a conversation with them. But they’re not final. As Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” We are not one-dimensional, and our multiple dimensions are not static. Just as our bodies are made of many parts that form a dynamic, interwoven system that works together, so it is with our psyches. We are more awake, alive, and complex than we know.

Maybe my story about how I was treated and how I reacted in high school seems extreme to you, or maybe it sounds like a walk in the park compared to your teenage years. The point is, we’ve all been wounded to a greater or lesser degree, and this leads us to develop patterns of defense. For me, I used to become so eclipsed by my defensive anger that I’d collapse into a certain hatred of the world, into an existential bitterness about humanity and life itself. Even though my anger was trying to keep me safe by urging me to recoil from the world, because I had no conscious relationship to my anger, no process for talking to it and clarifying it, my anger ended up exacerbating my trauma and depression and causing harm. In the depths of my repeat depressive episodes, my belief that people were no good and that I was no good left me highly prone to lashing out. As this naturally pushed people away from me, my belief that people were no good and that I was no good would be confirmed and reconfirmed, taking me further into the depths, which made me even more prone to lashing out…and down the spiral I’d go.

This is the emotional confusion I spoke of in chapter 1. My relationship to my grief and rage was such that I was either taken over by it or I’d exert tremendous amounts of energy pushing it into a dark corner where no one could see it. I’d either be intoxicated by it—which meant it dictated my thoughts, words, and actions—or I’d self-medicate with entertainment or substances. This, in turn, impacted both my outer world, where I became increasingly isolated and misunderstood, and my inner world, where I felt increasingly hopeless and stuck.

Yet, I did eventually discover the emotional intelligence that I spoke of in chapter 1: processes that helped me evolve my relationship to anger so that it owned me less and less. How was it that the spiral eventually reversed? Here is part of the wisdom of our so-called negative emotions—they are expert at getting our attention. Anger made my life such a mess that it eventually gave me no choice but to turn around and do the work to heal. In this way, difficult emotions beckon us toward alchemy.

That dysfunctional fight I had with my partner offers a big clue as to how this alchemy can happen. In the midst of conflict, I heard her ask a simple but powerful question: “What did they do to you?”* It stopped me dead in my tracks, cut right through my anger, and opened the door to a healing that my nervous system desperately needed. I perceived curiosity and empathy in her question, which were like essential nutrients I was starved for at the time. The angry part of me that was front and center suddenly softened, clearing space for something much more tender in me to emerge. The question implied “What happened for you to become this person who’s this upset all the time? It couldn’t have always been like this.” Curiosity and compassion are indeed powerful energies.

Imagine that you’re in a tense conversation with someone—a partner, friend, coworker, family member, or even a stranger—(to be clear, one where actual abuse or violence isn’t present or imminent) and you somehow find the mental space to ask a curious and empathic question. At least two other things would have to happen to make that possible. First, you’d have to pause. You’d have to drop out of the conversation for a moment, even if only mentally. Second, you’d have to take a step back from your own anger and hurt in order to flip the emotional script toward generosity. And while you might ask, “Why would I ever do that if someone’s coming at me the wrong way?” I must point out, in the instance with my partner, it stopped me from continuing to come at her the wrong way.

We can literally do the same thing within ourselves. We can move from the kind of monologue that comes from believing that our feeling is final to a dialogue of empathic inner communication. Doing so changes everything, but usually it requires a few simple skills. Without further ado, these skills are as follows:

  1. Pause.

  2. Unblend.

  3. Get curious.

  4. Shift the inner conversation.

Let’s look at them one by one.

The Power of Pause

To pause is to reclaim our attention. It’s to reel ourselves back in. It’s to come back to our senses—literally. It’s to come back to being in our bodies.

This deceptively simply skill is quite revolutionary. Your attention is one of the most sought-after commodities on the planet. About $200 billion a year is spent by the data-mining industry trying to figure out how to capture your attention, distract you, and make you feel whatever way an advertiser or political org wants you to feel.3 So, in a world that screams “Look at this! Buy this! Do more! We don’t care if it’s killing you! We don’t care if it’s ruining the entire planet and everyone on it!” learning how to reclaim our attention is a necessary act of resisting psychic death. If we are to remain psychologically free, questioning, perceptive, sovereign beings, then we must continually recalibrate our minds around our deeper intentions.

The key to learning how to pause in the midst of difficult and intense emotions is to begin pausing periodically throughout the day at times when you’re not triggered. Check in with yourself at least as much as you check Instagram. Stay in touch with your inner world at least as much as you keep abreast of the outer world. Binge-watch your well-being. Decide you want to fully show up as an embodied, liberated, emotionally bright, spiritually connected person as you do all the things. You are a fascinating being of enormous capacity. “Having all the feels” doesn’t even begin to describe it. A cosmos filled with big bangs and black holes and supernovas and nebulae is churning inside you. Many people go their whole lives without noticing this, much less basking in it. Among many other worthy things, pausing is about making sure that not-noticing doesn’t happen to us—making sure not to squander what the poet Mary Oliver called our “one wild and precious life.”

Unblending

Imagine you’re standing in front of a painting you really want to see. Except you’re standing one inch away from it. You can’t see it. You’re too close. There’s not enough space for you to appreciate what’s right in front of you. Naturally, you’d want to take a few steps back. Not because you’re trying to get away from the painting—in fact, just the opposite. You step back because you want to see it more clearly. You want to see all of it.

When we stand too close to our strong emotions, we become them. We get overridden, hijacked. We blend with them. In this state, our options are few. We get tunnel vision. We lose context. We say things we don’t mean. We do things one part of us thinks we need to do in order to protect ourselves, but then, later, another part of us regrets it. We’re in our emotions but somehow not connected to them. Paradoxically, it’s when we unblend—that is, when we take two steps back from our emotions—that we can best understand them and honor the messages they have for us. Unblending simply means putting a little space, a little daylight, between ourselves and the emotional parts of us that are activated.

You might think that your emotions are sometimes too intense for you to do this. The truth is, the more intense the emotion, the more we must find that space if we are to avoid hurting ourselves or others. The more gripping the feeling state, the more awareness we need to bring to the situation and the more urgent it is that we pause, breathe, and regain our center before taking even one more step.

Unblending is a way of reclaiming your agency in moments when you feel triggered. Once you’re unblended, you can begin connecting to aspects of your deeper wisdom without having to judge or disavow the triggered parts of you.

Getting Curious

When you stop and get curious about your emotional state, you can listen more clearly to the feeling, respond to the feeling, reason with the feeling, bring compassion to the feeling. You can decide whether the feeling is something you’d really like your actions to be informed by (or not). You can also shift the conversation you’re having within yourself. Which then means you can shift the conversation you’re having with others—it’s much easier, after all, to tell someone how you’re feeling if you have enough distance from your feelings to be able to communicate your experience accurately.

When we open to curiosity, we are that much closer to our natural state of childlike wonder. When we touch curiosity, we graze the rim of infinite possibility. To become curious, genuinely curious, about our situation is to invite movement into what was once stuck and fraught. It is to bring warmth into an experience without having to ask that experience to change. There’s something mysterious about the moment curiosity comes trickling into a struggle within ourselves. Our parts, of course, may fight it and block it for some time. But once they themselves feel it and relent, the paradigm shift is undeniable.

Curiosity is entry-level compassion, entry-level caring. In moments when having compassion (for ourselves or someone else) feels either out of reach or wholly unreasonable, curiosity is much easier to access. It’s entry-level compassion because when we get curious and inquisitive, we are on our way to understanding things in a new way. The more we understand where a part of us is coming from, the more likely compassion and caring are to spontaneously dawn.

When Curiosity Is Blocked

When troublesome or pained parts of us are present, it’s common for other parts to come in and judge, resist, shut down, or analyze the situation. For example, a client might say to me, “I can’t get curious about my anger right now because I hate it so much.” To which I’d honestly respond, “Of course you do. Anger is uncomfortable and makes messes. I get why another part of you hates it.” People often find the next step utterly surprising. We can ask the part of us that’s judging the angry part to relax and step to the side. We simply acknowledge the judging part in a friendly way and ask if it’d be willing to relax a bit. Amazingly, this works. And when it doesn’t—if, for example, the judging part won’t step aside—we simply switch to working with the judging part instead, get curious about it, and go from there.

This will work with numbness, with distractedness, with all kinds of parts of us. Sometimes people will say to me, “I can’t do parts work because I feel so shut down inside.” But that shut down feeling is coming from a part of them. So, we pause, get curious about the experience of “shut down inside,” and then move to the next step.

If this seems confusing, don’t worry. Just keep going. With enough friendly observation, the architecture of the mind is sure to reveal itself organically.

Shifting the Conversation Inside

Having paused, unblended, and gotten curious (all of which can happen in an instant once we’ve built the habit), we are now in a position to ask questions that come from the energy of that curiosity. Is this a part of you that’s weighed down by a wound or betrayal of some sort? Or is it a part of you that’s come to protect you in some way? What emotions are present? Do you feel them in the body? If so, where? And what are the sensations like? Heavy or light? Sharp or dull? Pulsing or constant? More warm or more cool? Does this part of you have a “voice?” If so, what are they saying? Or maybe you start getting images when you get curious. If so, what are they? And are they related to historical moments in your life? I’ll be offering many more questions we can use to begin engaging our inner parts in the practices to come, but hopefully it’s becoming apparent by now that there is much more going on with our minds and emotions than we’ve been taught to think there is. What could easily be labeled and dismissed as “sadness” is richer and more multidimensional than that. Getting curious about our feeling of sadness, to follow the example, we can turn inward to find a part of us—a subpersonality, if you will—that has a function, a voice, sensory dimensions, visual dimensions, a history, and even layers of other emotions. All this from what’s been a cursory exploration so far. As we continue, we’ll find that there’s even more to the story.

INSIDE OUT

These steps that enable us to organize an inner dialogue of empathic self-communication—pausing, unblending, getting curious, and using questions for self-inquiry—can be found, with variations and different names, in a number of spiritual and wellness practices. The language I’m using here comes from the parts work process central to IFS. Perhaps the coolest thing about parts work is that it can be practiced without a therapist present. It can be brought into meditation and contemplative practices, and it can be practiced in quick and meaningful ways throughout the day.

Perhaps you’ve seen or heard of the Pixar movie Inside Out. In that movie, all the emotional parts of a little girl named Riley are running around trying to help her navigate daily life in the midst of her parent’s separation, and each of those parts has its own job and its own agenda. Quite often those agendas don’t match, and the parts clash with one another. Isn’t it just like that with us sometimes? In fact, the progenitors of IFS have been commissioned as consultants by Pixar in the making of the sequel.

PART ONE PRACTICES

» When You Encounter Horrible Headlines

Consider the last horrible headline you read. It would be best if it weren’t something so close to home that you boil over and get furious about it. Pick something somewhat manageable. If you can’t think of a headline, recall a situation wherein you felt distressed or angry. Let the emotional parts involved in the experience get activated.

Once one or more emotional parts are present, pause. Take a breath and notice the emotional and cognitive qualities here, and whether you already feel caught up in them. Can you label the primary emotion(s), like “sadness,” “worry,” or “anger”? Are there sensations in the body such as tight shoulders, knots in the stomach, lower back pain, or something else? Don’t try to fix the sensations or make them go away; just feel into them. Notice the “voice” of this part or parts of you, and any associated thoughts. Don’t try to shut them out or talk back; just listen and receive them.

Notice that this is a part of you that is responding to the headline in a way that makes sense. There’s actually a logic being followed here. This part of you is either wanting to find a way to address the situation, to make things okay again, or it’s wounded and deflated in some way in response to something that matters. Even if the experience of its expression feels uncomfortable, this part of you does have an intelligence to it.

Can you take a few breaths now and find a sense of space between you and the emotion? It doesn’t have to be a dramatic shift. And, again—importantly—we’re not trying to push this part of you away. We just want to get to know it a little, to understand where it’s coming from. To do that, we’ll need just a little bit of space. Take your time.

Next, see if you can find some curiosity about the activated part of you. Not so much the story of why you feel this, or if you think this part of you is right or wrong, but the experience of it directly—again, the sensations in the body, the things this part of you seems to be saying: “I hate this,” “It’s not fair,” “It can’t be this way,” or whatever the message might be. See if you can find a space inside where it’s possible to find some curiosity or interest about this emotional part of you. Stop there for a moment.

If it’s impossible to get curious about that part of you, simply ask all other parts of you if they’ll kindly relax and step aside. You may have to do this two or three times before curiosity can dawn. But all you need is a sliver of curiosity, an iota of space.

Notice how you feel now that you’re curious about what’s happening inside of you, as opposed to being consumed by it, wanting to get rid of it, or being so focused on the external (headline or interaction) that you aren’t even aware of your inner feeling. It’s as if you’re mixing these two together: curiosity and sadness; curiosity and worry; curiosity and whatever it is you’re feeling. If you are genuinely curious toward the part of you expressing feelings and thoughts, they might still be there, but notice if you’re in a little bit of a better place.

If you’d like to go deeper and (this is important) curiosity, spaciousness, or compassion is present toward this part of yourself, below are some empathic questions you could ask. Don’t try to figure out the answers. Just ask and maybe even let the answer surprise you a bit:

» Is there something you’d like me to know?

» Are these feelings connected to something more personal?

» What role are you playing in my life? What job are you trying to do?

» How long have you had that job?

» Do you like doing that job, or is it exhausting?

» If you didn’t have to protect me in this way and you could have any other job in the world, what would you rather be doing?

This is one of many ways we can be real about our emotions without being lost in them or avoidant of them.

If you want to take this one step further and find out more about the vulnerability inside you that this reactive part is protecting, you could ask:

» If you stopped protecting me like this, what do you think would happen?

The answer we sense to this question points us in the direction of what is longing to be healed in our lives. Hold that part of you in a place of compassion. You can even use the next practice to offer it some healing energy.

» Self-Love for a Part of You That Needs It Most

Take a few deep breaths and feel what it’s like to be in your body. Then, think about a time in childhood when things were relatively simple (even if it was just for a fleeting moment). Begin to get curious about that moment. What age were you then? What grade were you in at school? What were some of the playful things you loved doing then? Can you see what your face looked like at the time? Perhaps you can think of your image from a family photo or a school photo. Can you hear your child voice, your child laugh? It might help to close your eyes for a moment to make the image of your child self more real. Bring that kid right into the room, right here with you.

Then, imagine surrounding your younger self in the energy of your curiosity. See if you can let that curiosity deepen into empathy or even caring. Offer your child self the good vibes you would offer any small child who’d been left in your care. (Even if you don’t like kids, you and I both know that if a little kid were left in your care, you’d at least show them some basic kindness.) Extend this energy to them.

Send them some sincere wishes for their well-being. Send them the thoughts, “May you be happy. May you feel safe. May you feel free.” Repeat these slowly at least a few times, and imagine the energy of those words reaching them, lighting up their little face. You can send the words on your breath, imagine them as a beam of light, or use any other technique that helps you get there.

You might feel nothing at first, or you might feel a dramatic shift of some sort. Either way, just keep going.

Next, think about a time in childhood when things were difficult. (Note: please don’t choose to work with a deeply traumatic memory unless you are highly experienced with self-work of this nature.) Perhaps a memory has been stirring in you as you’ve been reading. If difficult feelings come up for you right away, practice pausing, unblending, and getting curious. What age were you then? What grade were you in at school? Can you see your child self-image? Can you remember your laugh, your smile? What did it feel like to be you during that time in your life? Perhaps you’re having a very specific memory and can see or feel into a whole scene that unfolded for you. Remember or imagine as much as you can about this particular moment in your life. You may need to pause, unblend, and get curious again here.

Extend the energy of curiosity, friendliness, goodwill, or compassion to this kid. Surround them with it. You may want to place a hand on your heart and make sure they know that you’re right here with them. If you’re feeling emotions in the body such as a heaviness in the chest or a tightness in the throat, it might help to place a compassionate hand there with the same message.

Sometimes it can seem like your inner child part isn’t receptive to your care. It’s as if this part of you isn’t used to receiving such goodness from others, or even from you, and they might not trust it. If that happens, know that this is common and will change over time. Sometimes we need to make amends with our parts for how things have been until now. Sometimes we just need to gently continue wishing them well regardless of their reaction. Like an untrusting cat beginning to realize you have treats for them, they’ll eventually come around.

Stay here for a while, holding any feelings that are present in the space of compassion. Conclude by taking five deep cleansing breaths. Make sure to breathe bigger than any of the feelings that have been present in this practice. Make sure to transition gently from this practice and to take amazing care of yourself today.

» When Thoughts Scream: The Self-Love Approach to Calming Inner Critics and Overwhelm

When our thoughts scream, it’s a response to a perception of vulnerability. Whether that vulnerability is real or imagined, conscious or unconscious, doesn’t matter. Our nervous systems take no chances when it comes to survival; they respond to any kind of vulnerability as a matter of survival. You might want to get these inner voices and feelings to shut the hell up, but there’s a better way, a way that’s rooted in self-love. And it’s simple. I just need you to suspend your disbelief while you check out something new, do it at least twice, and then check to see if it worked after you’ve made those earnest attempts.

Follow these steps:

  1. Consider the source of this overwhelm to be another person—or people, as the case may be.

  2. Listen to what’s being said. Stop trying to push these parts of you away or change them at all. Pause and listen. What are the complaints here? What do these parts of you fear is going to happen? What do they think you did wrong? Listen passively to every last complaint, every last insult.

  3. Reflect back what you’ve heard. Inside yourself (not out loud), repeat back all the complaints you’ve heard. Every last one. For example: “Okay, I hear that you think I’m garbage, that we’re going to fail, that everything is terrible…” Some people’s voices say very difficult things about aspects of their social identity, like skin color or gender expression. If this happens for you, simply reflect back these sentiments as well. Don’t add anything. Just let this part of you know that you hear them.

  4. After you’ve repeated back every complaint, ask inside if there’s more. We want to know all the complaints. Another good question to ask these parts of you is, “Am I getting it?”

  5. If there are more complaints, reflect those back again just like you did in step 3.

  6. In your own words and in a kind tone, say to these parts of you, “Now I’ve heard every complaint—and I get it. I get why you’re upset. But, now that I’m hearing and understanding you, do you think you could turn down the volume here? Could you bring the intensity down a bit so that I can have the space to do something about it?”

  7. If the complaints persist, it’s because there’s still more on the table or these parts of you don’t feel like you’ve sufficiently heard or understood them. No one continues to scream if they feel truly heard and understood. Repeat steps 1–6.

  8. If the complaints still persist, ask inside what these parts of you need from you in order to calm down. Do they need you to set a boundary? To make a change or make some sort of commitment?

Nine times out of ten, raging thoughts and feelings such as these are defensive parts of us. Doing this process, I sometimes (but not always) find that people start feeling vulnerable, emotional, or like a wound inside of them has become present. If this is you, don’t be thrown off by it. What you’re feeling now is the wounded part(s) of you that were being defended, the more hidden layers of yourself that it would likely feel intolerable should anyone hurt, betray, terrorize, insult, or shame now again. If that’s where you are now, with a vulnerable part of you exposed, here are some additional steps for relating inside yourself in a compassionate way.

  1. Pause. Unblend. Get curious about what or who is now present inside you. Please don’t push them away or try to make them relax. There’s been enough of that already. See if, instead, you can find a space inside where you feel open or even caring toward this part of you.

  2. If you can’t find such a space inside, that’s okay. Notice the parts of you that are averse to this wounded part in some way. In a friendly manner, simply ask those other parts to step aside so you can help this troubled part of you. You may have to do this multiple times. Continue until you can find even a tiny space within that’s open and clear, perhaps even warm toward the wounded part of you.

  3. Explore this part of you a bit by noticing what they’re like inside. Are they in the body someplace? What are the sensations? Can you label the primary emotion that’s here? Do they have a voice?

  4. Once you’re able to be curious and maybe even caring, extend that curiosity and caring through the following steps:

» Simply stay there, as if you’re holding or hanging out with that part of you. Just breathe and be there with no agenda whatsoever.

» Ask this part if there’s anything they want you to know.

» Place a compassionate hand wherever you feel them in the body (or on the heart center) and say to them, “I’m here. We’re safe now. We survived.”

» If you have a visual of this part of you, you can offer them things like a blanket or a puppy to help them calm down and feel safe.

» You can return to the first step, simply staying there and breathing, at any time.

AFTERCARE INSTRUCTIONS

There’s a solid chance these opening practices got deeper than you thought they would when we started out. If you’ve gone to a deep place with yourself today, make sure to treat yourself and be extra gentle as you proceed. Some ideas:

  1. Call a friend or a family member who’s got your back.

  2. Take a hot bath (with salts and oils if you have those) or a shower, and wash it all away.

  3. Go outside and look up at the sky. Feel how that automatically drops your center of gravity down to your feet.

  4. Take five deep breaths and breathe as big as any of the emotions that have been here.

  5. Indulge in a simple pleasure such as chocolate or a ridiculous animal video online.

  6. Do the “Grounding: Body of Breath” practice on this page, or go to my website and try one of the breathwork practices there (at www.ralphdelarosa.com/meditations).

Whatever you do, be good to you. Always.

* It doesn’t matter at all that, in that moment, I only thought I had heard that question—the brain runs on perception, not actualities.