Learning to manage emotional triggers is hard work. Here are a few tips we learned along the way:
Make friends with your Feelings.... and your entire emotional body.
Developing a relationship with your feelings is an important first step in getting the most out of our human life. As our feelings move through us, however uncomfortable they might be, they actually are trying to pull our attention to something that needs it. Just like you have a physical body, you have an emotional body too. Emotions pull our attention to greater truth. Often to places where there is pain or misalignment in our world or family or environment. Being able to manage the triggers gives us the ability to feel our feelings and listen to them. To hold that feeling while we are able to look inside (and around) to see what needs to be shifted.
Choose the better feeling.
Connect with a bigger purpose
Let it go
Once you learn to hold a feeling and calm yourself, you will learn that you have the ability to choose your response. One of the most important and difficult things to do is to know this -- once you clear the immediate trigger, you can choose your feeling - learn to love the one that you are choosing. If you choose a good feeling - love that you can choose the better feeling. If you choose the lesser good feeling, love that you have the ability to stay in that hard place.
It is hard to motivate without connecting to a bigger purpose. The bigger you are able to cast your sense of purpose for your entire life, the easier it is to see the value of changing. When growth isn't just for you but for all the people in your life, for all humanity, for the entire planet or universe - it really helps motivate a reason to choose ease and calm in every situation. Try to see your life as an essential thread that is part of a big tapestry, and you have the ability to weave a beautiful color through it all.
We hold onto emotions and try to store them because we are afraid. Sometimes we are afraid that new ones ones won't come. But there is never a reason to fear that. Just try it for a day. Feelings are always moving through us. We just have to open ourselves and let them pass through. Being alive is a constant while you are alive.
LET THE RELATIONSHIP CHANGE
I learned that I am not my feelings. That feelings pass through me and draw my attention to areas of my past or myself that needed some relief. And that was the way I could learn that my feelings were my friends. And as difficult as some feelings were to accept and make peace with - there they were - waiting in every situation. So instead of running from those feelings I look at them as much as I can and try to heal any pain that is running through me with my attention.
WRITE AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUR TEACHER THAT IS ALSO YOU.
This is an open letter who has ever supported me and helped me get here. It is to my past self where I will continue to forget to be here accepting each moment and the movements within them. This is a letter to my future self not to get carried away and forget the journey that helped me get here. I thank you my friends, my loves, my lives for being with me always. I think I am going for it without apology. Thank you in advance for helping me to remain grounded in my life and guided by a spirit that is bigger than I will ever know.
and remember kids....Chocolate is delicious. Plants are precious. Love is everywhere in everything.