How To Get Smart About Your Emotions by Doing This One Thing

Because the body keeps the score.

I used to be completely disconnected from my emotions. So disconnected, I couldn’t even name what one was.

Emotional awareness is something I've been working on. The disconnection has caused several problems in my body. The most pronounced is that I grind my teeth at night.

I wear a mouth guard now, but I've been ruining my teeth and painfully tightening my jaw and neck muscles for forty years.

The body keeps the score.

As a child, I'd been trained to ignore feelings and plow ahead. No one helped me regulate my emotions, which often overwhelmed me. The best I could do was pretend they didn't exist.

I learned the hard way that you could only quash emotions for so long before they erupt like Mount Vesuvius.

We, as women, are experts at suppressing them. It's been ingrained in us since the bible story of Adam and Eve. Eve, the risk-taker, was swayed by a wily serpent and picked an apple from the Tree of Knowledge in the garden. Because she was feeling curious, some say tempted, she broke a rule that God commanded. This biblical God was vengeful and cursed Eve with painful childbirth and gave humanity the stain of original sin. Or I should say, Eve delivered sin and suffering to us all.

A woman brought down humanity. Poor Adam.

Do you still buy this myth?

Christian nationalists continue to do a number on women and transwomen today. Women still lag behind in pay to their male counterparts. The Equal Rights Amendment was drafted and introduced in Congress in 1923. A century later, it still has not enshrined its guarantees of gender equality in the Constitution.

We’re still paying the price for the myth.

The female stereotype is that women are too emotional. That's why they don't drive well and can’t hold an important job such as president.

We know men have emotions too, but they've also been raised to be even more disconnected from their feelings than we are.

As a society, we are completely out of touch with an internal system that makes us human.

Emotions are a part of who we are. They give us important information. Suppressing them makes us sick in both mind and body. To be healthy, we should feel our emotions, sit and alchemize them.

Try this.

Here is an exercise that I heard on The Time of the Feminine - A Global Sisterhood Podcast, which I highly recommend. (Spotify link below.)

Instead of making a “To Do” list, make another list first. Make a “To Be” list.

Write down how you want to be for the day, week, or whatever time period you're working on. Let this list reflect how you want to feel.

Then write your normal to-do list.

My "To Be" List:

• Peaceful

• Rested

• Content

My "To Do" List:

• Write an article

• Participate in a conference call

• Shop

• Walk the dog

• Laundry

I almost wrote "run errands" on my to-do list, but “run” made me think of a frenetic pace, so I changed the word to keep my peace theme.

My friend Carol wants to bring more joy into her life. I imagine her to-be list having the word "joyful" on it. The to-do list would get adjusted if something contradicts her plan to be joyful.

Of course, life will countermand the to-be list at times. I want to remain peaceful, but shopping might make me anxious and less content, so that's where I give myself grace. I acknowledge my emotion, process it and ultimately alchemize it.

Emotions, by their very nature, come and go.

Building awareness of our state of emotion is the key to emotional regulation and connectedness to the Self. As yoga teaches, the first step is to build awareness. Once you’re aware, everything changes.

Check this podcast out!