Beyond Avoidance: Finding Strength in Your Most Challenging Emotions
Stop pushing away what you feel. Discover somatic and mindfulness techniques to befriend your anger, sadness, and fear, fostering personal growth and greater empathy for the world around you.
If you woke up this morning and said to yourself, “I feel overwhelmed,” “I feel despondent,” or “I feel scared,” please know you’re not alone.
Right now, a potent cocktail of collective trauma, grief, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty about what tomorrow holds is likely leading to these big feelings.
These feelings may include sadness, anger, or despair. While challenging to witness, they offer valuable wisdom if you have the stamina to be with them.
Emotional Avoidance: Why We Look Away
When these intense emotions arise, our natural inclination is to look away, to distract ourselves, to push them down and out of conscious awareness.
Feel for yourself by reflecting on the last time you experienced one of these challenging emotions. What was your default behavior?
These unprocessed emotions don't simply vanish. Instead, they become lodged within our bodies, manifesting as stress, tension, and even physical ailments.
This creates a self-perpetuating cycle!
When we feel something difficult, we avoid it, which hinders our ability to truly process and integrate the experience, slowing down our capacity to grow and evolve.
So, how do we begin to break this cycle? How do we learn to stay present with these challenging emotions, even when persuaded to avoid, suppress, and detach?
The following 3-part practice is a process I share with my somatic coaching clients to help them tune in to their body’s wisdom, feel what’s there, and shift only when ready.
#1 Tuning In: A Somatic Check-In
Take a moment right now, wherever you are, to gently turn your attention inward. You don't need to change anything, just observe.
Feel into a moment today where something unexpected happened, and the outcome did not go according to plan. Take on this feeling about 5 - 10% more in your body.
Notice where this feeling shows up in your body. Maybe it's a knot in your stomach, a tightness in your chest, tension in your shoulders, or jaw clenching.
These physical sensations are the direct impact of external events that impact your internal landscape.
Spend a few breaths and notice what these sensations tell you - remember, there’s not right or wrong answer here:
Do you notice any feelings or sensations?
If you do, are there pressures, temperatures, or sensations?
What is their quality - sharp, dull, heavy, light?
Does it move or stay still?
Only your direct experience in this moment matters. This gentle awareness helps you connect with your feelings in a concrete way.
You move from abstractly “feeling sad " to understanding the early warning signs of sadness in your body, such as a heavy heart or a lump in your throat.
This form of somatic sensing, or naming what the body is experiencing, is the first move towards being with challenging emotions, instead of avoiding them.
#2 Permission to Feel: The Practice of Tonglen
Now, let's explore the ancient Buddhist practice of Tonglen, which offers permission to feel your emotions and cultivate compassion in the process.
Tonglen, often translated as "sending and taking."
It has the power of transforming the common habit of avoiding challenging emotions by opening our hearts to our pain and the pain of others.
The next time you experience challenging emotions you really want to avoid, get out a timer and program it for 90 seconds, then give this practice a try:
Breathe In: As you inhale, imagine drawing in the feeling you've noticed in your body – the tightness, the heaviness, the clenching.
You can also extend this to the pain and suffering of others experiencing something similar.
Imagine this inhalation as a gathering of darkness, heat, or heaviness. Breathe it in completely through all your body's pores.Breathe Out: As you exhale, imagine sending out relief, coolness, light, and whatever would benefit yourself and others.
Radiate this positive energy outward through all the pores of your body, sending the breath out through your fingertips.
Imagine a healing light surrounding the parts of your body holding this emotion, and the ease the breath brings to these areas.
Continue this gentle rhythm of taking in and sending out for a few more breaths. You might focus on a specific situation that is causing these challenging emotions.
Going deeper, you might broaden your focus to encompass the collective suffering you feel aware of in the world, and notice what you continue to feel in your body.
This practice helps us to break down the walls of separation we often build around our pain and fosters a more profound sense of connection and compassion.
That’s the power of a practice that may, on the surface, appear to be counterintuitive. We breathe in what feels unpleasant and transform it by sending out relief.
As Pema Chödrön reminds us, we can use what feels like poison as medicine, transforming our discomfort into a pathway for healing and empathy.
#3 Shifting Our Attitude: The 5 Second Activation
Practices like somatic awareness and Tonglen help us to be present with and process challenging emotions. They are essential to overcoming emotional avoidance.
Once we are aware of challenging emotions and where they live in the body, it’s important to avoid getting stuck in the emotional cycle.
The “5-Second Activation” can help. It’s a simple somatic technique for identifying a desired shift, particularly when feeling resistance or inertia.
After you have completed actions #1 and #2 above, give this a try:
Identify Your Desired State. Name the current emotional state (i.e., stress, uncertainty, etc.), and name your desired emotional state (i.e., calm, focused, etc.).
Remember a Resilience Story. Reflect on a time when you felt most alive (i.e., being in nature, making art, dancing, etc.). What do you notice in your body?
Name what you see, hear, touch, smell, and taste.
Where do you feel these sensations in your body?
What opens for you when you remember this story?
Countdown. Mentally or verbally count down: "5, 4, 3, 2, 1."
Feel Into Your Resilience. Now, turn up the feelings you identified in your resilience story. How does your resilience story move you into the desired state?
The 5-Second Activation acts as a mental circuit breaker, interrupting the brain’s default tendencies and creating momentum to shift one's state after processing emotions.
Transforming Relationships
Ultimately, while we may not always control the circumstances that life presents us with, we do have agency over our attitude and how we choose to respond.
Becoming mindful of our emotions, paying attention to our internal dialogue, and developing healthy ways to process our emotions are transformative practices.
And remember, these are practices that require support. If you want to take them deeper, please consider accessing some of the following Imagine Belonging resources:
Belonging Practice Host Guide. This timely resource offers somatic practices you can share with your colleagues to help reset your nervous systems at work.
Process Challenging Emotions w/Support. This video series offers quick tips on how to put somatic sensing, tonglen, and the 5-Second Activation into practice.
Apply for Belonging Coaching w/Me! Are you seeking a somatics coach to help you clarify who you need to become to be the leader the world needs you to be?
When we cultivate the courage to stay present with our challenging emotions, we deepen our capacity to show up for ourselves with greater kindness and grace.
This inner work, in turn, profoundly impacts how we relate to and show up for others and the teams or groups we lead.
By tending to our hearts with compassion, we naturally extend that compassion outward, creating a more connected and empathetic world, one breath at a time.