How you can use your body to transform your emotional experience

Posted on January 11, 2023 by Isaac Carreras Olive, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

How you can use your body to transform your emotional experience
Attend fully to your sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, and expand the world of possibilities.

Building emotional capacity is a complex process of body, mind, culture, and environment. It includes stored knowledge of different emotions, a rich vocabulary to articulate them, a found experience in contexts and situations, and an experienced background that has nurtured you in the emotional repertoire. However, there’s one crucial step: to stop and attend fully to your sensations in the body.
The brain is built to make predictions and activate the responses that might best serve us in the circumstance. Although it might feel like we are reacting to what happens, our brain is anticipating. Over time this anticipation is like a pattern that matches the appropriate circumstances. Our responses are often not as skillful, right, or delicate as we would like them to be. The brain predictions might be slightly off, or we might like to respond differently than what we normally do.

What do we do if we want to change this response that seems automatic? If you do not want to reinforce a pattern, then there is a fundamental step you can practice: connect to your body’s sensations at that moment.

Learning to be with body sensations is a process. It requires practice full of patients and compassion with oneself.

In my experience, I have found that gentleness works very well when approaching body sensations. I go softly, almost one breath at a time, getting closer to my body sensations. With practice, my capacity to attend and stay expands.

In this journey, I have also learned that it is equally important to accept where I am at each moment to listen to the body sensations that arise from emotions. I learned to be with the “it is good enough for now”.

I learned to attend to what I am feeling with soft but continuous attention to broadening the experience at each breath.

For me, noticing the body sensations in an emotional experience is an ever-ending journey with a recurring theme. Even though I initially stop and attend to them, I do not stay long enough with them. Instead, I allow my habituated pattern to entirely trigger. This happens especially when the sensations that arise from my body are not pleasant. I notice the discomfort, and I just want it to go away. So instead of staying there, being with what arises even though it might feel uncomfortable, I try to move on of discomfort and act out a strategy to go on.

Are you familiar with this response?

This has become a patterned response to those body sensations. It now triggers automatically, without me even realizing it. This pattern includes the sensations I allow myself to feel, the associated thoughts I am ruminating, the behavior that follows, and how I relate with those around me.

What I am learning to do to prevent this habituated pattern from repeating.

I am learning to stay with the experience that arises in my body.
I have learned breath by breath to stay with my body sensations.
I become curious, allowing myself to dive into them with openness, listening to what else might be there, how it moves, changes (increases or decreases, shifts or transforms).

First, I begin this process by lying down on the floor; I even do so now when the emotion and sensations are pretty intense. I feel supported by the ground that sustains me by lying on the floor, allowing ease and less excitement. Once I have built some practice, standing up while being grounded allows me for more openness and to meet with more expansiveness the sensations.

The idea of stopping and meeting the sensations has to be matched with a proper disposition, as Charlotte Selver pointed.

“That is the simultaneous presence of two mental
states that seem contradictory. One is the state of quiet so that impressions con reach us, and the other is a state of aliveness so that impressions can be reactively met”.

I check different things that help me stay with sensations and learn from them.
In the pole of excitement, how much there’s there?
In the pole of pleasant-unpleasant, where would you place it?
What do you feel inside? Is it pointedly or broader around an area?
It is expansive, or it is contractive?
It is moving and evolving or static and dull?
Is it warm or cold?
What is the frequency of vibration or intensity of feeling?
What is the sensation of inner space? How it is changed or transformed by this moment?

Try to stay with the sensations, have a feel for them, and not launch yourself into interpreting what they mean. That is a fundamental move. That is a fundamental move. Just as waking up and enjoying these moments without rushing yourself out of bed.

Breath deeply at each step, at each observation, with no rush to move to what is next.
You might learn that there is a difference between noticing a high frequency in your heartbeat and quickly saying that you are anxious, agitated, excited, and nervous. Now, it is not about the label or the interpretation of the experience. Instead, it is about feeling it and acknowledging simply what it is.
It is simply: “I am noticing a fast heartbeat.”

Stay then with what you feel; rest there. One breath at a time, allow yourself to dive deeper into your sensations. Maybe at some point, it becomes too intense, no problem, that is good enough for now. With practice, this move to get closer to your body will become more accessible; you will have grown your capacity to be with pleasant and unpleasant sensations.

So much of our emotional habituated pattern has to do with the response we built for not feeling what arises in us. Fearing to be unable to manage the intensity of what we feel, we move away from the sensation, blocking what is there with a response that takes us away from that pain or discomfort. Later on, it will become our pattern for a response.

“Addiction is not so much substance use or behavioral process as it is a movement away from our direct body experience of the real world. Withdrawing from our bodies is the beginning of any addictive behavior”. Christine Caldwell.

Maybe that habituated response made sense when it first originated. But the odds are that now don’t. Or that you might be using this pattern for similar circumstances. However, they are not necessarily the same, and a different response will be more adequate.

Now, when you fully attend this moment, notice the present sensations. You are in the perfect place to examine what is really happening with fresh and new eyes. Moreover, you are in a position to frame it differently from what you used to.

Maybe that increased heartbeat is not anxiety but surprise or excitement. Or maybe there’s more than just an increased heartbeat. Perhaps you can notice something else that can help you understand what is happening differently.

With this new and fresh look to what is really there an open and direct touch to the experience from your body, you will have the opportunity to do something different. You have the choice to be different.
It is not avoiding your body sensations that you find this new freedom, but you obtain it through them. So stop the pattern and do the courageous act of attending to your body sensations with kindness.
All that is needed for this to happen is attending to your body. You can begin doing so right now.

Notice, what body sensations are present in you while reading this article, what do you feel, and how do you feel it?
How does feeling them change this present moment? Is your sense of aliveness any different?

I hope you begin this journey. I know you will benefit from it. Your life will become fuller of beautiful moments and freer from habituated responses every day.