Below is a transcript of the episode as generated by Otter.ai. (*please note, this transcript has only been edited to put in line breaks for easier readability and may contain errors where a word or phrase got lost in transcription.)
[0:13] Emotional self-care and managing emotions.
Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic and illuminating space where psychology spirituality and heart wisdom meet. Here's your host, Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind.
Hello, hi, everybody. Welcome to Your Heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright. And we have a mental health toolbox episode today where we are talking about emotional self care, and how to make friends with their emotions and take good care of them. Mental Health toolbox episodes are exactly what they sound like they are tools and perspectives that you might find helpful for your own well being and peace of mind.
And once a month, I like to focus more on mental health awareness and issues that help us feel more balanced, feel more grounded and navigate some of our day to day concerns and experiences as human beings feeling a little bit more equipped to know what to do in the event of so what do we do when our emotions are running rampant, or we are struggling with something that we're feeling and we don't know what to do with it? Or we are needing to show up and be somehow on? And at the same time we're having some things happen in our emotional process? How do we contain that in a healthy way?
And how do we know the difference between healthy containment and not? So while we might not answer every single question in this episode, today, I want to tackle some of those and hopefully offer some ideas that might feel helpful for those things. Why is emotional self care important?
Everybody has them. Emotions are something that provide valuable information. They help us know how we are feeling about something they help us know when we are perhaps having a reaction to something when we might feel activated by something and it upsets us. They are these gateways and potential doorways that give us really valuable information about what is going on with ourself.
And I will likely use the words emotions and feelings interchangeably on the podcast, they're very similar. But I tend to think about emotions as something that is happening on a emotional level that moves us or brings some sort of an effect, emotive experience about feelings can include emotions. And we often use them when we're talking about like, how do you feel right now? Oh, I feel sad.
But I also think feelings can include sensations, they can include something that we might be feeling in our body, something that we might be feeling experientially, I feel like the world is out to get me today. That's actually more of a thought than a feeling. But maybe there's an emotional experience that goes with it. And maybe we feel that we have that thought and the feeling that follows has more to do with I feel vulnerable or I feel attacked or something like that.
So I think feelings describe a bit of a broader experience and emotions really zero in on the effect. And what it is that we're experiencing more in our heart and more on a emotive basis. So these things are messengers, feelings and emotions are messengers. I like to look at them as important pieces of our puzzle that bring us valuable information about something that we are experiencing them.
[4:21] Emotional fluidity and self-awareness.
And part of what we learn as we go on the journey and we learn wisdom and discernment is how do we work with our emotions? And when do we put a lot of stock in them? And when do we just know that this is something that's popping up right now? It's probably not going to last? And I definitely think one of the ways that we learn that is to navigate our experience itself. Learn about ourselves and learn what is normal for us.
For example, if you know that when you're really stressed, you tend to feel angry at everyone and everything you and the rest of the time you feel pretty okay towards people, and are able to have a more grounded thought process around them, and maybe not take things in a personal way or feel so reactive. Then when you feel angry towards people, you might say, how much stock do I put in this? And you might have a reflection moment where you say, Well, how am I doing right now? Well, I'm really stressed out.
And I know when I'm stressed, I feel reactive. That's when I can feel resentful, or I tend to get more upset, or I can be more irrational, you don't have to judge that. We just observe it because we're doing the work of self and so we know ourself. And then that observation might help us say, so what's really going on, while I'm stressed? And what can I do to take care of myself in this stress? And so as we deepen our relationship with ourself, we learn to take stock of our emotions, and we learn how to work with them constructively. If we're feeling something that we've never felt before, maybe we say, I'm going to just stay with this.
And stay curious about what is this false sense of self? What is this experience coming up? What is this effect that I am experiencing inside of me, if we have something and it is with us all the time, or we've been in a soul cycle where we are always feeling really sad, or really down or noticing that we're out of sorts, then maybe we would interpret that in the context of I wasn't feeling like this like three months ago, or six months ago? What's going on with me right now. And I think part of living intuitively and living with greater emotional intelligence and learning and trust, our experience itself means that we need to figure out how to map out and have some sort of a framework for working with our emotions, because they are so fluid. And they're such a big part of that.
And fluidity is the first perspective that I want to offer today to put in our toolbox. And that is just knowing that emotions are fluid. And I find this very helpful because they have a way of hijacking us. And making us feel in a moment like we are never ever going to feel anything else except what we feel right now. That sounds very adolescent when I say it, and if you've been around an adolescent in the throes of trauma who say, I'm so mad, and I'm never going to be happy again, or I'm never going to or sort of this catastrophizing things, then you are well aware of how this thought process goes.
But we as adults do it too, more often than we might want to admit to each other, where we will have these intense moments, and we might feel something and we feel like we've never felt anything else. And we're always going to feel this way, especially if you are a highly sensitive person or an empath, somebody who's very energetically sensitive, you probably have a heightened relationship with your emotions.
And that might very well mean that you can turn the volume up on them really easily and have a hard time turning it down. And you might not even mean for the volume to be turned up, you might just engage with life that way where you are wired in a way that you feel everything and you feel it in this really visceral, strong way. So even more important, if you have that experience as a sensitive is learning to constructively work with emotions.
[8:36] Feelings are fluid and valuable messengers.
And remembering that feelings are fluid. They are ever changing. They do Shift, it can help us in a moment when we feel something and it feels like it's never going to change our emotional experience itself. I think it's very helpful to do a little bit of a reality check and be like What are other times in my life where I've not felt this way, just to ground ourselves.
But I find it really comforting when we are having a bad effect cycle and just not in a good place with ourselves. And so we're sort of feeling all the fields that are not the great ones to feel, I find it really helpful to remember this will pass. I haven't always felt this way. I'm not always going to feel this way.
So even in the moment, if I can't see it, this is going to shift eventually, even if I'm in a grief or a tough season in life or something that is bringing a lot of anxiety or stress or something like that. It's always helpful to remember that the things we feel that there is a fluidity to them. And I think that framework is so important because when we're able to see it as fluid, it shifts our experience of it.
So instead of feeling this fixed rigidity that why do I feel this I have to get rid of it. I have to diagnose And here, it allows us to say, what's going on with me? How can I sit with this? How can I make space for where I am today, there are times where I think we just have a rough day, or we have a rough weekend or week or whatever it is. And we are not in a great space emotionally because of something going on in our life.
And I find it not only reassuring to remember that feelings are fluid, but to work with that constructively by just reminding myself well, I learned a lot today about what it is to be human and to have this emotional experience itself. This season is really helping me develop compassion, not just for myself, but for anybody who has experiences that they might be feeling these things.
Because many other people, we are not the first one who felt a certain way, we will not be the last one who have felt a certain way, many, many, many other human beings, who came long before us and long after us will feel similar themes to what we feel. So I find it helpful sometimes to remember, not only will it pass, but that there is this greater web of light that I'm connected to, and others have felt the same thing.
And if nothing else, we can say I learned what it was to fully excavate the emotion of fill in the blank negativity or fear or whatever it was out of sorts, feeling blue, sometimes it's hard to put language to our emotional experience itself, which is why I think color or art, or being able to represent it through imagery can be really helpful emotions, we do our best to logically interpret them and assign some sort of a word to them. But they're such a experience of the body and the heart and our aspect centers, and our attachments and hopes and dreams and disappointments and expectations and all of that.
And sometimes it's hard to find logic to put to those words, because it's something that's experiential. And so finding ways to listen to music, or, as I said, work with color, or do something that represents it in a more artistic way, or experiential, expressive way, can often be helpful. Something else that is a great tool for us to have is to utilize inspiration from nature, in order to work with our emotions and develop perspective for them.
[12:40] Emotional health and grounding techniques using water and earth energy.
And I'm going to share just a couple of things that I do. The first is to remember with since emotions are fluid, to really channel the wisdom of water. And to think about the idea that like water, our feelings, too, are part of this greater sea of self. I love this mental image because instead of isolating it and focusing in on one thing, we can see it as part of the greater waters of who we are. And if you've ever sat by the ocean, or a lake or a stream, or any body of water, orange, white, a bath, or pond or whatever it is that you have access to, and you feel a little bit lighter afterwards or feel a little bit more cleansed, or you feel a sense of again movement, and that there's flow that will eventually return
. Then, you know waters wisdom, which teaches us that all things flow, the river always finds its way, somehow it all comes out in the wash, there's something about the fluidity of water that if we can meditate on it, be by it, drink it, have a glass of water, and just do your own little ritual of allowing it to purify and clench you. Anything that we feel creatively drawn to do with water, I think is very helpful for supporting our emotional health.
And the other thing that I really like to do is I will oftentimes if I've got I just call it stuff like energetic fragmentation, and that for me shows up as if my head feels like it's really buzzy or it feel kind of this gray cloud comprised of stress or something I'm worrying about or feeling overwhelmed. And so oftentimes I will take my hands together and I will rub my palms back and forth.
Not super long, just long enough to feel like I am kind of shaking it out. And then I will take my hands and press them down against the earth. I prefer if I can be outside to put them on to it's usually the lawn sometimes I will do this on a hiking trail as a way to just say thank you to the earth but if I'm doing this more for my own grounding purposes, I will probably just go outside my house and I will put them on Milan, if you don't have access to Elon, then you can put them on wherever ground is for you, whether that's outside, or whether that's inside on the carpet, because you know that the earth is upholding the structure.
But there is something inherently grounding about giving it back to the earth, and really allowing ourselves to be supported by earth energy, something bigger than us that is very stable, it's very grounding. I love the idea that the Earth, compost, whatever it goes into it, and somehow gross life from it.
So a lot of times, I will just be like, take a layer of stress off of me, I'll press my hands on the ground. And I will just say, help use this to upcycle, whatever you need for your growth, but I am releasing it from me. And I find that really grounding to do it's a nice way to come back into my body to connect with earth energy, and to find a way to center myself.
[16:00] Emotional containment strategies.
When I have a lot of emotions and feelings swirling around me. I also wanted to talk a little bit about containment today and some ideas and tools around containment. Now, intentionally containing our emotions is very different than avoiding or denying our emotions.
Everybody contains to compartmentalize this to some degree, I think for many of us, there are times that we don't even think about it, where we have developed throughout our own personal timeline, these ways that we push it aside, so we can focus on the task at hand, or let's say we're at work and we have something distressing come across our phone that bothers us.
Maybe it's from home or friend or something like that, unless it's really severe, where it basically like sits in the front of our brain, and we can't focus on anything else. A lot of times, we might have some self talk around, I cannot deal with that right now, I need to focus on this. And we might say I'm going to think about this when work is over. Or we have a way of kind of sweeping it over to the side and letting it be where it's at.
And many of us again, do that involuntarily. We've kind of learned it along the way, I think the key there is that there is a time where we come back to it. And sometimes if it's something that's bothering us, we'll come back to it as soon as we can. And boom, we're in the emotion we're dealing with whatever it is that brought us the reaction in the first place.
But sometimes I think for those who might struggle with emotional wellness, and feel like feelings are really scary. And I don't like to feel them, because I don't know what to do with them, it's really easy to contain it and then never come back to it. And I think when we might find ourselves always compartmentalizing, always containing always feeling numb, feeling like some emotions are too scary to feel. And so we're not going to allow ourselves to feel them.
And there's a sense a lack of flow. There's a sense that our emotional relationship with ourself is like a waffle with all these tiny little squares, and everything is very segmented, and it's tucked away. And we try and keep it really organized and we never make any space for it. That might be when we are engaging in behaviors that don't really give us space to experience or feel or emotions. And so we might want to look at why is that? And what do I do with this? And the answer for that will be different depending on who we are.
Sometimes there's seasons where we just can't access where we're at emotionally. But I think more often than not just as kind of a rule of thumb. If we're not allowing ourselves to feel our feelings for overly long, or we're not making any space to meet with our emotional self, then we can probably know that we are blocking a part of our experience as a human that holds such valuable information for us.
And in many ways helps us to not only feel the things that might be hard to feel, but allows us to feel the things that are beautiful and wonderful and radiant to feel as well. I would imagine, though, that many who are listening to a podcast on heart wisdom and psychology and spirituality, probably have some relationship with emotional health.
And what we wanted to when we have something come up that feels overwhelming or stressful, it's just finding healthy ways to contain it. And as I said earlier, there are some times we just do that and you already have something automatic or easy in place. That's great. There's nothing wrong with that. When we need to do a little bit more containment work.
There's a couple things that I find I'd really helpful. One of them is a tool of imagining of putting it in a container. I call this one the work desk. And I like to imagine a big messy desk and clearing it and putting everything into like a big Tupperware container. And for me, that's a metaphor for emotional mess.
And so sometimes I'll do that. And I will kind of picture sweeping up and putting all of it into this container being like, Okay, I know it's there, it can be sorted later. But for now, I need to have this space clear. And because I'm a very visual person, I took this metaphor a little bit further. And I transformed it or kind of metamorphosis it into imagining that this desk was actually more of a big table and a art room, some kind of studio.
And over time, I found it more helpful to picture that my emotions were an artistic work in progress. And I would picture this big workbench, and there would be like half done paintings on it and supplies everywhere. And it was super messy. In my mind, sometimes I will think of art rooms that I've done in the past, I've got a fun one from the Boys and Girls Club from years ago, that will pop in my mind when we were doing art projects and there and we would just leave it and like go out to recess or something like that. And I will often use that as a really quick visual image to imagine that whatever's on that table, I'm just going to leave it there. But then I'm going to leave the room. And I'm going to step out of it.
And I'm going to step into whatever I need to. And for me, that is really helpful. It is my way of acknowledging, okay, all of this is there, I can access it when I need to. I'm going to access it later tonight when I sit down in my journal, or maybe this weekend when I have more time and can really do some writing and dive deep. For now, though, I know it's here.
[21: 59] Emotional containment and creative expression.
And my other favorite one that I love to do is I'm an angel person, I think we all know this on the podcast.
So if you're an angel person, you can use the angels if you're not an angel person, then you can use spirit or universe or higher self or imaginary friend, whatever you want to. But I just like to be like, hey, angels hold my stuff. And that is one of my favorites. It is so simple. And it's so fast. And I will do this, like hold my stuff. And this is my stuff, meaning any baggage, I have anything that's unresolved, anything that I think is really messy, but let's say I've got stuff that's on my mind and heart and I'm going through some emotional stuff.
And I have to show up and speak or teacher, do something that requires me to be in a different space emotionally, or maybe just engage with people. And I don't want that at the front and center, I want to be able to be more present. And so I find it so helpful to remember that we have spiritual support. We have our teams of light, we have those who love us. And angels are so helpful, they are so service oriented, because they love us.
And I like to imagine that they are like holding my bag of stuff, my baggage, and they're just going to hang out there and keep it safe for me until I'm able to come back and pick it back up and start to sort through it. And what I love about this is sometimes I'm like maybe when I pick it back up, it's a little bit lighter, because through that process of letting it go, I realized that some of its not as heavy as I thought it was in the first place. Maybe it's not even there. When I get back. Maybe somehow life moves circumstances along and I realized like I no longer need that bag.
So angels hold my stuff. It's one of my favorite shortcuts for emotional containment. The last thing I want to talk about today is the art of transformation or transmutation. And that is the idea that we can take our emotions, and we can transform or transmute them into art. And it's not only cathartic to emotionally express ourselves through art or writing or creating something creating something could be Gosh, I'm feeling all these things. And I feel really angry and antsy right now. And maybe you just go on a cleaning spree.
And so you just created a cleaner space, you created an experience where you were able to move your energy constructively and shake some of it out. Maybe you went for a run or a walk or something like that. Remember, when we think of ourselves as artists, we can always think about what am I creating right now. So whether we're using a creative tool or medium, or just creating an experience, we can still interpret it through that lens.
But for those who enjoy some form of the expressive arts, I think it's very helpful. to take whatever it is that we're feeling and put shape to it through color, or some artistic expression or some kind of a medium through words through music, through dance, whatever it is that speaks to us. I think it takes the rawness of whatever the emotion is, and it gives it shape, or some form of a way of looking at it, seeing it experiencing it. And it allows us to process some kind of layer or level that I think is really helpful with better understanding what we're feeling. Sometimes we just release, do some release work, because we do have to feel it in order to let go and heal it. Emotions are our friends, they are messengers.
So when we invite them and say, Well, I'm just going to work constructively with this. And I'm going to write down like every angry thing I'm feeling right now. And because that can be transmutation. And I'm going to just put it all down on my journal page and just get it out of me. We will notice that that is when spontaneous shifts and insights happen that we've just unlearned something in ourselves, we usually feel better, we usually feel like we have dusted off a layer of something and we can feel a little bit more clear and equipped to continue moving on with our life.
So this was not an exhaustive list today. But I hope this gave you some ideas on how to constructively keep working with the emotions for your experience itself. And we will be back next week with a new your heart magic. I am doing a special episode that is kind of tied into the Memorial Day weekend in the States and some stories around what that weekend means to me.
It actually was a catalyst years ago to decide to come to kawaii so I've got some fun writing to share and some perspectives and we'll be talking about some of those things. In the meantime, have an amazing week. Be well. Be in love, be you and be magic.
You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your life
