We all get triggered by something someone says or does. But most of the time, we don’t stop to simply feel the emotions that arise as a result of whatever that experience was or is. This is where mindfulness comes in.
If you take the tube in London, there’s a sign on the train platform that says “mind the gap.” It’s there to remind passengers to be mindful of the gap between the train itself and the platform as the step on and off of the train.
When we talk about emotions and our ability to transform our response to things that happen to us on a daily basis, let’s use this same idea of minding the gap.
Being able to notice our emotions as they arise is part of why we practice meditation to begin with. When we sit in meditation and repeat a mantra or focus on our breath, it helps us notice when our minds drift off distracted by thoughts or noises in our environment. It’s only when we notice that our minds have drifted off that we are able to bring ourselves back to the present moment. Over and over and over again.
In the same way, as we make our way through our daily lives, if we aren’t able to notice the emotions as they arise, we are simply held captive by them. It’s as if someone took the curved part of a cane, secured it around our neck and dragged us into whatever emotion or reaction that came after. As if we don’t understand that we, in fact, are in charge of our response to the events that happen in our lives.
We are not slaves to the experiences or events that transpire in our lives nor emotions that they invoke.
Maggie Kelly
But it does take practice to begin to notice when we are hooked and to be able to respond versus react.
One practice I’ve always liked is what I call the Mindful Gap practice. The easiest way to remember the steps involved in the Mindful Gap practice is Feel, Hold and Look.
Let’s take anger as an example. If we begin with the FEEL portion of the practice, we could first begin to notice that anger is arising. The minute you recognize that, stop everything and just FEEL it. Do not block the energy and don’t react to it either. Just stay mindful and aware of what you’re feeling.
When we learn how to take time to actually feel our anger or any other emotion, everything naturally slows down. It also causes us to turn our attention inward. Almost instantly you’ll notice there’s space to take a breath. It’s that gap between what happened and your reaction to it.
This mindfulness has created an opening, a gap, that wasn’t there before. This then allows you to see a way forward but there’s still work to be done.
The next step is HOLD.
In this step, you actually consciously push the pause button which naturally keeps you in the present moment. You will continue to feel the energy (in this example, anger) but you stay with the experience, watch it with mindfulness and don’t react to it. Don't rewind and replay what you just said and did and you don’t fast-forward to the future where you’ll say all of the great things you meant to say the first time. Simply hold still in the living breathing present moment.
At this moment, there’s nothing really to do except relax and pay attention. You can struggle and make yourself miserable or you can simply relax. There’s no real way to avoid the emotion.
When you first start practicing HOLDING, you might feel like you’re stuck in traffic. Your emotional speed is suddenly cut but you have a hard time settling down.
When we HOLD still, we can watch the energy shift and change. You’ll likely see it grow stronger and then weaker. It gets interrupted by other emotions. The story changes. Energy stops being angry and suddenly turns to jealousy or passion.
Your emotional experience isn’t just one solid continuous thing. It's a constantly changing process.
In the same way that FEELING takes courage, HOLDING takes patience. The essence of patience is staying with whatever you’re feeling without reacting to it, again and again, in the moment, each time it returns.
If you can simply sit with an intention to be mindful of your experience, to FEEL and to HOLD as the emotions emerge and run its course, you’ll have a chance to see not only how the emotion itself changes, but also how your perception of it changes.
The third step is LOOK. By now, FEELING and HOLDING have taught you a lot. You’re started to have a deeper understanding and much clearer view of your emotions.
When we LOOK at our emotions, we begin to see that it’s the very nature of emotions to be constantly moving and morphing, It’s how emotions are. It’s what they do. This is a profound insight that can change your relationship to your emotions forever.
It is when we are able to see the momentary nature of our feelings that all of our efforts at mindfulness are starting to pay off. You are starting to see how it is that anger (or any other emotion) comes and goes in a quick succession of moments. It’s not continuous. In fact, you are the one who has to keep it going. Unless you keep thinking the angry, blaming thoughts, the anger just fades away.
When we don’t feed this angry energy, it naturally dissolves and re-arises as a little less anger. Experiment: try feeding your angry thoughts with kind, compassionate, forgiving thoughts and then see what happens.
LOOKING does two things: it shows you the way forward in working with your emotions and it transforms your perception in a fundamental way.
Once we get over that our emotions are “things” that are unchanging and continuous, we can see how flexible they really are.
The main thing is to remember that your emotions, in their natural state, are nothing but pure energy. You can learn to use and direct this energy in a skillful way.
The more you practice these techniques, the more skilled you become at observing and transforming your emotional states and give yourself a little space from them.
When you mind the gap - FEEL, HOLD, and LOOKS - you can stop your emotions from disturbing your mind and keeping you locked in painful behavior patterns.
So when emotions come up, mind the gap. First feel them, hold still without reacting and then look - look at the gap. Feel it, experience it, and then see what happens.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to navigate your emotions, discover your life’s purpose, and/or sort through old patterns of behavior, consider joining Maggie for a coaching session which includes meditation. Click HERE for a 30-minute complimentary coaching session to see if you might be a good fit to work together with Maggie. Click HERE to view all the services that are offered at Satsang House!