Category: Emotional Work

The Most Important Thing

Posted on by Henriette

The reason why I write about emotional processing and mindfulness on my blog is because I believe it’s one of the most important things we can invest in, for ourselves, and those around us. It’s foundational. Also related to this is trauma work. I believe trauma work is an unexploited goldmine. Not in a monetary sense necessarily—but in the sense that if we really want to see progress in our own lives and in the world around us, resolving old traumas becomes exceptionally important. All of these things: mindfulness, emotional work and trauma work goes hand in hand in my view. We need to invest time and effort into it to become more calm and centred.

Emotional Reactivity Dissipates a lot of Energy

Posted on by Henriette

I recently made a short video on how to get creative work done. The gist of the video is that if we spend a lot of time either stuck in mental loops or being emotionally reactive, we wont get a lot of creative work done.

This video was intended for creatives but really applies to any work, any craft, any pursuit. It’s hard to get any meaningful work done if you’re siphoning off your attention to fear or outrage or any of these difficult emotions.

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Future Achievements Cannot Set Us Free from the Disappointments of the Past

Posted on by Henriette

There’s a reason I spend so much time writing about being in the present moment. I believe that being mindful and in the moment can transform our experience of life.

In my twenties, I used to chase certain achievements because I thought that it would counterbalance some of the suffering that I was experiencing. I thought that if I could only achieve a few key things, I would feel better.

But I’ve realised that there are very few external conditions that can bring us inner joy. Yes, certain things might lift our spirits for a while, but if we want to have a more sustained experience of joyfulness, equanimity and focus, then we need to be with our internal suffering for long periods of time.

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Emotional Work: Mental loops, negative emotions and deep patterns

Posted on by Henriette

What came first? The negative emotion or the destructive thinking pattern. This is a question that I’ve been trying to answer for a while now. But I cannot seem to come up with a clear answer, and the main reason for this is that these two are quite interconnected. When you don’t feel good, that state has a tendency to colour your thoughts and mental view points. Likewise, when you’re stuck in some self-defeatist mental prison, that can make you feel pretty bad emotionally. Then, if that isn’t enough, these two seem to feed off each other at times.

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Emotional Work: Why venting is a bad idea

Posted on by Henriette

Years ago an argument with someone made me so angry that I struggled to sit still after the interaction. This was quite a while ago, and back then, I still had a punching bag in my backyard. I couldn’t get my mind off the incident so I went outside to throw some punches just to get all that anger out of me. There was an enormous amount of frustration and anger flowing through me while I was punching the bag, and by the end of ten or fifteen minutes, I felt completely spent. Not only was I exhausted, I also had a raging headache.

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Emotional Work: Anger

Posted on by Henriette 3 Comments on Emotional Work: Anger

Anger is not an easy emotion to contain or process. Until recently I’ve been largely unaware of how much anger I was carrying around inside. Terrifying dreams showed me that I needed to work on this emotion but I had no idea how. I was intuitively nudged towards Anger by Thich Nhat Hanh.

This ended up being one of the most profound things I’ve read this year. The writing is simple and the book is short, but it contains an enormous amount of wisdom and great practical advice. This was indeed the single best book I’ve ever read on anger—and maybe even the best book on any single emotion that I’ve come across.

It’s really hard to do a complete summary of everything so I’ll instead point to some of the main ideas and advice that I found particularly helpful.

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Emotional Work: Mindfulness as a foundation

Posted on by Henriette 2 Comments on Emotional Work: Mindfulness as a foundation

There is comfort in mental loops. Going around and around in your head about how unfair someone acted is easier than feeling the emotions underneath the thoughts. Repetitive mental loops can, of course, initiate and perpetuate certain emotions. But often it’s easier to loop through narratives than it is to feel the emotion. In other words, there is comfort in the thinking pattern.

When we stop and try to be silent for a while, all sorts of uncomfortable emotions can bubble to the surface. These can be hard to feel and the temptation is to return to the thinking (or doing) cycle. This is why mindfulness (or mind-stillness) is the foundation of emotional work.

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Emotional Work: Part IX – There is no finish line

Posted on by Henriette 1 Comment on Emotional Work: Part IX – There is no finish line

I used to have this idea that if I can just process through all my emotions and negative memories for a few months I would be free of the past and able to “get on with my life”. Of course, things never work like that because pain is a part of life. The idea of doing an intense purge and reaching some point of ultimate perfection (or some point where no bad emotion will ever affect you again) is misguided. I’m usually skeptical of quick fixes, so I’m not sure why I wanted a quick fix for my emotional turmoil. Maybe the suffering itself played a role.

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Emotional Work: Part VII – Crying

Posted on by Henriette 1 Comment on Emotional Work: Part VII – Crying

We have enormous judgements about crying in our society. We see crying as some sort of weakness. We often associate it with an over-emotional woman or a difficult child. When someone is crying, we often feel like we should do something to stop them from crying. When kids cry from an accidental fall we blame the stair, or the stone, or whatever, and then we tell them to give the “naughty thing” a slap. To most of us, crying signals something terrible has gone wrong. We keep ourselves from crying for many, many reasons, but I’ve often found these reasons to be conditioned ideas.

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