Feeling Your Emotions in the Body

Since the Coronavirus pandemic began, all of us have struggled with a wide range of painful emotions: anxiety, grief, fear, extreme stress, you name it.  And for many of us, myself included, they’ve been harder and stronger than ever before in our lives.  I, personally, have had many very, very rough moments.

What has helped me the most over the last month has been remembering that these things are happening to the body.  Not just the mind, not just the heart – but the physical body, and the “energetic body” as well, however we understand that term.

As a result, many of the best coping mechanisms will be ones that focus on the body and bypass the mind.

Now, I’m a left-brain-thinking kind of guy. I have a bunch of graduate degrees, and until recently I worked as a journalist, trying to think things through and predict where things are headed.  It’s how I’m wired.

Trying to do that now, however, has been literally debilitating. No one knows any of the important things about this pandemic. Most of us don’t even know our own viral status. There is no way to think yourself through to calm, because there are no answers yet. Even my rational mind knows that.

Fortunately, most of the meditation that we teach at Ten Percent Happier is actually focused on the body. For example, one of the most common meditation practices is to focus the attention on the physical sensations of the breath in the chest, or abdomen, or wherever. 

What I want to focus on here, though, is experiencing emotions in the body. You can try this right now. Check in with how you’re feeling, emotionally: settled, anxious, calm, bored, sad, restless, whatever. Now inquire: how does that feel in your body? 

Anxiety, for example, often shows up as a buzzing energy in the chest. Sadness can feel like a heaviness in the heart. Anger can be accompanied by a tension in the arms, neck, or shoulders. These are just examples, of course. Every body is different, and how you feel may be totally different from what I’ve described. That’s fine.

The point is that in extreme circumstances, which we are in now and will be for some time, you might consider skipping the mind altogether. Stay with the body. Observe what’s happening on a physical level. And if you want to calm the mind, calm the body. Here are four benefits of doing so.

First, the body is in the present moment, not the past or future. By focusing on the body, you’re also not-focusing on the stories of your grief, anxiety, or boredom, which tend to exacerbate the challenging emotions.

Second, the body is where (some) calming is most possible. One practice I taught recently on Ten Percent Live, called “box breathing,” lengthens the breath in order to calm and regulate the autonomic nervous system (ANS).  You won’t gain a lot of insight into your “stuff” doing this kind of calming practice. But right now, that may be less important than maintaining some stability, sanity, and presence.

Third, as you get to know how your body manifests different emotional states, you might check in first with the body to see what’s going on for you emotionally. Your body becomes a barometer of your emotional state, which is especially helpful when you feel overwhelmed.

Finally, focusing on the body changes how you address those difficult emotions.

For example, if I regard sadness as an embodied phenomenon primarily, and a mental one secondarily, then when it arises, I can relate to it like an old traveling companion – maybe not a friend, exactly, but not something I need to think through or ponder.

Okay, here it is, I might say to myself.  I know this feeling well. There’s nothing I need to figure out, nothing I need to solve. I don’t even really need to know “why” I’m feeling grief – for a loved one, for the lives we all used to lead, for the intense suffering of people around the world. I don’t know the exact reason.  Maybe it’s all of the above.  But I don’t need to go hunting around. Grief is in my body. Here it is. Okay.

I’m not making this example up. I often feel profound grief these days. 

Or take a very different energetic example: anxiety. On most days for the last month, I awaken to a once-unfamiliar vibration in my chest that I now recognize all too well. I suppose I could try to sleuth out why I’m feeling anxious, but to be honest, I don’t care anymore.

Instead, I do some slow, deep breathing, just to calm the body-mind system a bit. Or, if the energy really needs to move, I do a little mindful movement, yoga-like, not frantically running around but centering back down in the body. (Try the ‘Warrior Pose’ from martial arts for an example of this.)

In these and other practices, I’m focusing my attention back into the body, which tends to quiet the mind and which is what’s actually happening: an embodied experience.

I invite you to approach your meditation similarly. If your thoughts are at all like mine, they’re mostly useless.  Put your attention on the body instead. That’s where things are really happening, that’s where both your pain and your comfort lie, and that’s where healing can happen.