Embrace Your Emotions to Cultivate Resilience
Learning to skillfully navigate feelings and emotions is a powerful way to build resilience and approach life’s ups and downs with greater ease. Living with ease doesn’t mean believing life will be easy—it means facing adversity head-on with a touch more grace. It’s about managing stress with less wear and tear on your mind and body.
To build resilience and thrive, we must learn to work with unpleasant feelings. While getting in touch with our emotions is an important first step, it’s not the same as working with them skillfully. That’s the key I want to focus on.
Why? Because when you master the ability to notice your feelings and respond to them skillfully, you’ll build confidence and trust in your ability to handle life’s challenges. You’ll develop the belief that you can face adversity with courage and an open heart.
Where do you start? By giving yourself permission to notice your feelings as they arise. Instead of shutting down or avoiding emotions, you can learn to work with them—even the strong, uncomfortable ones like rage, grief, fear, or shock. By practicing how to sit with discomfort, you strengthen your resilience.
Cultivating self-compassion while working with emotions is essential for healthy aging. It helps reduce stress and allows you to recover from emotional numbness. As you tune into your feelings, you’ll find some are pleasant, while others are not. This isn’t about dwelling on emotions but simply noticing them. Sometimes, we even judge our feelings, labeling some as acceptable and others as “wrong.”
Developing awareness and emotional intelligence takes time. Think of it as checking in on your “internal weather” throughout the day. Is it cloudy and stormy, or bright and calm? By pausing and noting how you feel, you create space to experience your emotions without judgment.
When you feel overwhelmed by stress or anxiety, take a moment to stop. Feel your feet firmly on the ground. Lower or close your eyes. Follow the rhythm of your breathing, in and out. With curiosity, explore what is causing your stress or anxiety. You might uncover feelings of helplessness, fear, or unease. Use these moments of intense emotion as a cue to pause and offer yourself kindness.
Resilience means being able to see the bigger picture while focusing on what you can control in the moment. As you develop balance and steadiness within yourself, you’ll be better equipped to respond to life’s challenges with clarity and purpose. In doing so, you create space for healing and growth.
If you have any questions or want to dive deeper, feel free to reach out.
Be well and thrive on,
Cheryl