How to Create Emotional Awareness and Acceptance

Creating emotional awareness and acceptance builds self-trust and creates opportunities to become more emotionally regulated. This in turn creates a healthier mind and body. Emotional awareness can be very challenging, especially if you’ve spent a lot of unconscious energy suppressing your emotions.

Many of us learned early on that our emotions are a problem, a nuisance, or even that they are wrong or bad. Many people feel that they did not learn how to create emotional awareness within themselves and were even rewarded for denying their emotions. While caretakers, teachers, or other people who influence our lives from a young age may not set out to cause harm, not being able to identify, sit with, express, and release our feelings ends up causing harm in some form at some point in our lives.

If you have gotten really good at denying, avoiding, numbing, or suppressing your feelings, I want you to know that it is possible to, with time and practice, create emotional awareness and acceptance. There are many feelings wheels out there that are very helpful; however, I recommend starting with the BLAST method. (BLAST stands for Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stress, Sad, or Tired). This is a simple way to practice getting in touch with your emotions by naming your feeling first.

When practicing the BLAST method, you first need to create time and space to encourage the process of going inward. This is where it is vital to learn how to pause. Having a consistent time to practice taking a pause can be helpful to make it a part of your routine. You can check in with yourself by pausing before starting your day, before eating, before opening up your phone to scroll, before sending that email… During the pause, ask yourself, “Am I Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stressed, Sad, or Tired?” This opens you up to emotional awareness and reflection. Again, there are a ton of other emotions and feeling states that exist, however, these few tend to touch on some common uncomfortable emotions that drive behavioral denying, avoiding, numbing, or suppression of emotions.

Once you name an emotion, you can begin to tame it. Once you allow yourself to feel the feeling, you can begin to heal and release the feeling. Practicing the BLAST method is where to begin with emotional awareness. Once you bring the feeling state into your awareness, you can now practice emotional acceptance. This can get tricky depending on your personal relationship with your internal emotional world. This can be helpful to do with a therapist if you’ve experienced emotional disconnect for a long time and if you’ve had invalidating experiences that reinforced the negative messaging that your emotions are wrong, bad, inconvenient, or problematic. Emotional acceptance is about validating that your feelings are real and determining how congruent your feelings are with your present experience. You can then determine how to manage and cope as effectively as possible.

Emotional acceptance is nonjudgemental; it allows the emotion to just be, to not be labeled as good or bad, positive or negative; it just is. All emotions provide valuable messages about our internal experience. Then you can explore why it is there in the first place. Practicing the BLAST method allows you to determine in a general way what you are feeling. Once you’ve identified it, you can get curious about why it’s there. If you feel that you can name your feeling state from any of the emotions from the BLAST method, (Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stressed, Sad, or Tired) ask, “Why am I feeling this way?” When getting going with this work of emotional awareness and emotional acceptance, it can be helpful to journal - like a lot. Journaling increases your awareness, the ability to practice emotional acceptance, as well as your ability to validate your own unique emotional experiences. Journaling is a very valuable process of releasing your emotions and is a helpful way to cope.

To fully release the feeling, it’s helpful to understand why the feeling is there, then to consider what it might need. Starting with naming it, and then exploring the why behind it. With journaling, practice, and consistency, you’ll begin to create more space for emotional acceptance. When you can accept a feeling state for what it is and understand why it’s there, you can then choose how to manage this emotion. I’ll be breaking down each of the emotions from the BLAST method within the next several blogs, so stay tuned. Until then, practice naming and getting curious about why it’s there in the first place - without judgement. This is where you can lean into emotional acceptance which promotes self-acceptance, self-worth, and self-love.

A Yogic Approach to Healing Emotional Eating

When you hear the word yoga, what comes to mind? For many people it’s a picture of a very flexible person doing something super bendy, but very unapproachable for most bodies. When I took my first yoga class, I was intimidated but interested. I took a pretty strait forward class that moved from static posture to static posture concentrating on form, alignment, and awareness of both my body and breath in a way that I never had before. As someone who tends towards anxiety and who carries a lot of tension in my body, it had a huge impact on me. I felt different in a way I couldn’t specifically explain—and wasn’t just a physical shift, but a mental and emotional shift as well. 

When I set out to become a yoga teacher in training, the very first class was all about the philosophy of yoga. When my teacher said that the yoga postures are only one small slice of what yoga is all about, my head nearly exploded! He then went on to say that the whole purpose of the yoga postures are so that we can sit and meditate comfortably. He said that the postures are a part of the yogic process so that they can assist in our ability to meditate by allowing our body to be less of a distraction to going inward, and at this, my head did explode—in the best possible way. I saw something I’d looked at in only one way from a whole new perspective, and this new perspective changed my life.

Yoga philosophy is non-dogmatic. It is not based on any religion and does not require any beliefs. It is a series of ways to grow your self-awareness from all angles so that you can fully know yourself and express your true self in an accepting, peaceful, and compassionate way. Yoga philosophy has nothing to do with what to do, but with how to be. There are 8-limbs of yoga, and the postures are only one of those limbs. Each limb builds on one another so that full self-awareness and self-actualization can occur. 

When you struggle with emotional eating, you are moving further away from yourself, you are entering a form of self-abandonment and escape. Applying yoga philosophy to healing emotional eating can be an absolutely transformative way to heal. Yoga philosophy allows a way to create ease with emotions, full self-acceptance and self-compassion, and a way to be calm, grounded, and at peace internally—no matter what.

The first two limbs of yoga offer concepts of how to be with yourself, others, and within the world. They are intended to be a guide to how to feel most connected to our true nature and include concepts such as non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing/craving, moderation, and non-possessiveness. They also consider concepts such as purity, contentment, consistency in practices, self-study, and surrender. The third limb is about using physical postures to build both strength and flexibility in your body so that you can feel comfortable and at ease physically. This limb relating to your physical body is also about embodiment and creating a healthy relationship with your body. The forth limb is about harnessing the power of your breath for mental, physical, and emotional fortitude. The fifth limb is about releasing the five senses and becoming deeply relaxed. The sixth and seventh limbs are about creating mental concentration and moving into a deeper state of meditation. The eighth limb is a culmination of all of the benefits of the first seven limbs into transcendence.

So how do these yogic concepts help with healing emotional eating? This process offers a way to be with yourself that is exploratory, curious, compassionate, and growth-focused. When integrating these concepts you become more grounded, accepting, comfortable, curious, and self-aware. Very often the part of yourself that desires to numb out or avoid discomfort through food is afraid of what will happen if you feel these uncomfortable feelings, or change your internal and behavioral patterns. This part of you is actually functioning as a protection from pain, discomfort, or suffering that it does not want you to have to handle, and is worried you possibly couldn’t handle without the old coping strategy of emotional eating. Through the yogic process, you become more curious about, and comfortable with your feelings, your experiences, and your body. Through exploring emotional eating through the lens of yoga philosophy, your mood becomes less of the driver of how to be, and more of a guide to what you need. If this all seems a little out there, I get it. I hope you will approach these concepts at least with curiosity and an open mind. However, if I’ve piqued your interest, which I hope I have, I will be outlining the process in the next few blog posts to break down each of the 8-limbs of yoga, and how to apply them with how to be with yourself, your body, your nervous system, your mind, as well as with food. 

EMDR Therapy + Manifestation

The concept of manifestation is not new, however, the way it is practiced has changed significantly over the years. Information about the brain, consciousness, imagery, and self-worth, continues to be studied and researched, and there is great evidence to the science of manifestation. So much evidence has been offered to understand more logically how and why it actually works.

I remember hearing on the Oprah show years ago, and it struck me in a big way, “you don’t become what you want in life, you become what you believe.” This is the foundation of manifestation, and why some of the concepts that popularized it, and made it seem a little out-there of just picture it and it will happen, have not proven to be how or why manifestation actually works. What you are unconsciously creating in your life, is created directly out of your level of self-worth. If you believe you are not good enough, destined to fail, are unworthy, inadequate, unloveable, or even always in danger, then no matter how much you want something, most likely you will find yourself in patterns of subconsciously sabotaging any efforts to create it in your life.

This is where EMDR therapy can be a very powerful and useful technique to integrate with your manifestation, or self-worth improvement process. EMDR therapy (if you want to learn more about EMDR therapy, you can read previous blog posts HERE, HERE and HERE) works to reprocess the memories, experiences, and feeling states that have created or reinforced the negative internalized beliefs that hold you back from living your best life. These negative beliefs create unconscious blocks to moving forward in your life. I know this to be true from both as a certified EMDR therapist, as well as a client receiving EMDR therapy. I have experienced how it helped me unravel more than one negative cognition, or negative internalized limiting belief, which has allowed me to take more intentional and subconscious action towards what I want. EMDR therapy has helped me embody how it feels to be worthy of what I want.

If you are familiar with some of the concepts of manifestation and cast it off as woo-woo, I totally get it. However, there are more and more studies and books out there explaining the brain-based science of how it actually works. I have been doing the work of To Be Magnetic (interested? try it out here with a coupon code here: TBM) for a few years and have seen it work really well with EMDR therapy. The process is logical and there in no woo-woo belief required. What I like about TBM specifically is that she has partnered with a neuroscientist and an EMDR therapist to create the process, which is a wonderful compliment to EMDR therapy, or any therapeutic technique.

Once doing the manifestation work (or any self-development work) many find that they discover that they have one or more blocks related to self-worth. Working through these blocks with an EMDR (or any) therapist can not only speed up the work of manifesting (creating the life you desire) or feeling more grounded in your sense of self, but also create more ease, self-awareness, emotional tolerance, and overall improve your mental wellbeing on many levels. 

When you create a vision for what you want and know why you want what you want, you set in motion opportunities for your brain to subconsciously seek it out. When you incorporate how it will feel to have what you want, and align it with your personal values, the why you actually want it, and then practice being in that desired feeling state, you again, set in motion opportunities for your brain to subconsciously seek it out. When practiced repeatedly while simultaneously clearing out the past memories, traumas, and experiences that created the blocks in the first place, you open yourself up to living in alignment with your new internalized beliefs, such as: I am worthy, I am lovable, I am good enough, I deserve what I want, In this moment I am safe, I’m ok…

Curious about integrating EMDR therapy with other types of self-worth development work? Feel free to reach out and schedule a complimentary consultation. You are capable of creating the life you want, the life you desire. You deserve to feel worthy of what you want and to do the work to support your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellbeing.