Creating a Year of Enchantment

When was the last time you felt enchanted? When experiencing enchantment, you’re filled with delight, you’re drawn towards the image, the item or the experience, and it creates a great feeling of pleasure. When you are enchanted you are captivated, fascinated, and inspired. 

If you’ve spent some time reflecting back on 2023, have you considered what brought you a feeling of enchantment in this past year? If not, take a look back and ask yourself, how often did I feel delighted, filled with great pleasure, and deeply inspired? As you reflect back on 2023, how alive, open-hearted, and charmed did you feel?

Imagine if being inspired, enchanted, and captivated became your primary pursuit in 2024. How different might your year ahead look? 

If you are feeling less enchanted as you reflect back over the past year, that’s ok! When you have time to deeply consider what enchantment looks like, feels like, and means to you, take a moment and really describe in detail, what does bring you a feeling of enchantment? Deeply consider what captivates your full attention, what fills you with pleasure and inspiration? I recommend beginning an enchantment journal for 2024. It can be a small pocket sized notebook that you can access easily throughout the day. If you prefer tech, you can start a page on your notes app in your phone, titling it ENCHANTMENT 2024. If you like to get fancy with your journaling, you can always make it colorful, crafty, and creative!

When you have some time to deeply reflect on what brings you a feeling of enchantment, begin to write down what you already know creates this feeling for you. For example, it could be something as simple as seeing the steam rise from your morning coffee or tea. Feeling enchanted may arise from having a good, long laugh with someone you care about, or it could be a moment of capturing colorful sunrise or sunset or rainbow. You might feel enchanted by a song, a great book, the taste of chocolate, or seeing a new leaf sprouting from the plant in your window. You might feel enchanted by the sweet face of a pet or a child, or from seeing a piece of art, a cloud formation, a tree, or a sparkling stone. You might feel enchanted by so many more things than you recognize, or that you take the time to fully notice in your day to day life. What brings you this feeling of captivation and delight is completely unique to you. Continue to notice, and to pay attention to these moments no matter whether they are small or large, simple or grand, and write them all down to have access to when you are feeling disenchanted or uninspired, or when you just need to have a smile.

Once you have your initial list, what you already know captivates your full attention, take a moment and reflect on it. How much of what enchants you costs a lot of money? How much of it has to do with success, striving, possessing, or acquiring? Most likely not too much. When we are enchanted we are not wanting, we are experiencing something wonderful, we are one with the present moment. And sure, maybe something enchanting may cost money, but it is definitely not a requirement. 

Spend time looking at your starting list and allow yourself to begin to add to it consistently. When you capture something enchanting, write it down after the moment or experience has moved on, try not to disrupt any of these beautiful moments! In my therapy practice, I recommend reflecting to all of my clients to keep a “what went well today” journal. This is about helping the usual anxious, stressed, worried, or negative mind take a break. When you reflect on what went well today you can shift your attention away from worry, negative self-talk, and projecting stress into the next day. Typically I recommend keeping a daily journal to reflect on what went well today? What wins did I have today? What am I most grateful for today? And be sure to add and include, what enchanted me today? When you focus on what went well, what wins you had, what you are most grateful for, and now adding this focus of, what enchanted me today, you can shift out of fear, negativity, and lack—and into contentment, delight and joy. 

When you are noticing the experience of enchantment, captivation, and pleasure in the moment it’s occurring, take time to really savor it. When we savor something pleasurable, we are creating an opportunity to feel full of contentment. When we are savoring the present moment, we are delighting in the experience of being delighted! When you are savoring, you are practicing mindfulness as you are fully immersed in the present moment, the here and the now. Savoring allows your mind is focusing on the good, and you can feel a sense of pleasure and gratitude as you are experiencing it.

When you are reflecting on moments of enchantment and writing them down as a reflection process at the end of the day, take time to savor each element you have experienced. Can you linger in the feeling of enchantment, let it fully enter your being in mind, body and spirit, and allow it to be re-experienced in a way that you feel the delight all over again?

This process of allowing yourself to be present, to experience pleasure, and to re-experience it upon reflection can impact your inner emotional world, your mindset, and your mood in a way that you can experience your own inner ability to create an internal shift. Moods are temporary and usually impacted by experiences, however, if a mood is lingering outside of the experience and it doesn’t feel great, you can bring in this reflective practice and try savoring and see if you can impact your mood in this helpful and positive way. When you can, it feels very empowering, life enhancing, and even healing. Allow yourself this momentary treat of reflection, and be sure to repeat it daily. We get good at what we practice, and this repetition of savoring enchantment offers an opportunity to create positive change in mind, body, and spirt.

Imagine the year ahead as one where your primary focus becomes searching for these moments of enchantment every single day. Imagine the year ahead as one where you notice the good, savor it, linger in it, practice the process of savoring, and search for more. Imagine the year ahead as a year where following what enchants you, what makes you feel most alive, open-heated, and fulfilled becomes your Full-Time pursuit. Here’s to creating enchantment in 2024!

Embracing Emotions

Allowing ourselves to be present with our emotions is an incredibly powerful and meaningful practice. When we embrace our emotions, we are embracing ourselves in a way that lets our feelings and experiences know that we can handle them. However, it can be a really challenging practice to embrace our emotions when we are struggling, when we are going through a difficult time, or when we are stressed and overwhelmed with life in general. When we’ve gotten good at numbing out and avoiding our emotions through behaviors, it can feel like we need to start completely from the beginning to learn how to be present with our emotions. It’s worth it to put in the work to learn to fully embrace our emotions.

Embracing our emotions can be a difficult practice to start if we have been avoiding, numbing out, or suppressing our emotions for a long time. We cannot pick and choose which emotions to numb, so if we are numbing any emotions we are numbing out the full spectrum of our emotions. This generalized emotional numbing creates a limited range of experiencing our lives in the here and the now to the fullest, and this is causes suffering.

If you allow yourself to fully embrace the vast range of the emotions you experience, you allow yourself to embrace yourself, your fullness, and your wholeness, as the amazing being that you are. If you avoid, numb, or repress your emotions, you are limiting your experience of your life and not embracing your full-self.

Emotions are information. They allow us to understand our experience and provide us with powerful messages regarding what and how we are taking in our present moment. When you can experience your emotions in a nonjudgemental way, by observing, exploring, and fully processing your emotions, you receive really valuable information. The trouble is that many of us struggle with the discomfort of uncomfortable emotions, and many of us never learned how to cope, handle, express, or release our emotions in a healthy way. This can lead to beliefs about our emotions that are faulty and unhelpful, such as anger is a “bad” emotion and happiness is a “good” emotion. If you can remove the judgement you can see the emotion for what it is, helpful information about your life experiences.

In the process of learning to embrace our emotions there are helpful ways to begin to ease into the work. When it comes to emotions, it can be helpful to know that you have to name them to tame them. Learning to name your emotions immediately diffuses some of the intensity of the emotion. Naming your emotion creates a construct to understand the emotion through language. Once you’ve named the emotion for what it is, the taming of the emotion is about getting curious about why the emotion is present for you, and what it wants you to know. In a space of curiosity you can ask questions that allow you to explore and express the emotions in a healthy, meaningful, and empowering way. 

Another important factor in learning to embrace our emotions is understanding, feeling, and coping with, the somatic elements of emotions. Thoughts about an experience can conjure up sensations in our bodies, this is where the emotions live within our physical being. Once you’ve named your emotion and gotten curious about it, begin to sit with where you feel the emotion in your body. This can be uncomfortable, however, if you can describe the sensation, and continue with the practice of curiosity, you can understand it, and then allow your body to feel it fully, in order to release it. 

Our bodies don’t know the difference between thoughts, perceptions, and experiences, so getting in touch with the somatic elements of emotions can happen after the fact of a challenging circumstance that hasn’t been fully processed. This is why it is so helpful to practice processing feelings by being present with them, naming them, and practicing letting them go in a way that allows you to fully release them from your mind and your body. This way you are not carrying around the baggage of old, unprocessed feelings. When we bury our feelings, we bury them alive. They don’t go away, they get repressed and suppressed and eventually they show back up because they want to be understood and healed. This process allows that full and deep embrace of your emotions, welcoming them in, naming them, getting curious about them, and then truly feeling them so you can let them go.

Journaling can be a very helpful way to begin to get in touch with your emotions. It can be intimidating if you haven’t tried it, and sometimes clients tell me that they are afraid of getting stuck in an uncomfortable emotion or feeling state if they open it up to journaling. This is where I recommend having a journaling process, where you feel in control of easing into the work of embracing your emotions. While it’s important that you find the right process for you, I recommend starting with a feelings wheel, you can access one HERE. Begin by naming the emotion, or locate the emotion on the wheel. Write it down in your journal. Set a timer for 1-5 minutes and write out everything you can about this particular feeling. 

It might look something like this:

-Emotion Name: Anger

-Where do I feel the emotion in my body? I feel it in my stomach, it’s a swirling feeling that I don’t like, and my heart is beating faster, there is some tension in my arms and my jaw. Everything feels tight.

-Am I trying to avoid the emotion, if so why? It feels really uncomfortable, I don’t like feeling angry, I just want it to go away.

-What message is this emotion trying to send me, what does it want me to know? I am feeling this emotion because someone really upset me at work, I feel like they took advantage of my kindness and then took credit for something I worked really hard on, it makes me so mad that they did this and then I didn’t stand up for myself, I didn’t know what else to do so I just stood there and now I’m stuck with all of this anger towards them and towards myself. I’m also hurt, I thought this person was a friend.

-What does this feeling need from me, is there any action I can take? It wants me to stand up for myself, to confront the person, but that feels really scary. It wants me to be brave and tell this person how I feel. I don’t know if I’m ready for that, but that’s what it wants me to know it needs.

-When the timer goes off, pause, take a breath, and draw a line on the page to delineate before and after.

-Take a quick scan of your body and notice if you are still holding onto tension related to the emotion as you’ve been writing and connecting to the feeling. If so, see if you can relax any areas where the emotion is still festering in your body. For example, if your stomach is still swirling, begin to take slow deep breaths into your abdomen, feeling is expand as you inhale and soften as you exhale. If your heart is still beating faster, continue with the steady breathing, slow and deep. If your jaw and arms are still tense, see if you can exaggerate the tension, take a deep breath in, and then exhale deeply as you let all of the tension go. Repeat this until the tension releases. Then imagine a soft light streaming into the areas of discomfort and transforming any lingering sensations of the emotion, see if you can imagine the light clearing it out and letting it go.

-Then, locate an emotion on the wheel that you’d like to feel, or consider the opposite feeling state from what you were experiencing. If was anger, the opposite emotion might be to feel peaceful. Spend a little time journaling about that feeling in any way that feels helpful for you. Invite in this more desired feeling state to your mind and your body. Allow yourself the opportunity to choose how you want to feel. You can also do a short, guided meditation or guided imagery from an app to help release anything else that needs to be cleared from your body.

-Be sure to thank yourself for showing up for yourself. Thank your emotions for helping you to understand your experience internally. Thank yourself for trying a new way to be present with your emotions, and for learning to embrace your emotions. Remember, there are no bad feelings, they are all messengers, information, and necessary to understand our complicated experiences of being a human. 

I hope you will take time during this busy, often overwhelming, and stressful time of year to pause, check in with yourself and let yourself feel your emotions in a mindful, curious and compassionate way.

Examining Your Thoughts: A Powerful Tool to Calm Your Anxious Mind

If the stress of the current global crisis of COVID-19 has you feeling anxious, uncertain and overwhelmed, you are not alone. These are unprecedented times. I happen to be in the “epicenter” here in NYC and it is collectively causing stress and anxiety that can be felt in the air here…and I’d imagine everywhere.

I wanted to offer this practical, evidence-based technique that you can implement immediately to help release some of the mental and emotional stress you are experiencing. This technique will help you calm your anxious mind. When you are overwhelmed, it may feel like your thoughts are racing, like there is impending doom, like there is no hope. When you use this thought examination technique, you create space to understand how your thoughts are impacting you, practice releasing them and offer yourself opportunities to get into a solution-focused mindset. 

Thought Examination Technique

This technique allows you to examine your thoughts and the impact they have on you closely. This technique changes your relationship with your thoughts and creates empowerment. Often thoughts and faulty beliefs are happening on a subconscious level, they are running in the background of your mind, however your physical body through the stress response, responds accordingly.

If you are having catastrophe based thoughts, then most likely your body will enter into a sympathetic nervous system response, or fight-or-flight mode. This is not a helpful place to be unless there is truly an immediate emergency. While this circumstance is an emergency for many, it is not helpful, and actually is damaging, to remain in this heightened state of stress and anxiety continually.

To begin practicing the technique, get out a piece of paper and practice going through the following questions based on any fears and anxieties you are experiencing and use it regularly to manage and change your relationship to any stressful thoughts.

1. Choose a fear-based thought that has been on your mind or troubling you recently.

2. Ask yourself what emotions are driving that thought.

3. Where do you feel these emotions in your physical body?

4. Ask yourself, is this thought true? Unless it is a present fact, the answer is no!

5. Ask yourself, is this thought useful? Unless you are trying to problem-solve, most likely the thought is not useful.

6. Ask yourself, what is it doing to me to have and believe this thought? This is important to evaluate how detrimental this one thought can be.

7. Ask yourself, how would I feel without this thought? This is important because it allows you to recognize how this thought is limiting your present moment experience and essentially causing unnecessary suffering.

8. Ask yourself, what is the opposite of this thought?

9. Notice how it feels in both mind and body to sit with the opposite thought. The purpose of this is not to lie to yourself or move into positive-thinking mode. The purpose of this part of the exercise is to be aware that if you are believing the first thought in this moment, then the opposite could just as well be true.

10. Mindfully reframe the thought, transform the thought into what is true right now, this process creates a reality-based thought.

11. If this thought does come true, what are three things you can do to cope with that occurrence?

Example:

1. What is the thought? If I lose my job during this health crisis, I will lose my home.

2. What are the emotions connected to having this thought? Fear, sadness, anxiety, helplessness, hopelessness.

3. Where do you feel these emotions in your body? Increased heart rate, nausea, tightness in my chest, tight jaw, neck and shoulders.

4. Is this a true thought? It could become true, but in this moment, no it is not true.

5. Is this a useful thought? Definitely not, it is causing me to suffer.

6. What is the impact of this thought on the present moment: Not be able to sleep well, pain in my body, no energy, can’t think clearly, feel sick.

7. How would I feel without this thought? Rested, peaceful, relaxed in mind and body. 

8. What is the opposite of this thought? I won’t lose my job or my house during this health crisis.

9. How does it feel to sit with the opposite thought? Better, but I still feel so uncertain.

10. What is a way to reframe this thought? Although I am afraid of losing my job, in this moment I am still employed and for that I am grateful. If I do lose my job, I will deal with that circumstance at that time.

11. What three things can I do now to prepare for if the thought comes true? If I do lose my job due to current unstable economy three things I can do now to prepare are: 1. look up how to file for unemployment, 2. update my resume, 3. look at my budget and see where I can immediate reduce expenses and create savings to prepare.

Notice how much different it is to be with the thought in a mindful way and engage with creative problem-solving? This process allows you to engage with the thought in a proactive responsive way rather than remaining in reactive-mode, which is emotional, stifling and illogical. 

When you practice this technique regularly, it will help to bring you into a more grounded, present-moment focused mind frame. This technique is helpful to practice anytime you are experiencing fear-based, anxiety provoking, catastrophizing thoughts. 

When you go into problem-solving mode you create more hope and experience less fear. The next time that you find you are stuck in a negative thought cycle, use this technique and end with finding solutions. Notice how this allows you to put your mind at ease and feel more in control and empowered.