PILLAR 2

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Gather a deep understanding of real-time, practical tools to support an easeful relationship with challenging or negative emotional states. Understanding, regulating and integrating emotional themes is the very core of restful resilience.

Week 6:

  • Extend your morning practice and discern your needs for structured or unstructured sitting time

  • Explore, understand and see the value of psychological projection

  • Discover a way of ‘redoing’ life events that leads to new habits and possibilities

  • Dive in to the science of habituation and desensitization to further your resilience

Morning Practice - Structured vs Unstructured

This week, I’d like you to sit for 20 minutes. I’ve created two recordings for you, one that moves through the themes so far (attention, welcoming, working with opposites, disidentification) and another that’s quiet and just keeps you gently ‘tethered’ to some simple pointers and guidance. Try each, and see what works for you!

Projection & Self Accountability

The psychological phenomenon of projection is something that all human beings do, all day long. There is something brilliant and clever to this process if we can catch it in the right way. Rather than using the knowledge of this as a stick to beat ourselves, we have an opportunity to meet parts of ourselves that we are in refusal of, and/or to take back the tendency to put our feelings ‘out there’ and into another. As we enquire into our own experience, and along the way acknowledge our own tendency towards defensiveness and disowning uncomfortable parts of our own experience, we can step into a place of accountability and deeper self-knowing and - ultimately - self-trust.

Days Review

This powerful yet simple tool can change the way you view events from the past and create new, more informed responses to future challenges. Explore the science behind it, and listen to some anecdotal stories that will set the stage for your own practice of this, through the week.

Habituation & Desensitisation

When we first notice any stimuli, our brain registers this as new information. As we adjust to this new input, that same thing we noticed a few moments ago moves into the background of our attention, as new inner and outer experiences take centre stage. We can take advantage of this tendency to ‘habituate’ to our environment and allow for intake of experiences that we can initially find intense and overwhelming, knowing that ultimately, we’ll adjust to the experience. We can take this further by learning to systematically desensitize ourselves to difficult experiences.

Daily Deep Rest Practice

This week, I’d like you to practice the Days Review each and every day. you can do this at bedtime if you like, or when you are transitioning from your working day. Of course, if you want to practice other Deep Rest practices in addition, please do! Do lean into the back catalog of previous practices and enjoy any favorites in addition to the days’ review.

Contemplation exercise:
Taking It Back

Take some time to consider a situation that has been triggering for you over the last few days. What has your mind done in terms of placing your feelings about this into another? Specifically:

  • Catch the language you use “they did this, they made me feel like that"

  • Play with turning this around in 3 ways (I did this, they didn’t do this, I didn’t do this)

  • Explore what’s on the other end of the finger pointing out. What are your feelings? What can you own within yourself and not put out into the other?

Don’t give yourself a hard time! Projection is completely natural and everybody does it. You now have another super-power at hand though, as you can get closer to what is arising in you and as a result of it, have more agency.