On Anxiety
Drop everything and go see Inside Out 2 if you haven’t already. I recommended this sweet Pixar movie to all my clients this past week. As the main character Riley goes through puberty, each of her emotions is depicted as a character with specific duties to help her respond to her experiences. The first movie included a cast of core emotions: joy, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust. In the second movie, secondary emotions start to infiltrate– anxiety, envy, embarrassment, and boredom. The movie does a great job educating on the function of each emotion, particularly anxiety.
When anxiety shows up in our daily lives, it makes itself very known. Through restless nights, ruminating thoughts, jitters, body tension, heart flutters, shallow breaths, hyperfixations. Anxiety revs up our system to prepare us for danger. It’s biggest concern is keeping us safe. As well-intentioned as it may be, it can also prevent us from experiencing and learning from our primary emotions. Our primary emotions are important because they give us information about ourselves and our environment. They are chemical messengers created in the middle part of our brain, where automatic functions are created. Emotions simply respond to our environment and then execute their pre-wired responses.
“Emotions are more often predictions of what our situations mean for our well-being than they are assessments of the actual outcomes. Either way, they are important sources of information for our well-being and our survival.” — Raja Selvam, from The Practice of Embodying Emotions
Inside Out 2 made me immediately think of the The Change Traingle– a tool developed by Hilary Jacobs Hendel. I use this tool to explore with clients how their primary and inhibitory emotions are interacting to create specific defenses. I recommend Hendel’s book It’s Not Always Depression for a deep dive into her theory of emotions, but here’s a brief overview:
Inhibitory emotions like anxiety, shame, and guilt block our connection to our primary emotions when they are too intense or when we need to bypass them to stay out of conflict. Defenses are anything we do to avoid feeling our emotions. Inhibitory emotions and defenses work together to keep our primary emotions at a distance. When we can acknowledge and experience our primary emotions, we can move into an open-hearted state where we have more access to our true self.
When you are experiencing difficulty with an emotion or feeling defensive, you can use the change triangle as a tool to explore which core emotions may need to do their work. Here’s how to work with the change triangle:
Identify- Which corner is the biggest part of your current experience? Are you in a defensive or inhibited state?
Pause - It’s hard to identify emotions if we’re flooded or numb. Take a moment to check in with what your body may be experiencing.
Name- Try to name all of the core emotions coming up.
Listen- Try to hear what an emotion may be trying to communicate. Is the emotion communicating a need? Ask yourself, if this feeling could talk, what would it say right now?
Tend - Find ways to move forward with your needs in mind. This can be a great place to tend to your body somatically.
On Deep Time: Meditation
I recently discovered the podcast Life Worlds and I’m obsessed. The podcast explores how we can orient our lives around nature by deepening our understanding and relationship to the perspectives of non-human life forms on earth. I’m finding it to be a really accessible intro to ecological concepts as a concerned and curious layperson with no background in ecology. The host, Alexa Firmenich, interviews guests ranging from political activists, scientists, poets, and sustainability consultants. And occasionally she facilitates the coolest guided meditations.
In this 30 minute meditation, you’ll time travel through the depths of time and evolution. You’ll sense into your body as Firmenich narrates how our primal ancestor’s development and relationship to the land lapses into ours. Best done laying on the ground so you can explore the evolution of your spine.
On Roses:
We need a moment for the roses of Rose City before they all crisp up in the coming Rose City heatwave—
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Roses are a symbol of mystical union and bloom in ancient legends ranging from gods and goddesses, lords, kings, deities, philosophers and great poets. The Hindu goddess of auspiciousness, Lakshmi, was said to have been created from 108 large roses and 1,0008 small rose petals. While in Rome, Venus, goddess of love and beauty, was born where seafoam met the ground and bloomed into white roses. Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, said to have cried red roses as she held in her arms her dying lover, Adonis. In alchemy, the rose symbolizes spiritual transformation as the heart blooms open to share love and compassion to all beings outside the self.
Dat Rosa Mel Apibus: "The rose gives the bees honey" after engraving by Johann Thedore deBry (d. 1598)
Roses are powerful allies for love, compassion, and heart-opening. You can work with roses or the energy of roses during times of grief and heartbreak, to bring nourishment to your heart space, or to keep you oriented to beauty. Here are some ways I like to work with roses:
Anointing yourself in rose oil. This one from Moon Nectar Apothecary smells divine.
Brew dried rose petals or buds in your tea. This one from House Nine is my absolute favorite.
Set firm boundaries for protection like thorns on rose stems
Let your grief crack you open like Aphrodite over Adonis, like a rose to late Spring sun