Why we get stuck in a rut in our physical, emotional and mental lives

Feelings about situations, people or places are also anticipations… and they’re physical.

Imagine a person that gets on your nerves. Imagine them doing that thing that gets on your nerves, that thing you’ve told them so often to please not do.

Now sense the tension in your body. You’re anticipating.

We anticipate emotional reactions all the time. We base our anticipation on our previous experience of that person, place or situation. This is as normal and natural as the physical anticipation of weight we played with in last week’s blog. But, just as in anticipating physical effort, in emotional anticipation we must also be open to adjusting our response to what the present circumstances really present.

With emotional stuff, with relationships, this isn’t always as easy as with a regular physical weight. Some situations, some places, some people are able to trigger in us deeply ingrained pre-programmed responses that we cannot simply wish away, ignore, or consciously de-activate and adjust our response, if we are already in the middle of our emotional and physical reaction.

These situations require taking time to step away from the stimulus, until we are ready to face the situation, place or person from an open perspective, from a new place. This may take as little as a few seconds (a couple of conscious inhales and exhales and a quick reminder of your directions), or as much as months or years.

In that period of stepping away from the stimulus what we are actually doing is we are finding our own balance, our own coordination, our own sense of inner order, finding our head and our feet. We are also learning to organize our resources in new ways. We may be learning to use our resources in similar but less demanding circumstances.

Eventually we are able to face the original stimulus with “fresh eyes”, seeing it for what it is and what it offers us today. We’ll approach it differently then, tackle it with a new inner order. We may even simply confirm that we don’t want that place, situation or person in our lives as much, or at all, anymore. But we’ll have made this decision from a calmer place.

We might also realize that today we can deal with the stimulus as it is. But perhaps tomorrow, if the stimulus is really strong or we’re having a particularly bad day, our old reaction comes up. However, this time we’ll be more in tune with our bodies, with those first signs of tension that indicate that we’re starting to anticipate our old response. We can then choose to once again step away to find our inner bearings, our inner sense of direction, and make a fresh decision respecting our response to the stimulus.

So this week, start playing around with this idea that we anticipate our social interactions. Check to see how this manifests in your body. Check also to see how long you need to step away from the stimulus to find your bearings, in order to really be able to face it from a new, more flexible and coordinated place. Allow yourself to be surprised by the “new” in the “old”.

See you next week.

Victoria