For many years, I have been teaching mindfulness-based emotional intelligence to leaders and became a certified Search Inside Yourself teacher back in 2017. For me, this was a life-changing experience… learning more about what emotions are, how to experience them, discovering how to regulate them, and starting to respond to situations rather than simply react to them.
Probably the most eye-opening concept in this program was for me what they called a ‘liberating shift’… that’s a mindset shift once you recognize an emotion as something that you experience in the body, something physiological… and not just something in your head or our mind. This perspective shift allowed me to stay with emotion, even if unpleasant, as I was experiencing it, describing it to myself, and learning to work with and navigate it (SIY Global 2023).
This gave me the idea for my power tool – moving from existential to experiential – as I truly wanted to pass on this learning to others– in the hope it would be a ‘liberating shift’ for them as well!
The Existential vs. Experiential Power Tool
In the Head or the Body?
A couple of months ago, I was leading a coaching session during which the coachee felt a strong emotion and got literally stuck in it… she to a degree seemed to over-identify herself with this emotion. She sort of became this emotion, the way she described it. I asked the client to think about where she felt the emotion… in which part or parts of her body… and to even touch that part of the body where she felt it the strongest. She touched her head, her neck, her chest, and her stomach… and this led her to the insight that an emotion can be felt in the body, that it is physiological, and not just in the head… and that we ‘experience’ an emotion and are not the emotion itself.
The moment she could adopt this mindset shift of experiencing the emotion (‘experiential’), and not being the emotion (‘existential’), she could start working with it… find ways to navigate her emotions better and more skillfully.
What Are Emotions?
Many might think of our emotions as non-material or as only happening in our mind, but emotions are also very physical. In fact, there’s a constant feedback loop between your body and mind, known as the mind-body connection.
Let’s start with ‘What is an emotion’.Scientists in Finland illustrated beautifully how emotions appear as bodily sensations in a series of studies (Volynets et al. 2020). They developed what they call ‘The Map of Emotions’ which clearly shows where humans feel specific emotions. The researchers showed that bodily representations of key emotions seem to be consistent across a wide range of cultures, genders, and generations.
Therefore, an emotion is a physiological response to relevant stimuli in the body and the brain. Emotions activate us physiologically in response to something in our external environment that seems like a threat or an opportunity (like a noise, or a smell). Emotions are also activated in response to things in our internal environment (like realizing that you forgot to do something…). And – we can get stuck in our emotions!
Stuck in Our Emotions
Whatever the reason, our mind-body is biologically wired to give us signals when it wants us to listen and learn, but sometimes we just don’t pay attention. Emotions build up and become stuck inside us. Feeling stuck at times is normal – even if our inner critic tells us otherwise! Being stuck can show up as procrastination, avoidance or distraction, feeling overwhelmed, feeling a general lack of motivation or confusion, tension, or frustration in relationships (Goleman 2005).
So how can we become more skillful at working with our emotions? There are many ‘band-aids’ that we can use when we recognize that we are stuck (e.g. taking a break, or some other rather tactical options), but more important is to understand why we got stuck in the first place (so we spend less time in that space next time!).
To help us get unstuck, we can use emotional intelligence skills to look deeper and help us get in touch with what might be underneath that stuckness so we can address the issue at its root. We can cultivate higher-resolution Emotional Awareness, which will help us understand and communicate our emotions, i.e. what we experience. With that insight, we can apply Self-management and learn how to navigate our emotions more skillfully (SIY Global 2023).
A Liberating Shift: Moving from Existential to Experiential
The benefit of this is that emotional awareness enables a subtle liberating perspective shift! A liberating shift is to view emotions as ‘experiential’ (e.g. I feel anger coming up) rather than ‘existential’ (i.e. I am angry).
We usually think of our emotions as being us… as if anger, happiness, or sadness are us or become who we are. To the mind, our emotions become our very existence. As one develops a higher-resolution emotional awareness of one’s emotions, we may gradually notice a subtle but very important shift: emotions are what we feel, not who we are.
Emotions go from being ‘existential’ to ‘experiential’. Just like clouds passing in the sky are not the same as the sky itself, emotions passing through the mind are not the same as the mind itself. This insight gives us some ‘space’ from our emotions, allowing us to be less caught up in the emotions and more self-aware. It suggests the possibility of greater balance, choice, and freedom in relation to our emotions (Kabat-Zinn 2012).
If my emotions are who I am, then there is very little I can do about it. However, if emotions are what I experience in my body, then feeling angry becomes a lot like feeling pain in my shoulders after a workout… both are physiological experiences over which I have influence.
By making this shift, even unpleasant emotions like anger, frustration, and sadness can be seen as containing valuable information about us and the people and world around us.
Coaching Application
As we work with a client, who potentially feels stuck in an emotion, we will need the role of the coach to support them in understanding what they are feeling, where they are feeling it, and potentially even why they are feeling it. For the coach, this is then an opportunity to explain what an emotion is, and that in fact, we are experiencing emotions physiologically in our bodies.
The coach should create the insight with the client that this emotion is experiential, felt in the body, and that we can notice our emotions by bringing attention to our body… what does an unpleasant emotion feel like in the body? In the face? Neck, shoulder, chest, or back? Or a difference in the level of tension? Or temperature? We can then experience our emotions without judging or wanting to change. Experiencing emotional difficulty simply as a physiological phenomenon, and not an existential one. It is not that ‘I am angry’, but that ‘I am experiencing anger in my body’.
This shift in mindset will allow our client to notice their emotions, experience them as sensations in the body, and subsequently reflect on where these emotions may be coming from. What was the trigger for bringing up this emotion? If it was a person, can we put ourselves in their shoes? Can we bring an additional, more non-judgmental perspective to the situation?
This should then allow, in the next step, for the client to move forward and respond to or deal with the situation more wisely and skillfully.
Practices
The following practices are designed to help with emotional awareness, and can be given to a client to try out:
- Body scan: this practice turns the attention to the physiological experience of the body and emotions, and therefore builds higher-resolution emotional awareness. The body scan is a meditation that allows us to practice two critical emotional intelligence skills: developing higher-resolution awareness of emotions and witnessing emotions not as the whole ‘existential’ story of who I am in that moment, but as ‘experiences’.
- Head-Heart-Body check-in: suppose you have just a moment to check in on your mental and emotional state, like stepping into a meeting, what can you do? The ‘Head, Body, Heart Check-in is a 3-breath practice focusing specifically on creating a moment of higher-resolution self-awareness. This can be useful before presentations or important conversations when we need to quickly discern what kind of mental and emotional state we are in and how to best proceed.
- Journaling about emotions: this is another method of self-discovery about our emotional lives. Usually, when we write, we’re trying to communicate a thought with another person. In journaling, we are not trying to communicate with somebody else. Instead, the purpose of journaling is to help your mind invite and encourage your thoughts to flow, by letting thoughts flow onto paper. Simply opening up a channel and seeing what comes up.
Reference
Goleman, D. (2005), Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ, Bantam Dell, New York
Goleman, D., Cherniss, C. (2023), Optimal – How to Sustain Excellence Every Day, Penguin Random House Ireland, Dublin
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2012), Mindfulness for Beginners, Sounds True, Bolder, CO
SIY Global (2024), Search Inside Yourself Teacher Manual, ver. 2.10
Volynets S, Glerean E, Hietanen JK, Hari R, Nummenmaa L. (2020). Bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal. Emotion. 20(7):1127-1136.
