Going with the Flow:Riding the emotional rollercoaster!

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  “Sometimes there’s just no way to hold back the river.” 

– Paulo Coelho

Let them flow!

Many a times, we all may have experienced that when we let our emotions move freely, give them a breathing space, just feel them without acting on them or suppressing them, after a while, they will change. In therapy, we call it grounding or anchoring ourselves in the midst of emotional waves.

  Try doing this for a minute or so. Say you are feeling anxious for any reason, and instead of avoiding the uncomfortable sensations, running away from your feelings, pushing it or challenging yourself to feel this way or that way, try sitting with the emotion and holding it.  Open yourself to this emotion and soon it will change to some other emotion, like sadness, which may transform to shame or guilt and your mind may be telling you that you are hitting rock-bottom and soon that transforms to gratitude, then to joy or humor, or happiness and love and may be compassion and again gratitude and this is how emotions are constantly in a flux inside our body and mind.

Ephemeral Emotions

  Once we let ourselves go through this wonderful ride of emotions, rather than just trying to feel good or avoiding feeling bad, we will start experiencing the whole spectrum of human emotions, and we may have a wonderful insight about ourselves. We may start laughing at ourselves, thinking what a fool we had been the whole time, to be so afraid of our own emotions, our experiences, so afraid of ourselves. You can call this as going with the flow of emotions, rather than damming them behind a wall of denial or distortion.

Reconnecting with ourselves 

 This experience can have profound impact on us. Once we start opening up, acknowledging our emotions (for a starter, you can start naming whatever you are feeling. Do it in your mind. No one has to know about it), we will start connecting with a deeper sense of self, a self which is fine with flaws and changes. We will start connecting with the people around us, our loved ones, our family, our friends, our colleagues, our clients and even our patients. We will realize that they are feeling heard and understood instead of being ignored and this will definitely nurture our relationships, not only with others but also with ourselves.

-Dr. Suhasini Das





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