Emotional Awareness Guided Meditation
If you’ve ever struggled with overwhelming emotions or being able to control them (instead of being controlled by them), I have an empowering tool for you today. With this transformative Emotional Awareness Guided Meditation you’ll escape the chaos of unchecked emotions and reclaim your power.
What is Emotional Awareness?
As human beings, we are driven by emotions. They’re behind virtually every action we take, choice we make, word we say, thought we think, and feeling we feel.
Yet, for many of us, our emotions often seem to have a mind of their own. They can feel like an uncontrollable force that happens to us, rather than something we have agency over.
This is where Emotional Awareness comes in. It is the skill of being aware of the emotions you’re having and how they’re impacting your actions, speech, and mind. By bringing awareness to your emotions, you gain agency over the process and recover choice over how you behave, speak, think, and feel.
The Power of Guided Meditation
One of the most effective ways to cultivate Emotional Awareness is through guided meditation. Meditation is a powerful tool that allows us to create a safe space where we can observe and experience our emotions without judgment.
Today, I am excited to share with you an audio guided meditation designed to help you cultivate Emotional Awareness. This meditation will guide you through the process of reconnecting with your body and mind, activating an emotion, and observing the changes that emotion creates in your body and mind.
In this practice, you’re going to make use of the power of your mind through meditation to experience a real emotion and train your awareness to recognize the changes it creates in your body and mind—all in a safe way and container.
First, you will guide yourself into a state of calm, relaxation, presence, and guidance. From there, you will activate your senses and introspective awareness, readying it for the practice.
From that state, you will then activate an emotion in you. There are various ways of doing this, however, the one I recommend here is to simply remember a past episode when you felt an emotion. This has several advantages, including that you’re working with a real emotional episode. All you have to do is let yourself be transported back to that moment (while maintaining the grounding of your awareness previously established), and your body and mind will experience the emotion as if it was then. Please see below for advice on how to do this safely.
Then, you will simply pay attention to what happens inside your body and mind as you experience that emotion again. By doing that, you are strengthening your Emotional Awareness and training it to automatically recognize the signs of emotions when they’re taking place.
At last, you will let this emotion and memory fade back, returning to the present moment, and staying a couple more minutes in that relaxed state to recenter yourself.
So, take a few moments to practice this meditation, allowing yourself to fully experience the emotions and sensations that arise. Remember, there is no right or wrong way to feel. The goal here is simply to observe and bring awareness to your emotional experience.
So, carve out some time for yourself, find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed, and get ready to dive into this transformative journey of self-discovery.
Step-by-Step Guided Meditation
Before you dive in...
Here are some suggestions for emotional regulation in experiential exercises that will ensure you do this safely and effectively:
- Choose an experience that generates awareness of the emotion, but not one that will overwhelm you (Growth Zone);
- Approach the emotional experience slowly and progressively, keeping a distance you need to remain grounded (think of starting by giving it a handshake rather than a full embrace).
- Hold attention long enough to experience and remember, but not so long that complete flooding occurs (tap lightly and then pull back);
- Stop before emotions “take over” or overwhelm you. This is an opportunity to practice emotional regulation skills.
- Use three “squeeze breaths” to release the experience of the accumulated emotion in the body (breathe in deeply, hold, squeeze every muscle in your body, and then let go as you breathe out).
At last, feel free to reach our support at support@healingintoflourishing.com if you experience difficulty or intense discomfort.
- Sit or lie down, breathe, and relax: begin by setting yourself in a calm and relaxed state both physically and mentally. This will allow you to relate to your feelings from a regulated and mindful place.
- Feel your body: start connecting with your body by paying attention to it. You can slowly scan it from your toes to your crown, relaxing every inch, noticing and allowing every feeling you find, just being present, no judgment.
- Inspect the mind: while still grounded in the body, connect also with your mind by bringing awareness into it. Discover how your attention is and which feelings, thoughts, ideas, or desires are present. Allow the mind to relax along with the body.
- Activate an emotion: remember a past episode where you felt an emotion that you’d like to work with. Bring back the memory of that situation, the place where it happened, who was there with you, and what happened that brought up that emotion in you. Imagine the colors, the sounds, the sensations, and even the smells that were there, allowing the memory to become as vivid as possible. Simultaneously, keep your awareness grounded in your body and relaxed.
- Notice sensations in the body: calmly observe what happens in your body. What do you feel? Where? How strong, and how fast? For how long does it remain? Just notice, allowing what you feel to be there without wanting to change or stop it. Celebrate awareness.
- Observe changes in the mind: calmly observe what happens in your mind. How’s your attention? Focused or scattered? How’s your energy? High or low? What are your feelings? Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? What are you thinking? And what desires and impulses are there? Simply notice everything and celebrate.
- Let the emotion go: release the emotion and gently come back to your body and breath. Use the breath and squeeze the body if you need to release any leftover emotional energy, and allow yourself to become fully relaxed again.
This is a simple meditation, and the steps are fully laid out just for you. However, if this is your first time meditating, or if you’re not used to it, doing this by yourself may still feel intimidating.
I wanted to give you everything you need to succeed and make this as simple and easy as possible… so I decided to include a fully guided Emotional Awareness meditation as well. You can listen to it below, and all you have to do is sit or lie down, relax, press play, and let yourself be guided through the journey.
Best of all, you can come back to it and repeat it whenever you want to—and I very much encourage you to do so! What are you waiting for?
Beyond the Meditation
Deep breath in… and out…
I hope that you found this mediation insightful and calming. Remember, emotional awareness is not a one-time event but a lifelong practice. It’s perfectly okay if you found it challenging. Like any skill, it gets better with practice.
While the guided meditation is a powerful tool in cultivating Emotional Awareness, it’s just the beginning. The real magic happens when you take these practices into your daily life.
To help you delve deeper into understanding your emotional self, I’ve created an Emotional Awareness Workbook. This workbook is filled with insightful concepts, interactive exercises, and practical strategies that will help you develop a healthier relationship with your emotions.
This workbook is designed to be your companion on your journey towards Emotional Awareness. It provides you with a step-by-step guide on how to practice Emotional Awareness, along with exercises and a diary for you to record your experiences.
And the best part? It’s free! Just enter your name and email below, and I’ll send it to you immediately.
Remember, cultivating Emotional Awareness is a journey, not a destination. It requires practice and consistency. But with each step you take, you’ll find yourself becoming more in tune with your emotions, more in control of your reactions, and more able to respond to life’s challenges with grace and resilience.
