Navigating Change with Ease

You’ve heard the metaphors about strength in flexibility – how a yielding reed endures against the rush of water while a rigid branch will snap? The ability to flex, to “go with the flow,” can be the difference between navigating change with ease and breaking under the pressure.

We know what it takes to keep our bodies flexible: regular stretching, continual use to keep muscles limber, joints running smoothly. How about our attitudes? Regular stretching helps there, as well – surrounding ourselves with positive people, modeling our behavior on those who seem to deal easily with change.

But there’s another key to flexibility in our lives: our emotions. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of automatically saying “no” to something, feeling extreme frustration about the requirement that you do otherwise, and either “having it out” through verbal conflict (expressing your anger), or bursting into tears. (I had a very wise therapist once who told me that tears are not a weakness, but an expression of feeling something – anything – deeply.) Once the rush of emotion has passed, once you’ve been able to feel (and express) the emotions fully, you’ve then been able to see things differently, and you’ve gone on to respond with a fresh perspective.

Release of emotions is like getting an oil change. It loosens things up and smooths them out. It makes the whole system run better. In terms of change, a clear emotional slate allows you the flexibility to respond positively instead of with resistance. The only way to attain a clear emotional slate, however, is to release what is already there.

How do you do this? Especially if you have a hard time knowing what you’re really feeling, how do you release it? Because releasing feelings is no mental exercise. It requires physically riding through the feeling, along with its accompanying physiological symptoms, until it is done. And mind, an emotion may start as anger and under that may be sadness. To generalize by gender, men usually cover sadness with anger, women cover anger with sadness. For the slate to be clear, you have to move through all of the layers.

“How’m I going to do that,” you say. “I’d be in therapy constantly!” Ah. Here’s the DIY (Do It Yourself) key: your emotions and your body are connected. You can actually get at, feel, and clear emotions without necessarily putting words to them, through movement. Anger is often released well doing any activity that involves impact though the hands and feet (playing basketball, for example,volleyball, kickboxing.) I’ve worked through more than one good “mad” by riding my bicycle hard.

I find sadness most easily accessed through expressive movement. Think how the word “yearning” might be physically expressed: reaching one way, while simultaneously being held back from the other. Let your body do this, and the feeling will follow. I thanked my NIA (a kind of movement class) teacher, Chelah, this week, while wiping tears from my eyes. I honestly didn’t know what I was crying about, but I sure felt better when I was done!

Accessing feelings is even easier in combination with music.

You can also get to emotions by feeling them along with a fictional character. This is the deep value of watching movies and reading fiction: emotional exercise. Sad? Watch a tear jerker. Want to rip someone’s head off? Okay, so not literally, though it might happen literally in your revenge plot!

So a clear emotional slate = attitudinal flexibility. This is especially useful for School of Love people, who tend to hold back on expressing their feelings for a variety of reasons, usually boiling down to potential rejection. But it’s also useful for the other schools. School of Peace: that exercise I said you need to do doesn’t just ground you in your body! School of Wisdom: adding the lubrication of expressed emotions makes decision-making a lot clearer. And School of Service: feelings keep you connected to the truth of whether you are succeeding at serving your spirit first or not.

Coach’s Challenge: Notice where you are resisting change in your life. Skip over the arguments in your mind about why you are right and they are wrong. Instead, focus on the feeling, and intensify it while moving your body. For extra credit, add your voice. Roar, yodel, beat your chest, howl, wail, whatever comes. Keep doing it until the feeling changes to another one. If it’s another intense feeling, keep expressing; go with its changing character. If it lightens up into laughter, you’ve done it! Now, consider the challenging area again. You will feel much more able to take action without arguing! And leave a comment on my blog, relating your experience.