Evolve Psychotherapy, with Kersti Abawi MA RYT

Here's my my biggest contribution to my own suffering. This is why mindfulness is so precious to me. Growing up, I learned to hide myself emotionally because it felt safer. That became my coping strategy for dealing with feelings, especially the BIG uncomfortable ones like anger, fear, and hurt. I buried them because anger was not allowed, fear threatened me and others (too scary to acknowledge!), and hurt...well...I had to appear strong for many reasons. Mostly to take car...e of myself through taking care of others. My mother often commented on how calm I was. Nope. So when these feelings popped up, I used distraction, busyness, sleep or dissociation (numbing out) to distance myself, ignore, and pretend that I didn't actually feel. Big rebound later in life. After I "grew up", I didn't know how to feel my feelings without panic, without terror, without feeling like I would completely disappear. I had not learned how to contain and hold my feelings, how to ground. No emotion regulation at all. I was either shut down or in emotional chaos. I created enormous suffering for myself. Can anyone relate?

I read a fair bit, and have books and magazines in strategic places... today I came across a great article in the June 2018 copy of Psychology Today by Gregg Henriques, PhD who works at James Madison University. If MINDFULNESS has become an overused term for you, try thinking of it as a cognitive behavioural approach, allowing for the adaptive processing of negative events and feelings. Dr. Hendriques calls it your MO. That stands for META-COGNITIVE OBSERVER. Right on!... It is a "participant-observer stance." A deliberate, reflecting observing position, in one's mind. Does that seem too eclectic? Not at all. It lets us be in contact with our feelings, but not BE all the feelings. That's what we practice in MEDITATION. Why do that? Because we have to evolve. I say "have" to, to share my passionate conviction about this point. Beyond how we feel in this moment. If not, we are no different than other primates. But we need to be able to FEEEL how we feel, not push it away. The first principle in Buddhism is that life is suffering. The Buddha realized that to run from suffering, to pretend it is not there, to try and jam it backstage, or to control it in other ways doesn't lead to escape, freedom, or peace of mind. Instead, it leads to more suffering. Next time I'll share a bit of my personal journey in creating my own suffering,

Bodymind relief!