Cory Alexander

Yucca Valley, CA, USA

Aubrey

Ohio, USA

Shawn Todd

Ottawa, Canada

MaryEllen Niefer

Caryn Miller

Kimberly

New York, USA

Talia

Limerick, Ireland

Erica Kreske

Temecula, CA

Sarah

Lafayette, California, USA

Observe physical sensations and ride the wave of your emotions to build tolerance for difficult feelings.

Science

Recovery & Healing

Healing

Psychology

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness

English

A brief practice to "ride the wave" of an emotion.  Instead of thinking about the emotion, acting on it, or trying to push it away, notice the sensations of the emotion by tuning into the feelings in the body.  When we simply FEEL the feelings, we might find that they go up and down, much like waves. We also increase the ability to tolerate discomfort and increase our confidence in turning towards emotional states. Adapted from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy created by Marsha Linehan

A brief practice to "ride the wave" of an emotion.  Instead of thinking about the emotion, acting on it, or trying to push it away, notice the sensations of the emotion by tuning into the feelings in the body.  When we simply FEEL the feelings, we might find that they go up and down, much like waves.

Riding The Wave Of Emotion (DBT)

 This is the practice of writing the wave of emotion. The goal is to let the emotion be present in the way that it is. To experience the sensations in the body related to the emotion. And to not do anything to try to make the emotion go away, or to lessen in intensity, or to avoid the emotion in any way. For example, by going into thoughts, or even by doing a soothing activity, or simply writing the wave. Recognizing that each wave has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. Some are large, some are small. They all eventually end. Maybe another wave comes right afterwards, however, whatever this emotion is, it will have an end at some point. By writing the wave we learn that we can tolerate even difficult, intense, and uncomfortable emotions. So make sure that you're in a space where you have some privacy, and come into a position where you're alert, but maybe not overly tense. Sitting up, your eyes can be closed, or just keep them open and look at a neutral object such as the floor, and let the muscles around your eyes relax. Start by observing your heart rate. Is your heart rate slower than usual? Is it faster? Or does it seem normal? And if you can't detect anything about your heart rate right now, just take note of that too. Now tune in to your breath. Observing, are you breathing slower than usual? Is your breath quicker than usual? Is it shallow, or is it deep? Or does it seem normal and average? Maybe even tuning in to where in the body you can experience the breath. And not doing anything to change the breath, simply observing it as it is. Notice if there are thoughts coming up right now. My guess is that there are, because there are usually thoughts happening in our minds. Your thoughts might be trying to pull you away from the experience of this emotion. Getting you to think rather than to feel. Just notice that. Maybe the thoughts are really intense, maybe they're really strong, maybe they're persistent, repetitive in nature. You can just notice those are thoughts and then come back to the body. Observing that we feel emotions, their feelings, we feel them in our physical bodies. And now tune in to the temperature of your body right now and what you sense about it. Do you feel warm? Do you feel cold? Or does your temperature feel just average? Are there certain parts of the body that maybe feel warmer and cooler than others? For example, what are the hands feeling like right now? Do they feel warm? Do they feel cool? What about the feet? What about the face? Continue to ride the wave of this emotion and consider asking yourself what is this emotion right now? Maybe putting a label on it. Is it sadness, anger, shame, guilt? And if you're not sure, that's okay too. Maybe also thinking what is the intensity of my emotion if you could rate it from a zero to 100. Where was it at the beginning of this exercise and where is it now? Did it go lower as you did this exercise and rode the wave? Did the intensity decrease or did it increase? Or maybe it stayed the same. There's no right or wrong answer. In fact, even if the intensity stayed the same, you just had five minutes of riding that wave which is teaching you the tolerance for even uncomfortable and difficult emotions. Remember at any time you can check in with these sensations and be present with the physical experience of your emotions. Take a few breaths at this point, feel your feet grounding into the earth below you. And look around the room and notice three things that you can see. Now one more grounding breath, big breath in and long exhale out as we move forward from riding the wave of this emotion. Breathing with the sound of the bell.