How Do You Actually Sit With Your Feelings? Mindful Ways to Process Emotions

When I started practicing yoga and climbing in my early 20s, I kept hearing a common refrain: “Engage your core”.  People never explained what this meant and whenever I asked someone they weren’t really able to put it into words.  This common refrain became a demoralizing phrase.  It always felt like I wasn’t doing enough or that I was doing something wrong.  That I didn’t quite get it, and nobody really knew how to help me.

I’ve seen and experienced a similar phenomenon as it pertains to mental health.  It is common to hear phrases such as “process your feelings” or “sit in your feelings”, and equally common for this to be unaccompanied by any additional information into how, exactly, one does that, or what that even means.  Many times in-session with clients I have witnessed the frustration and powerlessness that accompanies these phrases; the feelings that people are doing it wrong; that they don’t quite get it.  What does it mean to process feelings?  What does it mean to sit in them?  What the hell do we do with the emotions that come up day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute?

To unpack this, I think it requires zooming out to start.  We typically assign labels to emotions - happiness is “good”, sadness is “bad” - that can limit our actual experience of these emotions.  Imagine that you’re at the beach and you pick up a handful of hot sand.  

Ouch, that’s hot! That’s bad!  

The immediate inclination is to drop it - you don’t want to burn your hand!  Alternatively, it’s a blisteringly hot day and the sand is cool and refreshing.  That’s good!  The desire is to grasp it tighter and cling to it, to enjoy it for longer.  

In either scenario there’s a third option, the option to let the sand start to trickle through your fingertips and down onto the beach, neither grasping nor opening completely. The sand, the sensation, the environment, the weather, all of it is neither good nor bad, it simply is, a sensation to experience. When we’ve already decided that something is “good” or “bad”, we either want more of it or less of it, so in the instant that we’re experiencing an emotion that we’ve labeled as “bad” we’re already pushing it away and when we experience an emotion that we’ve labeled as “good” we’re pulling it closer.  

It can be tremendously difficult to get out of this cycle, especially because emotions have the audacity to show up at extremely inopportune moments sometimes!  “I don’t want to cry in the office, Derek” you might be thinking, which, fair.  That makes sense! While we don’t have the ability to choose what emotions come up when, we do have the ability to set them aside for a moment and come back to them later. Sometimes there’s a good reason to let it all go at once - that sand can be hot. It might be cooler, more manageable later in the day. But if we wait too long, a cooler evening turns back into another day, and maybe the sand is even hotter now…

Which brings us to the next piece of the puzzle - the actual sitting with.  The processing.  The uncomfortable, messy, but ultimately transformative part.  The coming back to.  It might be helpful to reframe it from “sitting with” to “slowing down”.  If we can sit with the hot sand for a moment, let it flow through our fingertips, “oooh, that’s hot”...

May change into “oooh, that’s warm”...

Which may change into “oooh, that’s cooler…”, a cascading series of sensations and experiences that are different in tone, texture, shape.  

One does not need to sit and meditate to experience emotions (although I am a huge proponent of meditation, look for a post on this in the future); there are many ways to slow down and be with our emotions.  Dancing, singing, playing (children are great at this), and, yes, sitting.  The only necessary component is that there’s an intentionality or focus behind it, a recognition and coming back to what might have been shelved earlier.  Many of us go through our days at warp speed, running from one activity or errand or responsibility to the next, never stopping, never slowing, just go-go-go-go until the end of the day, which doesn’t allow a lot of room for our bodies to take stock of what’s been stored inside them.  When we slow down, we create space for things to come up; think of it as an invitation for our bodies, a subtle cue of “hey, I’m ready for this now”.  

So what does it mean to sit with, slow down, or experience our emotions?  Similar to the concept of “engage your core”, which is not just one thing that we do but a series of interconnected and complex muscles that start with the foundational (for example, the transverse abdominals in the deep abdomen) and move to the superficial (core strength in general), sitting with or slowing down begins with the foundational (intentionality, focus, attention) and moves to the superficial (sensations, feelings, the tone and color of an experience).  The stronger the foundation is, the more colorful the overall experience will be, and the more tolerance there will be for experiencing all of the sensations that the sand has to offer instead of a binary good or bad, cold and refreshing or too hot, too much.  

In slowing down any experience, you might be surprised at what comes up. When you feel a strong emotion, pause and ask: Where in my body do I feel it? What does it feel like? Can I stay with it for three breaths before moving on?