A guided meditation on connecting your feelings to what you actually need. The speaker walks you through noticing a difficult emotion, asking what would help (connection, trust, being understood), and practicing self-care or asking others for support. It's about reducing suffering by learning to recognize and meet your own needs.
Moving from feelings to needs to zero in on the one challenging emotion that is the one you want to be most aware of, while at the same time supporting yourself to feeling it as fully as possible. Appreciate that developing stable awareness allows for a more grounded experience of the human side of yourself. Asking yourself, what is it that you most need to support yourself while you're in this difficult feeling? And at the same time, how do you find your way to care for what's present in your world independent of the feeling? Asking yourself, while feeling this challenge, what is your dominant need? It could be a need to accept what you feel, to be kinder to someone else, to communicate, to be empathic, either through giving it or even receiving it, or to be understood or to understand. See if you can find the specific need that would reduce and relieve your suffering. When you imagine feeling what is most difficult, how do you want the people around you to give? What quality would their energy have? How would they treat you? What would the words be that represent the needs that would most allow you to be cared for, empowered and to experience greater peace? Some examples of this could be the need for connection, trust, affection, appreciation, being understood, or what would hit the spot for you? Continue to allow yourself to stay aware of what is the challenging feeling and what gives you the best way to heal and find a sense of well being. How ready do you feel you are to reach for what you need, whether it's inside yourself or with another? Can you see that whatever area is hardest for you to let yourself need is likely to be the one of your greatest needs that you need to consider more? Do you have a need to ask for help, for kindness, tenderness, or whatever quality you particularly need to receive as sensitivity? How does it feel to you now as you show interest in what you need? Is this a comfortable feeling? Do you trust that you're going to go for it? Are you going to abandon yourself? Are you going to realize, oh yeah, I really want to go for what I need so I can take care of myself. And of course I recognize if I'm taken care of, I'll be way nicer to everybody else too. Does it feel awkward? Familiar? Reassuring? Contrived? Just keep looking at how does it feel to let myself need? Let yourself realize that opening a new door to what you need will likely feel a bit foreign, as that is not the way most of us were raised to take care of ourselves. Recognize that going for what you most need means you're listening and responding to what's most important to your heart, your soul, your body, no matter what you were taught or experienced in your world, staying with a difficult feeling that is most happening. Do you see the wisdom in continuing to ask, what is it that you need to be most supported? What qualities and actions do you need to take to be most at peace? Ask now, what do I need to be supported? Just contemplating this question is developing the art of moving from feelings to needs. Visualize yourself as the vulnerable human being you are with the feelings that come with it. See that you can support yourself by being riveted. What you need Give yourself as much encouragement as you can to say, now, this is what I sense I most need and I am becoming the one that is going for it. What else could ever make more sense? Especially when you realize that your greatest needs will never be unnecessarily harmful to anyone else.
