28 Jun 2019 · 1 min
Catherine Woodward Thomas, a psychotherapist and co-founder of Evolving Wisdom, teaches affect labeling: naming your feelings to calm your nervous system. A study showed labeling emotions like rage blunted heart-rate spikes. She walks through a breakup exercise and introduces Tonglen, a Buddhist breathing practice where you inhale pain and exhale blessings to all suffering beings.
This is five minute Friday. Welcome, everyone, to this episode, a very special episode with a new friend of mine. Her name is Catherine Woodward Thomas. And for those that don't know who she is, she's a life coach and licensed psychotherapist, one of three founding faculty of evolving wisdom, which was recently named by Inc. Magazine as the fastest growing online transformation educational company in America. Catherine has had the privilege of co-leading virtual learning communities that includes hundreds of thousands of students from all over the globe. She also wrote a best-selling book called Calling in the One: Seven Weeks to Attract the Love of youf Life, which became a bestseller within four months of publication and has since gone on to sell over 200,000 copies. She also has a new book coming out right now that's called Conscious Uncoupling.
So one of the things that I offer people is a simple technique called affect labeling in the psychological world, which is basically the ability to put a name on each of your feelings.
Okay, so give me an example. So.
An example is, first of all, there was a scientific study done where subjects were looking at a computer screen. and they were seeing, you know, faces of horror, faces of rage, faces of hatred, and they were being monitored in all of their vitals, and they're kind of going off the charts, their blood pressure is rising, and their heart rate is going. And then they did another technique with this, they say the same pictures to a new group, but put a name, hatred, rage, despair. And the vitals did not go up in the same way. So what that shows is that when we have a name for the experience that we're having, we don't get as overwhelmed. So language serves kind of as a container.
So how would we use that in a breakup?
So I have a practice where I just very simply advise people to ask yourself, you know, Catherine, honey, what are you feeling right now? I'm feeling terrified. I can see that you're feeling terrified, honey. What else are you feeling? I'm feeling so humiliated. Oh, I can see that. You're so humiliated. What else are you feeling? I'm feeling really pissed. Okay. Okay. I can see that you're feeling that. What else are you feeling? I feel exhilarated. You know, because we have all these feelings going on at once. They don't have to get on with each other, you know, so it's so that. that process. And then sometimes if the feelings are overwhelming, I also give that people an opportunity to do this process of Tonglen, which is a Buddhist process. I'm not Buddhist myself, but it's a beautiful practice that Pema Chodron actually made very popular. If you breathe a certain feeling into your heart, so I feel despair. I'm going to breathe despair in. I'm not going to turn away from it. And on the out breath, I'm going to breathe out a blessing to everyone in the world who in this very moment is suffering with this very feeling, including myself. And it starts starts to be like you can start to hold the feeling more because you've made a bigger playing field and you see it as an impersonal experience. Right. And then you become, you know, a force of good. Ideally, what happens is we want to harvest the seeds of growth that are inside of each of our feelings. So, for instance, the feeling of Rage, there's something underneath it, like a violation has occurred, and there's a part of us that's saying, I I should be treated better. I deserve respect. I deserve that my feelings should matter to the people that love me and that I've opened my life up to and I deserve to have better. So that can actually become a stand then that you take. Yeah. You know, because we're gonna move into self-responsibility. How is it giving my power away? How is it okay? How was I, you know, treating people to disrespect me, all that kind of thing? Sure. Right, so you want to harvest the seeds of growth that are... Because this is the thing, there's also a teacher, Ken McLeod, talks about karma and he breaks karma down basically to its original Sanskrit meaning, which means the ability to plant seeds for the future. It's action seed results. So every action we take, every choice that we make in that moment where we're in a breakup, planting a seed for the future. And a lot of people who end up in that negative spiral where you're years later fighting and back in court and stuff is because at the very beginning people planted bad seeds of hatred and rage.
