Emotional Intelligence the Mindful Way

This Adam Grant post perfectly sums up and advocates for mindfulness. He states emotions are not our call to action but rather encourage us to spent time reflecting. Mindfulness is the pause and reflect time. 

In an article on Mindful.org, Kimberly Brown a meditation teacher, shares that mindfulness is not about fixing or eliminating emotions but rather learning to understand them.

When we take time to engage in mindful mediation we can learn to ask ourselves "what am I experiencing right now?" Each of us needs to learn how to feel and evaluate an emotion. Not all emotions are experienced in the same way, person to person. Anxiety looks vastly different from one person to the next. Emotions are highly subjective. Utilizing mindfulness to explore and evaluate emotions helps us to address our needs in a reflective not reactive way.

My house is a big Bluey house. If you are not familiar, check it out. 

Disney plus recently added new episodes. One called 'Stickbird' has a moment of mindfulness. Bluey teaches her younger sister Bingo about releasing anger from the body. At one point Bluey askes Bingo what she wanted to do with the anger now that it is out of her body. Bingo attempts to give it to Bluey. Bluey states she does not want it. Mindfulness teaches us how to release an emotion instead of holding on to it or giving it to others. These cute dogs toss the anger into the ocean. And as an adult you will catch the part where Bandit, the dad, utilizes the skill too.

This mindful activity is similar to a mindfulness I teach our younger students. It's called Pink Bubble. We put emotions into a pink bubble and release it into the air to float as far from us as possible. 

I believe these are examples of evaluating an emotion and experience not "fixing" the emotion. No one told Bingo not to be anger but rather showed/taught her how to find the anger within her and release it in a healthy and helpful way. Remember feelings are subjective and we all experience them differently but we can all learn how to handle them in a healthy manner. 

Another important thing to remember about emotions is that while they are different person to person, they can also be different experience to experience. The next time you are angry it might feel different from the last time you were angry.

 “When we bring a lens of awareness, we can often see that there are multiple parts to an emotion, and through direct experience we realize that they’re not monolithic—they are changing all the time, and that can help loosen their grip by showing that they’re more porous than we’d otherwise believed them to be,” says Dr. Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

This quote, I feel, helps us see yet another benefit of mindfulness. The awareness mindfulness brings to emotions is the understanding that emotions are porous and not monolithic. 

The more we utilize mindfulness to help us understand our emotions the more we help protect our brain from the negative effects of some strong emotions. Research has shown that mindful meditation builds a protection in the brain which helps slow and stop the damage caused by negative emotions. 

The use of both long term as well as short term mindfulness can help our brains. 

Every mindful moment in your class matters.