My goal is to spend as much time living in balance as possible. Being that we are human and have ego’s that feed us fear based thoughts we all get thrown off from time to time.

What I have learned that helps is to have a “Default Thought” when we feel ourselves begin to slide emotionally. A default thought is a thought we can  immediately go to when something causes us to slide out of balance emotionally.

It can be a place in the past, present, future or even a made up place. We imagine that place when anything throws us emotionally. It will help us to disassociate from the situation causing us stress and bring us back to balance.

Buddism teaches us that when something happens in our experience, we need not let it “hook us,” to pull us in, to get lost in it feeling like we can’t get out.  When it “hooks us,” we begin to slide down the emotional scale, drowning with the emotion. We then reach for something to pull us out like food, alcohol, tv to numb our pain. We can accomplish the same relief in a positive way when we pull in our default thought.

Research has shown that a human emotion lasts only 1.5 minutes and it’s released. If we are feeling anything after 1.5 minutes, we are choosing to hold it unto ourselves.

Many people ask me how to let go of thoughts or emotions that are painful. This is one way to do this. It’s not as much about us letting them go or pushing them away it’s about changing our minds and focusing on something else. Then our distressing thought fades.

I have a friend who works as a teacher in a very rough inner city high school with gangs and lots of daily fighting. It is extremely difficult for my friend to pull herself out of bed and go to school everyday as every day is a challenge. I told her she only has 2 more months left but those 2 months feel like 10 years to her. I asked her if there was ever a time this year when she had a rewarding experience, one that made her smile and made her feel really great inside. She said yes, however there were just a few. I asked her to to focus on just one experience and how great it made her feel and when her thoughts guided her down a path of hating her job and couldn’t bare the thought of another day etc. I told her to force herself to think of that one experience that made her feel good (her new default thought). By doing this, the vibration of her being will shift into another emotional place, a new, balanced, peaceful and maybe even happy place.

Spend some time finding your default thought. It could be anything that evokes a feeling of peace, joy and/or happiness. It could be the day you met your true love, the birth of your child, a favorite place, a spot in nature, the ocean, a beautiful field of flowers, a tree where you used to sit under as a kid, laying in your bed. It could be anything.

After you find your default thought, practice “going there” even when you are not feeling emotionally out of balance. Then when you feel yourself slip and need to regain balance, quickly pull up your default thought. Close your eyes and be in your default thought. Spend as much time as you need in that thought. Tune into your body and notice if there is any tension left. If there is, sit longer, if not then continue on with your day. It will change your emotional state to that of more peace. Who doesn’t want to live with that?

Recently after having some interactions with a family member I felt a lot of anger and frustration bubble up inside of me.

As my day went on, I realized an hour had gone by since our interaction and I was still holding the negative emotions from our interaction.

When I tuned into my body, I felt shortness of breath, a knot in my stomach and a heaviness on my chest.

Thinking back to our interaction I realized (1) there was no solution to the problem (I could not fix her or the problem) and (2) I am allowing someone outside of myself to ruin my mood, my health and as time went on, my day.

By holding all of this negative energy, it hurts no one but me!

If I could see inside my body, I would guess my blood pressure had risen dramatically, the aging process had been accelerated due to all the stress chemicals being released and by holding this negative emotion to me to it disconnecting me from my connection to God/the universe. It’s like pinching off a hose with water running through it. I am doing this to myself!

So when in a mood or emotional place like this, with no resolution what can we do?

A technique that I find works remarkably well for instances like this is called The Sedona Method.

With the Sedona Method we ask ourselves a series of questions regarding our mood and/or emotional state. The question and response dialogue used with Sedona creates an outlet for stored negative emotion(s) to exit.

Here are the steps of this process: (I will use my experience as an example)

1. Ask yourself: “What is my NOW feeling?   (ANGER)
2. “Could I welcome or allow it?”  (YES)
3. “Could I let it go?”   (YES)
4. “Would I let it go?” (YES)
5. “When?”  (Now)

While asking these questions to yourself really tune into your body, many times you will actually feel the energy/emotions release out of your body. Really sit with each response to the question. Be honest with yourself.

If you should get a “No” answer to any of these questions, ask yourself this question: “Would you rather feel that feeling or be free?” Allow yourself to really sit with your response. Be easy on yourself with the answer, this is a process.

You can use this with yourself or with another person and ask them the questions. The idea behind this method is to continue to release emotions until you reach either a neutral or a happy place. For me, I released anger, frustration, resentment, fear then annoyance which eventually got me to a neutral place.  With each round my negative feeling state lessened.

Our emotions are layered and we must work through the layers to find neutral. The nice thing about Sedona is the speed at which you are able to shift. An experience like this for me took as little as 10 minutes to find neutral or happiness. Once you work this technique a few times you’ll find it to be as fast as it is easy to use.

For more information on the Sedona Method go to: www.sedona.com

Have you ever left your house and felt great-happy, joyful, just in  a  good mood, and run your errands only to come home feel fatigued, stressed, and angry or some other negative emotion?  Yes, maybe your errands fatigued you or maybe stressed you or did they? Have you ever met a friend for lunch, a nice lunch, and left feeling some negative emotions and you don’t know why? When we feel negative emotions “out of the blue” and can’t put our finger on where it came from it’s probably not ours!

Here’s what happens:

Quantum physics has proven that when you break the human body down to the smallest particle, it’s energy vibrating. Likewise, our thoughts and emotions are also energy. Negative thought or negative emotion vibrates slower (which is why it feels heavier) and positive thought or emotion vibrates fast (which is why it feels light). Our energy field expands when we are in a good place, in fact, the more we step into a happy, or positive emotional place and feel it, the larger our energy field expands. Just to give you an idea, your energy field (if you are in a really great mood) can be in a 30 foot radius outside of your body.

Someone that is in a bad mood has dense, heavy energy around them and their field may be only inches off of their body. When you with your huge energy field, sweeps through their energy field, you pick up all of their “stuff,” all of their negative emotions. Now you have someone else’s despair, anger, frustration, stress etc. in your field and it weighs you down. This can happen at the grocery store, the mall, work, at lunch with friends etc.

A few of my own examples: A while back I had coffee with a friend. I had just finished writing a new workshop that I had been working on and was on cloud 9! We met for coffee, she had a smile on her face the whole time and things seemed great. However, I left there feeling so exhausted and depressed (out of the blue) and could not wait to get home to lie down and take a nap. I got home and before lying down I went outside and did a few things to “clear my field” and my energy bounced back to where I was before our coffee. I called my friend and I asked her how she felt during coffee and she said she was great until the end when we were getting ready to leave. She was hoping to see the guy she wanted to date and she didn’t and immediately felt depressed and exhausted. She had to go home and take a nap! So I picked up on her emotions, cleared them and “my” depression and fatigue immediately lifted and I went on with my great day. Another example happened recently with my husband. I was in a really energized, good mood, ready to stay up late and work after the kids were in bed. He got home from work and we had a conversation, after that my energy began to get low. I begrudgingly finished making dinner and could not wait to crawl into bed. I told my kids to call my husband for dinner and he was taking a bath and had fallen asleep! He came out and could not stop yawning. We put the kids to bed at 8:30 and crawled into bed, both of us exhausted. I lay there for a moment and remembered how energized I was, I traced it back to our conversation and realized his emotional state “slid” after our conversation and I picked up on him! I cleared myself and felt much better again. He later told me that your conversation really made him feel “off” emotionally. What you can do if this happens to you/clearing techniques:

1. Stomp your feet outside on the earth (or inside if it’s freezing out) and shake your arms then legs, as if throwing the energy off of them. You can also brush (with your hand) the energy off of your arms and legs as well. Hold the intention that you are shedding all energy and emotion that is not yours.
2. If you are a yoga person, the beginning of the sun salutation where you sweep your hands over your head, cleanses your energy/auric field.
3. Draw figure 8’s or the Infiniti symbol in your energy field, all over, big and small.
4. Visualize yourself taking a shower with beautiful cleansing light washing over your body and energy field. Again, hold the intention that you are cleansing your field of all negative energy and emotions that are not yours.

Awareness is the key to this. Pay attention to how you feel and when your feelings shift. It’s amazing how often we lose our happiness because of someone else’s emotions on us. Enjoy these easy techniques for maintaining your balanced emotional place.

I hear this statement all the time in my practice. Much to your surprise, if you are a crier, it does NOT equate to being an emotional person.

A person that is emotional is completely in touch with what they are feeling. These people are deep, well aware of what choices they make in life and why.  Knowing how you feel raises your awareness to all new levels. To “feel” your way through life rather than “think” your way through life produces vastly different experiences and outcomes.

Practice asking yourself, “How do I feel” instead of “What do I think about this,” and begin to open your heart up to become authentically emotional.