Psychological Health – Your Body and Your Emotions

Body Awareness and Mindfulness can help you deal with unwanted emotions.

By Irene Hansen Savarese M.S., L.M.H.C.

To be “mindful” means to bring awareness and acceptance towards something that you have been avoiding, or you have been trying to fix without much success – like, for instance, feelings of depression and anxiety.

If you can allow yourself to turn towards and face whatever it is you have been avoiding or trying to fix – it being something scary, difficult or depressing – you are responding instead of reacting, accepting instead of avoiding.

You can do this by trusting yourself to hold difficult feelings in your awareness and noticing how it feels in your body. This can be done by “breathing with” your experience in your body. Try this:

1.      Get in a comfortable position.

2.      Focus your awareness on your breathing.

3.      Widen your awareness to the whole body.

4.      Bring to mind something that is troubling you.

5.      Notice any tension in your body.

6.      Try to accept whatever it is you feel in your body. Say to yourself: “It’s okay, whatever it is, it’s already here. Let me open to it.”

7.      Allow yourself to open and settle into the experience whatever it is, noticing your breathing and investigating the bodily sensation.

8.      Finally allow yourself to notice how the bodily sensations shift and change from moment to moment.

By being with your body instead of doing everything you can to get away from what your body is experiencing, you give yourself the opportunity to be in the moment with yourself and notice how the experience of tension can develop and change.

Mindfulness is not about getting rid of unpleasant and unwanted emotions, but about accepting and experiencing them, so they don’t take up all the space in your mind. You shift from avoidance to openness and greater flexibility in your response. Mindful awareness towards bodily sensations can give you freedom to experience your tension, give it space and let it go.

This article is inspired by “The Mindful Way through Depression – Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness” By Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Guildford 2007.

Irene Hansen Savarese is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Private Practice in Fort Lauderdale. Educated in Denmark as a Clinical Psychologist, she has years of experience as a Psychotherapist in Denmark and Florida. She specializes in Crisis Intervention, Anxiety, Depression, Eating Disorders, Personal Growth / Empowerment and Women’s Issues. She works with Individuals, Couples, Families and Groups.

Please direct questions regarding this article to Irene at (954) 776-0406 ext 3, please leave message, or email her at irenesavarese@yahoo.com

For more information please go to www.irenesavarese.com