The Daily G.I.F.T. from The GratiDude

Don’t mind me Bro, this is just how I SHINE!

Moving this to the TOP, as this is the Foundation.

Join me daily and create your own G.I.F.T.

Don’t just read it.

Live it.

The G.I.F.T. Today

Grateful: for feeling some fear yesterday emotionally and breathing through it…like untying a knot.

Intention-surrender default thought, open

First-schedule namaste

Things-Paki project follow up

Morning Meditation from The GratiDude

This is really about the concept of “Permission Levels” today and the whole concept of allowing yourself to both feel and express joy.  I know, factually speaking, depending on who you are with it is very easy to tone down or even completely suppress your own expressions of joy simply because you’re not sure how the people you were with will react to it or if it might make them uncomfortable.

Dr. Mark Brackett studies how we treat our own emotions, here is a quick summary of his take:

His RULER model can help us on this journey:

• Recognizing emotions in self and others. We must start paying attention to cues in our body and mind, and in other people that reflect our mood before attempting to get at the details of what we’re feeling and why. Recognition is the first key step towards understanding anyone’s present emotional state and improves with practice. It’s not about trying to nail down a precise emotion, just the general area where it exists on the Mood Meter.

Our greatest barrier to this is not pausing and not being self-reflective or self-aware. We’ve also been trained to mask and fake our feelings or project our emotions on others rather than observe what’s happening within ourselves. For example, someone could come home yelling and screaming and we assume they’re angry; but perhaps what they’re actually feeling is shame and that’s how they’re dealing with it.

• Understanding. This is knowing the causes and consequences of our feelings; it is one of the most challenging skills to acquire in becoming an emotion scientist and where the real work begins. This is the moment of truth and can be like opening Pandora’s box; we don’t know what will emerge, how it will affect us or what we’ll be expected to do about it. Understanding becomes a bit of a detective investigation, as we have to learn the underlying themes around our feelings. 

• Labeling. Being able to properly name our emotions is key to being able to know how to process and deal with them. Yet, most people find it challenging to find words to describe their emotions; we have a vocabulary gap. However, labeling and naming our emotions is critical and does four main things:

  • • It legitimizes and organizes our experiences. It gives our emotions substance and creates a mental model of the world that we can compare with other feelings we have as well as others.

    • It helps others to meet our needs. When we can communicate with specificity what we’re feeling, the people in our lives can look beyond our behaviors to understand their causes – creating more room for empathy.

    • It helps us to meet the needs of others. Once we know how someone is feeling, it’s easier for us to support them.

    • It connects us to the rest of the world. Our emotions become a form of communication and a way to share our experiences; the words give us a story to tell.

• Expressing. We have to be able to express our emotions and have people who will listen to us; it’s a co-skill that we can’t really do alone. This requires us to be brave; essentially, we are removing our armor and stepping into the arena – which can be the scariest of the five letters. So many of us are taught to suppress our emotions.

• Regulating. This is the most complex of the five skills and pertains to how we handle our feelings. Emotional regulation is not about not feeling; it starts with giving ourselves and others permission to own all our feelings and then decide what we do with them. It’s being with the feeling and not letting it have power over us. For example, we might engage in mindful breathing to help us be present and less reactive or overwhelmed by what’s happening around us. Or we might prevent an anticipated unwanted emotion by looking forward and steering clear of it or modifying our environment. We can also shift our attention to something else or repeat a positive mantra to ourselves. Or we can shift our narrative and story we tell ourselves about an experience. All of this is challenging to do if we’re not practicing good self-care.

“Unfelt emotions are not benign; they metastasize. Unprocessed emotions don’t dissipate.”

Instead, a better approaches you down below the video from the young man being treated to a special ride as a bucket list item and he is so overjoyed that he wants to make sure that the host understands that he gets quite spicy when he’s feeling good.

Instead of not getting spicy or instead of being semi-spicy, this young man decides no way I’m going full on spicy. I just need to let folks know what to expect so their mouth doesn’t get too burned if they take too big of a bite to speak.