Shift Your Daily Emotional Cycle

Let's take a long, deep breath together.

How are you?

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How about a couple long, deep breaths?

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I hope things are good.

I've been looking forward to saying hello for a little bit here.

Have you been living in a present state of mind and body lately?

It's worth taking stock of that.

When you take stock, you tend to prioritize it more moving forward.

So, how present have you been feeling lately?

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Related that topic, one way to think about yourself, and your mental health, and your wellness, and really, your day, is to recognize that we each go through emotional patterns that repeat every day.

Think about a 24-hour day as an emotional cycle.

If you were to map one 24-hour period to another one within some close proximity in time, in all likelihood you would see enormous overlap in the emotional patterns that you roll through during the course of each 24 hours.

We often think of the content that's causing or provoking our emotional cycles to be the important thing to pay attention to.

However, the reality is that if you have an existing pattern of emotion that you repeat regularly — and we all do — then you should instead focus on noticing what that pattern is for you if you want to better understand yourself and your mental wellness.

Developing a baseline understanding of your repeating emotional patterns, and how to improve your patterns, (e.g., by learning to shift your emotional state when you choose to), is incredibly helpful for feeling connected to the present moment of your life more often.

To put that a bit more concretely…

You might wake up in the middle of the night stressed during one of your emotional cycles.

And or, you might wake up happy in the morning.

Later in the day, you might feel guilty.

Maybe you feel guilty because something happened during the day, or maybe it’s because you tend to feel guilty regularly as part of a repeating emotional pattern of yours.

If you do feel shame or guilty regularly, your mind is managing to consistently populate with content (e.g., thoughts, conversation, media, etc.) that provokes you to feel of guilt or shame regularly.

In some future Shift, we’ll walk through a process for evaluating your pattern for yourself. For today, we’ll just notice the fact that we each experience repeating emotional patterns.

Noticing any aspect of your patterns can help you become more aware of how your mental health is evolving, or revolving, repetitively each day. Knowing that your emotional patterns exist makes it easier to recognize them run the future.

Once you notice a repeating emotion, you're in a position to do something about it.

And what is it that we do about it?

We Shift.

We learn how to recognize that when we’re feeling guilty it may just be because we feel guilty regularly (for example) and not for some reason that you actually should feel guilt, or shame, or anger, or frustration, or whatever the repeating emotion might be for you.

So let’s take a long, deep breath and notice how we feel right now.

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Relax your shoulders.

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Relax your arms.

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Sink into your space.

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Set an intention to be 100% present for the next minute or two.

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Sink deeper into your space.

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Feel your body weight against your seat.

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Allow your head to fall backwards if you want to.

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If that feels good for you, relax even further.

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Good.

Now, close your eyes with me — if you're in a place where that's a safe thing to do.

Set the intention to be a 100% present again.

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Listen to life and feel life on your skin at the same time now.

Focus 100% of your attention on listening to and feeling life for the next 30 seconds.

Ready?

Listen and feel.

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Notice how your body shifts into presence as thoughts or emotional cycles that may bubble up are allowed to relax away, for now.

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Release everything into the ether, for now.

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Release the content.

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Release the emotion.

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If thoughts arise to distract you from your pure intention to be present, notice them and let them go.

Notice them as cyclical thoughts that provoke cyclical emotions.

Take another long, deep breath.

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Listen.

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Feel yourself coming into presence.

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Allow your attention to be focused right here, listening right now.

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Keep listening to life as long as you want.

Keep listening even after I say goodbye.

Just stay present.

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Perfect.

Goodbye for now.

Have a great rest of your day.

I'll talk to you soon.

Stay present,

Sean

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