Step 2: Becoming a Non-Anxious Presence
Once we can learn to have a little distance from our emotions, the next step is to learn to not be afraid of them. One term that’s been helpful for me is learning to become a non-anxious presence. If you can learn to be a non-anxious presence to your emotions (and for others’ emotions!), it will be a total gift.
The trick is, when you feel an emotion coming up in you (especially if it’s an uncomfortable one), you consciously take a step back from it and try to observe it a little more as a spectator.
Sitting on the riverbank
One helpful way of doing this is to imagine yourself sitting along the banks of a little river or stream. The stream is your emotions. The goal is to let your emotions flow by.
These are iPhone pics of the little stream I walk to most days. (The water’s probably up to their knees in the first picture if they were standing, to give you better context.)
It takes about 20 minutes to walk there. I take off my shoes, stay for at least 20 minutes, then walk 20 minutes back. The cool thing about regularly going back to the same place is that because I’ve gotten to know it well, it’s new every time.
Seriously, every time there is something new. Sometimes I can convince my little boys to come with me. Usually, though, it’s something small and quiet—like, for example, some kind of new mushroom popped up on the path. Sometimes the water’s high, sometimes it’s low. Sometimes there’s a turtle, one time a dove appeared, one day there was a lemon that had been cut in half and squeezed. I sit or lay back on that big rock, usually with my feet in the water.
Last week, on a sunny afternoon, it was so peaceful that I fell asleep with my feet in the water. I have no idea how long I’d been sleeping when I startled awake. I sat straight up and felt like someone had said, Look out! But no one was there. I looked around, and directly across from my feet, a three-foot snake was swimming a few feet away! It slithered up on the rocks across from me. I whipped out my phone to try to identify it—it wasn’t poisonous. I was relieved. And still glad I’d been woken up to see it.
Today there were three young, shy raccoons climbing in the tree above me! They were filling up on the wild just-ripened muscadines rambling through the canopy.
This is how it is with our emotions.
Every time we go sit by this internal stream, we will find new things when we look closely.
When everything’s relatively easy-going, that is.
Sometimes though, our emotions can feel more like this scene from Lord of the Rings coming down the stream at us…
Big emotions can feel like enormous rapids charging at us that we can’t outrun.
The trick is: when you feel like you are getting caught up in the swirl/stampede, as soon as you notice it, move a part of your consciousness out of the swirl and back to the bank of the river. You still want to let yourself feel the feeling, but you also want to observe yourself feeling the feeling.
One really cool/surprising thing about our emotions is that they don’t actually last very long from a physiological perspective.
According to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard trained neuroanatomist:
“Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body, and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood, and my automatic response is over.”
Interesting, right? So why does it feel like it can last hours, days, months, and years? Well, that’s a tougher pill to swallow. She continues,
“If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.”
Ouch.
This is also called rumination. It’s not hard to do. Not too long ago, I woke up from a dream where I was watching clothes circle endlessly through the glass window of a dryer. It felt like my dream was pointing out some stuff I had been ruminating on. It made me laugh.
Let’s say you do release that feeling of anger, but 90 seconds later, you are still feeling angry. It might be that you picked up that angry feeling again...or it might be that you have a backlog of 7000 more angry emotions that you haven’t processed yet.
I imagine this second scenario like emotional hoarding, constipation, or a river with a log jam. It helps me to picture each of those images. It’s motivating to me to not want to live like a hoarder, for example. And it gives me grace for the time it may take to clean out my emotions when I realize I have been stuffing them.
You may often find yourself feeling like you’ve been swept back up into the middle of the river.
That’s totally normal.
Just, when you notice it, gently sit yourself back on the bank.
If you’re having trouble letting it flow in the moment, researchers say physically moving your body can help the emotion move through you, too. It may sound weird (or like great permission, I don’t know!), but it can’t hurt to try it. For example, after an intense scare, deer shake their whole body, and it helps the chemicals of fear move through and dissipate.
Knowing that even the biggest emotions can last as little as 90 seconds takes a lot of the fear out of feeling our feelings.
Another way to become less afraid of our feelings is to name them…
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