Practicing mindfulness doesn’t mean your life will suddenly be all rainbows and unicorns. Life happens to all of us. However, mindfulness does give us a more effective set of tools for dealing with daily life. When you experience difficult emotions, such as anger, fear, or frustration, just remember R.A.I.N.
R – Recognize what is going on.
It’s amazing how unaware most folks are of their emotions! When you begin practicing mindfulness, you become intimately acquainted with them—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Recognizing may seem like a “duh” thing to recommend, but we are frequently out of touch with exactly what we are feeling. Practicing mindfulness will help you experience your emotions without any overwhelm or resistance.
A – Accept it as it is. Allow.
It’s human nature to cling to feeling good and resist what we consider to be negative or painful. Because of this, we often push away or push down our less attractive emotions. But in mindful living, you practice being with your thoughts and feelings exactly as they are. That develops self-knowledge that leads to more enlightened and connected living. The truth is, they are not good, bad, right or wrong. They simply are. It’s our judgments about them that wreaks the havoc.
I – Investigate the physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings.
In other words, be with the sensations. Feel them fully. The investigation doesn’t mean analyzing the sensations, thoughts, and feelings. The aim here is not to figure out why you feel this way, but to simply experience it fully. When most folks first learn about Law of Attraction, they become fearful of their negative emotions and try to repress them rather than feel them. Unfortunately, all that does is have them erupt later in an even bigger way. So know that feeling your negative emotions is important to the process of letting them come up and out. From there you can get clarity on what is wanted instead.
N – Non-identification.
When we experience strong emotions, we often create a story about them, maybe from past experiences from long ago. When we do this, we often end up making those thoughts as if our thoughts are us. “I’m overly sensitive. I’ve always been that way.” “My temper always gets the best of me.” “People always screw me over. Why do I always get the short end of the straw?” These thoughts and beliefs are samples of how we turn our stories into a part of us. We make it part of our identity.
Part of the aim and benefit of practicing being present is to recognize that our emotions are telling us something valuable. Once we understand and feel this, we can sit with our difficult emotions, allow them to come up and out and watch them dissipate.
The R.A.I.N. process will give you distance from the strong negative emotions and thoughts you are experiencing so that you can understand that you aren’t your emotions and thoughts. You are simply experiencing them. Your emotions are letting you know when you are in alignment or not. From the clarity gained, you can then choose something different!
Eva Gregory helps spiritual entrepreneurs go from chaos to clarity and from clarity to cash flow. She is a Law of Attraction expert, and author of “The Feel Good Guide To Prosperity” and “Life Lessons for Mastering the Law of Attraction”, co-authored with Jack Canfield. Her gift is teaching spiritual entrepreneurs how to integrate Inner Guidance with proven practical business strategies to create successful enlightened businesses from a place of purpose, passion and prosperity. Get your FREE Soul-Centered Conversations That Convert template here and learn how to ramp up your revenue fast with a proven step-by-step template for converting those interested in what you offer to investing in what you offer.
