“If we can allow ourselves to skilfully acknowledge & experience difficult emotions, there is a corresponding release of a range of positive, enjoyable emotions.”
Dear Integral Meditators,
This week’s article focuses on emotions & how you work with them as a major lynch-pin of your energetic resilience. Its something that we will be exploring in depth in the new Wednesday and Saturday meditation series on building confidence & resilience with the inner-smile practice.
In the spirit of integration,
Toby
Mindfulness, emotions & your MRVA’s (Mass rapid value assessments)
In my upcoming meditation series on building confidence and energetic resilience in life, we will be focusing on developing a range of mindful skills, including:
- Healing and regenerating the energy of your physical body and internal organs
- Revitalise and transform your emotional vitality
- Build a warm, empowered & confident relationship to your life
To really get these skills to work effectively, we need to understand the energy of emotions, their power, and how to get them to flow healthily within us. Emotions are psych-somatic, partaking of both our bodily and mental energy. A good relationship to emotions opens our life-force and joie de vivre tremendously. A blocked or combattative relationship to our emotions tends to constrict our life-force, limiting our energy in life no matter how hard we try. Here is a working definition of emotion from Nathaniel Branden, for the purposes of this article
“An emotion is a value-response. It is an automatic psychological result (involving mental and somatic features) of a super-rapid subconscious appraisal. Emotions are psychosomatic embodiments of value judgments…Since emotions are the product of complex integrations of ideas beliefs and experiences, they cannot be commanded out of existence, neither by and act of will or by repression. It is a disastrous error to imagine that an emotion – merely because it is judged undesirable – can be repressed or dismissed with impunity.” *
Emotions happen very quickly then, as our body-mind engages in many ‘Mass rapid value assessments’ (MRVA’s). Once an emotion has been stimulated, it IS, whether we like it or not. So how should we approach it. To quote Branden again:
“If we acknowledge and permit ourselves to experience our painful or undesired feelings, without self-pity, and without self-condemnation, we facilitate the process of healing integration.” *
If we can allow ourselves to skilfully acknowledge and experience difficult emotions, a corollary benefit will be the release of a whole range of positive, enjoyable emotions.
How to acknowledge and experience emotions
A simple way to begin is to sit down, sense into yourself and simply describe the emotions you are feeling. You can either do this organically with whatever is there in the moment, or with regard to a particular emotion you are struggling with. As you do this you will notice there are both bodily and mental aspects to it. My go-to practice for years now has been something called sentence completion. You create a sentence stem, and then complete it, either writing or verbally around ten times, in whatever way occurs to you, as quickly and non-judgmentally as you can.
Here is an example around depression:
If I allow myself to experience and acknowledge the feeling I am calling depression within me –
- I feel like there is a huge weight on my shoulders
- My eyes stare from hollow sockets
- My mouth hangs open like a zombie
- I want to sleep for a thousand years
- I feel overwhelmed by all the things I have to do
- I resent others for leaving me with all the responsibility
- I feel confused about what to do next
- The world feels like an insurmountable mountain
- I can feel myself more present in my body now, landing and feeling stronger
- I feel a release and renewed enthusiasm and I move through it
Here you can see that, by the end of the sentence completion I’m already kind of pulling out of the difficult emotion, and moving toward something better. Better still, I have processed the emotion and an now move on from it into the next part of the day in freedom.
All this can sound a bit too good to be true until you actually try it, but once you get the hang of it all sorts of possibilities start to open up!
* Quote: Nat Branden, from ‘the Disowned Self’, chapter on the undiscovered self (Page 27 & 33)
Related reading: Mindfulness around emotions
Accepting & recycling your difficult emotions
Connecting to higher, deeper emotions (Enjoying emotional resilience)
© Toby Ouvry 2026, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com
Upcoming classes & workshops
Ongoing on Tuesday’s & Wednesday’s (live & online), 7.30-8.30pm – Weekly integral meditation classes
Ongoing on Saturdays, 5.30-6.45pm SG time – Saturday Integral meditation deep-dive sessions with Toby
Starts Wednesday 8th April, 7.30-8.30pm, & then ongoing – The inner smile – Meditations for inner regeneration & connecting to the Earth – An 8-week course
Saturday 11th April, 5.30-6.15pm SG time, & then ongoing – The inner smile & Earth healing deep-dive – An 8 session practice series
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