🌳 How to Navigate Triggers 🌳

Hello, my friends!

Today, I’d like to share with you about emotional triggers.

We’ve all been there. You’ll be doing well, having a good day, and then boom!

You’re triggered, and before you know it, you’re saying or doing things that you will later regret.

And it can take a long time to fix the messes we make in these moments.

Lots of time, effort, and potential conflict, all of which could have been avoided by navigating the trigger consciously.

Here's a simple practice that will help you to gracefully process strong emotional triggers.

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Every single life challenge has an emotional core. And all of these emotional cores are held in place by a story about ourselves and the world.

We can consciously strive to move our lives in a specific direction, but if our emotions and unconscious expectations are counter to our conscious efforts, then those efforts fall flat.

Before we can make progress in our lives, we have to attend to the inner forces which block our growth and lead to stagnation.

We have to start feeling our feelings, integrating this old stuck charge so that we can clear the inner obstacles.

Until we consciously attend to misaligned emotions, no conscious effort will bear significant fruit in our lives.

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Thankfully, the process of navigating triggers is pretty simple.

First, it’s important to know that whenever we feel an emotion, it stays with us until we are able to truly sit with it and allow the force of the emotion to play out.

So, if we have made a habit of distracting ourselves, or pushing through, of suppressing or bypassing our feelings, they pile up in the subconscious.

Emotions that we carry in the subconscious tend to be triggered into conscious awareness whenever we experience a situation that reminds us of the initial trigger.

Which means that sometimes our emotions come up and blindside us, even when the situation doesn’t really merit this emotional reaction.

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Emotion is energy moving through the body and being.

And health happens when energy flows freely and without obstruction.

When we tense or resist against energy that flows through us, it gets stuck.

In the body, stuck emotion becomes a pattern of baseline muscle tension, which we call emotional armor.

In the mind, stuck emotion becomes the nucleus for a limiting belief or story about self and world.

And we will find that all of the life circumstances we experience reflect the emotions we carry within our body and Being.

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To navigate triggers consciously, we must first cultivate awareness around our emotional state, so that we actually know when we’re triggered.

That’s the first step. Keep tuned in to your emotions so you know when something’s coming up for you, and so you can handle it head-on, with intention and grace.

By paying attention to our triggers, we position ourselves to process the feeling before we launch into reaction.

That means less knee-jerk words and actions, and more ability to both reflect and respond constructively.

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The next step is to lean into the feeling, rather than leaning away.

That means, when you feel fearful, or angry, or sad, or shameful, instead of trying to push the feeling away, let yourself feel it without resistance, all the way down.

Instead of tensing up against the feeling, as we tend to do, relax and let the sensation come.

Allow, and observe.

That’s step two.

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Step three is to pay attention to the physical sensations in the body which accompany the emotion.

Emotions are only processed in the body.

Learning about why you have emotional triggers, where they come from in your history, or any other conceptual knowledge around it, this doesn’t process emotions.

In fact, we often unintentionally attempt to use the mind to control uncomfortable emotions. But this doesn’t work.

The bottom line is that emotions are not processed in the mind. They are processed in the body.

So, mental engagement with our feelings often causes us to identify with the emotion and make it a condition, rather than a passing experience.

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When you are triggered, after you notice that you are triggered, lean into the feeling and relax, noticing the sensations in the body which accompany this feeling.

Allow the emotion and sensation to be exactly as they are, and Breathe!

Just breathe.

As you do, observe the sensations of the body, sitting with them and allowing them to shift and lift in their own time and way.

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Emotions come like a wave.

If you allow the wave to come and pass without resistance, then the emotional message is received, processed, and fully released from your field.

And once you unlearn unconscious habits of suppressing or otherwise holding on to your emotions, this processing can happen quite quickly and easily.

The more you practice meeting triggers like this, the more natural it will become, and the less effort it will take.

You are, in essence, training new and healthier emotional habits.

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As you sit with the feeling, you will notice that the intensity ebbs off, and it will seem like there is more space around the feeling.

You may, in the process of sitting with the emotion, have thoughts come to mind, situations linked with this feeling, aspects of personal history, aspects of identity, beliefs about the world.

But just let these things be as well. We don’t need to analyze our feelings or solve them.

Clarity comes all on its own as we process our stuck emotions. More than we can find through conscious effort and intentional soul-searching.

Until we process the emotional core linked to a situation, we are blind to the story which is linked to it.

And, being blind to these things, we will unconsciously perpetuate situations which reaffirm both our story and the linked emotion.

But, as soon as we have met the feeling, it’s like the scope of our awareness widens, and we can see clearly things that were previously invisible to us.

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After the intensity of an emotion ebbs off, we then have a choice about how to respond. Exactly the choice that we don’t have when we move into unconscious reaction.

At this point, it’s helpful to remember that we get triggered for two reasons:

1. Old stuff is coming up to be processed so that we can release it.

2. New emotional triggers highlight the misalignments of the situation, and guide us to proper, healthy response.

If we come to see that this trigger is just a resurfacing of old unprocessed emotional charge, then by sitting with it, we have done all that is necessary to address it.

If, on the other hand, it is a current situation that triggers our emotion, then we can choose how we would like to respond constructively to this inner messenger.

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The last thing that’s important to understand for this subject is the language of the emotions.

Our emotions run a vast and nuanced spectrum. But the most basic emotions can be oversimplified into the following four:

Anger: Points out to us that our boundaries have been crossed, and fires us up to safeguard these boundaries.

Fear: Points to a need to take action, and (ideally) inspires us to take responsibility for our lives, our situation, and our wellbeing.

Sadness: Points to an unmet need, highlighting needs or desires that the conscious mind may have overlooked.

Joy: Indicates that we are in alignment and that what we are doing is working for us.

When you have clarity around what you are feeling, it will guide you to the most constructive response.

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So, just to recap, healthy navigation of our triggers follows these steps:

1. NOTICE that you are triggered.

2. Lean into the feeling and RELAX.

3. Observe the sensations in the body and BREATHE.

4. Sit with these feelings without resistance, ALLOWing them to be just as they are, until space is created and they no longer feel so intense.

5. After the intensity has peaked and ebbed, consider, from a space of clarity, how best to respond to this trigger, or if an outer response is even helpful in the current situation.

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This is just one simple tool out of the emotional alchemy toolkit.

Despite the simplicity, healthy emotional processing is a critical skill for living the life you want to live and being the person you want to be.

And simple isn’t always easy. Because each strong trigger is challenging. Each tempts us to forget what we have learned and launch into unconscious reaction.

But everything we do is training, and every time you meet intense emotion consciously and intentionally, with grace and humility, it becomes more natural and more reflexive.

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I hope you have enjoyed this short share on navigating triggers.

If you would like to learn more about emotion alchemy and shadow work, drop a line in the comments and I will reach out to you.

Thanks and blessings, beautiful beings!