20 Emotional Weather Systems: Making Friends with our Feelings
20 Emotional Weather Systems: Making Friends with our Feelings
“Meet your feelings at the door and invite them in For Tea.” – Rumi
Emotional health is all about taking time to explore how we are feeling in the present moment and making friends with the reality of our inner experience. Of course, this is complicated and challenging when we are overwhelmed with intense emotions that are uncomfortable or painful. However, allowing oneself to fully experience an emotion is how we process our feelings and let them flow through us. The first step to emotional regulation is “being with” the emotion with acceptance and curiosity:
Emotional understanding may involve a variety of skills. It might involve emotional awareness, or recognizing that we are having an emotion. It likely involves having emotional clarity—knowing that we are feeling sad rather than fear, for example. And it can be served by emotional granularity—or being able to distinguish between similar emotions. Overall, understanding the nature of emotion can do a lot to help us cope with our emotions and make the most of them. Berkley Wellbeing Institute
A mindful approach to emotional awareness involves noticing the texture of the feeling and then exploring its energetic qualities in the body, without getting lost in all the words and stories about why you are having this particular emotional response. The following exercise can be adapted to support individuals, groups or classes of many different ages to increase their emotional literacy and understanding of their emotional worlds
Emotional Weather Systems is an excercise borrowed from Margaret Jones Callahan a wonderful artist, art therapist and author of Mindfulness Based Art Book: Spark. Margaret’s e-book provides mindful art activities for the classroom, counselling office or workshops. It includes meditative scripts and emotionally safe ways to engage participants in art explorations and debriefings of the personal meaning of their creations.
I have used the following Margaret Callahan excercise with individuals, classes and workshop participants. This activity can be both a personal exploration and a group bonding experience.
Purpose
The purpose of this activity is to gain awareness of the energetic quality of emotions and to find visual ways of expressing and accepting one’s emotional reality.
Learning Objectives
Participants will:
- Check-in with their current emotional state.
- Reflect on the metaphor of emotions being like weather systems that shift and change.
- Express their emotions with colours and images that illustrate their emotional weather.
- Share their “emotional weather” art with a small group.
- Reflect on the impact one person’s emotional weather might have on others when you are together in a complex “weather system.”
Activity Directions:
- Reflection: Invite the group to sit comfortably and close their eyes or just soft focus if they are uncomfortable with their eyes closed. Read the following script:
Emotional We