Summary of the Accept Your Feelings Tool

You can always find this Accepting your Feelings Tool page at PaulDuignan.Consulting/accept.

Before you use this Accept Your Feelings Tool, you should start by using the Focus Your Thoughts Tool to slow down your thoughts. This might happen in your first session, or it might take a number of sessions of using the Focus Your Thoughts Tool. Whenever you want to then start introducing the Accept Your Feelings Tool that is set out below.

• Start by using the Focus Your Thoughts Tool to get your thoughts under control.

• Once your thoughts get more under control, move your attention down into your body and find out where you are feeling any feelings you are having at that particular moment.

• Just experience these feelings, don’t try to stop them. Just sit with them.

• You are likely to find that over time your feelings will slowly start to reduce, or that you will get more comfortable with what it is like to be aware of them and feel them you and you will no longer find yourself having to avoid them. For instance by getting up and doing things (like eating and drinking) to attempt to avoid them.

The details of using the Accept Your Feelings Tool

1. First use the starting instructions from the Focus Your Thoughts Tool. After say five to ten minutes, or however long it takes to start to slow your thoughts down with that tool, begin to move your attention down into your body.

2. Find the place in your body where you are feeling your feelings. This may be in your stomach, your chest, or in some other part of your body. If you try to locate your feelings and find it hard to do even though you have tried it for a while, look up Body Scan on Youtube and select a twenty-minute or so Body Scan exercise. Do that a few times and then come back to trying this Accept Your Feelings Tool.

3. Move your attention to the part of your body where you are feeling your feelings. Just gently concentrate on feeling the feelings that you are experiencing within the moment. This is likely to be harder for people who usually spend a lot of time ‘in their heads’, chewing over their thoughts.

4. Work on just accepting whatever you feel as you are feeling it. What many of us usually do is to try to escape from such internal feelings. We do this by, for instance, getting up and doing things that make us instantly feel a bit better. For example, we may go and eat some chocolate, or we may have a wine or a beer. For most people, most of the time, this does not cause any problems. However, if we do this a lot then we are developing a pattern of trying to escape from our feelings. It can be easy to get into such escape attempts because we often are not consciously aware that we are feeling some of our feelings. Also some things like eating too much of the wrong things, or drinking too much alcohol can develop into additional problems themselves. If you want to find out more about how we develop habits and patterns around our thoughts, feelings and behaviour, look at my page describing the ITEMS Model.

5. So, just keep your awareness concentrated on the part of your body where you are feeling your feelings. If you start having lots of thoughts, go back to your counting using the Focus Your Thoughts Tool. Once you start your counting again and your thoughts calm down a little you can, if you like, try out the idea of ‘pushing’ the counting that you are doing down into the location in your body where you are feeling your feelings. It is as if you are no longer counting in your head but you move your counting down into a particular part of your body. For instance, down into your stomach where you have a feeling that you want to concentrate on. If is as if you end up counting ‘inside’ the feeling. After a while of doing this you are likely to find that you are not just counting, but starting to concentrate your attention on the feelings itself. At this stage you may find that you are just naturally let go of the counting and focus directly on experiencing the feeling.

6. Don’t try to stop your feelings. Just gently concentrate your awareness on where they are within your body and stay attending to them. Even if your feelings remain at the same level of strength, you will be gradually teaching yourself to get used to experiencing them and not to run away from them or try to stop them. Over time you will find that this reduces your need to do things like eating and drinking to avoid feeling particular unpleasant feelings.

7. You may find that your feelings start to reduce a little as you are doing this technique. Or that you may just become more comfortable having them - it can be hard to tell which is happening. But either way, the power of your feelings to drive what you think and do is gently reducing as you are getting better at accepting them. If you wish, you can start talking about your feelings in a friendly way. ‘There you go again, that is just that so and so feeling . . .’

8. From now on keep using the Focus Your Thinking Tool and include the Accept Your Feelings Tool in your mindfulness meditation sessions.

9. Good luck, with using this tool. Remember you can always find it at PaulDuignan.Consulting/accept.

Please note that if, when doing any type of psychological or self-development work, you find you are feeling overwhelming emotions or persistently troubling thoughts, you need to talk to a health professional.