Living in a slide of emotions causes us great wear. To try to balance our moods and recover a certain calm, it is necessary, from the outset, not judge ourselves and establish certain routines.
In this article, the psychologist Anna Rodríguez Ximenos proposes some exercises which may be useful to you.
By Anna Rodriguez Ximenos
How to find emotional serenity
Three keys in your day to day
- Decide in which space you will carry out each daily activity and learn to properly allocate time.
Putting order around you will translate into inner peace.
- Look for creative resources with which you feel identified and that allow you to unleash all the potentialities and skills that beat within you. Try different artistic activities until you find the one you feel comfortable with.. Be constant, it will help you forge a solid internal referential link.
- Accept the wide range of emotions you feel as genuine in youDon’t try to separate yourself from them. Any emotion, no matter how unpleasant, can live inside you; it is about learning to contemplate it without judging it. Give yourself all the time you need to feel yourself.
Practices that will help you
Find a place where no one bothers you and where you are calm and quiet.
Think about an imaginary place where you feel comfortable to frame and visualize your emotions:
visualize serenity
- name an emotion that overwhelms you and visualize it as if it were a stone.
- Contemplate the calm of the lake that is offered to you. Imagine the temperature, the color, the atmosphere. and the sound of calm water. In addition to the lake, you can summon natural elements from the environment that connect with the essence of your being.
- Throw the stone into the lake with all your might. Watch how it disappears and the sound it produces when submerged.
- Enjoy the propagation of the waves on the surface of the lake. Visualize the concentric circles: each wave exactly repeats the previous movement.
- Remember that the stone is your emotion. visualize how the disturbance that has caused your emotion is transmitted smoothly and continuously until it is extinguishedlike waves.
visualize balance
- Imagine that you are on a giant pendulum that you can control the speed of and make it slow.
- close your eyes and perceive the wonderful movement undulating to one side and the other of the space of that pendulum in which you participate. Stop at it, don’t be in a hurry.
- Now imagine that the pendulum swings between two large spheres that represent the opposite poles of your most extreme emotions: sadness and joy.
- Don’t stop swinging, slower and slower. Enjoy the undulation and the present moment. Have fun in it. You are about to touch the sphere of sadness, you can almost touch it with your fingers. Imagine what color it is, how bright it is, its texture and size. Keep imagining its aroma, its taste, its sound. Stay there as long as you need until you can perceive it with the five senses in a way that is pleasing to you.
- Now flow slowly to the sphere of joyfollowing the same procedure.
- Repeat this rocking from one side to the other as many times as necessary until your mind and body are completely calm.
Marta goes to the family doctor to explain to him the uneasiness he feels in the face of his latest sentimental breakup and, above all, his growing emotional ups and downs. He barely looks at her; instead, . While he goes to meet his best friend, with whom he has arranged to see an exhibition, he throws the recipes into a trash can.
During the visit, Marta says that Are you thinking of starting therapy?. “Another one?” Her friend is amazed. “It is for this extreme instabilitythese sudden, uncontrollable mood swings”, Marta justifies herself.
“I go from tears and heartbreaking grief to the most exultant joy in minutes. I can’t take it anymore, I’m exhausted”.
“But Marta,” says her friend, “you already know what’s wrong with therapists. You leave therapy because you are not being ‘fed’ enough, or not as you would like. Why don’t you just assume that you’re unstable, period? Why don’t you stop desperately looking around you and, with the imagination and sensitivity that you have you do something for yourself?”.
Where does that emotional instability come from?
Marta remains silent for a long time as she passes in front of the paintings without seeing them. Suddenly, she is moved. How much she loved to paint as a child! After being diagnosed as a gifted child, her parents high intellectual demands had been placed on him… and they also expected her to be good, receptive, and conforming. Drawing was his only redoubt of freedom..
Sometimes he painted at his desk, he didn’t realize it, and he ended up cramming it with a pencil universe full of bugs, unicorns, aliens, and seahorses. Until one day they threatened to expel her from class if he kept painting, and stopped doing it.
Then, in adolescence, in his attempt to separate from his parentsbegan to oscillate between the most radical apathy and the most frenetic activity, between the darkest depression and the most maddened euphoria, and that ongoing feeling of instability he has never left her. It is as if she did not have good internalized affective anchors.
She also thinks of Jonathan, of him and of all his affective ruptures. No one can ever fill his desperate need for love. Though he craves the bond deeply, he always ends up destroying it.
She feels like a failure, without a thread of continuity, with a broken identity.
Her friend snaps her out of her reverie and, before leaving, asks you to take care. Beer and chips for dinner is not a healthy diet, she tells him. Nor work until two in the morning.
When you return home, it seems too big. He wanders, walks through spaces, opens and closes doors. Finally he sets out to look at old photographs. Instinctively, he chooses one of his parents and rescue his paint case from the junk room. After hours, when it ends, she feels satisfied and calm.
From then on, he began to paint daily after work.. Little by little he fills the door of his house with color, the kitchen cupboard, the table where she works… Painting re-appropriates a space before common that now belongs only to her. With the pulse of the hand, without thinking about it, outlines a new portrait of herself: By taking the objects of his daily life to the canvas, he can see them without fluctuations.
It is a time of enjoyment and delight in which for the first time he can enjoy solitude, he does not have to prove anything to anyone and does not depend on external stimuli. As the days go by, she feels more centered in herself, can perceive their true needs –what your body and heart need–, your wavering anxiety calms down and you find yourself more trained to take care of herself as it deserves
In the past, Marta would have run to try to calm her fears by hiding them under a frenetic activitygoing out every night in search of something that does not exist, prey to an abysmal pendular movement that would once again lock her in on herself.
But the stability that we yearn for cannot come from outside, but arise as an internal reference.
Thanks to painting and the self-care that she finally seeks, Marta has gone waking up his dormant creativity, he has managed to express himself by keeping up with in a free and calm movement. Painting has become the axis that he needed to be able to flow in peace and build a full and peaceful life around him. He has understood that Being healthy consists in unfolding the potentialities that each one of us has inside, in molding them and in accompanying them with affection and respect.