Everyday life is filled with opportunities to become emotionally reactive:
- You perceive a sales clerk at your favorite clothing shop as rude or dismissive.
- Your spouse asks you to be quiet while he or she is on the phone.
- Your colleague at work is late in delivering his or her part of a group project.
The events that trigger our emotional reactivity are insignificant. They may be big or small, and they can occur with perfect strangers as well as those you care deeply about.
In fact, anything that hijacks our attention without our conscious choice can trigger an emotional reaction within us. And this is because most of us do not yet understand that we have the power to direct our attention (and therefore our creative energy) on purpose.
What Causes Emotional Reactivity
If you examine the root of emotional reactivity, you’ll discover that it stems from an experience of powerlessness.
We experience ourselves as being at the mercy of those around us. And so, when the people in our lives are appreciating and valuing us, we feel happy. But if they’re short-tempered, preoccupied, or concerned at the moment only with themselves, we have a negative reaction.
This has much deeper consequences than the momentary discomfort of losing our cool. Our emotional reactivity leaves us with utterly no control over the quality of our own life experience.
The following 3-step process will help you restore your energy when something or someone has caused you to react emotionally. And it will also show you how to calibrate your vibration purposefully, so you’re less far likely to lose your balance in the future. By learning to master your own personal energy field, you’ll show up in your life the way you intended: not as a reactor, but as a powerful creator.
Step #1: Acknowledge that because you are the one who is emotionally reactive, you are the one who must rebalance your energy.
While it’s certainly easy to blame our emotions on other people, doing so casts us in the role of victim. It’s far more powerful to accept that, whatever the trigger was, the emotional reaction is ours to deal with. And, because the imbalance is within our own body and mind, we alone have the ability to neutralize it.
Step #2: Use your breath to connect with the core emotion that’s being triggered.
Your breath is the bridge between the physical and non-physical aspects of you. By breathing into the sensations of discomfort in your body, you can often trace them back to one particular, underlying emotion.
For example, if you felt emotionally reactive when your boss didn’t acknowledge you on an accomplishment, take a moment to unpack the feelings that were triggered. Maybe you felt overlooked, unimportant, unworthy, or even unlovable. Allow yourself to breathe into this emotion, even if it seems out of proportion with the situation that triggered it.
Allow yourself to feel the intensity of the emotion fully and completely, without describing or labeling it. Simply be with it with all of your attention, and feel the unique frequency of its vibration. As you grant this feeling permission to exist – and as you embrace it rather than resist it – you’ll notice that it begins to dissipate and release.
Step #3: Having identified the vibration at the heart of your emotional reaction, ask yourself how you’d like to feel instead.
You may not have control over what other people say or do, but you always have control over your response. This means you have the ability to decide how you want to show up in each important aspect of your life. Do you want to drag the same emotional reactivity with you into your next new encounter? Or will you choose to show up embodying the energy of what you desire?
Using your breath, allow yourself to connect to the bottom-line feeling or energy that you’d like to feel in this situation. Is it joy? Confidence? Empowerment? Love? Whatever emotion you’re reaching for, breathe its essence into your heart. Imagine filling up every fiber of your being with this frequency. Allow the vibration of this energy to permeate your entire body and radiate out through every cell of your being. And know that this new frequency will magnetize like energies to it.
In every moment, you have the ability to deliberately choose the direction of your own thoughts. You can decide in advance of each interaction and situation who you want to be and how you want to feel – regardless of circumstance. Begin exercising this basic energetic control over your life, and you’ll naturally find yourself being less emotionally reactive.
Christy Whitman is an energy healer, Master Certified Law of Attraction Coach, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Having It All: A Woman’s Guide to Unlimited Abundance. Her latest book, The Desire Factor: How to Embrace Your Materialistic Nature to Reclaim Your Full Spiritual Power is on sale now at www.thedesirefactor.com. Christy communicates with, and for, The Quantum Council, a collection of non-physical ascended masters who desire to help humanity understand that we are divinely designed for well-being, abundance, success, and loving relationships. You can take the first step in aligning with and creating your desires by participating in a free 30-day program called Watch Your Words: Click here to learn more; www.watchyourwords.com.
