Radical Mindfulness is not an optional part of health

We are often taught to avoid dark emotions. We push to "let them go" or "think more positively," but these reactive strategies simply entrench them more and more in our bodies.

Instead, I've found that processing and digesting our emotions is much more effective. It's a process that I call Radical Mindfulness, and it is the foundation of the Guided Mindfulness practice that I use with every single client.  

A traumatic experience can literally block important functions in your body and mind. Allowing your body to digest that experience empowers your innate wisdom to:

1. Break that experience down into pieces,
2. Absorb what is nourishing from the experience,
3. S--t out what's no longer needed. :)

Radical Mindfulness is using your mind to feel and be curious about your emotions rather than scared of them. And by allowing yourself to feel, you are allowing your digestive organs to break them down and process them through your body in a way that is exactly like digesting food.

(And for any fellow astrology nerds, there are a lot of factors at play in this process, but it's the Virgo part of you that is doing the processing, digesting, and distributing.)

Radical mindfulness can at first feel foreign and hard, but it is an essential part of joyfully living your life as a human.

As part of my work with clients, we spend time practicing this skill via guided mindfulness meditations. It supercharges the actions of the plants and directly connects you to your own sense of intuition.

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Version 2:

Digesting emotions is nutritious, but first you have to chew (a little).

What if you didn’t chew your food? How would your stomach feel having received no help from your teeth? Not good.

Chewing is a critical part of your digestion and, interestingly, it is uniquely under your control. Most of your digestion is unconscious. You don’t have to order your pancreas to squirt out enzymes. But you do have to set your mind to chewing. If you don’t, your gut will suffer.

Your reward for this partnership of conscious effort and unconscious intestinal digestion is nutrition. When you eat a meal, your body is able to extract the nutrition you need and release into the stool what you don’t.

Our digestive system is built to process emotions in a similarly nutritious way. Any stressful experience can be learned from; some aspects of trauma or grief can help us get stronger or grow as a person. Proper digestion of emotions can extract what is healthy from our experiences and release what is not.

As long as you chew, that is.

What do I mean?

Chewing is mindfulness—giving your emotions conscious attention rather than stuffing them, left to fester inside like a rotting piece of meat.

Examples of effective chewing:

• I feel sad. (PERIOD. [Chewing action: allowing self to feel sad])
• I feel angry and I feel it in my chest. (END OF STORY! [Chewing action: notice the fire of anger in the chest without punching anyone])
• I feel guilty and ashamed. (IT’S OK TO FEEL GUILTY AND ASHAMED. IT’S PART OF YOU RIGHT NOW AND ITS IMPORTANT TO HONOR HOW YOU ARE FEELING. [Chewing action: pretending the shame is an upset child that you’re holding for a few minutes, without blame or problem solving])

Examples of not chewing:

• Positive affirmations (“I feel sad so I’m going to tell myself I’m amazing!”).
• Distracting with behavior (“I feel lonely so I’m going to eat a pint of ice cream in Cancun.”)
• Obsessing about the situation (“I feel angry because my boss is such an a—hole!”)

Don’t get me wrong…the situation can be important, and we all love ice cream. But honoring your emotions enough to give them a little bit of focus is a critical step that so many of us forget. We aren’t taught how to digest emotions as children and we are marketed products to make us avoid our emotions as adults.

But just like you can drive a car and chew your french fries at the same time, you can learn to chew your emotions enough to avoid getting stuck in them; to avoid stuffing them to fester and corrode.

With your Intuitive Health Consulting paid membership comes one free Guided Mindfulness meditation session every six months. In a 30 minute phone call, I guide you through simple steps to shift your emotional digestion and thereby change your relationship with yourself.

Yours in mastication,

-Travis