Leaning Into is the habit of consciously focusing and observing an emotion. The goal of leaning into is to help you become more acclimated to experiencing feeling without fixing, suppressing, ignoring or otherwise dismissing what is there for you.
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What does Leaning Into Involve?
Leaning Into involves training your conscious focus to the sensations you feel in your body while deliberately holding a hand on that spot and breathing into the experience of how that emotion feels. You will find yourself becoming more clear on what the feeling is, what its message is, and you will feel more capable of allowing it to be a part of your everyday experience.
What do I Gain By Doing This?
Stuffing, avoiding and other dismissing our emotions is a habit we developed in response to the toxic and deficient experiences we had with our parents and trusted authorities. We discarded what we felt in order to avoid being attacked for having feelings, for “being a burden”, and for “taking up space”. We found that our parent was pleased with us when we didn’t voice our emotions, and this taught us (mistakenly) that our feelings cause people hurt and harm.
Reality is, though, that the parent is wrong. Their reaction to our emotions was the problem. They were emotionally arrested and incapable of connecting with and respecting our emotions. That was not our fault, as we did not cause their underdeveloped sense of emotional maturity. That was caused long before we came into the picture.
Clients often discover themselves:
- Experiencing greater comfort and connection with yourself, alleviating the emptiness and lack of “knowing yourself”
- More courage in voicing what you feel
- More self-respect
- More peace as you grieve and ally yourself with your feelings
- Greater ability to handle disruptive emotions and be able to self care
- Less shame and more confidence in who you are
- Deeper sense of “mattering” and being valuable
Let’s Do This
Check out my video on applying this process: