Emotional Management through Mindfulness

When we talk about managing emotions and mindfulness, many people don't see a connection between the two topics. They think they are separate issues.

But that's a misconception. They are interconnected. Let's understand this.

Mindfulness is a training to move from a state of semi-consciousness to a state of full awareness. Through this training, you broaden your perception. You start to notice things that, before, with a scattered and undisciplined mind, you didn't notice. You not only perceive outside of you, but also introspect within yourself.

Many think that the most important benefit of mindfulness is to relax, to control stress and anxiety. But, as researchers, including Fred Kofman, assert, the greatest benefit is the possibility of objectifying one's own thoughts.

Once you can observe your own thoughts, you can operate on them. You can do something about them. In this way, you are tackling stress at its root, at the source.

You have the ability to operate on thoughts and emotions.

This also means "choosing" thoughts and emotions: this serves me, it helps me; this prevents me from reaching where I want to go, or from being who I want to be.

When you are fully identified with your thoughts, they take over you. When you train to make your thoughts objects, you have the possibility to align them, to perceive if they are based on facts or interpretations and fantasies, and to decide about them. It's not them deciding about you, but you deciding about them.

As Fred puts it, the practice of mindfulness turns you into the observer of your own thoughts and emotions, allowing you to work on them. Without this distance, you will continue to follow patterns of circumstantial outcomes regarding stress.

Fred gives the example of a three-year-old child. At this age, it's not possible to work on their thoughts and emotions. The child is so attached to them that they cannot perceive them. Many of us, at different times, have the same experience as a three-year-old child.

Fred recounts that once he entered a movie theater, sat down, and found it strange that the film was very dark. Suddenly, he realized he hadn't taken off his sunglasses.

We look at something with glasses on and don't realize we're wearing glasses. Through the glasses, we see in the same way that we see through our ideas and emotions. We behave like victims and don't realize it because we are fixated on a certain story. We don't let go of certain beliefs that harm us because we don't realize that we are fixated on a single way of seeing.

In the movie "Untold," when tennis player Mardy Fish goes to play against Roger Federer, his wife tells him, "You don't have to play." Only then does he realize it, because the pattern he had in mind was to "endure everything."

Mindfulness can function as a process of emotional management, creating conditions for you to look at your "mental program" and see where it's going wrong and causing pain, where there's a misaligned piece. With this awareness as an observer, it's easier to operate by normalizing the mental program.

This is ancient wisdom knowledge associated with neuroscience and cognitive science. The mind has the ability to observe itself, what we call metacognition. Thanks to this, we can work on our internal content.

Awareness is the ability to realize. An animal realizes many things. Plants realize where the light comes from and turn towards it. We, humans, realize that we realize. That's the big difference. That's why we can change, transform, and shape thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

Thanks to this, we can decide and define not only about our present but also about our future. Also because of this, we have doubts and existential conflicts that plants and animals do not have.

Fred has a very good podcast, "Meditar a Consciência" (Meditating Consciousness). In episode 29, he says: "Consciousness precedes all experience, just as the sea precedes every wave."

What does this mean? Consciousness is like a blank movie screen onto which all our experiences are projected, whether physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, fantasies, or memories. When the projection of a film ends, the screen returns to its state without having been affected by the images. The same happens with our consciousness.

That's why the ancient wisdom of the East says that at the bottom of your consciousness, there is total serenity. Movement exists only on the surface. The deeper, the more serene. Diving into the sea is another example. On the surface, the noise of the waves. At the bottom, the silence.

So, everything that is projected onto the screen of consciousness is completely movable and relative. It is not definitive or absolute. All experiences are a pattern of vibration of consciousness. Just as they appear, they disappear.

Sometimes, however, we become fixated on certain experiences without realizing it. When this happens, the experience affects our body, mind, and spirit.

With this understanding and practice of detachment, we can sit in the armchair of our internal cinema and watch the movie playing on the screen of our mind without being altered by the images. We can decide to keep watching continuously, pause the movie at some point, stop it altogether, get up and leave, or switch to another movie.

We can choose because we are not the movie. If we don't fixate on anything, the images will succeed each other. They will arise, linger for a while, and then disappear. This is emotional management through mindfulness training: developing an open mind that does not fixate but flows.

*Berenice Kuenerz is a psychotherapist, Life & Business Coach, and mindfulness instructor.