“Recently, I heard in a video that when you can control your emotions inside, you can face any situation. And when you find the reason behind the feeling, it will help you feel the feeling better. So, how do I identify the reason for a feeling within me?”

A coachee shared this with me in a coaching session earlier today. As we continued the conversation, she was surprised to realise that one does not really need to know the reason behind a feeling to feel it! Oftentimes the reasoning becomes a hindrance to actually feeling the emotion that is emerging, as the need to reason was in fact masking a deeper fear. These insights left her feeling clearer about how she can reclaim choice in a relationship by honouring her own feeling space in the here and now.

While this is not the first time, I have encountered this kind of pattern in a coachee, I am struck by the scale of distortion and misunderstanding when it comes to how one looks at the emotional landscape and engage with it in the relational space.

Earlier this month, I had written about how relationships affect our health and well-being here. Keeping this context in mind, I feel it is a need of our times to prioritise three things when it comes to emotions and relationships.

1. Awareness of our relationships with our emotions.Being aware of our personal patterns of relating to our emotions will give us a hint about the inner drama that we play in our lives. This awareness is the first step to own up to our choices (conscious or unconscious) that co-create our reality in the relational space.
2. Integrating practices that can enable us to experience the emotions fully and freely within us.Yōga Āchārya Śrī T Kriṣṇamacārya speaks about how a healthy person is one who is able to experience all rasas as they emerge within and then return to a space of śāntam (equanimity) without any residues. Many of the somatic practices in Indic traditions are designed to create the conditions for the practitioner to allow for this free flow of prāna and rasās within. It also enables the body to awaken and access its innate healing potential.
3. Seeking the right guidance and creating safe spaces for practiceIn my experience as a facilitator, I’ve found that self-reflective group spaces enable the conditions in which I am able to open up and be vulnerable about my patterns and challenges without fear of judgment. It helps one to know that beneath the apparently unique issues in our lives, there is a universality to the pathos. And being in the right kind of space creates the opportunity for one to see oneself through the others. Each one becomes a mirror held with compassion for one another.

It is this realisation that has inspired me to initiate the first online cohort of ‘Relationship As Mirror‘ program starting today. I’m excited and looking forward to learning and journeying together with this group for next four weeks.

I also take this opportunity to acknowledge the various mentors who have been my guiding lights in developing a deeper understanding of myself in the past 20 years.

Gratitude and praṇāms:

• To all my mentors in Chinmaya Mission who introduced me to the application of ideas from Bhagavad Gita and Vedanta in inspiring ways as a teenager and graduate student that motivated me to pursue the path to discover ways to integrate ancient wisdom in a contemporarily relevant manner in my life.
• To Sujata Ameya who introduced me to the way of looking at relationships as a mirror for the first time in my early 20s through unique experiential activities that she designed in her programs.
• To Saraswathi Vasudevan from whom I first learnt to work with my body and breath and apply the principles of Yoga Sutras in a self-transformative way.
• To Raghu Ananthanarayanan and Ritambhara Sangha who has been instrumental in my healing and self-transformative journey as a coach and facilitator over the past seven years and from whom I continue to study and practice Yoga Sutras and Antaranga Yoga practices.
• To Usha Pink Mist Retreat who introduced me to the world of energy work, Seth, and trans-generational healing in the past five years, and the Sacred Paths community with whom I continue to practice and learn and grow.

If you resonated with the ideas mentioned in this post, I’d love to hear your thoughts from your own life experiments in the relational space. Look forward to reading them in the comments or as personal messages.