There are 5 emotions --the Emotional Love Warriors-- that I regularly cultivate in myself for an amazing loving marriage with my husband. (I’ve already shared 2 in depth, curiosity and certainty. Onward to the 3rd!) Yep, like plants in my garden, I water, weed, and feed these emotions so they grow stronger and stronger and I can reap their fruits regularly. I want you to know how to do the same. Of the 5, I want to say this is the most important: Calm. Because CALM allows us to see clearly, choose wisely, and love freely. For HSPS, It’s like the Grand Entryway that gains us access to the most deeply loving, deeply wonderful, deeply powerful parts of our trait (Yes, you are ALL THAT!). (Of course, I think each of the 5 Emotional Love Warriors are the most important! Check the others out here.) You’ve heard me say it before, but it’s worth hearing it again: when stress is high, emotional intelligence is low. And when emotional intelligence is low, so is connection. This is especially true when you’re Highly Sensitive. When not feeling somewhere in the realm of calm, we become much more irritable, easily hurt, more judgmental, much more easily triggered by small things -- and way less capable of handling the big things effectively. When you are overwhelmed or stressed or anxious, not only does it feel bad, but it sets off a vicious mental-emotional cycle: you are likely to have a more critical set of thoughts and opinions about yourself, and a more critical set about your partner, too. These critical thoughts are like having a wild tiger inside you that's out to get you!!! They, obviously, add more stress to your system, taking you further from calm. And connection. But when calm, you likely have very different thoughts and opinion about yourself and about your partner--your whole life even---way more positive ones! Because your emotions feed your thinking, just as your thinking leads to your feelings.
Calmness is the cure. Accessing CALM gives us HSPs back the ability to navigate love and life from our natural --almost magically unerring and uncanny--wisdom, perception, attunement, and emotional intelligence. It gets us back to thinking more highly of ourself and our partner, seeing what's going well and ENJOYING ourselves and our marriage so much more. Like other emotions, You can access
alm on purpose. There’s so much you can do to get back to and maintain calm.
Here are a couple primary routes to take to do this:
1. One of the primary ways I help clients do this is by teaching them to guide their brain--so that it stops being an internal tiger, freaking them out, and wreaking internal and external havoc--and starts being more like a soothing, reliable, stabilizing force, grounding them in the feeling they WANT to feel.
Being the guide, the steward of your own mind is essential for living from calm…. because the way you perceive and think about things IS the source of how calm or stressed you feel.
So when you feel less than calm, you can ask yourself 3 really simple powerful questions to help steer your mind towards more calm:
What am I thinking right now?
Is that thought/worry really true?
Is there another way to look at this situation that might be equally true (or equally likely) or truer (or more likely), and that would feel better?
2. You can also do a lot --and should!--by working directly with the body. The emotion of CALM in particular is very accessible by using your body in various ways: Go for a jog, or nature walk. Meditate. Personally, doing deep breathing is one of my favorites. There's much more to this, of course. I go deeper and more broadly into accessing calm--and therefore love--in this week’s podcast episode: The HSP Mind Body Heart Slump. Have a listen here. There’s a lot more you can do, and may need to do, to be able to truly reliably return to calm, and live from there the majority of the time. There's no getting around the fact that you've got to teach your body-mind to stop thinking it’s always under threat (and yours does if you aren't feeling calm much). You've got to teach it that it’s safe. It’s worth every effort to do so, so you can make calm your HOMELAND. Your heart, your mind, your marriage, will reap the deep rewards...tenfold.
With Love, Hannah
P.S. Without first getting to a state of CALM, it’s incredibly hard to guide yourself into the other feeling states from which thriving love is built and maintained. (Like connection, security, and admiration.) And you won’t be able to access calm on the regular if your mind is allowed to run un-shepherded, like a wild tiger inside you! When you come coach with me you'll learn how to tame the tiger, and help her become more like a purring kitten. (Don't worry, you'll also learn to discern when letting the tiger out is appropriate and in service to love)!
ne with you, you'll know how to always calm any upset-- and even to avoid it all together most of the time. CALM will become your homeland. So you'll be able to consciously choose how you want to interact with your partner, and have so much more access to your ability to love and to FEEL LOVED like you want to. Email me at Hanna@lifeisworthloving.com to set up a time to chat about getting started.