Align Your Inner World with Your Outer World 🧭

Suffering as a mismatch between expectations and one's experience.

A lot of the people I work with struggle with a mismatch between what's objectively "true" and their subjective experience. 
This is often described by people saying something like "I have a great partner, good job with good money, and hobbies, but something just feels off". We're disconnected from our "inner" world and thus out of alignment with our "outer" world.

In my experience, a big reason for this is an inability to contact an emotional experience fully.
What I do with people when I encounter this pattern is work on contacting their emotional experience, befriending it, and listening to what it has to say. 
Once this has happened, a release, often letting go of tension and releasing more motivation and energy (a client recently told me "I finally feel motivated again to look for jobs and to do things!") happens. 

After a while, this process becomes more natural and fluid, at times happening by itself. 
With more practice, this ends up being an ongoing dance: an emotional experience arising, it being paid attention to, it dissolving. 
Being able to enact this in real-time for most experiences has been one of the most amazing skills I've learnt in the past ten years! 

One of the things I wished I would have realized earlier is the value of having someone else teach me these skills, hold me accountable in their execution and co-process & co-regulate my emotions with me. 
Mirror neurons are neuronal networks that are activated when we engage with another person and connect with them. 
From an emotional perspective, they're empathy: feeling your feelings as mine and vice versa. 
Having someone by your side who's invested in the regulation of their emotional system and can hold your emotions as well as theirs, allows you to dig into strong and overwhelming feelings, uncover them, and process them so you can release them. 

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