Week 6 & 7 | Cftgroup

SUMMARY

Thank you for your continued efforts and courage with our work together.

Throughout the sessions that we have been working on together we been focusing on the fact that we have many different potentials in our minds. A lot of these are to do with different desires and motives and also different emotions. When emotions come into the mind and body they can organise how we think and want to act. So in this session we looked in more detail at how these different patterns that we call emotions operate within us. So we slowed down and looked at them one at a time, going through the pattern that we will call angry self, the pattern that we call anxious our and the pattern we call sad self. We saw how they all operate quite differently in a way. We also saw that they don’t always get on that well for example angry self may see anxious self as a wimp and anxious self may be frightened of angry self and so they try to suppress each other. Sometimes both angry and anxiety are frightened of sadness. These ideas also brilliantly shown in the Disney film Inside Out which would be well worth you having a look at. We then switched on purpose and quite deliberately into a compassionate mind state and saw that our compassionate mind thinks about situations somewhat differently. In addition our compassionate mind doesn’t fight with or try to suppress our other emotions but works with them. The key is however, that the compassionate mind doesn’t let them run the show.

Once again then we learn to override what we feel in order to stick with our intention and wish, which is to act compassionately and wisely in the world.

So congratulations on continuing this journey and deepening your understanding.

Just a few notes for this week:

Personal Practice

Try looking at beliefs of your emotions, and what the compassionate-self’s perspective is using the handout.
Please find on this page the recording of one of the exercise we did, which was on compassion for ourselves.
Remember doing these exercises can bring us into touch with our own personal struggles, which can be overwhelming at times, and that is not your fault. Try to see if you can bring your compassionate self to your struggles during these times.
Finally, see if you can notice times during the week where you have thought of our sessions or tried to do some of the strategies suggested in our sessions. These can be both good and not so good experiences, but it is so helpful to notice and explore what happened. You can use your workbook to write anything down.