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Below are 5 “keys” to recovering your inner sense of well-being, and coping with the emotional rollercoasters of life.

1. Live who you are. You would think this is “oh-duh” but apparently not. Most people do not know who they truly are, much less live who they are. So you are not alone, if you have forgotten your real self. This key is called “prevention” by conventional therapists. It is what you have to do on a regular basis to prevent yourself from sinking into an emotional whirlpool. This is about letting your inner child out, and doing more “self-love”. If you have trouble doing this, consider a plant. A plant needs a certain amount of water and sunlight, and a particular kind of soil in order to thrive. Self-love is allowing yourself your “conditions to thrive”. It is self-care and self-nurture on a regular basis. When you “flower”, you naturally bring more beauty and love into world. You need to live who you are, at least most of the time, in order to get your happy face back on. This is your number one responsibility in your life. It is no one else’s job to do this for you. For example, maybe you secretly want to be a dancer, but are forcing yourself to be in a “serious” bank teller job. This just might kill you, if you don’t make sure somehow to get lots of dancing in your life.

2. Use your healthy coping tools. This key is called “intervention” in regular therapy circles. We all need a few healthy coping or “intervention” strategies in our toolkit, for life WILL throw at least a few major stressful life events our way. When it does, we need to know what we can do to cope. And no, alcohol and drugs don’t count. Know what works for you that is also healthy. For example, you make sure you get in a power walk or some form of exercise at the end of a stressful day at work to allow the energy of stress to move through, and not stay in, your body.

3. Practice scaling your emotions. Scaling your emotions is a way to measure how light or heavy they are. On a scale of “0 to 10”, with 0 equals no anger or stress, and 10 equals maybe rage or panic attack, know what your “2-5” especially is. Whether irritability, frustration, annoyance, mildly worried or afraid. And know how those variations of emotion feel in your body, when they are in the 2 to 5 range, BEFORE you get to higher numbers on your scale. Begin using your coping tools then. Don’t wait.

4. Know your emotion constellations. In the night sky, a constellation is a group of stars that go together. Each of your emotions is like its own constellation. Within “anger” or any other emotion constellation will come certain thoughts, scents, visual cues, sounds, tastes, bodily sensations, physical environments, and even secondary emotions. Know what these are for you, so that you can be very conscious of your emotional landscapes. Know what your calm constellation is, for that will give your hints about how to bring your body into a state of calm. Those will remind you of many healthy coping tools you can use to prevent yourself from feeling overwhelmed. Maybe you like to imagine being at the beach, with the sounds of seagulls, the scent of salty air, the taste of coconut on your lips, and the feel of your toes sinking into the warm, wet waves. Perhaps aromatherapy helps you at work, with the scent of lavender on your desk.

5. Re-direct your body into the feeling you choose in that moment. Your body has a hard time being in calm and stress at the same time. If you are breathing slowly and deeply, you can’t breathe in that shallow fast way you do when you’re anxious, at the same time. Your body will calm because you are directing it to do so by breathing the way you do naturally when you are calm. If you are thinking thoughts that are consistent with feeling safe, in control or even upbeat, then your body will steer in that direction, which is why constructive self-talk, that you really believe, usually works every time!

Now that you have the keys to getting back the sense of well-being in your life, use them! And remember, the most important key is to “be you!”

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Valerie Varan, MS, LPC, NCC is a holistic psychotherapist and author of the newly released book, Living in a Quantum Reality: Using Quantum Physics and Psychology to Embrace Your Higher Consciousness. After an initial career in the environmental engineering field, and much prompting from the Universe, Valerie obtained her master’s degree in counseling psychology, worked traditionally for several years, and then went into private practice in 2006. Finally synthesizing her love of quantum physics, psychology and ancient wisdom, she has come to specialize in helping spiritually awakened people embrace their transpersonal and quantum worldview; cope with their, often unexpected, holotropic states of consciousness; and pursue their spiritual visions for a more conscious society.

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The mind, emotions and body form a triangle of energies that the ego senses as itself. This is the ego body. When these three aspects of self are connected and relatively balanced, they form a container for the larger self, that many call the soul, to pour through for loving purpose.

Imagine you are at the center of this triangle. To see it in your mind’s eye, draw a triangle with a point in the middle. At the first point of the triangle, label it “physical body”. At the second point, label it “Emotion”. And at the third point, put the word “Mind”. Then at the point in the center, write the word “soul”.

Think of times when you have felt centered and balanced. Note that you will have centered your sense of self at this point in the middle of this energetic triangle. Here, you are the observer-feeler. Not a disembodied head or heart. Not a dissociated body. But from this point, you are using all three aspects of ego self, as the appendages of soul that they are in this physical plane. You feel your bodily sensations, your thoughts and ideas, and your emotional responses to these ideas and observations. You are using your heart to navigate the direction in which your soul longs to move. You are using your head to help you get there. And you are using your body for the expression of soul it is intended to be.

This state of consciousness is where you want to be to feel centered and balanced, and a vessel for your soul awareness. This is the ultimate state for mind-body awareness.

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They pick up the signals being emitted by you, other people (and things), and you feel these signals. Your energy field registers their energy field, and you have a vibratory response (aka emotion) to what you feel. Emotions that feel pleasant are a result of your field and theirs being compatible. The peaks and valleys of the energy waves synch up, and resonate with one another. Unpleasant emotions stem from energy waves coming together that are not in resonance. When your heart is open to everyone around you like a rose in summer, you open your energy field to all of their energy. So you feel all of their energy. And it can feel like too much, especially when you haven’t shored up your own field. When you internalize, you literally allow their energy to enter your being. Worse is when you can no longer distinguish your own energy field from that of other people. It is only your belief that you have to let their energy into your field in order to feel compassion, understanding and intuitive guidance. Technically, you can learn to read them without displacing your field. And you will be much more effective when you do so. Learning to set energetic boundaries helps you discern when and how much external energy to let into your field. Paying attention to who you are, and prioritizing how love and life seek to move through you as you is essential. In the meantime, qigong teaches you to use imagery to set such a boundary. For example, you can see yourself enclosed in a violet egg of protection when you are out in public. Imagine the boundary, then go about your day. Or, as Richard Bartlett, DC, NC says, “set it and forget it!” Since energy flows in the direction of your heart and focused thought, when you open your field, you literally invite all other energy to come in. But you can choose when and how long to keep your field open, and to whom. When your heart and mind tune into your children, you will feel them. When you tune into your coworkers, you will feel them. In turn, they can feel you, usually subconsciously, and will respond to what they sense as a loving energy coming into them. That is why even strangers will feel drawn to opening up their hearts around you. Intuition has many psychic layers. The first of these is the ability to tune into others’ emotions as an empath does. But you can also tune into thoughts, physical pain or blockage, or other layers of individual experience, as you decide to do. You can also tune into collective emotion, thought, or pain. When you do, you may not even be around anyone physically, but you will feel the collective grief or anger of humanity, the thoughts of a nation, or the pain of a society. (According to MIT physicist Claude Swanson, the ability to tune into collective forces involves nonlocal energy fields called torsion, but suffice it to say, these are energies that interconnect us as one in some kind of broad and “spooky action at a distance”.) Being an empath can literally be a pain. But when you learn to balance this gift of sensitivity, it no longer has to overwhelm you. You can then use your gift for healing or whatever purposes inspire you.

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Energy healing gets a bad rap from western medicine. Many of my clients feel alienated from physicians who bash it when their patient wants to incorporate it into their healing protocol.

A client of mine recently had his surgery cancelled by his doctor simply because he was asking questions about how fast the cancer in his body was growing and was considering his holistic options. The doctor told him he didn’t want to risk that his time would be wasted and told the client he felt disrespected, and therefore was taking his surgery off the schedule for the following week.

Most of these clients just feel it important to add holistic approaches to the western protocol in a complementary fashion. Most are not opting for alternative. Those who do, usually want to try less invasive procedures first to see if it works, when they believe they have time to do the western protocols if the holistic methods aren’t working fast enough.

A friend of mine was such a case in point. She tried to shrink her breast cancer with nutritional treatments, positive thinking and imagery, distant energy healing, prayer and other healthy activities. But the tumor continued to grow. And then another one appeared as well. So she did have the surgery, chemo and radiation, but continued to do her other healing strategies as well. Luckily she is now in remission, but as it turns out she had “the bad gene”. And it makes sense that she needed a wide toolbox to treat her cancer.

But I remember when she first called me, months after her diagnosis, to talk to me about what I thought she should do. She sounded surprised when I told her she could incorporate the holistic things she was doing along with the surgery, chemo and radiation that were recommended by her physician. “Oh. You can do them together?” she responded, clearly letting that new frame of mind sink in. I can tell she’s glad she did it all. (And by the way, she couldn’t speak highly enough of Traumeel as a homeopathic form of vibrational remedy. She said she used the liquid for her inside healing, to rebuild her physical tissue, and used the ointment as an outside thing she could apply, like if she severely bruised herself or something. She said her tissues were healing so quickly that the downside was it was harder to remove her port. She also was glad she incorporated lots of fresh squeezed carrot juice and barley powder into the hallelujah diet she followed to restrict her sugar intake.)

I think most of the doctors are okay with their patients adding a good diet, but most don’t really bring it up with their patients. I know that was true in the case of my husband. He is now in remission, thank God, but he needed surgery and a long round of chemotherapy for his stage 3c colon cancer. I was the one who asked his highly respected oncologist about any nutritional recommendations. And the only thing he could tell me was to check with the dietitian. The dietitian herself seemed to know very little beyond most of our common sense. She told my husband to make half of his plate raw foods and add about 5-6 Brazil nuts to his diet for a daily dose of selenium.

So though nutrition is not considered a bad thing, energy healing seems to be a taboo phrase among the conventional medical establishment. I think it is because of two things. One, it doesn’t work as predictably as their scientifically studied protocols. Two, they don’t understand how it could possible work in the first place.

How does energy medicine work? For that answer we need to look to physics, especially quantum physics and its related research. I’ll give you the short less technical version. Underlying all tissue, bone, and structural components of the body is an energy field. There are multiple layers to this field, which create a matrix. So, the energy field is really a matrix of various kinds of energy, carrying patterns of information at differing frequency levels (that is, different speeds of vibration) as it roller coasters along in waves or currents. When we change the pattern of energy underneath, the physical structure of the body changes.

The more physical the structure, the slower the waves travel; the less material, the faster. The slowest energies are the electrical and magnetic fields that we refer to as electromagnetism. Those are about the only fields known to western medicine. Those energies take time and space to travel over distances, so their effects seem to be mostly local. Physicians are using electromagnetic energies in their treatments. They just don’t see it as such, when they use equipment to listen to how your heart is beating or to see how your brain waves are moving, or to take pictures inside of your body. They may not call it that, even when they are using pulsed electromagnetic fields to speed up the rate of healing on your broken leg bone. But that is energy medicine by its very definition. Energy medicine or energy healing is the use of one or more types of energy specifically in trying to heal a condition of some sort. It can work with both physical and psychological conditions because technically, in the world of the quantum, it is all really just energy anyway.

Let me give you more background on that. No matter how closely they zoom into physical tissue (or any material object), what physicists find is over 99% empty space. Recently, on the television series Cosmos, it was illustrated this way. If we were standing in a huge Gothic cathedral, the space would be like that size. But the particle stuff would be only about the size of a speck of dust floating through a single ray of light entering from an above stained glass window. They find there is more power or energy in the empty space, mysteriously enough, than there is in the particle of matter found in the nucleus or in the electrons which whirl around it, as planets to a sun. No matter how closely they continue to zoom in, they find the same thing over and over again. Wierd, huh? It’s the slowness in which the energy travels that makes it appear dense and physical to our eyes, a type of optical or perceptual illusion. It works because “we”, the material aspect of our body, are traveling at about the same speed as that which we are looking at. We are linked into a state of awareness at this slower band of frequency.

So we can use electrical and magnetic energies in our healing. And we are still in our infancy stage when it comes to knowing how.

We can also use nonlocal energies in our healing. These are energies that seem to defy the laws of space and time. Quantum edge physicists are studying these fields as torsion. Torsion fields seem to travel somehow faster than the speed of light, because action happens instantaneously. What happens to something over there (say to a particle in London) also affects its sister particle (say in Los Angeles), at exactly the same time. It is as if there is a symphony taking place, and those two notes are played in unison, while led by some invisible Conductor, in a larger field of synchronous play. Torsion fields are theorized as responsible for this supposedly impossible “spooky action at a distance”. Associated with the spinning motion of subatomic particles, they are implicated in the nonlocal effects of distant energy healing, remote viewing, extrasensory perception, psychic senses, intuition and prayer.

The first wave of physicists studying energy healers have found that they radiate measurable magnetic fields way more than the average person. These fields are variable in the frequencies that are generated, and are believed to play a role in the healing. Magnetic fields from the heart have been measured out to a distance of 15 feet away from the body. The hands seem to be a way of directing the flow of the energy from the healer to the healee in a targeted direction.

The second wave of these scientists have been documenting the role of torsion in energy healing. Also quite relevant is that biophysicists have found that the energy in healthy states of the body is coherent; that is, it is very well organized, in a laser-like spiral pattern. Whereas in unhealthy and diseased states of the body, the energy has become more disorganized, scattered or even chaotic.It seems that energy healers have a highly coherent energy field, upon which the client’s chaotic field can reorganize itself, if the client is open. Such physicists say that there is a archetypal (perhaps soul) or blueprint field of energy or consciousness from which the body is constructed at the level of our atoms and molecules. They believe that energy healing can work by improving the organization in the blueprint field so that it sustains healthy cells and tissue.

Distant energy healing seems to involve magnetic energy, but more importantly perhaps torsion fields of energy, those that have the power to pull scattered states of energy into more coherent and well organized states, which are conducive to health and well-being.

Energy healers say that they, in their own individual ways, go into a state of unconditional love, and that it is the energy of love that heals. They say that love is an energy that synthesizes us back into our pure state of wholeness. And the more they are able to “dissolve” their personal sense of self into this state of love and wholeness, the more effective the healing. I have come to see such pure love as the energy that physicists call the field of quantum consciousness as a whole, the field of “space” out of which matter seems to condense in response to the consciousness (degree of “coherent” love perhaps?) of an observer. (Quantum physicists say it in mathematical terms, that there is a “wave function” that represents all possibles states, and that it is consciousness that “collapses” the wave function into one definite state.)

Energy healers do notice that if the person or healee has any psychological resistance to healing, they will not heal. They have learned that a person’s free will dictates whether or not they heal. I have noticed that often such clients do have reasons, even if they are subconscious reasons, not to heal. In one obvious circumstance, a client may have a pending lawsuit filing for compensation as a result of an accident which left them with many medical bills. If they were to heal, the lawsuit wouldn’t fair as well. But there are many not so obvious reasons that we may choose not to heal. Some of these may be personal reasons. Others may be reasons only known at the higher frequency level of the soul. Like maybe our getting cancer is the will of the soul, because it is in our having cancer that we might be led to find the cure for the world. There seems to be some resonance of this with some who have gone through such tough kinds of illness. They very often say that without their illness they would not have made the kinds of life changes that now feed their soul.

So how would I summarize how energy healing works? I would say that when our field becomes scattered, with all the stressors that we are subjected to, and we end up sick, we can use, if we are open, another’s field as a blueprint for our own field to get back into shape. Literally. The other’s field we would use would be from a person known for generating a highly coherent field (of unconditional love), who has demonstrated their ability to offer energy healing.

We can also use meditation and healing imagery to reorganize our own fields into states conducive for health or healing. It is the state of consciousness we go into that organizes (or not) our fields. When we use whatever imagery (use all the senses, not just visualization) that for us puts us in a state of well-being, peace, calm, but especially a higher frequency of unconditional love, then that imagery can have an immediate or spontaneous effect on our body and its physical condition because it is a coherent field that has the power to organize energy.

We can use tone, sound, music, and other modalities as well which give the effect of restructuring energy fields. No wonder so many of us are tied to our music as a way of coping with daily stuff. It is actually helping to self-heal in little ways that make us feel better.

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 If you have severe trauma, panic, anxiety, depression, or other mental health issue, you may not want to read any further without professional assistance because it is possible for you to get triggered by what I discuss next. Anything I write in this blog is not a substitute for professional psychotherapy. On the other hand, if you feel safe enough to continue reading, I am going to describe what I mean by constellations of emotions, and how you can use this fact of consciousness to take yourself from a negative state to a positive one with the use of multimodal imagery.  

Emotions come in constellations of sensory – sights, sceneries, colors; sounds; tastes; smells; physical sensations, actions, behaviors, environments, situations; thoughts; and secondary emotions. For each particular state, there is a corresponding constellation.

If we want to manage a particular emotion, we may need to better understand what is within our particular constellation of that emotion. When we don’t, the emotion tends to manage us instead of the other way around; we find ourselves reactive, rather than responsive, to what we are feeling, sensing and perceiving. Without our awareness, even an otherwise benign cue can trigger the emotion associated with that cue, whether the aroma of a freshly cut lemon, the color red, or the squawk of seagulls.   I came to this understanding of emotion from my own transpersonal experiences, practices in qigong and other energy healing modalities…..and, after reading about “same-state consciousness”. Same-state consciousness is a term used by consciousness researchers. In their study of varying states of consciousness (e.g. a dream state, the state of being wide awake, the state of being high on drugs, a transpersonal state, an out-of-body or near-death state), consciousness researchers found that each state of consciousness had its own logic and reasoning, its unique way of perceiving reality. They began to call it “same-state consciousness” since the logic seemed to apply only when in that same state. Once out of that state, the logic of the new state appeared to take over. Most of us have had this experience upon awakening from a vivid dream. Within the dream, the events seemed to have made sense. Upon awakening, and reflecting back upon the dream, however, it is then we noticed that the laws of time, space, even gravity, did not apply to the dream experience. And yet, the experience was equally tangible, and therefore, real. This experience applies to other states as well. Within the state, it is completely real and rational. Out of that state, and in another, we can hardly relate to the previous state.   I began to realize after some years in private practice, that this same phenomenon applies to emotion. (And to any state of consciousness, personal or transpersonal.) For example, when we are within a state of anger, the anger has its own way of perceiving, believing, thinking, rationalizing, behaving and experiencing its reality. But once we have calmed down, and take time to reflect back, we can hardly relate to the state we were immersed in while we were angry. The thoughts are different, the body and its motivations are different, we are different. When we are within any facet of fear…..not only anger, but sadness, nervousness, jealousy, shame, guilt, panic or trauma…..we can hardly relate to the thoughts and actions of love. But when we are in a state of love, we can hardly relate to any state that is not of love.   My clients quite frequently have noticed this. They may be venting about something one day, and log their thoughts and emotions. The following week, they often have a radically changed perspective on their circumstances, their marriage, their life. They stare at their earlier worksheet as if struggling to remember what that state was all about. A friend of mine recently had this experience. She read a passage in a book that transformed her mindset in a flash. Unconditional spiritual love overtook her, and its clarity washed away the debris of resentment and frustration that had been lodged in her heart for her partner. Excited about this transpersonal state of love, she rushed over to tell me about it. The way she thought about her significant other no longer resembled the earlier perceptions of that morning. She was elated and full of joy, at least for a couple of days. Such transfigured states rarely last for too long in those of us only beginning to experience our higher wisdom. Thankfully, she took me up on the suggestion that she journal about the state while she was within this blissful place. She did her own constellation of higher love, and was able to retrieve the memory by re-reading her journal later, whenever she was back in the mindset or constellation of anger. Because she had captured love’s logic and reasoning, its felt sense and multimodal presence, she could remember and transport herself back to that place. Such is the power of having awareness around each of our constellations of emotion. Once we are aware of what pulls us into certain states, we can use our realization to consciously take ourselves into the emotion we choose to feel. And emotion is a choice, once we are free from the belief that it isn’t.   The following are some examples to help you construct your own constellations of emotion. In my constellation of anxiety there may be:

1. Visual cues – lightening threatening (e.g. I’m in a metal canoe far from shelter), deadlines about to overtake me (e.g. a multimillion dollar proposal due), parking struggles in downtown venues, a person losing control in their rage
2. Thoughts – I’m (or someone I love) going to get badly hurt or killed, the event will start and I’ll miss it; thought themes around loss of safety, always/never
3. Secondary emotions – sadness
4. Sounds – thunder, braking/honking traffic, raging tones of voice
5. Smells – musty smell of a dirty or unclean environment
6. Tastes – medicine
7. Phyical sensations – tension or headache in my body, movement away from danger, movement toward cleaning and decluttering, movement speeds up

Your turn to draw or write out one of your negative constellations of emotion. If you want to draw it, put a circle in the middle of the page. Within the circle, write out the name of the emotion. Draw rays out from the circle, one for each sense, like taste or sound, one for accompanying thoughts, and one for any secondary emotion. (But then don’t stop there. As soon as you are done, do a constellation for a positive emotion.) If you are doing your anxiety constellation, consider which sights you see in your mind’s eye. Are you envisioning catastrophe? Which scenery triggers you, the sight of a crowd, a hospital, the sight of cars coming too close to yours, seeing people judge you or reject you? Which colors are in this constellation and evoke your nervousness? Which sounds trigger your anxiety? The buzz that reminds you of the dentist’s office? Loud popping noises? Which tones of voice? Any smells? Burnt toast? Fire? Gasoline? Tastes? A food to which you are allergic, or in the past led you to get sick? Physical reactions and situations? Heart beating faster? Avoidance? Numbing? Shallow breathing? Arms swinging? Feet moving? Thoughts and themes? All or nothing? Perfectionism? Shoulds, supposed to’s, have to’s? Danger? Are you overgeneralizing a current situation to all places and times? Are you dwelling on the past, or putting expectations on the future? Secondary emotions? Check for any subtle emotion that is an offshoot to the anxiety or emotion you are working with right now.   Now that you completed the constellation for the negative emotion you selected, it is time to re-orient and transform your emotion to another one of your choosing. For example, many of us choose to go to “calm” after feeling “anxiety or panic”. Visuals – which scenes or sceneries lead you to feel calm? The sight of the beach, with its white sand, turquoise waters, coral reefs? A favorite vacation spot? A peaceful garden? A spiritual or sacred place? People with loving eyes? Seeing yourself connected and loved? Physical sensations – In which ways can you feel your body relaxing, softening, quieting? Perhaps you can feel your inbreath all the way into your hips? Maybe you feel the warmth of the sun against your skin? or the bubbly water massaging your back? Fragrances – Which scents are within your calming scenery? Certain flowers? Salty ocean air? Apple pie baking in the oven? The smell of freshly mowed grass or rich soil in the garden? Tastes – The taste of apples, cinnamon, buttery crust? Pepperment? (Hint: When certain foods are in our calm or happy constellation, we tend to overuse them as comfort foods. Being aware of why you are eating these foods will help you become more mindful of using other avenues to calm rather than habitually using tastes of foods.) Sounds – People laughing and having a good time playing? Birds singing? A gentle breeze caressing the leaves of the trees? A nearby stream on a hot summer’s day? Secondary emotions – As your body calms, does contentment arise? A sense of peace or wellbeing? Gratitude? Thoughts – Be mindful of your new state. Notice if your mind has ceased its chatter. Or, maybe thoughts of gratitude and safety have settled in? You may be thinking “I can”, feeling empowered, and grounding yourself in the present moment.   This is how we use constellations of emotion – through the power of our will (our determined choice of direction) – to respond to our circumstances, rather than to simply react out of base animal instinct. So when you catch yourself in some form of fear, any distressing emotion, choose to bring yourself back to a place of calm or happy. Use the power of multimodal imagery – involving every sense including mind – to redirect your thoughts, your imaginings, your emotions.

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As a way of prevention, we fill our life with all that makes us feel calm, relaxed, at peace, energized, alive and whole. That way, when life stress comes our way, we are so resilient that it takes a lot to get us agitated, irritated, or overwhelmed. To take inventory of your prevention activities, make a list of all of the things you do that bring your body back to a state of relaxation, that bring you happiness or joy, that are fun and make you feel like a kid again. For some of you, it might be tubing, riding your bike, or playing at the ocean. For others, it might be meditating, engaging in a yoga class, or going on a retreat. Eating healthy foods, getting plenty of water and enjoying sufficient sunlight are essential prevention activities for all of us, as is getting some form of exercise or movement daily, even if simply stretching each half hour during our sedentary work day. Poor nutrition, lack of sunlight or vitamin D3, and too much sugar in the body sets up the body to have the same physical symptoms as anxiety, anger and depression, and all of the talk therapy in the world will not help that.

For interventions, we need tools in our tool box that we can bring out and use when we do get stressed or overwhelmed, when our emotion runs high and we want to ratchet it down. The key to this strategy is to bring out the tool and use it when the emotion is still rather low (say 2-5 range out of a 0 to 10 scale). When we wait to use our tools after the emotion gets to say an 8, then it is harder to feel successful at managing the intense emotion because it is increasingly difficult the longer we hold out. Some tools, like avoidance, numbing or use of alcohol, are not a problem if used sparingly and judiciously. But they can lead to mental health disorders when overused and overgeneralized to much of life’s situations.

Here are a few of the most useful holistic and integrative intervention coping tools to manage painful emotions:

• Constructive self talk – Focus on “I can do ___”, “I am strong in this way ___” or in other words, focus on the various ways you are capable, adaptable, resilient, and so forth. Practice daily catching the belief system and self talk that scrutinizes on how you are still lacking or imperfect, and switching it over to the more constructive self talk that is specific to a situation rather than generalized to all times and places. I recommend that my clients take even 5 minutes every evening to reflect on the self talk in the day that was associated with upset, frustration, overwhelm, sadness, anxiety, fear or any other uncomfortable emotion; log the themes (e.g. all/nothing perfectionism, success/failure, good/bad, right/wrong, I can’t, I should, I have to, I’m not, etc.); and then write down more constructive self talk for each theme and situation as needed. Practice the new reframes daily so that they become your new neuroplastic normal way of thinking, because whatever we do repeatedly (including harmful self talk) we tend to become an Olympian at it!
• Constructive imagery – While you are observing and even logging your unconstructive self talk, notice too what you are seeing or imagining in your mind’s eye. We humans tend to scan for danger instead of safety, think of the worst possible catastrophe instead of the most likely or probable, and play such scenes over and over in our imagination. I recommend my clients use relaxing imagery (e.g. favorite vacation spots) to relax, scan for safety cues (e.g. people minding their own business) to reduce fears of danger, use spiritual imagery (e.g. involving spiritual figures) to transcend and heal, use colors to see love energy (e.g. love energy as green) and send it to areas in need of healing (e.g. certain organs in the body, or chaotic areas on the planet), etc. Imagery is more than visualization; it involves all of the senses. So hear the seagulls, taste the coconut, smell the salty ocean, feel the warm water, as well as see the sights.
• Tapping – There are many forms of tapping, which is a method used in energy psychology, and has its basis in eastern medicine and qigong. And unlike acupuncture, energy healing, or reflexology, tapping is free! Tapping on the acupressure points simply helps reset energy meridians or highways. For instance, when you are in panic (9 or 10 on scale of 0 to 10) and it happened so suddenly that you didn’t have a chance to catch the fear at a 3 or 5, you can tap. The panic is an activated state your body may have become an Olympian at doing repeatedly, and so it goes there really fast and efficiently for you. Such energy is like a tightly formed spiral, and the tapping breaks up or diffuses the energy pattern so that you can reset it. Many like to name the activated state, then name the state for the body to get to. “Even though I’m panicking about ___, I’m on my way to calm.” Or, “Even though I feel worthless, I’m on my way to accepting and loving myself unconditionally.” As you tap (e.g. inner eye brow, outer eye brow, cheekbone under the eye, above upper lip, crease above chin, collarbone points, “bra strap” points under the arms, under breast points, inner side of each finger at the base of the nail, around the edge of the ear, top of the head, bottoms of the feet), notice which points feel most relevant to the emotion you are tapping in the moment and do those points most. For example, it might feel that at the inner and outer eyebrow points your body went into chills. The key points will change from situation to situation, and mood to mood. As you go through all of the points, you may discover that you only need one or a few rounds to bring yourself back to a 0 or 1. Brad Yates has a number of EFT tapping videos you can download and watch at http://www.bradyates.net/videos.html.
• Nutrition therapies – Have your doctor test you for the key nutrients that may be lacking and causing some of your symptoms. For instance, fatigue may be a sign of low vitamin D3 or iron; poor memory may be because of insufficient of the B vitamins and omega 3s. Get advice from those knowledgeable in nutrition who can recommend which foods to favor and which to avoid or minimize, who can know how to prescribe supplements so that nutrients are in systemic balance, and who can rule out conditions like hypoglycemia, thyroid or other issues.
• Biofeedback or neurofeedback – This is feedback you can measure in the moment, whether how sweaty your skin is becoming during panic thoughts, or how your brain wave patterns are changing with your practice of constructive self talk and other forms of meditation. Though not every practitioner is created equal, any more than any other doctor, these methods can help especially those who need something more tangible as feedback on how they are progressing. For my clients with symptoms so ingrained that they have effected their personality in a strongly disordered way, neurofeedback has usually helped to some degree, even if family and friends notice the changes before my client does. It has also helped clients with concussions and other brain injuries that are resistant to many other forms of therapies.
• Body-based or somatic awareness – My clients with obsessive-compulsive disorder tend to love this one, particularly “mindfulness of the feet”. In feet mindfulness, you are bringing your destructive mind chatter to a focus on the feet and to any of the sensations you can observe there. Scan the feet for signs of warmth, groundedness, spaciousness, movement, comfort, relaxation, etc. You will likely discover that you can’t think about the imperfections on your face, or the office politics, and the sensations of your feet at the same time. Also, the feet are not usually tainted with anything else, unlike a focus on the breath, which for anxious clients can make them then worry about how imperfectly or shallow they are breathing. Yet breathing into the hip area tends to work, or noticing how the air feels as it enters the nostrils upon inhalation. Heart mindfulness is wonderful for those who don’t have heart issues, but may want to notice which things makes their heart feel expansive rather than contracted.
• Values – In our society, most of us are surrounded by others whose values differ from our own. Yet we try to copy their life choices, and wonder why we don’t feel good when we do so. I recommend that you think of your energy as currency, and reassess how to spend it on what you value most. If you value freedom and exploring others’ cultures, then don’t expect to feel wonderful stuck in a cubicle job more suited to those who value having a set of rules and procedures to follow all day long. If you value spreading love and helpfulness around the planet, then don’t be surprised when you feel drained because you are spending 14-hour days competing against others who value power. Ask yourself what you value. Is it money and prestige no matter the cost? power and leadership? learning and education? service to those less skilled than most? family and friends? Align your energies with your highest values and you will feel abundant in your emotional life.

One more suggestion. Don’t think of painful emotions as negative. For all emotion is useful, even the ones that don’t feel good at the time. Emotion is there for a reason, and it is trying to tell you that you are facing something that is more like you or less like you. If the something is more like you, the emotion will tend to feel pleasant and expanding. If it is less like you, it will feel some measure of pressure, stress, tension, contraction, pain or trauma. Don’t numb to it or ignore it (at least for too long), notice it instead…..when it is mild and just a hint of something wrong. Make the correction that is being called for, deep within your soul. And use your body awareness, especially heart awareness, as your compass. That is the path toward feeling authentic and congruent in your life (the outer self matching or resonating with the inner), and the root of sustained happiness. For instance, if you regularly notice tension at your workplace, and it is on its way to becoming an overwhelming stressor, then give yourself some time to think about the job and what it is that is creating harmful stress. Are you in a field your soul would want for you? If not, perhaps it is time to develop a plan for transitioning into your soul work. Is it just the particular job or position? If so, perhaps the position doesn’t match your skills very well, and it is time for a change. Is your self talk and imagery creating fiction stories about your co-workers that may in fact not be true? Are you assuming and taking things personally? If this is the case, it may be that with a little mental discipline, you can heal the situation. Catch yourself in any emotional perfectionism as well. Some people who have numbed or dissociated from emotion for way too long hold the false belief that negative emotion is bad or weak, and no one is ever supposed to feel a negative emotion ever. Wow, that is a lot of unconstructive self talk! The fact is that being human includes both feel-good and feel-bad emotions because the emotions are the compass that helps you choose that which is consistent with your life path and core energies. Being healthy requires that we have access to the full range of emotion, and feel emotions that are appropriate to a given situation. So remember, prevention in your life is essential. Design your life to be full of a variety of activities that are congruent with who you feel you are deep inside. Choose to be authentic with your innermost self as often as you can to be in balance. Be with others who share your values and life fun. Then for intervention, use your coping tools (sooner rather than later) to deal with life, which for all of us is a test of our choices and values, and therefore the struggle and imperfection of it all. Forgive yourself for mistakes, allow yourself to learn, and discipline your mental energy. That is how you will cultivate resilience and strength, and successfully navigate all swells and storms in the waters that are our emotions.

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