Mastering my Emotions – or are they Mastering Me?????

Dr. E here. I want to expand on the breath today and how the breath is related to mastering my emotions. For me the breath is instrumental in coming back to myself when I get upset, angry, don’t get what I want, feel I am not heard, etc., etc. The breath is the first level to become present to myself. The second level is to become a witness to my emotions and feelings.

Recently I was asked by a client how she could learn to shift out of excruciating discomfort and fear. Here is how I worked with her. Feel free to apply this to yourself in your own life the next time you find yourself in a similar place of emotional discomfort.

Here is the scenario: The client I was working with told me that she had said no to a request her partner had made of her. When he was not “overjoyed” by the no and behaved in a distant way she started feeling rejected – a desolate feeling she is most familiar with. In the midst of her emotional upheaval she requested coaching from me:

“Anna, this is a wonderful opportunity for you to stay grounded in yourself - to observe your feelings and to observe Mark’s behavior. You said no to a request he made. Whatever goes on over there for him is his. Your job right now is to stay with what is so for you. If he gets insistent or distant notice that. He is not right or wrong for it – it’s the way he knows how to be with and handle the situation.

What’s so valuable to see for yourself is the way you get triggered when he doesn’t react the way YOU WANT him to react. This is the very place for you to grow – to notice your feelings that are an automatic reaction to his behavior. He just acts the way he knows how to act or react when he does not get what he wants. You interpret it as being rejected by him.

That’s the work:

1. Breathe!!! Notice your feelings and come back to yourself by presencing that you are all right. Breathe into that sense of all-rightness and feel it in your heart. What I am asking you to do is a conscious creation by you in the moment. You can either continue wallowing in the feeling of being rejected or alter the way you feel because you say so. It’s a choice and declaration in the moment BY YOU. And it’s yours to do – no one else can do it for you.

2. Notice your partner’s behavior and feelings – just notice – let him be. When you don’t like the way he is, notice that. That’s a sign for you to come back to yourself and ground yourself in yourself – breathe!!! Notice your feelings and come back to yourself by presencing that you are all right. Breathe into that sense of all-rightness and feel it in your heart.

Shifting from our addictive feelings to creating the way you want to feel might not be that easy initially given that we all are sooooo used to our habitual ways of being. It takes resolve and everyday practice. However, the more you become the master of your feelings – versus the feelings mastering you!!! – the more you will be at peace with yourself and with what is.”

To the Reader: Use this “shifting of emotion” practice in your life and let me know what is showing up for you. I’d love to hear from you!

About the Breath

Wherever you are sitting at this moment, whether shackled to your desk at work or nestled in between your elusive couch cushions preparing to read this short piece that comes from me, Dr E, to you – I ask you to pause. Take your hands and put them in your lap, let them rest there. Straighten your back, close your eyes and breathe in. Take the air in through your nose and feel the breath filling and expanding your belly. Do this two or three more times, slowly and with attention. Feel better? Good.

Now we can discuss the topic of this week’s blog “the Breath” - the basis for staying alive, so ingrained in our existence that it happens reliably without our awareness. It’s part of our involuntary nervous system. As long as we live our breath is with us. The breath, in its amazing simplicity, is the most immediate and effective access to mastering ourselves, our emotions and the way we interact with others and life itself.

Some of you might know that for many years I made my career in the corporate world. As a business consultant, it was my job to manage and execute projects and coach managers and executives of multi-national companies. Referencing this time I am reminded of being successful at my work yet felt disconnected from my body and spirit. At some point my outlook got resigned and hopeless of never being able to have fulfilling love and joy in my life. This was a period of confusion and delusion for me – it felt like drowning in my helplessness of not being able to create and have what I wanted in my personal life. In a sincere attempt to seek some relief, I decided to take a break and go to Plum Village, a meditation retreat in the South of France. I knew that a peaceful environment was exactly what I needed to sift through my life with a clear head and allow time for some well-ventilated evaluation.

I arrived at the retreat center in an emotionally desolate state, anxious to begin my “clearing” and let go of all the distress. On the second day upon my arrival, I awoke with the dawn for the 6am meditation. I walked into the open air room and took my place on the floor with the other women. The sun had just risen and assumed its eyelevel position on the horizon, emitting that stark, white light that renders water and grass alike the same luminous shade. The room was silent, even footsteps made no sound, and we were all summoned to take our positions and delve deep into our beings.

At first the silence was awkward and paralyzing, similar to the first few seconds after the lights are dimmed and before the movie appears on the theater screen where every cough and twitch around you crawls up your spine. Then, after a few seconds, the silence took on an odd rhythm. Every soundless pump of blood began to hold significance, as it had become my singular and only action. My mind began to wonder; sifting through past loves, reliving familiar anxieties, being caught in gut-wrenching feelings and repetitive chatter in my mind. Then it hit me, not in the cognitive sense, but deep in my body at every cell. Here I was in the South of France, deep in anguish, and utterly alone. I felt like all the events and anxiety in my life that seemed to have caused my pain had taken the seat next to mine on the airplane and had come along to accost me on this retreat. Geographically, I had left those physical offenders behind. Yet, I was still totally affected. After days of meditation and being in silence I got that how I was feeling was a creation of my own making. Anxiety is a feeling, fear is a feeling, despair is a feeling, not simply the punishment and inevitable result of an undesirable situation. Until I’d let my attachment to these feelings go they would live inside me, everywhere I go.

Now, this wasn’t the stereotypical “moment of clarity” people often speak about where rock bottom is behind them and a newfound certainty makes everything go away. This was in fact one of the most desperate and real moments in all of my life. The insight that everything I experience is an emotional manifestation within myself that I create and no one else. At first this was terrifying and yet provided a whole new possibility. It called me into taking responsibility for my state of mind and feelings. The key to doing this, as I had been learning throughout the hours and hours of meditation, was “to breathe”! I learned at that time that I don’t have to do anything. I already breathe every moment day and night. If I were not breathing, I wouldn’t be alive! Bringing my awareness and consciousness to my breathing was the wisdom that altered my life and being. So, I filled and expanded my belly with the breath touching every cell and corner of my being with that life giving energy. Slow and methodical, I was gradually able to feel the calm.

In that instance and many, many since then, conscious breathing has been my guide back to inner peace. Reminding myself to focus on my breath has opened up new ways of being: One is the ongoing mastery of my emotions and reactiveness that surely has altered my life for the better!!!! The other one is the use of my breath in activating and moving life force energy that allows for a sense of wholeness and union within myself and with my beloved. I learned a lot about that through the tantric practice. Yet more about that in the following weeks!

Open your Heart with A Relentlessly Tender Intensity

Hi, Freddy Z. here, coming to you all from the TantraNova headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. With this new technological undertaking Elsbeth and I have taken on to generate dialogue about our life’s work and passion, we’ve been trying to figure out the best way to convey and communicate our ideas with all of you. We gathered that the blog would best be served if in addition to our joint sharing we take turns with our own personal interpretations of our experiences, thoughts and insights. That said, I opted to give it a go first. I came across a horoscope the other day that was too good not to mention. I have always been a firm believer that the most significant messages or insights in life are the ones that find their way to me. This particular astrological account was sitting smack dab in the middle of last week’s issue of New City. Rob Brezsny, Mr. Freewill Astrology himself, laid out an intimation for me and all my fellow Aries that resonated for days. It read as follows:

“ARIES (March 21-April 19)
Would you like to shed your soul’s baby fat without having to go on a diet? Do you want to supercharge your immune system, improve your memory for the events that really matter and build the spiritual power of your sexual feelings? Are you interested in postponing forehead wrinkles, getting glimpses of your beautiful future and diminishing your fascination with the media’s nihilism? The secrets to pulling off these possibilities will be more available to you than ever before in the coming weeks. And what’s the best way to ensure you’ll gather them in? Open your heart. I mean really open your heart-with a relentlessly tender intensity.”

Mmmmm! “Relentless tender intensity.” Just say it out loud, let it fall from your mouth and penetrate the air. The claim holds such a significant weight that it’s impossible, for me at least, to not desire that kind of spiritual truth. The opportunity comes, of course, when this declaration of willingness to unite yourself with all that is exquisite seems somehow easier said than done. I have found that the human experience often leaves us with some blockage and that past experiences can become the deciding factor in how we live out our present moment. We at TantraNova have worked with so many people all these years and heard their testaments to bringing about undesirable situation after undesirable situation in their lives - whatever that looked like for them.

We have found that the clarity only comes once we step back and realize that the common denominator in all these experiences was ourselves, or more importantly an ingrained way of thinking that comes from old stories we have been reliving way too long. What helped our clients, and us as well, begin to erase the story that has us energetically constipated and keeping us from “shedding your soul’s baby fat” was breathing into and acknowledging the fears and survival methods that limited positive possibilities. In other words, opening the heart with “a relentlessly tender intensity.” Relentless because nothing, especially pain, can if we choose keep us from living our lives to our greatest potential. Tender because love is what ultimately connects and reconciles all of us as human beings. Intensity because keeping your heart open when your ego and survival mind tell you to close off requires focus and intensity .

Greetings from Dr.E & Freddy Z

Hello everyone and welcome one and all to our very first of many more weekly blogs. For those of you who don’t know, we are Elsbeth and Freddy Zental and have been helping couples and individuals tap into their creative life force energy with TantraNova for the past seven years. We are so excited to use this interactive new forum to share and exchange ideas about creating intimacy, love, and lasting relationships in all of our lives. We feel this blog space is an amazing opportunity to shape a cohesive community where ideas are exchanged and we can witness together what is possible when freely expressed creative energy becomes a collective.

We will use this blog to share information, insights and opinions about the philosophies we have been living and teaching for many years. We believe that the pulse of sexual energy each and every one of us possesses can often be stifled in our consciousness and our daily lives. We have therefore sought, through some of the ancient practices found in tantric sex and Eastern healing philosophy, to acknowledge, unshackle, and tap into our creative life force energies and express ourselves in the richest and most fulfilling ways.

For some of you the term “energy” may be vague or not register in the literal sense. This is another reason the blog space is so important to our practice. It will help us give insight to and demystify some of our most fundamental understandings of the human experience. You see, energy as we know it in the tangible sense, lives in the wires and lines that give life to our extensive technological devices. So too, our bodies are coursing with a similar energy. This energy can manifest itself in both the positive and negative sense and fuels us both emotionally and physically. A large portion of the energy we all posses is our sexual energy. We at Tantra Nova ascribe to the notion that sexual energy can resonate in two states, aroused and un-aroused. The world we live in typically has us believe that sexual energy only exists in the aroused state and that there is a very specific time and place for that desire to be expressed. If one can acknowledge both states of sexual energy and live additionally in their un-aroused state, then this place of coalescence and harmony can serve you as the birth-place of all creativity, beauty and life. We can then begin to master the art of relating to each other intimately and without fear or rebellion.

Our hopes are that this venue will serve our community with education and insight to the philosophies and practices we, Elsbeth and Freddy Zental, have devoted our lives and spiritual beings to. Consider this a loving and full body embrace into our dialogue and we look forward to the growth this will provide all of us in our lives and relationships.