9. Emotional Work - Tuning Up
The practice of aligning your mind, emotions and intuition, to enable better action.
Tuning up is the practice of getting your mind and emotions aligned with your intuition, in relation to the context of the wider environment and the behaviour of others. As the name implies, tune ups are a regular process of maintenance required to keep your intuitive system in the service of your greatest good, for which it serves as a compass. Intuition is often described as a gut feeling, a deep sense of knowing that emerges from the body; as such, it is a close friend of nature. Your emotions, however, are deeply influenced by society and its power structures, which show up in socially constructed norms, expectations, and constrained arrays of choices. As such, they may or may not match the feeling you have in your gut.
To further complicate things, your first reactions to a difficult situation are often mistaken for intuition, when they are in fact no more than instinct or habit. These are often the provenance of our inner children, whose persistent fears and frustrations can drive responses to seemingly threatening situations. To look for facts, take stock of a situation and decide how to respond is the task of your adult self, whose job it is to reflect and make conscious choices. Regular tune ups of the intuitive system ensure that all three – mind, emotions, intuition – operate and resonate in harmony for your benefit and that of the world around you.
Although the goal of tuning up is alignment, this is not a linear process and takes time to learn. In the moment, some seemingly simple situations provoke in us snap judgments or responses that may not accurately reflect what we truly believe or wish to convey. It is often after the fact that we notice the incongruity of our responses with the situation at hand. Thus, part of tuning up is doing your best to recall past mistakes or missteps, and noting these in your own records so you can recall the lesson for next time.
For more complex situations, in which you find it difficult to be secure in your truth – whether because you can’t hear it, are questioning it, know it but don’t want to believe it, or feel one way when you think you should feel another – set aside some time to reflect and consider your thoughts, emotions, and intuition in turn. Your intuition offers the deepest truth but is often difficult to access or easy to be unsure about. If this is the case, try tuning in to see where the emotions sit within you, and name them - perhaps with someone you trust - to see if this helps you get closer to the truth.
Brené Brown suggests taking a moment to pause, reflect, and consciously switch from our first responder limbic systems, to our creative processing frontal cortexes: she refers to this as pulling our ‘thinking brain back online’ (1). This may require calming self-talk, mantra practice, a cool-down period, or similar, after which you can use a process of logical thought to evaluate your emotional responses, which, although powerful, can be unhelpful in the assumptions they make about reality.
For example, is it reasonable to feel mistrustful, hurt, betrayed, or angry in a particular situation? You may feel this way about others, or it may be directed towards yourself. Try to evaluate the situation objectively, laying out the facts. Looking carefully for the starting point, check whether your reaction is commensurate with the incident or behaviour that triggered it. Conversely, perhaps you feel passive or reluctant to engage regarding something about which you might typically expect to have strong feelings. Might you be turning away from something you should be dealing with? Or are you avoiding contact with a situation because of a potentially negative response you anticipate from someone else?
Here are some guiding questions or journal prompts that may support your reflection process:
What is it about this situation that I find so upsetting/confusing/frustrating/scary/familiar/unfamiliar?
If it was someone I care for in this scenario, how might I expect them to feel, and what comforting advice would I offer?
What would a logical response to this issue look like?
What do I need to get beyond this conflict / help me feel confident in how to proceed?
How do I want to see myself responding to similar situations in the future?
(If the situation feels overwhelming or beyond your control) What small step might help me feel a bit more grounded here?
What do I need in this scenario? What would serve me?
How can I try to get my needs met, so I can move forward?
And if it is not possible to get my needs met, when is enough enough?
Far from overthinking, this is the type of meta-reflection that supports the most fundamental emotional work. Bringing it into a process of tuning up helps us to get unstuck, to learn from it, and move on.
We can usually expect our intuition to line up relatively well with the facts of a situation, as it is meant to protect us. But this assumes our intuitions are receiving signals loud and clear. Creative expression is a good way to get in touch with what your intuition is saying – allowing yourself space and time to write, sketch, paint, and sing enables you to tap into knowledge that is below the surface of your rational mind. If your emotions and your thoughts/beliefs are not in keeping with this vision, ask yourself: what do you need to do to get them there? Then make a commitment to doing the emotional work needed, using the many techniques and resources offered here and encountered elsewhere on your own path, to align your intuitive system and bring it into harmony with your deep knowing. You can observe the fruits of this alignment over time based on whether they grow or shrink your spirit - whether they make you feel more or less free.
Tuning up means systematically learning from the past and present to gain embodied clarity that breaks unhelpful automatic patterns through guiding intentional, considered action. In a reflexive application of hooks’ definition of love, such emotional work constitutes an important practice of self-love, since it requires exercising willpower for the sake of personal spiritual growth. But neither self-love nor the spiritual growth it engenders can exist in a vacuum - they require safety, connection and protection to flourish. Tuning up, then, initiates a virtuous circle - it strengthens intuitive wisdom, which supports the creation of the conditions spiritual growth requires, thereby nurturing the self-love that in turn reminds us to act on our intuition - because we matter, and our well-being is worth it.
Tuning Up: Practice
1. Create Space for Reflection. Set aside quiet time to reflect on a situation regarding which you feel internal conflict or misalignment. If time is scarce, this can be combined with other activities – showering, walking – but the key is intentional reflection. Be honest with yourself about the initial reaction you had when the situation arose, and put a pin in this for later. Then, expand your understanding through reflection. Some guiding questions or journal prompts, such as those listed above, may be useful.
2. Engage Creative Expression. Use creative expression to access your intuition without judgement. Ideas for this include: journaling without editing, recording a voice note to yourself, doodling or drawing, humming a tune or making sounds that you allow to evolve as different emotions emerge. This excavation of emotions and bodily knowledge will usually generate important information for you to consider.
3. Evaluate Your Emotional Response. Reflect on the issue once again. See if the process of deep expression has offered new information that can shift your awareness of the situation. You may wish to do this with a friend, loved one, therapeutic professional, or even a thoughtfully prompted AI assistant. The act of articulating your thoughts to someone or something else helps engage your thinking brain, allowing you to examine your responses more objectively.
4. Seek Alignment. Assess whether your intuition, emotions, and thoughts are aligned by exploring whether your original response, your considered reflection, and your creative expression track. Does your reflective or creative work validate or challenge your original response? This process of evaluation may offer new or additional insight that helps to understand why your original response emerged, and the degree to which it served you, both in the moment and afterwards.
5. Commit to Action. If the original response does not reflect your creative expression or considered reflection, consider what actions might be needed to enable a different, more aligned intuitive response. For example, Chani Nicholas offers a guided meditation that encourages listeners to note where “yes” “no” and “I don’t know” reside in the body, so these can be more easily identified in the future. Using a mantra or a breathing practice that enables more responsiveness and less reactivity may also be supportive. Recall that this process is not linear and you may need to return to earlier steps in an iterative way.
Being able to offer ourselves comfort, consolation and counsel though tuning in and tuning up prepares us for life situations both simple and challenging. This is also important work to do with trusted others, whether friends and partners, counsellors, teachers, mentors or other supportive people who consistently show you love, care, and honesty. This strengthening of intuition through collectivity not only supports individual processes of intuitive alignment, but can also lend itself to movements for social justice, which further enhance the conditions needed for more people from marginalised groups to actualise the self-love described here. As with everything, practice begets ease, and habit increases flow. Through this process of heightened awareness and intentional change, emotional work becomes magic.
References
(1) Brown, B. (2015) Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Avery.
Further Reading
Pinkola Estés, C. 1992/2008. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman. London: Rider.