Emotional health is directly connected to our physical health. Choosing healthy ways (exercise, meditation, centering, and deep breathing) to deal with stress go far toward our overall health. The mind-body connection is the way your body responds to how you think, feel and act.

Some of the physical signs that your body and mind may be out of connection are chest pain, headaches, back pain, extreme tiredness, high blood pressure, upset stomach, weight loss or gain, insomnia, etc. Many of these ailments may be as well treated by learning how to improve your emotions. Learn how to sort out the following emotions: anxiety, stress and sadness.

Too many of us have learned as children to stuff our feelings. The only emotional growth comes after we accept our feelings. Feelings aren’t good or bad or wrong or right. They are simply how we feel. Some people are helped by writing in a journal a short description of how they feel. After you accept your feelings, you can study healthy ways to deal with them.

Unfortunately, many people now believe that they have to continually “vent” all their feelings. In my opinion, vending feelings about the same situation does little good. If, once your feelings are known about a situation to all involved in the situation and everything stays the same, then learn new coping skills such as reframing to change the way you feel.

Remember, you can only change yourself-not others. If you still feel unable or unwilling to change-find out what your unhappiness is giving you. Holding on to old hurts only hurts us.

From Stacey Curnow: “How to Find the Lesson in the Life Challenge”:

So if you don’t like what’s hap­pen­ing in your life, then the cause is some­thing within you, not in exter­nal cir­cum­stances. In other words, you’re the problem.

But that’s no rea­son to despair! By cre­at­ing such unde­sir­able “cir­cum­stances,” the Uni­verse is actu­ally doing you a favor. It’s giv­ing you an oppor­tu­nity to take full respon­si­bil­ity for your exter­nal reality.

What’s more, we can derive mean­ing from any expe­ri­ence — no mat­ter how “bad” it is or how much pain it involves-if we’re will­ing to look for the hid­den mean­ing, or the gifts it’s offer­ing us.

You don’t even have to fig­ure out the cause of the chal­leng­ing emo­tion or “fix” it. Just allow your­self to feel it, and see what comes up. The next time you feel a neg­a­tive emo­tion, try the fol­low­ing approach:

· Place your palms gen­tly over your eyes, care­fully seal­ing out stray light. Allow your breath­ing to become steady and observe your thoughts and feelings.

· Try not to judge or react to your thoughts and feel­ings; just be present with them, and let your­self expe­ri­ence them, even if it hurts.

· At this point, you can also acknowl­edge and offer appre­ci­a­tion for the chal­lenge that is play­ing a part in your growth and pos­i­tive transformation.

· Now ask your­self, “What is this here to teach me? What is the pos­si­ble gift in this situation?

Don’t have time to do the full exer­cise? Then just ask your­self that last ques­tion. In fact, you might want to mem­o­rize the ques­tion and imag­ine your­self ask­ing it the next time you’re fac­ing a challenge.

Finally, one gift you can always find in a neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence is that it sharp­ens the con­trast between what you do want and what you don’t want, giv­ing you an oppor­tu­nity to focus more pow­er­fully on your desires. (Which is another rea­son why it’s impor­tant to carve out time to sit with your neg­a­tive emotions.)

It some­times also helps to acknowl­edge that any gifts that may arise from adver­sity might not be appar­ent to you for some time. After all, such gifts are almost always more obvi­ous in hind­sight. So at the very least, you can derive com­fort from know­ing that you can expect-very soon-to see the bright side, even if you can’t yet.

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