💌 WITH LOVE, DOMINIQUE

Bringing meditation, mindset and spirituality down-to-earth to empower your authenticity & greatest potential.

 📚️ VOL 05 / 🕖️ READ TIME: 7 m 44 s

👩‍💻⏰ LAST DAY TO APPLY: The Muses Program ⏰👩‍💻

Wooooooweeeee — we’re reaching The Muses Program deadline ladies! And it’s been so amazing connecting with you and hearing all your wonderful vision so far!

If you’ve been thinking bout it — we have a limited # of spots left! Don’t miss the deadline and the opportunity to put into practice and embody what we’ve been discussing over the past few weeks!

We’re rounding out this series — so below you’ll find your own mini-coaching session on how to use your meditation practice to transform your “negative” emotions as vehicles to your personal power!

IN TODAY’S ISSUE:

• 🧠 TODAY’S LESSON / Our "Negative" Emotions Hold All the Secrets to Our Personal Power.

• ✏️ WORK IT / TIPS FOR YOUR PRACTICE

• 👩‍💻 MORE DEETS / THE MUSES PROGRAM

 🧘🧠✨ TODAY’S LESSON: Our "Negative" Emotions Hold All the Secrets to Our Personal Power.

Okay, my lovies! If you’ve been keeping up with these newsletters, you know we’ve already talked about:

• How meditation can literally change your life (through neuroplasticity).

• How we can use meditation to create MORE time for what we love (through focus).

• How we can use meditation to “manifest” our most abundant life with more ease than ever before (through understanding and working with our Inner Wisdom).

• How we can amplify success, Inner Wisdom, and joy in our lives, regardless of external circumstances (through the practice of rejoicing).

I lay all that out because we’ve covered some pretty positive stuff so far.

But in this lesson, I want to dive into a more divisive topic (both internally and in life): understanding the power of our “negative” emotions.

If you’re a practical person who hasn’t done a ton of inner work yet, you might live life like most of us do — searching to find happiness by clinging to the “good” and trying to avoid the “bad.” (Big premise in Buddhism btw.)

From a down-to-earth perspective, this means living through or basing decisions on what you’ve been told will create more “good” externally for your future (even if it’s not the path that brings you joy in the moment or in long-run) OR trying to avoid external things that feel “bad” in the present and future, without really reflecting on why they feel bad.

(Btw - most of us need to do challenging things every day, which is why the concept that you can get away from “bad” and create more “good” by shifting your external circumstances doesn’t entirely hold up. What ends up happening is that we assimilate to the type of “bad” we’re used to because it feels familiar, repetitive, and within our control - rather than intentionally choosing the “bad” / “challenging” / “difficult” that feels new and has the potential to get us to a better place.)

Now, to my spiritual people, based on how you got into this space, you may also have fallen into a similar storyline: that the path to “manifestation” or enlightenment is by (low-key, high-key) emotionally bypassing yourself to maintain a level of (occasionally toxic) positivity.

Because “good” emotions like love, happiness, and joy are “high vibrational” and therefore aspired to, while “bad” emotions like anger, sadness, and confusion are “low vibrational” and therefore need to be shunned or avoided.

The reason why neither of these perspectives works is that they both lead to: either an avoidance of or full trust in our “negative” emotional responses, rather than a true understanding of them.

Here’s some top points I’ve learned from my studies and experience:

• When we don’t reflect lovingly or non-judgmentally on why we’re feeling what we’re feeling and instead avoid it or take it for fact, we typically end up with a generic answer that doesn’t lead to powerful solutions.

• Most of our immediate understanding or reaction to an emotion is incorrect. The emotion is valid, meaning you are in fact feeling it. But the storyline or thoughts that stir up usually aren’t. And it's the storylines that get us hooked, not the feeling. (More on this below)

• When we run away from or double down on our “negative” emotional reactions, our brain essentially shuts down as a stress response and relies on our past habitual responses. This not only reinforces that reaction (and habit-loop) for the future — but because we’re so focused on shifting our external circumstances, we lose out on the opportunity to open our mind to more information that can transform that trigger FOREVER.

It’s almost like our natural reaction is to febreeze the sh*t (“negative emotions”) in our house (mind) instead of truly picking up our cleaning supplies (reflection, inner work, meditation) to fully scrub it up (releasing the trigger altogether).

And trust me, I get it. “Negative” emotions come with a lot of stigma. (Which is a wild concept since literally all of humanity feels them, even if we’re not talking about it.)

I spent nearly 25 years of my life avoiding my negative emotions, totally caught up in what feeling sad, mad, frustrated, confused, lost, anxious, and not good enough meant about me as a person and how I was leading my life.

I even fell into the spiritual Law of Attraction trap when I first started diving into more spiritual concepts — and in my attempts to “manifest,” I just ended up rose-colored-glassing a lot of red flags and pushing myself to emotional burnout that took me some time to dig myself out of.

It wasn’t until I started meditating that I learned to bring love to my negative emotions, which changed the whole freakin’ ball game.

Because of that, I want to give you a different perspective:

Don’t try to change the emotion. Change the meaning and power you’re giving the emotion.

To understand what I mean by that, I want to quickly go back to our lesson on Ego / neural plasticity and specifically how, throughout our lifetime, our brain is picking up “data points” from our environment that dictate how we make meaning of and interact with life.

So I want you to think about how we, collectively, have been taught to make meaning of our emotions.

Imagine yourself as a little baby. Brain like a sponge. Absorbing all the information in your external environment to assimilate, be loved, and survive in your environment.

• When you’re happy or were experiencing “positive” emotions: your parents or caregivers likely encouraged that emotion. Maybe they: kept doing the goofy things that made you laugh, played with you or encouraged you to continue to be happy. Which in order to assimilate to your environment, you learned: COOL, positive emotions = good.

• Now, when you’re sad, mad or were experiencing “negative” emotions: your parents or caregivers likely didn’t encourage that emotion. Maybe they: nurtured you to stop crying, tried to make you “happy” again or maybe even right out said, “stop crying” or responded in a way that showed you “this emotion won’t be welcomed”. Which in order to assimilate to your environment, you learned: OK, negative emotions = bad.

This isn’t to say anything about how our parents or caregivers raised us. I come from the perspective that everyone’s doing the best they can with the information, experiences, and lessons they’ve been given. Those experiences shape who we’re meant to be as people - “bad” and “good.”

I’m also not saying we should give into our emotions the way lil’ babies do — emotional regulation and being able to communicate what’s going on is (obv) something really important for adult-life and what (in an ideal world) lil’ babies are being taught to do in order to learn how to process and communicate their needs in a healthy way.

What I am saying is that: we internalize these definitions of “positive emotions = good” and “negative emotions = bad”. And those definitions (of emotions we’re all feeling and are natural) begin to weave the storyline of who we are and “how well” we’re doing as people and in life.

(Which in the present-moment can cause alottta unnecessary self-criticism, rumination and drama that actually fuels that emotion to stay longer in the body than it needs to.)

What starts to become obvious in a deep meditation practice is that these concepts of “good” and “bad” are just labels we learned growing up.

When we sit with these feelings in meditation, release the thoughts, release the meaning about ourselves or our lives, and release the identification with it - we realize at the core, emotions are just sensations.

Sensations that we’re all experiencing pretty similarly based on the emotion. (A cool study on that: HERE.)

Sensations that can shift meaning based on the thoughts or storyline we’re applying to them. (A cool article on how fear and excitement elicit the same physical symptoms: HERE. Spoiler alert: It’s our thoughts making the meaning.)

And because they’re just sensations:

• Instead of falling into the trap of meta-emotions - which is the process of having emotions about your emotions, where one emotional response triggers additional emotional responses. For example, feeling guilty about feeling angry, and then feeling sad about feeling guilty.

• Or feeding the storylines that make those emotions last more than 90 seconds - which Harvard brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor uncovers is the total time needed to flush an emotion physically out of our system - anything else is just the thoughts recreating the emotional loop.

— We can begin to shift the storyline behind our emotions, changing the way we welcome and listen to those “negative” cues and transform our triggers into something more positive and supportive for the long-term. (Enhancing our connection to ourselves, others and to our true personal power.)

Yes, this requires a radically different view of how we’ve been taught to think about our emotions. Not as enemies, but as the vehicle to the positive emotions we’re trying to accumulate MORE of.

One way I like to look at it is: turning the light on our dark. 

“Light” being love and “dark” being our “negative” emotions. (Which again I put in quotes because I think negative emotions can become beautiful insights to creating positive solutions, which makes them positive catalysts for growth in themselves.)

And think about it - what happens when you turn the light on in a dark room? Everything becomes light. 

There are practices, meditations, and tools to work with this to understand how even our most powerful triggers can become a source of our greatest power - which I’ll be sharing fully in The Muses Program.

But for those looking to work with it themselves, the main tip I’ll give you is to start to look at yourself as if you were your own best friend or the person you loved most in the world. 

If your own best friend or loved one came to you with sadness, fear, doubt, or confusion - what would you say to them? How would you care for them? Would you ignore them, run away, meet them with harsh criticism? 

Or would you give them lovin’ and understanding in hopes that they would come back to their true selves again? (I hope it's the latter!)

Begin the consistent practice of doing that and watch how it changes your life!! In the meantime, more meditative tips below!

 🧘✏️ WORK IT: TIPS FOR YOUR PRACTICE

This (obviously) runs deep and is what I’ll be covering in more depth in THE MUSES PROGRAM for my female visionaries. But if you’d like to implement this into your meditation practice, here’s what you can do:

COMMIT & GROW YOUR PRACTICE: Like I’ve mentioned in my previous post, Single-Pointed Focus meditations like Vipassana and Mindfulness are amazing for non-judgemental awareness and observation. The misconception around meditation is that we’re meant to use the practice as a way to “think about nothing” or “get rid of” the feelings that come up. At it’s best, this misconception will lead us to thinking we had a “bad” meditation — at its worst, it’ll lead us to skipping our practice all together. What I want you to do instead, is to experience the emotions as sensations and let go of any inner narratives around them. Practice accepting the feeling and moment as it is, let yourself emote if you need to (we a good cry over here!!) and start to experience the stillness and space that can exist even when that emotion is present. As you breathe, you can also imagine sharing loving energy to that sensation — again, not as a way to “get rid of it”, but as a way to learn to meet yourself with love & understanding regardless of how you feel in the moment! I also talk about this on a podcast I did a while back with Karin Hadadan of @icietnu: HERE.

JOURNAL PROMPT: Once you’ve done the above, you can journal on the below and get clearer on how to bring loving awareness to yourself:

• What is a recent situation or experience that triggered that “negative” emotion?

• What is the narrative or storyline that is keeping that emotion alive or repeating?

• Is this an assumption your mind is making? Is it absolutely true / valid?

• How could this experience or emotion actually be a vehicle to bringing more love to yourself or your life?

• What can you do to care for yourself in the meantime?

OFF-THE-CUSHION CARE: When we’ve gotten used to running away or avoiding our difficult emotions, we typically run to unsupportive behaviors as a way to distract ourselves.

We might bury ourselves in work or partying or social media to distract ourselves from the discomfort coming up. And while a certain level of distraction and reframing can be beneficial, at an extreme it can stop us from caring for ourselves properly.

From the above journal prompt, make a list of small achievable ways you can start caring for yourself. I would recommend doing these consistently to create a habit out of them, because that’s how we change our state of being in the long-run. Doesn’t mean you have to do the same activities, just means that your dedicating time each week (or each day based on the activity) to truly care for yourself.

Based on where you’re at, this can mean anything from allowing yourself to fully relax without any shame to finally signing up for therapy to have that support system to doing one thing a day that is just for your joy & pleasure. (Follow your intuition on it — think of it as activities that will improve your sense of wellbeing, but doesn’t necessarily need to be THE BEST way or a super structured way.) Caring for yourself will come in many forms, just make sure the pure purpose and intention behind it is to do something loving for yourself in the moment vs. push yourself to “become” something for the future. ❤️

 👩‍💻💌✨ MORE DEETS: THE MUSES PROGRAM

AH! Like I mentioned, we dive deep into this in the upcoming Muses Program and this is one of my absolute favorite lessons to teach. In the program, you’ll learn powerful tools to reframe your negative emotions and use the experiences that come up as a way to amplify your personal power.

Along with that, you’ll also get:

• 12x, Weekly 90 Minute Zoom Sessions

• 3x 1:1 Coaching Calls Throughout the Program

• A Personal Power Plan & Lessons — to break down even your biggest visions into approachable steps in the program & beyond.

• 5x Frameworks of Meditation — that you’ll be able to guide yourself through by the end of the program to unlock intuition, embrace personal power & release anything that stands in your way.

• An intimate container of 8 like-minded visionary women to inspire, empower and support your journey.

• Homework, reflections and group chat support to ensure the most impact, attention and personalized support.

For more information or to apply, check it out: HERE.

APPLICATIONS CLOSE: on July 17th, PROGRAM BEGINS: July 30th / Aug 1st.

MORE WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER:

1:1 Alignment Coaching: For Founders, CEOs, or Executives who are looking for more personalized sessions, I currently have one spot available for July.

Reach out to [email protected] with more details on why you’re interested in coaching to start the conversation!

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