Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, I'm going to share three tips to work with moments of tension and

To not reinforce certain negative patterns. More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so a lot of us reinforce patterns of conditioning within ourselves because we are on autopilot, and we're lacking mindfulness.

Pattern of conditioning can take a lot of different shapes and forms. It could be a thought pattern that conditions an emotional pattern which conditions are reactivity, it's usually some form of reaction to stimuli that is coming in from another person, the external world or even your internal world, and these patterns can reinforce themselves over times, over time, and can run really deep and if we're not paying attention to this unfolding, they will just

continue to reinforce themselves over and over, getting stronger and stronger. And so one of the powers of mindfulness is that it brings awareness to these patterns as they're happening in real time, so that we have the opportunity to respond rather than react, and sometimes that response can be as simple as just being with the experience without reinforcing it.

And when we don't reinforce it, we don't get the reward of it completing in a certain sense, and therefore doesn't continue and reinforce the pattern of conditioning.

So one simple way you can work with this as it arises, whether it's a moment of anger that causes you to want to say something or trigger that arises that might cause you to want to react in a certain way.

When you see these things showing up in your mind and your body, do three things, meet it, breathe, and soften, meet, breathe, soften.

So very simple, but very powerful when applied. What does it mean to meet it? It means to just first acknowledge like this is here right now, let yourself feel it. It's in the body.

It's probably showing up as some form of discomfort that's causing you to want to do something, right? That is conditioning, the volition impulse that energetic,

that energetic buildup in your body that's saying, I need to do this. I need to say this. I need to act in this way. I need to behave in this way. That's conditioning.

Very easy for it to reinforce because it feels very compelling. So we first just meet it. Okay, this is what's here. Take a deep breath into it.

So simple. You hear it everywhere. It's powerful. My friends, if you're not using it, you got to start using it. It's just one of the quickest ways to settle the nervous system.

So you meet it. Take a deep breath.

I like to feel as though I'm breathing into that energy in the body. It just helps disperse it rather than it being so localized.

So meet it, breathe it, and then soften. Notice, and this a lot of the softening will already happen with the deep breath, but noticing other areas in your body that are tense.

And usually this will happen with conditioning. The shoulders will get tense, the face will get tense. Maybe the hands will get tense. You'll have your own physical expressions of tension and different patterns that arise for you, but just inviting those to soften.

Now what you're doing is you're holding the energy of that pattern without letting it reinforce itself. And therefore, kind of breaking a certain karmic cycle or cycle of conditioning, you could say.

And this is how just very basic awareness and mindfulness and some embodiment work can really change your life. Now, this isn't to be used as a form of suppression.

Or to say that certain emotional responses aren't important. Right. Just because there's anger that's arising. Doesn't mean that we have to meet breathe, soften so that we don't feel angry.

It just allows us to respond more intentionally. We might soften around it, but now we can more intentionally go, okay, this is here. What, what is this pointing to? What is the wisdom of this? And how can I respond skillfully rather than just aimlessly reacting to it on autopilot? That's, that's where we can get ourselves into trouble.

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