Deep Emotionality Practice

Hey ,Every newsletter is my way of giving back. Please let me know if there's a topic you want covered, a format you prefer, or a question you need answered so that I can tailor my offerings to serve you better. Use me. :) Speaking of requests, I received one recently to dig a little deeper into a concept I introduced at my live event back in December. It’s what I referred to as ‘deep emotionality’. If you’re not interested in reading this now, and would prefer to read about my Break-up Principle #1 RANT… go here. If not you, maybe someone you know is hurting and could use it.

“What’s my purpose in life?” “How can I make more money?” “What am I going to do?”. All great questions. All questions we’re privileged to be able to ask ourselves. What an exciting time in history where if we’re resourceful enough, we can make a buck doing just about anything and never step foot in a corporate office if we don't want to. But these questions can come with a serious burden. I’ve talked with countless people - clients, friends, and colleagues about purpose and money and entrepreneurship  - and let me tell you - there is a fine line between being stoked trying to ANSWER these questions, and getting obsessed with the solutions to the point that it’s all we can think about, and also feel as if no amount of effort is enough. Many are walking around feeling purposeless, anxious, not good enough or lonely.

That’s why I believe NOW more than ever we must pay attention to what's really important. We must return to what we hold sacred - the people we love, the experiences we want to have and mostly, THE EMOTIONS WE WANT TO EXPERIENCE MORE.

ATTENTION + EMOTION = THANKFULNESS.

If we’re only happy when wondrously awesome things happen in our lives, we’re training ourselves to be miserable.

Allow me to use romance and dating as a metaphor here as it’ll nail my point exactly. After years of talking to both women and men about what it is that attracts them to others; what turns them on, lights them up, makes them feel loved, heard and appreciated - they never, EVER mention big things. No one mentions the extravagant gift they received for their birthday, or the epic vacations they took to Bali. The gifts and the vacations do matter, of course, but their significance pales in comparison to these tiny little things: The way he always looks her in the eyes when she speaks to him, the way she laughs at his jokes, the coffee she brings her in bed every morning, the way he holds his hand every time they enter a restaurant. We fall in love with the little gestures, the cadences of their voices, and with the rhythms of their bodies. And when these small, seemingly insignificant things keep coming at us, they stack. One on top of the other, stretching our hearts with their magnificent volume. It’s the little things. Always and forever.

Our attraction to people is the sum total of little micro attractions. This is just how it works in love and passion. 

I believe that the quality of all our relationships is in direct proportion to the quality of our lives. My newsletter emphasizes our relationships with others, and significantly more relevant, with ourselves. But there is another relationship which we must tend to first if we want to get what we want in matters of the heart and self worth. It’s our relationship with the world. This post is not political - it’s not macro, its micro. It’s about how we take in each day and night. Each moment. Bottom line, what we choose to focus on. When we forget the little things - to both do them and receive them, we suffer. Most break-ups and divorces are not the result of a big event or indiscretion; instead such endings usually occur after long cycles of malnourishment - of hearts having been deprived of all the little things stacking up and spreading within them.But it’s not just about other people. When we fail to notice all the subtle ways life is and always has been beautiful, then we shrink alongside our narrowed perspective of it. One crucial lesson I’ve learned about the science behind fulfillment is this: misery is the product of a narrow perspective. We must become a lake if we want to feel more of what we want to feel, more of the time.

I think “gratitude” needs a re-branding. It’s the God of all emotions and yet it’s been so watered down into sugary cherry popsicles with a side of lollipop, and a slab of corporate wellness. BUT: If we think about it in it’s concentrated, medicinal form…

Gratitude really can’t be reduced to something you have or don't have. It’s something that requires building. Creating. Gratitude WILL strike almost anyone when something REALLY awesome happens, or in those rare moments on vacation surrounded by nature, gazing at the ocean or mountains… those moments when you realize how large the world is, and how tiny your problems are. Those moments when it’s easy to become a wide open lake. But most of the time, gratitude has to built out of nothing, and I can speak for myself here: It’s discouraging when I  know I should be grateful, but I just ain’t feeling it. And no amount of Instagram quotes are going to cut it.

You have to train yourself to be able to build more thankfulness. To see, hear and FEEL the little things. Some people are more wired naturally to do this. Why? Because of many factors, of which I won’t outline here. The more relevant point is that we all need to train, because we are all athletes of life. No one is immune. If you're more wired for negativity, you just have to train more. WHY?? because our relationships to everyone and everything deadens if you don’t. Life is either a battle or a privilege based on how you choose to see it.

Deep emotionality is a practice I participate in every single day. It’s my personal training manual for cultivating more gratitude - which I’m not naturally wired to have as much as I need to have it. Every day I take time to focus on small things that are actually huge. I picture it with all the imaginative juice I’ve got so that I can see it, hear it, and most of all, feel it. When I feel it, an emotion builds up - it’s like gratitude but slightly different. It’s the feeling of being…touched. “Touched” is that micro-moment feeling that proceeds gratitude. It’s both completely unmistakable and impossible to fully explain or measure. It's not happy or sad, it just is. It sounds corny, but I connect to little things such as the way the light looks as the sun is retiring for the day, or being able to see the sky from my apt, or my morning coffee…. I try to take in these small parts of life as if they’re the most significant occurrences of my day. 

Some tips: 

What helps immensely is moving your body first, even if just a little. Increasing blood flow primes the nervous system to be able to be still and focused. 

I remember the winter after my mother died. It was January 2014, when we had here in NYC the “polar vortex”. F*cking beyond freezing. Every morning, for what felt like weeks, we woke up to 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Everything was covered in ice. Preparing to go outside was like dressing for war - the amount of layers I had to put on to be able to decently walk my dog was nothing short of ridiculous. One early frigid morning while standing in the middle of the empty dog park, all I could think about was how much I hated winter. It made me tired. Made my skin dry, and my head itch perpetually underneath my hat I could never take off. I hated that my pits sweated under all my layers of clothes even though my fingers were frozen. Total January misery. Then my mind switched to my mom, who’s life I ached for every minute of every day. As I thought of her life and her death, my eyes wandered over the sad, ice covered trees, and I thought to myself... If I died right now, I would miss winter.Become a lake.Here's to the little things. All my love,Jillian