Managing thoughts and emotions
When dealing with difficult thoughts and emotions, the mindfulness-based approach focuses on learning to understand the connection between the bodily reactions you feel, the thoughts and emotions that trigger them, and the actions you take based on that connection. A connection that can go in several ways, where your actions might also affect your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations.
You already know this approach from the first 3 weeks of this course, where the focus has been on registering what you feel in your body, mind, and emotions in connection with, for example, a body scan, and how you react to what you feel.
What you have trained so far is partly a psychological self-awareness of the patterns between your body, thoughts, feelings, and actions, and it is also training your attention. You have learned that you can control and direct your attention wherever you want. You can use this in a concrete way when dealing with thoughts and feelings that you experience as unpleasant.
The aim is for you to learn to separate the processes so that you can either change your behavior in a more constructive direction or learn to remain completely neutral and accepting of what is going on in your body, mind, and emotions without reacting to it, but just letting it be as it is.
