In the movie the Exorcist, there is a scary scene when the priest comes close to the bed of the little girl who is possessed. She suddenly lets out a horrendous screech and projects huge quantities of green vomit-bile all over the priest who has come to help her.

It’s a bit like this when we’re triggered and let our raw emotions come pouring out. Our victims receive a mixture of feeling and words that may actually have at least something to do with what they said or did. But when triggered, the bilge pumps at the bottom of the elevator shaft pour out their stored-up, festering pain, fear and anger. And the people in our line of fire receive bits of feeling and information appropriate for them, all mixed together with what we always wanted to say to our judging fathers/smothering mothers/rejecting teenage cliques/dead siblings/oppressive social systems etc.

This does NOT mean that all our communications should be in sweet dulcet tones, totally calm and reasonable and without passion.

And yet, as leaders, we do want to be mindful about the impact of our energy, especially when we have power.

So there is a dynamic tension to be held between passion and intentional communication.

“It is easy to fly into a passion.
But to be angry with the right person, and to the right extent, and at the right time, and in the right way.
This is not so easy.”
Aristotle

There are times to let others know the depth of our anger, to sound the note of outrage.
There are times for our loss and grief to pour forth like a river.
The music of our joy and tenor of our fear.
We want to be able to share our dreams and desires, our concern and dismay, our passion and our zest.
We want access to the full palette and range of our emotions to give authenticity, meaning and power to our words.

We can feel fully.

And still choose to communicate consciously.

We bring to those with whom we share this life the gift of our emotions.
But learn to do this in a way which is non-violent, mindful of our impact.
Creating rather than impeding real relationship.

There is an art to this, but here are some basic principles:

1. Be authentic with what you feel. People are basically telepathic-they pretty much get anyway, what you think you are not expressing.

2. Stay in contact with those to whom you are communicating. Be attuned to your impact–no projectile vomiting.

3. Have conscious intent. Be clear on the purpose of your communication, and what you are seeking as a result of sharing your feelings.

4. Communicate your emotions non-violently, practice variation.

Look for opportunities over the next days to experiment with conscious communication.

The Practice
Take note of each and every time you get triggered.
Commit to not acting when triggered.
Really!
Use the four-step process to recenter yourself in your place of power.

Manage Your Triggers Process
Step I Name It.
Step II: Create space appropriately.
Step III Shift state
Step IV Respond to situation

Adapted from the practices of Robert Gass.

Photo: Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images

A Hindu holy man with his face painted with the names of gods and goddesses at Pashupatinath Temple in Kathamndu.

“The natural arisings of our joy, our grief, our fear, our anger and outrage are the heartbeats of our humanity and the blood of living a passionate and fully embodied life.”
Judith Ansara

Our emotions are filled with life force, power, and wisdom. How empty life would be without the range and passion of our emotional life!

But we’ve been working to develop a discipline of not acting when triggered. Does this mean that we’re striving to become dry, cerebral and unfeeling mindfulness machines?

Not at all!
Feel fully. All of it! Bite into life with zest, and taste it all - the sweet and the bitter. Open your heart! Welcome the tides of emotion. Lead a passionate life, ennobled with the full range of your human emotions - joy, anger, fear, sadness and love!

How does this fit with our triggering work?
Let’s explore this further.

First, not everything we feel is a result of core wounds being stimulated. Emotions arise from multiple sources:
1. authentic, spontaneous responses to real situations
2. personal triggers
3. social triggers
4. emotional contagion
5. beliefs and misperceptions
6. physiology

Someone says something that moves you deeply, and your eyes start to tear. It is not necessarily the case that you’re really feeling sad about some childhood experience. You witness someone emotionally abusing a child, or read about a truly vile incident of injustice. Your anger is not always due to some past trauma. There is not a treacherous elevator shaft sitting under every passing feeling.

Emotional triggering has certain characteristics that can help us distinguish it from “authentic, spontaneous responses to real situations” and other sources of emotion:

1. The intensity of our response seems disproportionate to the
stimulus
2. Our reactions overwhelm our ability to effectively respond to the
situation at hand. Remember the phrase “our forebrain gets
hijacked by our limbic system.”
3. When we reflect later on our reactions, things may look rather
different than we “assessed” at the time

Our triggering practice asks that we do “not act when triggered.”
It says nothing about “feeling what we feel.”

In fact, several of the state-shifting techniques invite us to feel our emotions. This is often a very skillful response to feelings - whatever their source.

Important distinction:
Feeling -
Acting -
Two different things.
Both important.

But rather than: “I feel. Therefore I act.”
We invite you to consider: “I feel. I center. And then I act.”

In addition to continuing with our trigger practice, let’s bring our emotional life into focus. Today, really watch your emotions. How many can you notice today?

The Practice
Take note of each and every time you get triggered.
Commit to not acting when triggered.
Really!
Use the four-step process to recenter yourself in your place of power.

Manage Your Triggers Process
Step I Name It.
Step II: Create space appropriately.
Step III Shift state
Step IV Respond to situation

Practice variation for today:
Watch your emotions carefully today.
Try to catch as many as possible.

Whenever you do notice an emotion, simple label it mentally:
“Fear - happy - unhappy - anxious - scared - angry - relaxed - etc.”

Adapted from the practices of Robert Gass.

Photo: Richard Lam/CP

Naked bike riders make their way Sunday though downtown Vancouver to protest the car culture and oil dependency.

When we’re first training a dog to walk on a leash, it pulls and pulls, trying to run off until we firmly yank the leash back. The untrained puppy tries to run off again and again - until one day, it realizes that it’s not going anywhere, and ceases trying to run off.

So it is with our triggers.

For much of our lives, when our triggers have been activated, we have acted out - instinctively, like a dog running off after a scent.

The day we commit to not acting when triggered, we begin a training period. We’re letting our emotional “wiring” know that it is no longer in charge. We’re taking charge of our own reactivity. The repeated process of learning to restrain our words and deeds, starts to correct old habits of acting out.

If we stay with this practice, at some point we actually establish a new habit. It becomes no longer second-nature to act when we’ re triggered, but rather we learn to instinctively pause rather than react. Our “inner gyroscope” kicks in more and more quickly.

We break the self-reinforcing patterns and we begin shifting our behavior, beginning to impact the social “reality” around us.

Here’s the real gift. As we choose to become non-reactive in our outward expression, and more and more frequently use the state-shifting techniques to come back to our place of inner power - over time, we actually get less triggered in the first place. Just like the dog that no longer pulls so hard on the leash.

The four-step process is a profoundly powerful tool for retraining, to radically shift the cycle of reaction-action-reaction.

Managing Your Triggers Process
Step I: Name it.
Step II: Create space appropriately.
Step III Shift state
Step IV Respond to situation

For the remaining days of this practice, make an absolute commitment to not act when triggered.

The Practice
Take note of each and every time you get triggered.
Commit to not acting when triggered.
Really!
Use the four-step process to recenter yourself in your place of power.

Adapted from the practices of Robert Gass.

Photo: Pilar Olivares/Reuters

Peruvian anti-riot police officers participate in a military parade to celebrate Peru’s Independence Day in Lima on Sunday.

Daniel Goleman, the author of the bestseller Emotional Intelligence, conducted significant research into the impact of leaders’ emotions on their organizations. His book, Primal Leadership, can be summarized as follows:

“A leader’s emotions are contagious. If a leader resonates energy and enthusiasm, an organization thrives. If a leader spreads negativity and dissonance, it flounders.”

Remember that 93% of communication is non-verbal–and emotional communication is especially intense. As we begin to master our emotional reactivity, we become more intentional about the “primal” impact we have on those around us.

“For one to control one’s thoughts and feeling means one can actually control one’s atmosphere and all who walk into its sphere of influence.”
Malcolm X

Understanding this enormous impact–for good and for ill– we want to set a high standard for what constitutes triggering (that is, to be more sensitively monitoring and shifting our state of being)

The Practice
Take note of each and every time you get triggered.
Commit to not acting when triggered.
Really!
Use the four-step process to recenter yourself in your place of power.

Managing Your Triggers Process
Step I: Name it.
Step II: Create space appropriately.
Step III Shift state
Step IV Respond to situation

“Action without contemplation is blind.”
Gandhi<

Adapted from the practices of Robert Gass.

Photo: Alexander Joe/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Former South African President Nelson Mandela celebrates his 89th birthday at the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund in Johannesburg.

Our triggers feel so real (and so obviously caused by the event out there), that it’s hard to remember that the intensity of our emotional reactions has more to do with what we carry into the situation, than the event itself.

We carry our core wound around inside us… like an accident waiting to happen.

We are already (at the lower levels of our elevator shaft) feeling the very thing we are trying to protect against feeling–a doomed mission.

We don’t have control over our emotional wiring. It is the legacy of our biology, the circumstances of our birth, our life history, our culture, our social identity…

But we do have potentially far more choice than we may previously have owned about how we react and respond.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Marcus Aurelius

The 4-step process is a simple but powerful and tested technology to assist you in doing this:

Manage Your Triggers Process
Step I Name It.
Step II: Create space appropriately.
Step III Shift state
Step IV Respond to situation

The Practice
Take note of each and every time you get triggered.
Commit to not acting when triggered.
Really!
Use the four-step process to recenter yourself in your place of power.

Adapted from the practices of Robert Gass.

Photo: John Lehmann/GLOBE AND MAIL

Garbage starts to pile up on the streets of Vancouver on day three of a strike by Vancouver City employees.