EXERCISE AND COVID - PART 5: INTEGRAL FITNESS AND TRANSFORMATIVE EMOTIONS

by Eric Leskowitz, MD, David Meggyesy, Greg Warburton, Barry Robbins and Scott Ford | Sep 30, 2020

Integral Fitness and Transformative Emotions

Integral Transformative Practice (ITP) was developed by Human Potential luminaries George Leonard and Michael Murphy. ITP is a constellation of exercises designed to further the development of body, mind, heart and soul. This form of cross-training can serve as a long-term path toward self-realization by viewing stress as an energy that can be consciously transformed. Training in Transformative Emotions can bring you into a fuller moment-to-moment awareness, to feel the exhilaration of the flow state of consciousness.

The following exercise will increase your physical and emotional intelligence by heightening body awareness, thereby allowing you to respond more skillfully to stressful situations. The object is to create powerful, transformative emotions of your conscious choice, and is part of the practice of heartfulness. It is described here by Barry Robbins, the Vice-President of ITP- International.

Barry Robbins

Find a quiet space to relax and settle in. Journey inside your body and consider the memory of a stressful emotion that has triggered you. Notice the physical sensations that accompany this emotion. Use your fingers and hands to touch this location in your body where you are experiencing the emotion. This is how stress shows up in your body.

Now, take a deep, cleansing breath and consider a positive emotion that you’d prefer to feel instead. It may be the opposite of the stressful emotion, or something different. Then think of a time when you experienced this emotion, or create the mental image of a situation in which this emotion would arise.

Repeat the earlier practice and identify the physical sensations in the body that accompany this new emotion. The more you practice this process, the more fully the Transformative Emotion becomes embodied and the more rapidly you can bring it alive into any situation. The grid below can be used as part of your ongoing practice, to map out where each emotion shows up in your body and tie it into a memory that can become a permanent resource for handling stress.

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 PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6


* This article was originally published in The International Journal of Healing and Caring, Volume 20, No. 3