The Sleepy Hedgehog Model of emotion management - from Emily Nagoski's book, "Come As You Are":
“Staying over your own emotional center of gravity . . . means owning your feelings, listening to them, and being responsive without being reactive, taking emotions seriously without taking them personally.
I’ve come to think of staying over your emotional center of gravity as the “sleepy hedgehog” model of emotion management. If you find a sleepy hedgehog in the chair you were about to sit in, you should
• give it a name
• sit peacefully with it in your lap
• figure out what it needs
• tell your partner about the need, so you can collaborate to help the hedgehog
Getting mad at the hedgehog or being afraid of it won’t help you or the hedgehog, and you certainly can’t just shove it into your partner’s lap, shouting, “SLEEPY HEDGEHOG!” and expect them to deal with all its spiky quills. It’s your hedgehog. The calmer you are when you handle it, the less likely you are to get hurt yourself, or to hurt someone else."
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Tom Robbins on solitude:
“Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.”
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Ram Dass on the judging mind:
“When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get get enough light, so it turned out that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, ‘You’re too this, or I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people in to trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”
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Emily Nagoski, author of "Come As You Are," on working through emotions:
“Emotions are physiological cascades that want to complete their cycles and they will complete those cycles when you allow them to; they want to be travelers, not residents. They want to move on. Let them. You may tremble or shake or cry or curl up in a ball. You may notice your body doing these things without your volition. Your body knows what to do, and it will do it as long as you sit calmly with it, as you would sit calmly beside a sick or grieving child.”
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Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness expert and author of "Wherever You Go, There You Are," on staying in the present:
“It is all too easy to remain on something of a fog-enshrouded, slippery slope right into our graves; or, in the fog-dispelling clarity which on occasion precedes the moment of death, to wake up and realize that what we had thought all those years about how life was to be lived and what was important were at best unexamined half-truths based on fear or ignorance, only our own life-limiting ideas, and not the truth or the way our life had to be at all.”
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