How do you make lemonade out of triggers?

We’ve just about spent our first month together in our new membership program, The Monastery. Its been a blast so far! We have a good sized group of people and we’ve been diving into individual journaling, paired dialogue, and small group work together. With the participation and presence of our “Monasterians” we have the pleasure to discover that community supported inner work and spiritual development is actually a great idea 🙂

We have been learning how to work with triggers as a useful digging tool. Quite a reversal from how we typically think about being triggered: unpleasant and difficult are the words that come to mind. A trigger is when we react negatively to an outside stimulus such as an argument, an unpleasant email, or a difficult thought or unhappy memory. We react emotionally to that trigger, with feelings ranging from mild to overwhelming.

So we’re bringing a reframe, and we’re making lemonade out of lemons. For most of us, triggers can take up so much room in our lives, creating emotional turmoil and resulting in protective or coping behaviors.

What if, instead, we didn’t have those triggers, those reactions, and those habitual ways of dealing with the things we find difficult about life?

Imagine all that energy taken up with being triggered would instead be freed to become creative energies for your use. What would you do with all that freed creative energy?

It’s an interesting question, have you thought about this before?

We ask ourselves this very question on a regular basis. It has helped us create an imagination, or a north star, a way out of the quagmire of triggers and their consequences for us.

Maybe you’ll find it useful too 🙂

P.S. While enrollment for the Monastery is now closed for at least a few months, we have more plans in the pipeline we’re excited to share with you.