What are emotional triggers, and how can we heal and better respond to them?

Respond to triggers: emotional triggers are something everyone deals with but we rarely talk about.

(Scroll to the bottom for show notes)

Today, I want to talk about five different ways that you can heal and respond to your triggers.

And in order to illustrate this, I'm going to talk a little bit about some of my own triggers, which is what inspired me to blog about this today.

Let's start with what a trigger is.

What is a trigger?

A trigger is a word, person, event or experience that brings up an immediate emotional reaction. And I think it's important to say the word reaction because often when we are reacting, we are not observing, and we are not able to be objective.

So we're usually acting from a place of impulse or deeply rooted patterns. We all have these. Every single one of us has some kind of trigger. And no matter how much you work on your triggers, you're always going to have new ones come up that are going to show you things within you that you can heal, and it's going to just keep going deeper and deeper until the day that we die.

I think it's really important to make peace with that. So rather than thinking that there is a destination or "somewhere that we are going to get to" once we love ourselves enough (and that all of this stuff goes away and everything is magical), we accept that this is part of the journey.

I personally just do not believe that is what happens because I think that we chose to be here. We chose to have this human experience, we chose to go through the duality of life, and that includes the ups and downs. And if we can embrace those, life is a lot more fun.

Next, I wanted to share a couple of my own personal triggers that happened this week.

The first one began with me posting an ad for private yoga sessions on Craigslist. Which, I know it's Craigslist... obviously I'm going to get my fair share of creepers and weirdos. But I have found good clients on Craigslist before and I've had a hard time finding local yoga and personal training clients lately, so I figured "what the hell". I got a few responses that were super gross. Such as "I would pay to see you do yoga in your underwear" (barf)... and I just ignored them.I get a couple of possible leads and so I stick with it for a minute. And then I get this email from somebody that says, "Yeah, you must have been dropped on your head. You need to move away from the dinner table early and do some more cardio to get rid of some of that extra weight."

TRIGGERED.

I know this person is obviously trolling. They are probably miserable and could be a 400 pound person in their underwear in their mom's basement for all I know. But it triggered me harder than I wanted to admit. It really got to me for a few days.

I continued to think about it incessantly for a few days, and finally I'm like "what the fuck is this all about?" Many of you guys know my history with eating disorders and being a heavy kid, and I was teased like crazy in elementary and middle school. This whole experience made me feel like that little girl getting moo'd at when she got off the bus.

This was a chance to respond to triggers differently and div...