The Inner Practice
Reflections on our energy and how we use it.
Written by Anna Scott.
She Already Knew
She sat across from me, hands folded in her lap, and told me about her boss.
He was angry. He was unprofessional. She had a long list of evidence, and she delivered it with the certainty of someone who had been building her case for a long time.
She wanted to go to HR. She wanted to file a complaint. She wanted to quit. She had three plans, all of them focused outward.
All Of Her Energy Was Pointed At Him
How to Be With Emotions (Without Fixing Them)
I used to run from my emotions like I was running from a house on fire.
Fast. Urgent. Wanting to escape.
Yet no matter how far or how fast I went, they were still there.
If anything, they grew louder, more present, and harder to ignore.
More insistent.
More present.
Harder to ignore.
Until I learned something different.
The Hope Chest
My mother taught me not to feel. It took a lifetime — and my daughter — to unlearn it.
My father died when I was two.
My mother was left with six children. Five boys and one girl. Me. The youngest.
She did what she had to do. She kept the house running. She kept us fed. She kept moving forward.
Her motto was simple.
No one likes a whiner.
She Got on a Plane
This morning I spoke to a friend who is in Amsterdam.
After we hung up the phone, I noticed a strong feeling move through me. I checked in with my heart and stayed with what was there.
First came resentment. That she could travel. That she could get up and go while I feel stuck here. I recognized it immediately — that is a story, not a truth about my friend.
Underneath the resentment was jealousy. And the jealousy was useful — because it showed me what I actually wanted. To travel. That was real information.
But there was still no peace. Something else was underneath. So I stayed. Present with the feeling. Not following the story. Not making my friend wrong. Just staying.
Futile
I found myself inside an emotion I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t despair. It wasn’t fear. It was something new.
I wasn’t in touch with it. I had been avoiding it. My business has been in a season I didn’t expect — a long, humbling one. For a year and a half, I’ve been telling myself to stay open, stay trusting, stay generous. And still, nothing had shifted the way I thought it would.
The effort tasted thin in my mouth.
When I Stopped Fixing My Mindset and Started Listening
We often discuss mindset—how to shift it, improve it, or upgrade it.
But recently, in a circle of interior designers and creative women, we tried something else:
We stopped trying to fix our thoughts and started listening to them instead.
Before the session, I had a panic attack.
It came out of nowhere—just a typical morning, walking my dog, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. My heart was racing. A wave of dread moved through me, and I didn’t even know why. I had just read an email.
My first instinct was to push it away, to figure it out, to get out of it. But instead, I remembered what I would soon be guiding others to do.
So I stopped.
And I stayed with it.
Not to analyze it. Not to fix it. To be with the sensation.
And slowly… it shifted. Not because I changed my thoughts.
But because I was willing to feel what was there, without judgment.
That’s the space we created in the session.
We asked:
What thought do you wish would go away?
What emotion do you avoid?
What if you stopped the battle with it, and just let it be?