Allowing Complete Emotional Experience

A meditation on emotional states and how they present as bodily sensations and thoughts. The process guides you through connecting to emotions in their most basic state to feel them as a primary experience prior to judgement or reativity, allowing for the complete experience of the emotional state.

Transcript

Take a few breaths to find your comfortable position and settle into it.

Use the inhale breath to reassert length in the spine and use the exhale breath to release unnecessary tension in the skin and muscles of the body.

To the best of your ability,

Endeavor to keep your head over your shoulders and your shoulders over your hips.

Allow the jaw to drop slightly and use the exhale breath to release tension through the wrists,

The muscles of the face,

The cheeks,

The eyes,

The forehead.

Release tension through the scalp,

Down the back of the head.

Through the back of the neck,

The sides of the neck and the throat.

Feel the chest rising on the inhale and allow the body to soften and relax on the exhale,

Releasing tension through the shoulders,

The front body,

Down the arms,

Through the elbows into the forearms and the hands on the exhale breath.

Inhale again into the upper back and as you exhale release tension through the skin and muscles of the back.

Once again finding your seat and noticing the state of relaxation in the legs,

The thighs,

The knees,

The calves,

The shins,

Ankles and feet.

Allowing the body to relax through an upright balance.

So often when people ask us how we are feeling,

We respond reactively with,

I'm fine or all is good,

Everything is good and everything is well.

As the conversation continues depending on the level of intimacy that we have with the other person,

We may come to our true feelings.

Actually I'm excited,

Actually things have been difficult,

In actuality I'm depressed,

In actuality I am angry.

So as you sit here,

Check in with how you are actually feeling,

Your current emotional state.

Has there been a general feeling or emotional flavor over the past few minutes,

Hours,

Days or weeks?

Try to check in with that.

Maybe something happened just before your practice that shifted your emotional state.

Or maybe upon reflection you can recall a more distant,

Significant event that impacted your feelings.

Perhaps there is a feeling associated with a particular person or a new idea or an anticipated future event.

Whatever the emotion,

Allow it to arise and deepen your experience of it through concentration.

Just feel the feeling with the knowledge that even if unpleasant or undesirable,

It is just a feeling,

An emotional state.

Now concentrate on the physical body and notice where you feel that feeling the most.

There are general trends or patterns where people feel specific emotions.

Fear is often felt in the pit of the stomach or in the throat.

Sadness is often also felt in the throat or in the chest.

Anger may be felt in the face,

In the eyes,

In the hands,

In the jaw.

Happiness may be felt also in the face and in the chest.

Anxiety or a feeling of numbness may reside in any other part of the body.

Given your emotional state,

Identify where the feeling is more obvious or pronounced in your own body.

Concentrate your attention to increase the accuracy of your feeling and describe it to yourself in basic terms.

Is the feeling hard or soft?

Is it heavy or light?

Is it hot or cold?

Is it still or moving?

Is it prickly or jagged or smooth or wavy?

Does it have a shape?

Does that feeling have a color?

Is it big or small?

Is the feeling concentrated in one general area or is it diffuse,

Spread into multiple areas of the body?

Try to let go of any story you are telling yourself about the physical sensation and concentrate just on the sensations through these descriptive characteristics.

Admittedly,

Some of the sensations are intense and difficult to experience.

If this is the case,

You may try and experience the feelings as though they were in somebody else's body.

Or you could try to realize that you can sit with these feelings without causing yourself any actual physical harm,

As uncomfortable as they may be.

To the best of your ability,

Try to experience them directly in their most basic form,

Focusing with concentration to increase accuracy and clarity instead of commentary and reactivity.

What do these feelings actually feel like?

Good.

Drop that process for now and bring your attention to your thoughts.

Notice or remind yourself of the thoughts that are associated with this emotion.

The initial emotion that you are working with or a new emotion if another one has arisen.

The thoughts may appear as imagery,

A scenario,

A person or people,

A situation,

A location,

An imagined future.

Or perhaps it's an internal dialogue,

An imagined conversation,

An internal commentary or monologue,

A train of verbal thoughts.

Just notice the thoughts that are associated with this emotional state.

Become aware of their compelling nature.

Try to notice them without getting swept up,

Carried away,

Involved,

Fused.

Study them with the same attitude that you had while watching the physical sensations in the body,

The same impetus.

Try to resist making thoughts up but rather remind yourself of the emotional state and notice the thoughts that arise with that state,

The thoughts that are prompted by that emotion.

See if you can notice the correlation between the thoughts in the mind and the physical sensations in the body.

In other words,

See if you can notice a relational stimulation between the two.

I think these thoughts and that creates these sensations in my body.

Or I have these feelings in my body and it stimulates these thoughts in my mind and how the two in turn re-stimulate each other.

Perhaps as you notice this process there will be an amplification or a diminishing of the intensity of the thoughts or feelings.

Either way,

Be focused on their relational nature.

Let the relational movement between them be the focus.

Good.

Now,

Take a moment to notice that while we have been focusing on these thoughts and feelings that are associated with these emotional states,

We have been observing them from a particular point or place in our awareness.

An observer mind.

That viewpoint itself was unmoved by the feelings in the body or the thoughts in the mind.

It could observe them without fixing them or changing them,

Without trying to move them.

Just observing them.

Allowing in a non-judgmental way the emotional state to arise.

Move,

Change and perhaps also to play itself out in the mind and the body.

See if you can rest now into that part of the mind,

The container within which the emotional state,

The physical sensations and the thoughts could be experienced completely with a diminished reactivity or a diminished secondary layering of experience onto that primary experience.

In other words,

Through complete direct experience,

Which in turn was achieved through accuracy and concentration,

We are more able to metabolize and to integrate the emotional states without denying them,

Without judging them.

For the next few minutes,

Reside in the stillness of the observer mind while at the same time noticing feelings in the body or thoughts in the mind.

All at once,

All together,

Moment by moment.

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