Meeting Difficult Emotions With Compassion

This meditation is designed to help listeners respond to difficult emotions with compassion. The meditation involves observing or calling to mind life circumstances that bring about difficult emotions. The instructions offer ways to hold those difficult emotions with kindness and compassion. Ideally, the listener will be able to learn practices in this meditation that can translate to daily life experiences.

Transcript

Just allow yourself a moment to kind of check in with your sensory experience. So sense your feet on the floor, Sense your back against the chair, Your contact with the cushion or floor. You might see where you can feel the sensation of breathing. You can feel the breath moving in and out at the nostrils or the rise and fall of the chest or belly, Just some place where you can kind of bring your attention into present moment experience. So the sensation of in-breath and out-breath just as it happens, No particular way you have to breathe. If it helps you settle in, You can deepen the breath a little bit, Take a little bit of a longer in-breath, Really feeling the belly rise and expand on that in-breath and even longer out-breath, Allowing the belly to fall. This kind of deeper breathing with a longer exhale sends a signal to your body that it's okay to be relaxed at this time. Whenever the mind moves into judgment or planning, Kind of moving into future oriented thoughts or perhaps replaying something from the past, You can just notice this movement of mind and without any sense of any judgment of yourself or the practice, You can just bring attention back to what's here. So feel the contact with the floor, The movement of breath. And now bring to mind a recent experience with stress or a negative or difficult emotion – this doesn't have to be the most difficult experience you're facing, But just something that's relatively recent and accessible – and just call it to mind. You might call to mind the scene or the circumstance or the trigger for this feeling, Whether it's anxiety, Fear, Anger, Sadness. And just calling it to mind for the purpose of trying out this approach. So when you have a sense of it, Just know the way in which this experience is causing some level of pain or stress. So rather than focusing on the particular storyline or moving ahead into judgments or solutions, See how it is to just accept the presence of this stress or difficult emotion, Not view it as the enemy. That's how it is to just kind of internally say, This is okay right now for this feeling to be here. You might investigate a little bit in the body. Does this cause a response in the body like a change in heartbeat or tightening of the stomach, Chest, Throat area? Is there a tense feeling anywhere else in the body? Does the breathing become a bit more shallow? Just notice if there's any accompanying feeling in the body that kind of goes along with this stress or difficult emotion. And now see if you can offer some gesture of kindness or compassion toward this. A simple way is to just put a hand wherever it's felt in the body. So if it's at the belly or something, You simply put a hand or both hands resting there. Just this sense of contacting, Kind of being with, Accepting, And moving toward comfort. And again, This doesn't have to get into the story. It can be just the simple feeling of the warmth of a hand over the place that is tense. It doesn't have to be any more complex than that. You might just internally acknowledge the presence of the difficulty. So that might be in the form of, This is fear or this is anxiety or simply this is difficult. This is just a way of inclining the mind to stay right here. Now move away, Not dismiss. This is difficult. And next you might acknowledge, Without getting too far into the story, That this stress or difficulty is the result of various circumstances, Conditions, Forces, People. Notice that it is not your fault or not really any one particular person's fault because those who dole out suffering often are suffering themselves. And so sensing that feeling this difficult emotion or stress is just part of the human condition. You may experience it as a personal story, But it's to some degree universal. There are others feeling this exact feeling. And then last, Just sensing how it is to be with a difficult feeling in this way. Like how does the body feel with this contact and acceptance? What is the mind doing? Is it resisting? Is it relaxing? Is it trying to get into the story of the pain? Just not trying to change any of that, Just being aware. What is my response and body and mind to this accepting and holding of discomfort and this intent to relieve? Any response? You