This week we are focusing on exploring and establishing mindfulness of emotions.
And this is a very unique place where we're not trying to repress any emotions.
We're not trying to deny any emotions.
In a way,
By seeing them,
We're sort of,
You know,
We're not celebrating them.
But we're also not expressing like we're not trying to not express them.
The way that it's been described to me is when working with emotions,
We're not like for or against them while we're meditating.
You know,
It's kind of a radical thing to do because in ordinary life,
We're often for or against particular emotions,
Like we put them in categories,
We have good ones,
And we have bad ones,
We have emotions that we're ashamed of having,
We experience some emotions as unacceptable.
And then there are some emotions we think that we're supposed to be having,
And that we're not having.
And some,
You know,
That we do have,
And we're like,
Okay,
Wow,
Feeling so good,
I kind of made it,
I'll never be depressed again.
And that lasts for about 10 minutes or so,
Right?
So many people have a complicated relationship with emotions,
Because we have expectations of how we should be feeling.
And that really comes from,
You know,
Our cultural conditioning.
Some of it comes from our family.
Some of it comes from our just our general life experience.
Sometimes,
We've had trauma in our early lives.
And so we've shut down our emotions.
And as we practice meditation,
We begin to slowly get to know our emotional life again.
And emotions are a central part of being a human being.
And meditation practice is a safe place where you can go and really start to explore your emotional life and be with what you experience.
There's no bad emotion,
There's no wrong emotion.
You know,
We don't have to add any extra judgment that we might have received growing up,
Or that we may have received in society.
And what's interesting about this exploration,
Is there's no clear definition,
Like no one really knows what an emotion is.
Like we assume we know what emotions are,
Because we can quickly identify,
Like I know when I'm angry,
I know what sadness feels like,
Or what joy and happiness feel like.
But as a category,
Emotions are actually kind of hard to pin down.
You know,
Is peace an emotion?
Is calm an emotion?
And some people would say that yes,
Those are actually emotions.
In the Buddhist instruction,
The instruction for mindfulness practice,
And kind of these four foundations of mindfulness that we've been exploring,
The discourses don't talk about emotions in a very obvious way.
Like mindfulness of feeling is described as feeling tones.
And if we were to translate that into psychology,
It's kind of the felt sense is the basis for our emotions.
The felt sense of pleasant or unpleasant,
Of liking or not liking.
These are kind of like the building blocks of our emotional life.
And emotions aren't a single thing.
They're a composite of a variety of things that kind of come together to create the particular emotion that we're talking about.
Right?
So sometimes,
Thoughts come before emotions.
And sometimes emotions come before thoughts.
You know,
That's also an interesting sort of inquiry.
And mindfulness,
Paying attention,
It's kind of this process,
Where we begin to see these different elements,
Like what comes first.
One understanding that I thought was kind of helpful,
Is that thoughts are kind of like the messenger of our emotional life.
So we don't need to spend a lot of time with the messenger,
Right?
We get the message,
And the message is occurring as a result of our emotions.
The message is occurring as an emotion in the body.
What happens for us is that emotions are kind of like a factory for a lot of thinking.
And so we want to learn how to be,
In a useful way,
Kind of mindful of the emotions before we spin out in the story.
So at the end of practice,
I asked you to,
I dropped in the question,
How are you?
Like,
That's a really useful question.
How am I?
How am I?
And sometimes we don't know.
And that's also fully acceptable,
Because our emotional vocabulary is kind of in its infancy.
We don't have a like,
As we practice,
We're,
We're sort of learning a new language around emotion.
We could say,
Well,
I'm like,
I don't feel anything,
Or it's pleasant.
I think I feel pleasant.
This is a pleasant meditation,
Or,
You know,
I've got this ache,
And it's unpleasant.
So even just that simple identification is useful.
One of the interesting things about the English word for emotion,
Is that it has motion in it.
So to think about emotion as,
You know,
In movement,
Emotions are a movement,
They're a process that are moving along.
And they,
Like,
If we let them move along,
They mostly want to work themselves out.
But what happens is we,
We tend to block them,
We tend to say,
Well,
These are the ones that we want,
And these are the ones that we don't lock.
And we sort of lock on to the emotion,
I'm angry,
And then we hold on to that,
Or we push it away.
Or we get afraid,
And we don't like the feeling of fear.
And so then we get tight around that feeling.
And then sometimes that becomes a habit pattern.
You know,
Emotions can get stuck.
And then we become the emotion to some degree.
I think we all know people in our lives,
Or we we personally experience,
Like,
Fear as an operating behavior.
I have some relatives where that's really true,
Where that fear,
That emotion of fear,
Has gotten so stuck,
That that's how the movement of life is through this emotion of fear.
So part of what mindfulness does,
It begins to unstick us.
You know,
We're making room for our emotional life,
So the motion can start to move.
And it's fascinating to watch how emotions move and change and shift.
They do move.
You know,
If you,
Let's say,
Like an emotion like anger,
It can come up.
If you can,
If you can be with it,
I think the magic number is like 90 seconds.
Let it sort of like be there for 90 seconds.
It's a minute and a half.
It changes.
And it's really useful to see that change.
So just to give it some space to change.
When we give emotion space in our body,
And we're not reacting to them,
We actually learn to,
In that moment,
Take that three breath journey.
It's,
It's so liberating in a way,
To have that space.
You know,
Having that space is so useful.
If we think of awareness as,
As simply space,
Like our mindfulness practice is just space,
You know,
If we fill that space with a lot of thought,
Or if we fill that space with a lot of emotion,
There's very little awareness available,
Like awareness equals space,
Like let's say,
Like let's just play with that idea for a minute.
If we're filling the space with all of our thinking and our emotions,
Then it's going to be really hard for us to be present for other things.
One of the reasons that we practice this quieting the mind is so that more awareness,
More space can happen.
So if we stop filling the space,
Then there is this experience directly of freedom.
And that's kind of what we're doing this for freedom,
Right?
So as the thinking mind quiets down,
What starts to happen is that our priorities shift a little bit,
We become more interested in staying with the quiet mind,
Staying with the breathing,
Staying with the body.
And as thoughts come,
They're just like floating little bubbles.
And then we enter into the realm of feeling more.
And so then we enter into this realm of our emotional life,
And we can observe that too.
So to end this talk today,
I want to say that one of the greatest ways that the body can support emotions,
Both difficult ones and the ones that we enjoy,
The pleasant ones,
Is as we're cultivating mindfulness,
We want to help our emotional life feel safe.
We want to help our emotional life feel safe.
We're letting the body is this place of safety.
So if we don't personalize the emotions like anger,
We allow anger to be safe,
To be experienced on the physical level,
We're not reacting to it.
We allow joy to feel held,
Not overly identifying with it.
We allow love to feel safe.
And all this,
The safety is cultivated by breathing with it,
By entering into that three-breath journey,
Just feeling,
Okay,
Where is this emotion arising?
Let me connect to it.
Let me make room for it.
Let it be safe to be in my body,
Not like a problem.
So thank you for your consideration of this view of emotions and our emotional life.
