Establishing Mindfulness: Emotions_2

This is the second talk on establishing awareness around emotions. In the Buddha's instructions for mindfulness practice, the establishment of the four foundations of mindfulness, he doesn't talk about emotions in a very obvious way.

Mindfulness of feelings, or feeling tones in psychology is the felt sense and the basis for emotions. The felt sense of pleasant and unpleasantness, liking or not liking, are like the building blocks of emotion.

Transcript

This week,

We are exploring mindfulness of emotions.

And this is the third area of establishing mindfulness.

So the first,

Just to recap,

We focused our attention on the breath.

Last week,

We were really focused on embodiment,

Being in our bodies.

And this week is emotions.

And then next week is thinking.

And these are very much intermingled,

Thinking and emotions.

And our emotional life,

It's challenging,

Because emotions are really complex.

Sometimes we experience a thought,

And then right after that thought,

An emotion comes.

So for example,

If you have a thought of a loved one,

Then right after that thought of that loved one,

You'll have maybe a warm feeling in the body.

The emotion of that person comes up.

Or if somebody has hurt you,

There's a thought of that hurt,

That experience,

And then anger comes,

Or a shutting down follows.

That's one way emotions travel.

Another way is that the emotion comes before the thought.

So we are here at the ocean.

And when a wave,

A rogue wave,

Kind of knocks into you,

You get knocked down.

And the first experience is not it's a rogue wave.

It's just fear of being knocked down by a wave.

And so fear comes first.

The emotion of fear comes first.

And then I need to get to ground is sort of the next thought.

So sometimes emotions come first,

And then thought.

And sometimes thought comes first,

And then emotion.

So this is something really interesting to start to get curious about.

As we begin to experience the whole body,

Breathing and feeling,

There's kind of a reference point for our emotions,

Which is useful.

The reference point for our emotions is really happening in the body.

We probably wouldn't be able to recognize emotion unless there was some physical evidence of something happening in our body related to it.

And part of our mindfulness practice,

Our awareness practice,

Is to start to sense and feel the expression of emotions,

How they're manifesting in this body,

To feel the physicality in the present moment to whatever the emotion is that we're having.

Our involvement in emotions generally involves some story or some idea that might have very little to do with the present moment.

It's something maybe from the past,

Like they said this,

Or what I said was this,

Or something happened,

What this person did,

What I wanted.

There's this whole dialogue,

This whole storyline that keeps the emotion stirred up within us.

And we keep stirring up the thoughts and the ideas about the story that we're telling ourselves.

And so that physical manifestation of that emotion is continually stirred up.

We can think about grief.

Sometimes the stomach can get really tight when we are speaking about loss,

Or we get butterflies when we're afraid,

Or the body,

The sensation in the body gets contracted.

The shoulders kind of go up when we're angry,

Or there's heat when we get angry.

So there's this really direct line to our emotional life,

And it takes place in the body.

That's why the cultivation of,

You know,

We don't just cultivate,

OK,

Mindfulness of breath,

Check.

Mindfulness of body,

Check.

It's not that way at all.

It's this,

It's kind of a complex composition of all of these things.

So what we do in meditation and in our mindfulness practice generally is we're centering ourselves.

We're bringing attention to our breathing and the physical body.

And the intent is sort of like,

I'm going to step away from my stories and my thoughts,

And we're going to tune into the sensations.

But stepping away from the stories and the thoughts,

Stepping away from the emotions,

It's not like we're pushing them away.

We're just getting a different view.

It's like when you go and hike up a mountain and you look down at a town.

You know,

You have a different viewpoint.

And meditation practice is sort of this idea of changing the view of the stories and the thoughts and kind of tuning more into the felt sense,

The body sitting here,

The breath sitting here,

The feeling of the breath,

The feeling of the body.

And in this way,

Emotions arise and pass,

As do thoughts.

And so what we're offering is kind of the respect that they're there,

Allowing them to be there,

But not getting so involved in the impact of them.

There's a few advantages of bringing some attention to the physical experience of emotions.

One is that they're not the story,

You know?

So we're not connecting with the emotion in a way that continues to stir it up with the storyline.

The storyline is the stirring of the emotional pot.

You know,

So if we're just being with,

So let's say we're sitting in a story of a man and a story of hurt comes up because somebody has hurt us.

And then we get this experience,

The emotion is sadness and anger,

And then the experience in the body is sort of like,

Ah,

This is heavy and tight.

And then we're just,

OK,

I'm just going to experience the emotion in my body right now.

I'm not going to get too involved with the story.

The body has a lot of intelligence,

You know?

We can be with the field of sensation and the nervous system and the activities that are going on.

And emotions are a process.

So we just sort of like,

OK,

I'm just going to stay with the process.

Emotions,

As I said on Tuesday,

The word motion is in the word.

So it's a process of moving and unfolding.

So we're making room for the movement of this in the body.

Like,

Ah,

I feel sad and betrayed,

And there's a tightness,

And oh,

That's the feeling.

And if left alone,

If we just hold it in awareness,

It can move,

And it can unfold,

And it can relax.

And sometimes it's difficult.

Sometimes emotions don't get better right away or when we want them to.

Difficult emotions sometimes get stronger,

But that's the movement.

So remembering that it's a movement,

That's so important in this practice.

Emotions sometimes need time.

You know,

Fear,

If we've been operating from a fearful place,

Which is not surprising given that we live in a fearful society.

If we've been operating from that place for a while,

When we start to really get in touch with our fear,

It might get stronger for a while.

It may need some time to sort of unwind.

And we can get out of the way of it in a sense by changing our view and staying grounded in the breath and the body.

It's not always easy,

Especially if there's intense emotions or a long history with particular emotions or a story that's entangled in our emotions.

And so I often suggest that you might need some help with this,

Either in the realm of practice with me as a teacher or another teacher or with a therapist,

Somebody that's trained in helping unravel the story,

Unhooking from the story.

Sometimes we're so entangled in our stories that it's almost impossible to unhook by ourselves.

But what we're doing is we're stepping away from the stories and practice to the extent that we can.

And we're offering.

The offer is really a profound respect for our emotional life,

Kind of like it's just a present moment phenomena happening.

And that can be challenging to do if the emotions are quite entangled with our perceptions and our concepts of who we are.

So it's a process.

And working with emotions as we continue and working with thoughts,

It's really about making room.

Like,

As we practice,

The breath is kind of like it's a way of expanding our awareness and making room for these processes to unfold.

We're sort of like the breath and the body as we attend to it.

We're getting out of the way of our thoughts and ideas and our projections.

And this is a very respectful thing to do because we all have emotions.

Some of them are pushed down.

Some of them are quite expansive.

But to be much more respectful to our emotional life,

Letting them be as they are.

Some people feel shame because they think their emotions are not OK.

I have so much anger.

I feel so ashamed of myself.

I shouldn't do that.

Or I'm not supposed to be angry.

This is what we say.

And then there's definition.

We define ourselves.

I'm angry.

But we're not the anger.

There's just anger that's arising.

And maybe anger arises a lot for you.

But we're not the anger.

We're not the angry person.

It's just anger as a habit pattern.

Or anger is arising.

Or there is anger in this moment.

This is an important way of understanding.

And I hope that makes sense.

Mindfulness practice is this capacity just to see and be present with what's happening without being pulled into it as me,

As identified with me.

I am afraid.

No,

There is just fear.

There is fear right now.

So to be with our emotions and not be our emotions,

You know?

I keep repeating this so that you can start to experiment on your own to see the difference between when you're with yourself and when you're not.

When you're actually being your emotions versus when you're just with them.

When you're with them,

How can you begin to be a good friend to them,

The one who listens,

The one who makes space and doesn't judge them?

So in my experience of working with emotions,

My teacher offered me sort of this visual that works for me.

It's kind of like my emotional life.

I'm continually composting the ones that are kind of challenging for me,

Anger and fear and regret.

And kind of letting them be composted back into my body,

Letting them be felt,

Like I'm digesting the emotions in my body.

Like,

Oh,

To feel it and then to allow the body to handle it.

Like,

I trust my body to hold all of my emotions.

And all of the emotions are allowed.

So this is my reflection today on emotions.

And I thank you for your consideration and your attention.

And I welcome your feedback.

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