So Tuesday I introduced the topic of mindfulness of emotions and I asked you to take out a piece of paper and make three columns with the headings of pleasant,
Unpleasant,
And neutral.
And you don't have to do this but it's useful.
And under each of these headings I invited you to keep kind of a running log on the various emotions that you experience and write them under the heading or headings that you experience the emotion in.
And this exercise which we'll talk about is a cognitive practice of experiencing emotions through our thoughts and our ideas,
Our opinions,
And our stories that we have about our emotions.
The liking of them,
The not liking of them,
The pleasant,
The neutral.
So now I'd like you to consider that emotions are not what you think.
Like literally they are not what you think.
To understand that is to help you just to open to and be more in direct experience with the emotions themselves.
So today the topic is to look at our emotions through the use of our body to get really familiar with and experience emotions in the body.
When the Buddha started teaching about mindfulness of the body he first taught mindfulness of breathing.
You know breathing is pretty much the center of our life.
Without it we're not alive.
And our life is kind of presenting in these sort of concentric circles.
You know it keeps going out and out but breathing is at the center.
And as we expand outward from the center we hold more and more into our experience.
You know the next layer is this embodied physical experience.
And then after that it's the the circle of mind states.
And then after that it's the activities of mind that lead to suffering or lead to freedom.
And these are known as the four foundations of mindfulness.
But I like this idea of you know this image of that we're in the center with our breathing.
Just breathing with things.
And if we can breathe with our emotions as they arise it can be a great support.
Not getting pulled into the world of emotion so much.
Sometimes we will get pulled in.
But if we can learn to use the breath as a way to be a little bit freer from our thinking.
Not focusing on our thinking but focusing on our breathing.
It keeps us fluid and relaxed in the middle of whatever storm we may be experiencing.
So to begin with feeling a wider field of experience.
And this starts with the breathing.
And then the next movement is experiencing the whole body as it's breathing.
But there's also a reference point here for our emotions.
Often we can feel the emotions arising.
And then when we do feel the emotions rising we don't have to act from them.
Our involvement with emotions often is on the level of our stories and our ideas and the events of our life.
And mainly they don't happen in real time.
They're happening in the future.
There's the anticipated dread or the anticipated future.
If this doesn't happen this particular way then and our emotions get entangled with this whole storyline.
So our involvement with our emotions especially if it's there's a lot of story and ideas and events that are happening might not be focused on the present moment.
It's more about who said what,
What happened,
What may happen,
What this person did,
What they didn't do,
Who that person is.
And so we get really stirred up in our thinking and our thoughts and our ideas.
And that physically that physically manifests the emotion.
And when that emotion gets stirred,
Then there's a tightness or an anxiety.
There's heat of anger.
Sometimes anger shows up as heat.
Butterflies in the stomach if we're afraid.
Muscles tighten.
So when we're doing our meditation we're centering our body in our mind.
And this is where we can also bring some investigation and inquiry to our experience.
So to the extent that we can we're stepping away from our thinking.
You know thinking is happening as sound in the mind.
But we don't have to get involved with it.
We can just stay in the body.
And as emotions arise,
As stories arise,
We can start to see them.
Where does the story actually live?
And notice not the content of the story but the felt sense of it.
And when we do this we're kind of offering a profound respect to our emotional life.
To our felt senses.
Allowing whatever the experience is in the body to be there in the present.
The emotion is manifesting in the present.
But the happening,
The anticipation,
The anticipation of a future where we should worry,
That's not happening anywhere in the moment.
That's just happening in the body as emotion.
And the advantage of bringing attention to the physical experience of emotions is that emotions are not a story.
It's just when we connect,
When we can connect with the raw experience of emotions,
Just the felt sense,
We're no longer feeding the story.
We're redirecting the mind away from the story that is often in the future,
That's catastrophic in our minds.
And we're just looking in a very honest way,
What does this fear feel like?
What does this anger feel like?
What is this conceit or this concern of this comparing mind?
Sometimes we can actually feel and just feel,
Not getting involved in the story.
Like honestly what's happening?
You know it's like okay there's just a tremendous amount of heat and sensation in my belly right now.
And it's filtered through these thoughts and these ideas and our associations.
But those aren't true.
Those aren't happening.
Those are just happening in the mind as story.
And one of the most important parts of experiencing emotion in this raw way is that the body has a lot of intelligence.
You know it's dynamic and it's just constantly in activity.
There's a constant movement of sensation and nerves and it's all just in process all the time.
Even when we're as still as still can be.
And emotions are the exact same way.
They're just firing and they're alive for a time and then they diminish.
They move and they unfold.
So if we can just trust in the body,
Stop relying so heavily on our thoughts and feelings and storylines and ideas about what could happen.
Just get out of the way.
You know it's really in the process of just letting the emotion move through us.
The body gives room for the process to unfold.
So we have to get out of the way of our ideas and our thoughts and our projections and just get into the felt senses.
In my experience I think of my emotional life as kind of like a being composted in the body.
When I just keep coming back to the feelings,
I'm not involved in the story.
I see the story as a story and I'm just digesting the emotion,
Allowing the body to handle it,
Trusting the body.
I trust my body to move through and process all of it.
The grief,
The shame,
The anger,
The resentment,
The fear,
The longing,
All of it.
And even some of the more beautiful emotions we have.
You know it isn't so much that they get composted,
But by feeling them physically in the body,
There's more of a likelihood that there's room to grow and unfold.
Love and compassion can grow and unfold.
Self-care,
Real compassion for ourselves.
They want to be expansive too.
And we can start to feel those emotions in the body.
Joy,
Humor,
Laughter,
Lightness.
I mentioned last time the idea that we're trying to help our emotional life feel safe with us,
Letting the body be a safe place.
Yesterday we talked about allowing fear to feel safe within you.
Like it can be there,
Held,
But not running the show.
Or anger,
Letting anger feel safe.
There as an emotion,
Movement,
Or allowing joy to feel safe,
Or allowing love to feel safe.
Just feeling where these emotions are present in the body and investigating the sensations themselves.
Giving permission for them to be there.
I've said this before,
You know,
You can welcome something.
You don't have to like what you're welcoming,
But you can welcome it.
It can be there.
The idea of coming back to your body is one of the greatest skills in meditation practice.
And it's a skill that takes a while to learn.
So be patient with yourself.
Learning how to be safe,
To feel safe,
That takes time too.
But this is one of the components of what the Buddha teaches.
And so I offer this to you for your consideration.
Thank you for your kind attention and your practice this
