Waves Of Emotions-2

Emotions are a very important part of human life and a very important area to bring mindfulness. Meditation practice is a helpful place to be with emotions because meditation can be like a laboratory, it’s a place where we can trust our emotional life. Rather than thinking that something should be denied repressed or held onto.

Seeing our emotional life and the way in which emotions move through us is trustable; to let it move through us, to let it come and be there.

Transcript

So,

Emotions,

They're like waves,

You know,

They're like waves.

The word emotion in English,

It comes from the Latin word for movement.

So all emotions are a process.

They're processing what wants to move through,

Unless,

And this happens,

Unless they're frozen.

And certain emotions get frozen,

And then the process,

The evolution of the emotion doesn't happen.

And frozen emotions are often best met with a counselor or a therapist.

But left alone,

If they're not habituated,

All emotions want to move.

That's one of the reasons why sometimes with certain emotions we say,

You know,

I'm just going to give this some time.

If you give them time,

Things can sort of settle and to some degree take care of themselves.

We've all had this.

So today I'd like to explore a little bit more than we did on Tuesday,

Working with emotions in our meditation practice,

As a practice.

So I'd like to say a few things about the actual instruction for mindfulness practice and meditation.

Generally,

We encourage people to put the breathing,

Our breath at the center of meditation with some instruction and encouragement to stay there.

Because the focus on breathing,

It can stabilize the mind and help concentrate the mind.

It can help calm things down and strengthen our mindfulness practice.

So the breath as an object is quite common.

But if something else in your practice becomes more pronounced or compelling than the breath,

Then the instruction in vipassana is to let go of the breathing and take your meditative awareness and shift it to this other thing that's happening.

Basically meditate with that,

Bring your awareness to that,

Cultivate your mindfulness,

Your awareness of that experience.

Makes sense?

So meditators often have to deal with discomfort,

You know,

Especially in the beginning if you're new to practice.

So within reason,

We simply move our attention to the discomfort.

So let's say you're choosing to sit in full lotus.

And you notice that you're with your breath,

And then your foot starts to fall asleep.

And then it starts to radiate up your leg and up your thigh,

And the whole body is feeling like it's going to just explode in pain.

You might want to consider moving out of lotus at that point.

Or if we hold our awareness and explore it in awareness,

Trying to be really simple with it and not getting caught up in the reaction or the aversion of what we might have just moved towards.

And just be present with it.

Like,

Oh,

My foot's kind of falling asleep here.

You know,

Just as if there's a loud sound around you or sounds,

Maybe there's construction happening outside your window.

We move into the sound as the object of attention.

We don't treat it as a distraction,

Or as you know,

This is an it's annoying,

I don't want it.

But we treat it as,

Oh,

This is listening meditation.

We let go of the breath,

And in a calm way,

We open up to and take in the sound as long as it's there.

And like everything,

It comes and it goes.

So I preface this because it's the same thing with emotions.

If emotions become pronounced and compelling,

Or predominant in your experience,

Then they become the meditation subject.

So again,

You let go of the breath,

And you take in the experience of the emotion.

And it's a little bit tricky because some people get very easily entangled with the emotion as me,

I am angry.

They get involved,

Or they resist it,

Or they judge themselves for whatever the emotion may be.

So the trick is to have this very simple awareness of the emotion as it's going through.

If you can just remember that the emotion is a process.

It arises,

It peaks,

And in that peak may be discomfort,

And then it subsides.

So there are a number of tools for mindfulness of emotions.

And the first one you may be familiar with in the workings of that acronym,

RAIN,

Recognize.

The first one is to recognize that now an emotion has become the predominant or the compelling experience of your meditation.

Now there's an emotion that needs our attention.

Sometimes that's not so easy because a lot of people are disconnected from their emotions.

It could be that there's an emotion,

But it's not having an effect.

It's just sort of like it gets covered over.

It gets dismissed somehow.

And then what happens is things like our thoughts and our stories become more compelling.

So there's a dismissal of them and not valuing them.

So I encourage you,

If this is part of your disposition,

Like,

What am I feeling?

What's the felt?

What's the emotion here?

And the emotion just could be like checking out dullness.

So part of mindfulness is to recognize when emotions are present and when they need attention.

It's recognition.

And the second step is acceptance,

Is allowing it to be there.

So not being in conflict with the emotion that you're having.

That's hard sometimes.

You know,

When we're angry or frustrated,

Or when there is uncertainty,

I notice with uncertainty and doubt.

These are emotions that are hard to be with because we want certainty,

Right?

So allowing it to be as it is.

And meditation practice is a safe place to have that experience of allowing.

It's safe for your emotions.

You're welcome to have,

You know,

Murderous rage in your meditation practice.

It's a safe place because you're committed to not moving,

First of all,

So you can just let it course through you and let it be there as it needs to be.

Another really helpful step,

So there's recognizing and then there's allowing.

And this is not,

It kind of deviates from the RAIN analogy of investigate and then nurture.

It's the step of naming it.

Mental noting and using a simple label is so powerful.

There are Vipassana teachers that just teach noting,

Monastics that just teach noting.

So powerful.

In the ancient like folk tales,

If you sort of name the dragon,

The dragon loses its power.

So there's lots of power in the naming practice.

There's something about naming our experience,

Which takes the power away from it.

The power that comes from being identified with it.

You know,

If we get identified with it,

I'm an angry or I'm frustrated.

It becomes us.

We become entangled with it.

I am this way.

When we put a label on our being,

We're feeding this as our way of being.

We don't need to do that.

So it's very simple,

This naming process,

You know.

Just name it anger,

Anger or doubting,

Doubting,

Sad,

Sad.

The idea is that with naming it,

You're naming it from a place where you're not caught in it.

You're not lost in it or swept in it.

You may be feeling it quite,

You know,

Distinctly and viscerally.

You know,

If you're noting that you're happy,

Something just happened and happiness is coursing through you and the whole body is like,

Yippee,

Yahoo,

Happy.

Just breathing with that energy,

Not getting out and celebrating,

Not getting up with it.

It's the same thing with anger.

You know,

Anger,

Anger,

Anger,

You know,

And then you're exhaling and you're staying with the feeling and allowing the feeling and breathing with the feeling and what happens to the feeling?

It changes into something else.

When there are strong emotions,

The mind often wanders off into story very quickly.

Some emotions are strongly connected to stories.

You know,

I can be sitting,

Meditating,

Minding my own business perfectly still.

And then there's a sound of a car driving by and it can remind me of like a car that rear ended me like 30 years ago.

And then the anger from that experience wells up as part of this story.

And why did that driver drive in that way and why didn't they stop?

And I should have like done something.

And pretty soon I'm in a whole other world of the story of what happened 30 years ago.

So this practice of mindfulness is not to get sucked up into the story.

And I've said that,

You know,

A lot in our practice,

Because we spend our life in stories.

You know,

We're,

We're storytellers.

There's nothing inherently wrong with stories,

But if we're living in them,

They actually inform how we are.

So the idea is to come back to here,

To now,

And by naming the experience,

We're more likely to be present.

Anger,

Anger.

And then,

Oh,

That person I'm angry at,

And then come back,

Come back.

That's the story.

Anger,

Anger.

That's the sensation.

That's what I'm with.

That's what's immediate.

That's what's here.

And be with that.

And this is with any emotion.

I'm using anger because we often can experience anger in different ways,

Frustration,

Not getting what we want.

So there's recognition and acceptance and naming.

These are really quite beautiful and they work together.

And then,

Then there's the investigation.

So investigation happens.

It almost happens naturally without really having to go very deep.

We don't need to look at,

Like we can just be with the feelings and then the feeling of it,

The felt sense of the anger,

The doubt,

The sadness.

Like when we don't hold it at a distance,

You know,

When we just go into the direct experience,

How is this,

How am I experiencing this in my,

In my body?

You know,

You can often experience anger in particular as heat in the stomach or fear is often like a tightness in the chest.

There's sometimes a clenching in the jaw.

There's a temperature with different feelings.

So the actual experience,

The investigation is not on the level of the story.

Okay.

I just want to be clear about that.

The investigation is on the level of the body,

The energy in the system.

What we're exploring and investigating is the felt sense,

Not the source of the anger or the story that led to the anger or the story that leads you to sadness or the story that has you be a certain way in the world.

The question that you're dropping in is what is this?

And the way in which you're asking the question is about what is this now?

What does this feel like now?

You wouldn't know what emotions you were having unless there was some kind of sensation in your body that corresponds with it.

So some people,

When they're afraid,

The stomach tightens and then the shoulders lift and the breath gets short.

Or if you're feeling a lot of joy,

Ah,

It's just warmth and energy and tingling.

And then when we're sad or grieving,

It's heavy and there's a lot of weight and lethargy.

So there's something that shifts when we bring our investigation,

Our attention closer to the physical side of the emotion.

Feel the physical side.

So when we investigate,

We're not investigating the story.

We're investigating the body because the body keeps the score.

We want to know and let that energy be experienced,

Stay close and connected to it.

And what happens is that the body generally doesn't want to stay tense.

You know,

Think about when you hold a baby.

It's just such a relaxed little being.

The body wants to be relaxed.

So when those emotions that involve tension,

You know,

Notice that and just be with,

Again,

The investigation is to be with the tension.

And if the body's left alone with that tension,

It will relax.

So if we can drop down into the body and feel the emotions as a physical experience,

Then what's happening is you're kind of getting out of the way and the body has this opportunity to open and to change course,

To move and evolve and resolve and then dissolve.

I encourage you to investigate in this way,

Letting the investigation land in the physical body.

And you may notice in your investigation that it shifts in different ways.

Sometimes it does resolve and quiet down and relax.

And sometimes it gets stronger before it gets freer,

But it gets freer.

So I'll stop here.

Thank you for your kind attention.

I'd like to take questions now.