Welcoming The Tender Heart Of Difficult Emotion - Brief

Welcome a difficult feeling, accessing gratitude for its place in your life. Connect to the deep, sweet wish that underlies every painful emotion. By giving space to emotion, with compassionate inquiry, we move through it to something that feels very good. In the end, you can hold both the difficult emotion and the underlying yearning. This practice builds your ability to choose your response to life’s difficulties, including relationship conflict, and be less triggered.

This 8-minute version includes a guided process. See the Long version for more explanations and my own personal examples, and the 19-minute version for a full guided process with some explanation.

Transcript

Welcome.

I'm so glad you're here.

This meditation is a powerful practice of being with difficult emotions in a way that lightens them but doesn't ignore them or push them away.

So let's begin.

Bring your attention to the breath.

In-breath and out-breath.

And now expanding your attention to the entire body,

To any body sensations that are present for you right now,

As you prepare yourself to meet difficult emotion with your gentle attention.

Starting with a difficult feeling that you're experiencing now,

Or inviting connection to one you've experienced recently,

Is choosing a difficult feeling as much as you can,

Not spending too much time to find something right now.

And now welcome and thank the feeling.

You are welcome here.

Turning to the feeling with words like this.

Thank you for showing up.

You are part of me.

Thanking and welcoming in a way that feels authentic.

So it can simply be,

You are part of my experience.

Then asking the feeling what it's about.

Just listening inside while connecting to the physical sensations of the emotion to see what it's about.

And it's okay if it's also a jumble of feelings.

And now asking the feeling,

What do you want?

I wanna know,

What do you want?

It may take redirecting your attention to this question and to the body sensations of emotion.

At first,

The answer may seem kind of vague.

It will get more clear.

But for now,

Go with whatever you've got.

Picking one thing that the feeling seems to be answering that it wants.

Now,

Welcoming whatever the answer is.

Thank you for telling me.

I hear that you want that.

Or if it feels authentic,

That's a fine thing to want.

That's a wonderful wish that you're holding for me.

And now turning again to emotion sensations with this question.

Let's say you get that as much as you can dream of,

Or as much as you want.

What else do you want?

Now,

You may get a sense that that question isn't really answerable.

It's as if the feeling doesn't believe that it can get the first want,

Or that it wouldn't be good somehow if it did get that first want.

So you can stop and ask,

Is there something else that you want instead?

And then again,

Welcoming,

Thanking.

And if you get this as much as you want,

What else do you want?

Continue with this process until you get to a place where there's no more,

That the response to that question is,

That's it.

Or it keeps coming up,

That final want,

In slightly different ways.

If you want,

You can pause this audio now and keep going for a few minutes until you get to that final want,

And then come back.

So now looking at that final want,

And see if you can allow it.

See if you can invite those feelings and step into them.

Be immersed in them,

In that intention,

And enjoying it.

So taking a moment for that now.

And now,

See how that resonates back with the first feeling,

Allowing both,

And seeing how that feels.

Coming back now to the present moment,

With gentle attention to your experience right now.

Thanking yourself for this process.