Guided Meditation 11.
2 Expanding the Window of Welcome for Emotion For this meditation,
Choose a moment in time when your own emotional expression left you feeling uncomfortable.
You can choose a moment of sadness,
Irritation,
Outrage,
Doubt,
Skepticism,
Exhilaration,
Overwhelm,
Rage,
Anxiety,
Fear,
Or even terror.
When you think of that moment,
What do you feel in your body?
Notice the nuances of contraction or constriction.
Where do you feel the sensation?
Is there anything in your face?
The face is often the easiest place to begin and to feel into.
Is there any sensation around your nose?
This is where you may notice disgust or contempt.
Around your mouth?
Sometimes we can feel sadness or irritation in the corners of our mouths.
What about the corners of your eyes?
Or between your eyebrows?
Is there confusion?
A little fear?
Exhaustion?
As you connect with these edges of sensation and what emotions might lie beneath them,
What is most important for you and your body to acknowledge?
Is the emotion itself unbearable,
Unresolvable,
And uncomfortable?
Do you have a hopelessness that naming it will help in any way?
Is this an emotion that was unknown or unnamed in the family you grew up in?
Does it bend your body into negative space where you no longer get to exist?
Feelings that have never been resonated with can collect in a hollow feeling space in the chest or the gut.
If your experience is wordless,
Then you can imagine bringing a soft cloud of attunement,
A response of,
Of course,
To every nuance that is here in your body.
If your thoughts lead you to remembering other people's emotional expression,
Do you need acknowledgement that someone in the past has overloaded you with their emotions?
Are you longing for absolute freedom from other people's emotional experience and for emotional self-responsibility?
Do you want to live in a world where people calm and soothe their own annoyance and frustration rather than taking it out on others?
Do you wish to know that everyone who is grieving will be cared for and that it is not your burden to carry?
Is there any edge of contempt or annoyance that you would like to name when you are in the presence of your own or others' emotions?
Do you sometimes want to live in a world that is absolutely free of all emotions?
Or conversely,
Are you tired of people hiding what they feel and do you ache for expression rather than numbness?
What other longings and truths are rising toward consciousness?
Are there any other emotions that you have caught the edges of that would like to be named and linked with your deepest dreams?
What is here to mourn or acknowledge that keeps your heart closed toward yourself?
Return to thinking about your physical response to your emotional experience.
What happens in your body now?
What is the next nuance of feeling that needs to be named or held?
If you find that disgust is here,
Disgust does not respond very well to empathy.
Instead,
Imagine yourself making your disgust into a kind of a mat that is lying on the ground in front of you,
Covering something up.
Let yourself really feel your disgust.
And now imagine lifting the rug or the mat of that emotion to look underneath it for what frightens you or makes you angry or sad.
Hold any discoveries with gentleness.
If you find that you are dealing with self-contempt rather than with disgust,
Do this same exercise.
And also name the way that you have a sense that you have stepped outside human acceptability with the emotion that you are feeling.
After your body relaxes with the feelings and needs guests,
Check in with your body again.
If there is any change in body sensation at all when you think of the emotion,
You are starting to experience neuroplasticity and the gradual change in the window of welcome that resonance can bring.
