This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Intro to Mindfulness Meditation (3 of 4) ~ Emotion by Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Intro to Mindfulness Meditation (3 of 4) ~ Emotions - Diana Clark

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on July 09, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Intro to Mindfulness Meditation (3 of 4) ~ Emotions

Welcome, everybody. Some of you may know that this is the third class in the introduction to mindfulness meditation. It's perfectly fine if you haven't been at the earlier ones; we'll be building on what we've done before, and I'll also be reviewing what we talked about.

Here at IMC, we teach mindfulness in a particular progression. It doesn't have to be taught this way; there are plenty of perfectly valuable, legitimate ways to teach it. But how we teach it here is an idea that Gil Fronsdal¹ came up with, maybe a few decades ago. I really like this idea of practice as having concentric circles. In the center is what is most stable, and as you get to the rings around that, things get a little bit more wobbly.

In the center is mindfulness of breathing. The experience of breathing is always available—we're always breathing, or you hope so. A little bit out from there is the body. This is also stable; the body is always available, and it's especially stable compared to the third ring, which is emotions—what we're going to talk about tonight. Then the fourth is thoughts. The world of thoughts is very slippery; we are always getting pushed around by them, and it tends to be the least stable.

In the preceding weeks, we talked about mindfulness of breathing and mindfulness of the bodily experience. What I'd like to highlight is that it's so much about experience—sensations, as opposed to thoughts or ideas. Sometimes we get confused; we think it's about sensations, but we don't recognize that we're actually thinking. Next week, we'll talk a little bit more about thinking, but when we do mindfulness, it can be done without any words. The experience can be without words; it's just the experience of, for example, feeling the chest expand and release, the stretch, these movements. Or maybe with breathing, the belly goes in and out, or maybe you feel the temperature of the air going in and out of the nose. It's not so much the concept or the idea of breathing; it's the movement of the body in these different ways.

We start with mindfulness of breathing, using the breath as an anchor. The mind wanders—this is what minds do—and then we just very simply come back to the breath. The mind wanders, we come back to the breath. The mind wanders, we come back to the breath. It doesn't matter how many times you have to do this. In the beginning, it'll be a lot; the mind may even be wandering more than it's on the breath. That's fine. That's how it is when we start.

Then, with mindfulness of the body, we have the anchor here with the breath, resting attention on the sensations of breathing. Let's say there's a compelling bodily sensation, just a discomfort in the back. You might feel like, "Oh, I can't be with the breath because my back really hurts," and we just try to keep being with the breath while we're thinking about the back. Instead of getting into a wrestling match or struggling with this, we just let go of using the breath as the anchor and turn towards having the experience in the back be the anchor. We feel it. This might be exactly what you do not want to do, but it turns out that to actually be with our experience is a way to have more freedom with it, to no longer be pushed around by it, and to have a different relationship to our experience. We might say that mindfulness practice is all about changing our relationship to what's happening.

So we turn towards the experience of what's happening in the back. If we were to use words, they would be adjectives: stabbing, throbbing, pinching, hot, cold, vibrant, something like this. We're just noticing the uncomfortable experience in the back. We're not thinking about it, but the mind will want to go into a story: "Oh my gosh, this thing in my back. I'm probably going to have to check in with the chiropractor as soon as I get home. Why did I decide to go to a mindfulness class anyway?" There'll be stories that will happen. As best we can, we just let those go to the background and be with the experience in the back until it's either no longer compelling and it just kind of diminishes—this happens, not always, but it does happen—and then come back to the sensations of breathing. Or maybe you're with the back, it's uncomfortable, and the mind just goes off into fantasy. You completely forget that you're meditating, and then you wake up: "Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be doing that meditation thing." Then start back with the breath. When the body is compelling, turn towards the body. When it's no longer compelling, turn towards the breath. We're just very easily, gently going back and forth between these different experiences.

Now I'd like to introduce the idea of how to have mindfulness of emotions, because mindfulness practice includes all of our lives. All of it. There's nothing left out. Emotions are a part of the human experience, of course. So how can we bring mindfulness to emotions?

First of all, emotions have at least two components. Often we tend to think of sadness, for example, as just, "Oh, I'm just sad, and I'm sad because I have this grief, this terrible loss that happened in my life. Of course I'm sad." But emotions have more than one component. They have this somatic signature, and they have a mental aspect: thoughts. The somatic signature of sadness is how it feels in the body. How do you know you're sad? Very often, there'll be a heaviness in the shoulders, maybe a little bit of a slumping, and there can be pressure behind the eyes, maybe even feeling like tears arising. There can be a bit of a collapsing of the posture, maybe there's a lump in the throat, something like this. And the mind is saying, "Oh, so sad that so-and-so is sick in the hospital," or "so-and-so died," or whatever it might be that we're sad about.

We're going to let the thoughts just take care of themselves. They're going to want to hijack the experience, and that's okay. We'll just let them take care of themselves, and we are going to pay attention to the bodily experience of the emotions. This is partly because bodily experiences move at a different tempo than thoughts. What's happening in the body is more stable, it's slower, it's more tangible. We can feel it, we can really get an experience of what it's like, unlike the thoughts which are running really quickly and going all over the place—the past, the future, all kinds of things.

In some ways, I think about this as translating emotional experiences into bodily experiences. By being with the experience of the body, we are actually honoring and respecting our experience. We're not suppressing our emotions. We're not pretending that they're not there. We're not trying to wish that they were different or anything like this. We are actually being with our emotional life, and this alone can add so much freedom to one's life.

What would it be like if you felt comfortable with all emotions? You didn't have to move away from them or avoid them. You could have difficult conversations, you could have tender conversations, you could comfort people in the midst of their terrible grief, you could hold your own grief. It adds a lot of freedom to our lives because we start to notice how much we're trying to avoid emotions or trying to only have particular emotions and have more of those. But it doesn't work that way. We don't get to control our emotional life. We try, but when we're trying to only have certain emotions, there's a way in which we shut down our experience.

Mindfulness of the emotions is this way that allows us to no longer be in conflict with our emotional life and to have some confidence with regards to it. But maybe importantly, it enables us to have some intimacy with our life. There's this way in which if we're trying to avoid our emotions, we're a little bit disconnected from ourselves, from others perhaps, and then our life is just kind of passing us by. We feel like our life is not very satisfying. But to be present for our inner life brings this richness and fullness of the human experience. Emotions are an integral part of our lives, of course.

It can be transformative. There's this way in which turning towards and honoring and respecting, "Yes, this is what anger feels like. I have this heat in my face, I feel like my legs, my arms want to move, there's this restlessness here, and maybe the chest gets puffed out a little bit," and some of these subtle things. If we can be with our emotions, they can evolve. They have the freedom to arise, be present, and then pass away. This is the nature of emotions: to just arise and pass away. The physiologists and the neurologists tell us that emotions really only last 90 seconds. And you're like, "Wait, I've been sad for longer than 90 seconds. I've been sad for days, weeks, months, even years."

Well, what happens is the sadness arises, and then we get tangled up with it. It's the getting tangled up with it that causes it to persist. "Oh no, I wish the sadness weren't here. I'm always sad. I'm going to be sad again. Everybody else is having a good time and I'm not. Maybe I should do that thing I saw on that YouTube video... maybe I should go learn to meditate." There's often this subtle way in which we're trying to make them be different or go away, and it's often not even noticed that we get tangled up. It's the tangled-up-ness that perpetuates the emotions. Instead, they can arise and pass away. How can we allow them to be there so that they aren't persisting? By being with the bodily experience.

Our relationship to emotions in general will show up. It might not be obvious, it might even be very subtle, but for some people, they are emotional about emotion. They think that it's the true expression of who they are and they should announce and share all their emotions at all the time: "I feel this way and therefore this should happen, and now I feel this way and therefore that should happen." On the other end of the spectrum is: "Emotions are a pain. I try not to have any of them. In fact, I'm not even sure if I do have them." We have these two ends of the spectrum. These are two legitimate ways of being; it depends on so many things.

The encouragement here is just to recognize that you will have a relationship towards emotions. Can we move more towards the center? We don't have to express every emotion, and we don't have to pretend like we don't have them. Some of the most beautiful, sublime experiences of our lives are emotions: when babies are born, that emotion of love, falling in love, or the love that we have for others. Or fear, which is very frightening, of course.

Guided Meditation

Let's take an alert posture, a posture that expresses your intention to meditate and also has some ease. It has some uprightness. The spine is upright. If your body allows it, it can be helpful to not be using the backrest in the chair, but to be sitting upright.

Connect to this experience of sitting right now. We can connect to the sitting surface. If you're using the backrest, feel the pressure on your back from the chair. Feeling the pressure on the buttocks from the chair or the cushion, feeling the pressure on the back of the legs, the feet.

We're here. Let's do a small little body scan. Check in with some common areas of tightness or tension: the eyes, around the eyes, the jaw. We're just noticing what they feel like. It might be that bringing our attention to those areas allows some softening of tension. Relaxing the shoulders, letting the shoulder blades slide down the back.

And then just check in: what is your emotional state like right now? What is your mood? What are the feelings?

And then you can notice how you're feeling about how you're feeling, your relationship to whatever the emotional state is right now. And if your emotional state is not clear, can you be okay with that, with it not being clear?

And then we'll bring our attention to the sensations of breathing. Feeling the belly moving in and out with the breath, or feeling the chest stretch and the release of the stretch, or feeling the air moving in and out of the nose. Choosing one of those three areas and just resting attention there.

Breathing naturally. The body knows how to breathe. We don't need to change the breath in any way. We're just noticing the sensations, the experience of breathing.

We're just hanging in there with the rhythm of breathing.

When you discover that you're lost in thought, just very simply, gently begin again with the sensations of breathing.

Nothing in particular needs to be happening. We're just here now, noticing the sensations of breathing.

Letting the thoughts just be in the background and being with what it feels like to have an inhale, what it feels like to have an exhale.

And now, let go of having attention on breathing and again, notice the emotional state, the mood, or feeling that is present. Very simply offering it a kind of simple awareness. See if you can discover where in your body that emotional state or mood or feeling is experienced. What sensations in your body let you know that you're having that emotional state? This might be subtle. It might be vague.

Can you make a distinction between experiences in the body and the mental events that are happening? We're turning towards the bodily experience.

And then again, you can rest your attention on the sensations of breathing.

Q&A

We often put the breath at the center. Starting with the breath is a way that can allow the body and the mind to settle down. Maybe with a little bit of a body scan, we notice if there are some areas that are uncomfortable, and then just rest there with the bodily experience until something becomes compelling. This could be a bodily discomfort, but it can also be joy or an energetic uplift. Joy and happiness are absolutely a part of this path of practice. We can use the stability that we discover with mindfulness of breathing to help us create the container, so to speak, in which we can be with the emotions.

Emotions are often felt, not exclusively, but often felt in the face and in the torso—chest, throat, belly. Sometimes it can be a little bit tricky with emotions because we want to resist them or judge them. We want to do anything except to have a simple awareness of them. But turning towards the bodily experience is a way in which we can have this more simple relationship and experience of emotions.

With that, I'd like to open it up to some questions or comments about anything I've said. And I'd love to hear a little bit about how that meditation was for you. Was this whole idea of looking for the somatic signature of the emotions in the bodily experience obvious, or was that perplexing?

Questioner: In my case, it was a little bit difficult to identify the emotion, but once I felt it, I just wanted to start crying. And then when you said that we should come back to our breathing, it was very difficult for me to let that emotion go. I was probably blocking the emotion or not letting myself feel it completely, but once I started feeling it, it was very difficult for me to come back. I just found that interesting.

Diana Clark: And how do you feel now, at this moment?

Questioner: I feel fine, yeah. I feel good. I feel relieved in some way.

Diana Clark: So that was a little bit of a surprise for you, the crying?

Questioner: Yeah, I was not expecting that at all.

Diana Clark: Thank you. This can happen. Emotions can kind of bubble up. When we create the conditions, when there's some quietness, they bubble up. The way that I think about it is that they get metabolized in some kind of way when they get seen and acknowledged. Maybe they let themselves be known a little bit more, and then they often just go on their way.

Questioner: You mentioned that if you don't know what emotions you have at the moment, it's just okay to say "unknown." That can help a lot, because many times I don't really know how I'm feeling when I look at it, and I can't label it specifically as something. That instruction was helpful. My mind automatically labels certain sensations in my stomach as bad. It just has that association. Feeling the sensation, "Oh, that's bad, I need to avoid it." That association seems very, very deep. Irrespective of what I'm doing, if that's happening, I think it's a bad sensation. I don't know what comes first. Is it the negative thing in the brain that causes the stomach sensation? Is it the stomach that caused the brain, or do they happen together? It's very perplexing.

Diana Clark: It's a fantastic thing to practice with, to get curious about it. What's happening first here? Is it the sensation in the belly and then the mind, or the mind and then the belly? It's a great thing to just bring some curiosity to, not so much that you have to find the answer, but just to experience and see how it is. With regard to the vagueness of the emotion, it can be helpful to maybe have a sense of... well, sometimes I wouldn't know what I was feeling, and I liked this expression "out of sorts." Just out of sorts. I don't know what it is, it's just out of sorts. So sometimes it can be helpful to just acknowledge there's something there but I don't know what it is. Or there could be some other vague label, like "I don't know, but it's delightful." It can be helpful to have some specificity with our emotions, but it's not helpful to try to figure it out and dig and think, "Oh my gosh, I got to get to the bottom of this." That's not what we're doing. So if it's just not clear, then be okay with the vagueness.

Questioner: You have a beautiful way of explaining this in such detail. It's so helpful for me, especially when you talked about not getting entangled in the thoughts. It's like it gave me permission not to become obsessed with my thoughts of the day. Thank you. I was able to really calm down.

Diana Clark: You're welcome. Next week I'll talk a little bit more about this, but there is a way in which we think that our thoughts are the absolute most important thing that is always happening. And our thoughts are important, I'm not going to say that they're not, but so many of the things we think about... the first 1,227 times you think about it is enough. We don't have to continue thinking about things.

Questioner: I think you asked twice during that meditation about what was the emotion that you were feeling. The first time, the emotion came up and it instantly manifested itself into a kind of pressure on my eyes, behind my eyes, a kind of weird light show and darkness going on. And then the second time was just a heaviness on my chest. Same emotion, but two different ways that it manifested itself. The question I have is, then I was concentrating more on the bodily feeling, the heaviness and such, and not so much on the emotion anymore. Is that helping work through the emotion that you're trying to work through?

Diana Clark: This is a legitimate question. I would say that actually, this heaviness in the chest, for example, is the emotion. They're not separate things. To have this bodily experience and to have an emotion—heaviness in the chest, pressure behind the eyes—that's emotions. They're actually primarily a bodily experience, as it turns out. But I appreciate what you're saying. It's not uncommon to have the idea of, "But no, I need to get in there with the emotion and somehow work with it or understand it or do something with it." We have psychology telling us that this is beneficial, and I am going to say it is helpful and beneficial, but that's not what we're doing in meditation. It turns out that these emotions can resolve themselves if we give them the conditions in which they can. I'm not saying it's fast, and I'm not saying it's always easy or straightforward, but there's a way in which the emotions can metabolize or shift or change without our having to get to the bottom of them or completely understand them or connect them to that thing that happened when we were a kid. Meditation offers an alternative way.

We don't want to tip into overwhelm. That's not the direction we're going. So if we're swimming in this ocean of grief, and we turn towards the bodily experience and this huge well comes up, we can see, "Can we hold it? Wow, this is really strong." Often there are waves with sadness, there might be tears and maybe a little bit of sobbing. If you can stay with the bodily experience, that's great. But if you can't, and you're starting to feel like, "Oh my God, this is too much, I can't handle it," that's not the direction we want to go. It's not so helpful. In that case, I would say just open your eyes, feel the pressure against the body where you're sitting, feel your feet. "No, I'm here now." If it's a particularly emotionally labile time for you, it can be helpful to even before you start the meditation, look around the room and identify some things that are pleasing, completely mundane and pleasing. "I'm looking at this chair, it's kind of nice how it has shiny legs." "I'm looking at this cushion here, it has this softness to it." "I'm appreciating the sinewy curve of this wire that's on the back wall." These are such mundane things that we don't usually pay attention to, but it can be helpful to notice some things that are mundane and pleasing before we start our meditation. And then if we feel like we're tipping into overwhelm, to open our eyes and connect with these objects again. This is a way to help remind us, "No, we're here now."

The RAFT Model for Working with Emotions

I want to talk about another tool that you can use, a specific tool for working with emotions that can be really helpful. This was developed by Tanya Wiser, who teaches here on Thursdays, and Gil Fronsdal. It has this very nice acronym: RAFT. R-A-F-T. A raft is what carries you over the flood to safety; this is a common metaphor that's used in Buddhist teachings.

• R is for Recognize. Just recognize the emotion that's happening: sadness, out of sorts, delight. Whatever it is, you can use a simple word, just a little note. "Yep, it's anger, joy, delight, envy," whatever it might be.
• A is for Allow. That emotion is already there. You are already experiencing it. Can you allow it to be there? Because it is already there. There's often this way in which we want to push things away because we feel like then we'll make it go away, or if we ignore it, it'll go away. This is my favorite tactic; I used to just try to ignore things. But if we can allow it to be there, we are aligning with the reality of the moment. The reality of the moment is that that emotion has arisen, is being experienced, is known. Can we stop pushing it away or wanting more of it or getting tangled up with it? Instead, can there be this movement towards openness? "Yes, this envy is here right now." You can have any emotion. It doesn't mean that we're going to jump out of our meditation posture and go out and express them. We can have murderous rage, we can have such incredible anger, but we're not going to act on them. We're meditating. We're going to stay in our meditation posture and allow the emotion to be known and felt and experienced. This might be the only place in our lives in which we have complete permission to feel whatever there is to be felt.
• F is for Feel in the body. "It feels like this." Feel the lump in the throat, feel the heat in the face, feel the restlessness in the arms or legs. If we can rest our attention on the bodily experience, as I've been saying, it takes the authority and the momentum out of what's happening in the mind. The mind is making all kinds of stories, rehashing what happened or planning the future. Or we're saying, "Oh my gosh, this means that I'm a bad person because I'm having this emotion." The mind likes to take emotions and really run with them. We're just going to let that happen more in the background and again, just turn towards the bodily experience.
• T has two meanings.
  1. Tease apart. Tease apart the experience of being angry from our ideas or commentary or notion about what it means to be angry. "I shouldn't be angry, they didn't really know that they were being so rude and obnoxious." Or maybe we're working ourselves up. To tease apart the actual anger from our reaction to the anger, our commentary about the anger. Often these get conflated, and this is how the tangled-up-ness happens and the emotions get perpetuated. Just notice what emotion we have about the emotion. If there's anger, and then we have shame about the anger, then we can just turn towards the shame. That's the new emotion. Let the anger do whatever it's going to do, and then feel the shame. "Oh yeah, okay, there's shame here. It feels like a heaviness on the shoulders and a small little knot in the gut." You might notice that there's hatred, and then hatred of the hatred, and then there's hatred of the hatred of the hatred, and off you go. That's okay. "Yep, hatred feels like this."
  2. Trust. Can we trust that at that precise moment, we don't have to fix it? We don't have to jump up and do something. That'll be the impulse often: "I have to make this go away, it needs to be different, I have to fix it, I got to send that email." Can we trust that at that moment, it doesn't have to be fixed? It may get fixed later, but at that moment when we're experiencing it, this is related to allowing. Something happens when we can trust and put down and soften the wrestling that we do. Then some wisdom often arises. When we open to the experience, there's a little bit more space for a new way of seeing things, a new idea, a new interpretation, something that wasn't seen before that can really shift our relationship, shift our understanding. So trust that you don't have to do anything at precisely that moment. Maybe you can trust something that's meaningful for you that's bigger than you—trust the universe, trust your favorite deity. In Buddhism, we have refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha². Maybe that's meaningful for you. What this trust is pointing to is the movement away from, "Oh, I'm feeling this terrible thing and I have to fix it." The trust is moving in the opposite direction.

Our capacity is so much more than we give ourselves credit for. It really is.

Guided Meditation with RAFT

Okay, so taking a meditation posture. I'm going to begin with something that we did last week, and that is just encourage you to bring your attention to the sensations in your left hand. What the hand is touching, what it feels like to have a left hand. I'm pointing to the left hand with the assumption that it's a neutral experience for you. If it's not neutral, then choose another area in the body.

What is it like to just feel the hand? Allowing the hand to show itself to you, independent of any commentary you might have, independent of what you're thinking. Just the experience of having the left hand. Maybe there's tingling, pulsing, heaviness, vibration. Just allowing those sensations to be there.

And then in the same way, can you bring that kind of attention to the emotional experience? The emotion and attitude, mood. It might be subtle. As if it were okay for that experience to be there.

Can you recognize what the emotion is? Just use a very simple label: sadness, happiness, delight, boredom, frustration.

Can you just allow that emotion to be there? Can we just let it be, without adding anything to it, without insisting or wishing that it were different? Just allowing.

And then feeling again into the body, the bodily experience of this emotion. How does it feel? What are the sensations?

And can you tease apart the emotion from the mental events that are surrounding it, the commentary we might have about it? Can you tease those apart?

Can you trust that it doesn't have to be fixed? It doesn't have to be different at this moment.

And rest attention on the sensations of breathing.

Final Comments & Q&A

This idea of RAFT—recognize, allow, feel in the body, tease apart, and trust—doesn't have to be in that order. It's a nice acronym, but maybe you can just be recognizing, "Oh yeah, there's that frustration again." Maybe sometimes just acknowledging it is sufficient and it just kind of peters out. Or there might be a way in which we just feel it in the body first. "Oh wow, I don't really know what this is, but there's a tightness in the chest or a knot in the gut." And then maybe just allowing that bodily sensation to be there, and then there's some recognition, "Oh yeah, this is shame or sadness," or whatever it might be.

The point here is not to figure everything out, which is often what we like to do. We like to understand things; they feel more manageable, and certainly that has its place. But the emphasis with this practice is to experience them. There's this way in which when we're figuring them out, we're kind of shoving them to the side. Figuring them out can be a way to not experience them, turning away from experience and running into concepts like, "Oh, that must be because of X, Y, or Z that happened in my life." I'm not saying those things aren't true. I'm saying that this is a different way that turns out to be enormously powerful and transformative: to just, as best we can, be with our experience.

Questioner: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what freedom feels like. We talk a lot about freedom when we talk about meditation. Specifically, let's say you're dealing with grief. It becomes this thing you carry with you all the time for a long period of time. I find that inquiring or sitting with your emotions or noting... suddenly that itself is overwhelming, to see what a mess you are, what are the things that are going on inside of you. So then the question becomes, okay, where is the freedom?

Diana Clark: I'll say a few things about freedom. One is, emotions arise—grief—it's felt, and it's not a problem. It's just grief. It feels like this, and it's not a problem. So none of the emotions are a problem, and this is where freedom is. It's not like we have to avoid anything. We have the capacity to be with anything. Then we start to recognize how much of our life we spend trying to make sure we only have certain emotions and not other emotions.

A second way is that a big part of mindfulness practice is that we start to gain more clarity and see a little bit more deeply into our inner life. That includes noticing, yes, there's a lot of grief. Grief is a natural thing. When there's human life, there's loss, and there's grief. This is the human experience. But there are also so many mundane, perfectly neutral things that are happening in our life that we often are just dismissing. Or there are often even little delights. For me, it's the first sip of coffee in the morning. I love coffee. The first taste just makes me happy. All these small little things that are even delightful, we tend to be dismissive of them. So the freedom is in starting to see, "Oh yeah, there's a lot of grief, and there's other things happening too." We're honoring and respecting the grief, but we're not letting our entire experience collapse into that.

Questioner: Quick question on the labeling. Is it more helpful to label, or does it just get you lost in thought? Is it more helpful just to stay with the feeling?

Diana Clark: It's helpful to gain familiarity and for our emotional vocabulary to increase. What we don't want to do is, as you described, try to figure it out: "Okay, now I have to figure this out. Am I this, this, or that, or the other thing?" I know a number of people who have spent some time starting with "mad, sad, glad." Maybe it's a variation of one of those three. Jack Kornfield talks about this in one of his books. He was a monk for quite some time in Thailand and in Burma, and it wasn't until he came back to the United States that he realized that he really didn't know his emotions at all. He spent time with lists of them, and that really helped him to broaden his awareness of what different things were. So this is one way to approach it. I think it can be helpful to have some... like I said, is it in one of those three families? And then maybe just bring some curiosity throughout the day, not in meditation, to have a little bit of a sense of one's emotions without it having to turn into a big self-improvement project.

Questioner: Sometimes I get random feelings that aren't associated tangibly with some mental formation, except for they cause discomfort, like a random feeling in the stomach, for example. The other thing is sometimes I have this irresistible urge to move, and I'm not able to pinpoint it to one specific part of my body. What is it that's just making me want to move?

Diana Clark: I'll say that it turns out that they're not so random. They are emotions, and as the mind and the body start to settle, then we start to see connections that we don't see with just our regular mind. And this wanting to move, there could be countless reasons. You could just label it "restlessness." And then, okay, maybe that's something you could recognize, allow, feel in the body, and tease apart.