This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Sensing Emotions; Intro to Mindfulness (13 of 25) Wisdom of Feeling Emotions. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Sensing Emotions; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (13 of 25) Wisdom of Feeling Emotions - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 31, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Sensing Emotions

Hello everyone and welcome. Now we're continuing this week with mindfulness of emotions. When I practiced in Burma, there were no explicit instructions on emotions. However, there was a very strong emphasis on staying in the body, being mindful of the sensations that were at play in the body as we were meditating. The consequence of that was that when we had emotions coursing through us, the focus was not the emotion per se, but on the sensations in the body—the physical expression of the emotion.

The consequence of that is that we learned not to judge the emotions, not to react to them, not to make a story of them or participate in the story making which sometimes fuels the emotions. But rather, in a sense, a radical leaving the emotions alone, not interfering with them, not getting involved in them, and just feeling how they were being experienced in the body.

So that was what we were taught. And now that we're teaching this mindfulness practice in the modern West, there seems to be tremendous value in actually naming "mindfulness of emotions" to make it a subject for mindfulness. There's no reason not to. The way I was taught in Burma was, in principle, we learn to be mindful of anything and everything; it's just they never mentioned emotions there. So here we can learn to be attentive to emotions.

There are many wise ways of being with emotions. You can journal with it, you can go for a walk and feel them, you can talk with a friend about what's happening for you with emotions. There are many things you can do around emotions that are wise and useful. But what we do here in mindfulness is also a very wise approach which is useful to learn. In some ways, it will support other ways if that's what you want to do, but it's also very powerful for itself.

So what it came to then is to learn how to be present for emotions without interfering with them. To be present without judging them, without repressing them, without celebrating them or getting involved in them in any kind of way. It's very simple. And the consequence of that is a very deep respect for some inner embodied wisdom or process by which our emotional lives have a chance to unfold in their way. Just like we allow a cut to heal itself, our emotions are not fixed things; they are processes in motion.

When we're in a sense wounded emotionally, something deep inside knows how to care for that. When there are wonderful things happening to us, there's a way in which trusting the depth of what knows how to be here... that can't happen if we are reacting, involved, participating in the emotion. It's fine to do those things sometimes, but to learn the phenomenal benefit of mindfulness, we put aside all the ways we get involved and judge and get entangled with emotions in order to trust some deeper process that is not of our own making.

So two things that I find very helpful. First, when we sit to meditate, we are intentionally giving permission for an emotion to be there, but the way we allow it to be there changes. The second thing is this metaphor, the image that I love for this, especially when there's difficult emotions: that we're doing the equivalent with attention, with awareness, as we would take our two hands together, cup our hands, and gently hold something. Maybe there's a little animal, a kitten that's been born, and you have to maybe carry it someplace. So you gently hold it in your open hand and you feel the tenderness, the softness, the fragility of that kitten, and you just hold it gently.

So to come up underneath anger, come up underneath fear, come up underneath joy, come up underneath confidence, and just allow it to be there and just hold it. And the way to hold it that works is to feel the emotion as it's expressed in the body with its sensations—the sensations of the emotion, the embodied... what is activating the body when the emotion is present. Finding that place and then imagining we're giving permission there and just holding that place.

So it's very similar to the exercise we did in the week for mindfulness of the body—exercise with a hand. So we'll start with that exercise and then we'll apply it to emotions.

Assuming a meditation posture, gently lowering your gaze, maybe closing your eyes. And let your inner attention be gently directed to your body.

Take a few gentle but deeper breaths. Gently deeper, just so it feels good for you. In a longer exhale, letting there be a gentling of your body, a settling.

Letting your breathing return to normal. Just for the next few breaths, on the exhale, relaxing your body. Maybe feeling holding patterns in your body, tensions, as you breathe in, and softening around those tensions on the exhale.

And now, gently bringing your attention into your hand. And then feel the sensations of your hand. And the idea here is to center yourself on the sensations without centering yourselves on the judgments, the ideas of "hand." Without centering yourself on your opinion about doing this exercise, or being for or against what's happening. Without analyzing. Allow the sensations of the hand to be there as they are.

It isn't so much that you're feeling them as it is you're attuned. You know, you notice, you see how the hand experiences itself. Tingling. Pulsing vibration. Warmth and coolness. Maybe there's something unpleasant, maybe there's something pleasant. Contact of the hand against some other surface. Pressure. Weight.

Allow the attention to gently roam around, feeling different parts of your hand in some random, relaxed, flowing way. Without the attention being fixated or zeroing in on any one place, but just gently, slowly taking everything in, in a gentle journey around the sensations of the hand.

If it helps you to stay present, you can imagine your breathing is accompanying the hand, or you are breathing in and out through the hand.

And now notice how you're feeling in terms of your mood, your emotional state, mind state—the general state of being that you have. It might be very subtle. It might be strong. It might be something not normally called an emotion. Maybe a feeling of being settled or agitated. There might be a subtle sense of worry or fear, or a subtle contentment, confidence. There might be a sense of inner ease or well-being. It might be an inner sense of unease, where not feeling so well.

In whatever way, whatever mood or emotion that's present for you, how is it experienced in the body? What part of your body is activated? What sensations are present related to that emotion, that mood, that state?

It might be a very broad feeling. Maybe it's mostly in the torso or above the waist. Maybe it's throughout the body. Maybe it's mostly the front of the body or the front of the chest. Maybe it's very specific: in the belly, pit of the belly, the chest, around the heart, in the face, around the eyes.

Once you localize the sensations connected to the emotion, then in that physical place, see if you can have the same kind of attention as you had for your hand. Give permission for the sensations to be there. And let your attention gently roam around that location, sensing, feeling what's happening physically in relationship to the emotion.

If your state or emotion fades away, see what replaces it. If it gets stronger, allow it to do so. Whatever is happening to it, give your emotion permission to be present and permission to change in whatever way that it wants to change.

Maybe with a sense of awareness that is like two soft hands coming below the emotion, below the sensations, to hold them. To allow them to be held and felt as they are. Independent of your stories, reactions, beliefs. Independent of any story about them. Just allowing them to be there in their own right. And as you hold the emotion that way, what happens?

And just gently allow your attention to move around the area of where the sensations are, so it mitigates any tendency to get fixated, caught, reactive to your emotional state.

For these few minutes, trust the body. Trust the mindfulness of emotions in this very simple, sensory way.

Centering yourself in the physical sensations, not centering yourselves in the thoughts and attitudes, feeling, judgments, stories, predictions.

And if it proves difficult to do this, maybe there's a secondary emotion that has to do with your relationship to the primary one. And maybe that secondary emotion needs the same kind of attention.

Sometimes it's easier to stay out of the head and out of thoughts if you have your breathing... breathing with or breathing through the sensations of the emotion.

And then to begin ending this meditation, center yourself on your breathing. Center yourself on the body's experience of breathing. And gently take some little fuller, deeper breaths. Longer exhale as you relax and let go and settle in more. Feeling your body more fully, more broadly. Wide panoramic sensations of your body on the inhale, and a settling or grounding on the exhale. Grounding in your weight, in the surface that holds up your body—chair, cushion, bed.

As you exhale, is there anything it would be useful to let go of? Any thoughts? Ideas? Letting go of whatever is useful.

And then, in whatever way that you feel more settled or open, or more tender or more connected to yourself, caring of yourself... can you turn that outward into the world? That allows for some simple, non-assertive, non-intrusive way of feeling a connection, or feeling a care, or feeling a tenderness to the world of people in your life, life in your communities, and out across the world.

Privately, that no one needs to know, wishing them well. Wishing that your capacity for awareness and attention is clear and clean, so it can be a conduit of your goodwill, your well-wishing.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And if you feel a little more tender, vulnerable from this meditation this morning, you might repeat out loud or silently to yourself these phrases that I'll repeat of goodwill:

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

And may I be centered and respectful of myself, so in my way I can contribute to the welfare of others.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (13 of 25) Wisdom of Feeling Emotions

So with this talk, today becomes the third talk on mindfulness of emotions in this 25-part series on Introduction to Mindfulness.

One of the challenges of developing mindfulness meditation is the degree to which we identify with our experience. What "identify" means is that we define ourselves by it in some way, or we are relating to emotions or whatever is happening as if we are what's happening. So if we have an emotion, we must be that emotion. It defines who we are, it represents us in some kind of important way, so that who we are as a person can now be judged based on what's happening.

With emotions, this gets very tricky. Partly because emotions are so changeable and so conditioned and dependent on so many factors outside of our own lives. Some of the emotions we experience are conditioned by our society; we don't even realize how much we've internalized values of our society, and that these internalized values then become the basis by which we judge ourselves, by which we feel frustrated. We want things, we like certain things, we don't like other things. In the wake of liking and not liking, wanting and not wanting, there can be joy and happiness getting what we want; there can be anger, frustration not getting what we want; there can be fear and worry about how we'll be judged if we don't live up to certain societal standards.

A phenomenal amount of our emotions are not unique to ourselves but are strongly conditioned by the society, the family, the friendships, the ideas of people around us. And it's not necessarily wrong for this to happen, but to be caught in the net, in the web of these societal values in such a way that we are debilitatingly caught in our emotions, our reactions, our identifications around what's going on—this is one of the things that mindfulness is trying to free us from.

To do this in relationship to emotions is phenomenally useful. It's not to dismiss anything, but by being able to not be identified with our emotions, then we can start seeing much more clearly what is actually happening. It gives us a phenomenal insight into the cultural way that emotions are conditioned and the values and beliefs from which they come. We begin questioning not necessarily the emotions, but we can start questioning some of the underlying assumptions, beliefs, values that we don't even know we're carrying that are the seedbed for some of the emotions we have.

This is especially true for the difficult emotions. I mean, certainly there can be very strong grief. That grief is to be deeply respected and has a very important place in the heart, and is something to really learn how to hold carefully, lovingly. And grief can be entangled with identity and how we should be and shouldn't be, and deeper assumptions about who we are and what the good life is—all things that can add to grief so that there's unnecessary suffering connected to it.

So one of the ways that we then practice mindfulness is looking how to practice mindfulness without the extra layer of identification, the extra layer of telling a story about the emotion, perpetuating a story. And instead, not to again dismiss identification, dismiss storytelling, but to put it aside for a while so we have something more important to do with the emotion, and that is to feel it and know it so we can really know it in a deeper way.

There's a depth inside of us that is not accessible easily if we stay in the storytelling mind, if we stay in that part of the mind that's preoccupied about what this means about me and who I am and what I should do and what other people will think about me. We have tremendous reservoirs of wisdom, of compassion, of love available deep inside if we can drop below the place we're involved in navigating, negotiating identity in relationship to the emotions we have.

One of the powerful ways of doing that is radically simple. And it's not the only way to be with emotions; there's a lot of other valuable ways to be with emotions. I love the idea that we just go for a walk with a friend and have a chance to talk about what's going on and talk about how we're feeling. That can be tremendously useful. It can be useful to journal, it can be useful to dance the emotions, it can be useful to express it in art. There are many ways to work with emotions.

And one of those ways is mindfulness. Mindfulness has its own approach that can be phenomenally useful, but it's not the one that's always useful—you know, it's not the be-all and end-all of how to be with emotions. So knowing that, maybe it's easier to give oneself over to mindfulness of emotions because we're not trying to make it the only solution. But it's one way. And to know that it's one way, maybe we can give ourselves: "Okay, for these minutes, I'll do it. I'm going to do it the mindful way."

And one of the mindful ways is meant to be very simple, and that is to simply find the physical manifestation of the emotion in the body. And as we feel the physical sensations, then give permission for the emotion to be there. If we give permission for the emotion to be there and we're caught up in the stories and our reactivity, then we're just perpetuating this endless cycle of feeding the story, feeding the identity issues that we have, that can actually make it go on for a lifetime.

But if we could drop below that and just feel the physical sensations... Physical sensations are not just physical; they are deeply connected to the heart, to deeper psychology of who we are. There's something profound that can begin unfolding and working and showing itself when we drop down into the sensation level of the emotion. And it's there that we can give permission for the emotion to be. We make room for it by making room for the physical sensations.

And this image that I love is to take two cupped hands and let the awareness be like two cupped hands that comes underneath a difficult emotion and just holds it. Saying, "It's there, it's okay, I'm just going to be here with you. I'll hold you, I'll be with you, I'll feel you. However long you need, you have permission to be here forever, it's okay." That radical kind of permission.

And then stay present and make room and allow for whatever needs to happen with the sensations. Let them move and shift and become stronger, become weaker. Just be with them. As we do this, we come to a vantage point where we can now begin better seeing our relationship to the emotion: that in fact we hate it, or in fact we love it and we're trying to hold on to it. In fact, that the relationship is... when we're not just letting the emotion be there, we're telling stories about it, we're judging ourselves, judging it, judging other people, we're seeing the world through the lens of that emotion. If we're angry, everything is aversive, everything is wrong.

So we begin seeing that it is not just the emotion, but it's also how we're relating to it, or how we're caught in it, or the stories we make about it.

So we're starting to see, as we settle down into just breathing with the sensations, breathing with the emotion, at some point what begins standing out in highlight is that we can't do that. There is, in fact, a layer of reactivity, a layer of judgment, a layer of identification that goes on. And rather than seeing that's wrong or bad or reacting or being upset because that's there, if anything, in mindfulness meditation it's more like we relax and say, "Oh, I see, that's how it is. That's what's happening for me."

And so we see it. And having seen it and known it, then you have the choice to say, "Okay, let me put that aside and just stay more simply with the emotion now without that reactivity." Or we see, "Well, this reactivity, this judgment, this identification... there's a different emotion that seems to be the basis for that. Let me now do that simple mindfulness of emotion with the fear or the anxiety that seems to be fueling the identity, the way I want to identify or disidentify with what's happening." Or maybe it seems to be that I have a strong feeling of aversion... maybe that aversion needs the same kind of careful feeling at the sensation level. Make room for it to be there. And always kind of stepping away from the story, stepping away from the interpretation, stepping away from the identification we might have with it.

This is a way of making lots of room, lots of simplicity. And to do that in the meditation posture where we're not going to punch someone out or grab someone or run away, but just feel it. With a guideline: Keep it simple. Keep it simple as simple as you can. What is a simple way of holding the emotion? What's happening? Trusting it's okay. If I feel it in the body, I can maybe just allow it to go.

The exception to this is sometimes some emotions like fear... sometimes if we feel it, it actually can then reinforce more fear. And sometimes there's a loop that we feel it, and every time we feel it we get more afraid; we feel it again, we get more afraid. And it can get out of hand a little bit. So you have to watch yourself, monitor yourself to see. And if you feel like there's a loop and it's getting stronger and stronger, then you want to find some way to switch what you're doing.

Maybe just go back to your breathing and not focus on the emotion directly. Maybe it's to do love and kindness meditation. Maybe it's to open your eyes so that that breaks the loop cycle, and we kind of look around and just do mindfulness of seeing or mindfulness of hearing. That kind of helps us to get disentangled from this looping that goes on that can make things get out of control.

But if it's not looping and getting too intense, the possibility exists of learning a radical simplicity around emotions. That's deeply respectful of them, allows them to do their own thing, allows them to be there without interference, without analysis, without fixing, without making it go away. Just allowing the wisdom depth within us to show us a way with emotions.

So for this day, if you want to explore your emotions further, periodically through the day check in with yourself. See what emotions you have and see how you feel it in your body. With the idea that just the physicality is a simple, direct, embodied experience. And as you do that, see if that helps you see more clearly what relationship you have with the emotion. Are you for it or against it? Are you judging yourself because of it? Are you telling a story like a prediction of the future, or is your storytelling what's fueling it?

Just see what the relationship is. And once you've seen it, relax, come back into your body a little bit, and then continue with your day.

So thank you very much.