This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Room for Emotions; Introduction to Mindfulness (14 of 25) Capacity For Emotions. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Making Room for Emotions; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (14 of 25) Increading Capacity for Awareness - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 01, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Making Room for Emotions

Hello and welcome to this fourth guided meditation on mindfulness of emotions. What I'd like to start with today is using an analogy.

In English, we use the distinction between the words "listening" and "hearing." Someone might direct you to listen to something, and intentionally you turn your attention to listen. Or, you can hear something without the intention to hear. These two words overlap, but "hearing" is more likely used for something which is more receptive and maybe unintentional. We hear a sound, and then we're interested in what is going on, so we listen carefully; the listening is the effort to be engaged.

The same distinction applies to "seeing" and "looking." Someone might say "see here," but usually the instruction is to "look." In the way I'm talking about today, I am trying to highlight the difference between two different ways of using our eyes to see. One is a natural receptivity where we see what's happening without trying to see. The other is seeing by trying to see intentionally—to look.

When we practice meditation, both are activated, and both are fine. But there is an orientation or a leaning towards the part that is more receptive, not trying to make something happen. If we're sensing the body breathing, or if we're sensing the body's sensations, the idea is not to be so much in the control tower trying to sense, or making an extra mental effort to really feel what's going on. Rather, we put ourselves in a situation where we can really sense and receive the sensations in an open way.

On this topic this week of emotions, we want to receive the sensations. A nice mode for being with our emotions is to listen to them—or rather, to hear them. We allow them to come. We wouldn't direct ourselves to strain; there's no strain involved. It is just allowing the emotions to be heard, to hear deeply what's there.

I don't know if this distinction makes so much sense to all of you, but the idea of receptively being open to hear and listen to the emotions—as if there's something profound to hear there—for some people, that gets their self-consciousness out of the way. It gets their efforts to try to fix or make something happen out of the way. It's a way of allowing the emotion to be there, giving it permission to be there, while also being available to hear, to feel, and to find out what's going on more deeply.

It would be akin to sitting with a friend who just wants to be heard. You are just an active listener. You're present, hearing, allowing it to come, but you're not involved in trying to fix, question, or interfere with your friend. You might indicate that you're listening well and nod and say "yes" or "I hear you," or maybe sometimes repeat back what you hear, but you're just a really good listener. That's all they need.

With mindfulness of emotions, we're trying to shift the orientation from any tendency we might have to be judging them, to be preferring one over the other, or to be resistant to them. We often approach them as if they're a problem and we have to fix them, thinking if we just bring mindfulness to it, this difficult emotion will go away. The idea is to approach it more with the capacity to allow it to be there.

I use that word "capacity" very carefully. We're trying to increase our capacity to sense, feel, hear, and see whatever is happening without interfering with it. By doing so, we are able to see it deeply, hear it deeply, and feel it deeply so that it reveals something deeper about itself. One of the simplest things it reveals is that, in some way or other, it is always changing. To see it change makes it easier not to be stuck around it in a fixed view or reaction. It is easier to allow it just to change, to unfold, and give it room to do what it wants.

We will begin this meditation with a small act of imagination, and then we'll go into this a little bit more deeply.

Assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes. Before doing anything else, before taking some deep breaths and relaxing, spend a few moments feeling or listening deeply. What is here for you? How are you?

One way to increase the capacity to hold and be with whatever is here for you is to imagine that you're in a very, very large space—a big cathedral-like room or a vast landscape. Whatever way you're feeling is clearly one part of a vastness all around. Maybe you are looking into the night sky, and you still feel just the way you're feeling, but the vastness of the night sky highlights how you're feeling. It's like there's a vast room for it to be just the way you are.

Be quiet and still, spacious with how you are, as if awareness is the vast sky within which how you are is known. In the vast sky, nothing is a problem. It's just a piece of the whole.

In the middle of it all, breathing in and breathing out. As you exhale, relax and soften the body.

Centering yourself on your breathing, the center of all things is breathing in and out within a vast landscape of a spacious awareness. Maybe almost as if there's vast space in your own body, and the movements and sensations of breathing are like a gentle wind coming and going.

As you exhale, relax the thinking muscle. Relax around thinking, calming the thinking mind. More often than not, there's a thinking mind which contracts us, narrows our identity, who we are, and what's important. The more we're preoccupied and caught in our thoughts, the smaller the capacity is to be open and aware non-reactively.

As we continue meditating for a little while longer, center yourself on the breathing, but with your peripheral awareness—with a very light touch, not trying too hard—be aware of your body. Maybe feel the weight of your body, the substantiality of your body. Without focusing on the body or thinking about it much, let it be a companion on the edges of peripheral awareness—the edges of breathing—where peripheral awareness provides more room for breathing to come and go. Inhales and exhales.

Now take a few moments to recognize how you're feeling. What's your emotional state, your mood, the state of your inner being? How, more globally, do you feel?

Let there be lots of space for how you're feeling. Maybe your central attention is being with your emotions, your mood, your state—maybe breathing with it—but the peripheral awareness creates a vastness, a spaciousness where it's easier just to allow the emotions to be there without reacting or doing anything about them, judging them, or making commentary.

We're like a good friend. You're just listening, feeling, or seeing the emotion for what it is, giving it permission to be there. Finding an ability to give lots of space and room to how you feel without thinking about it, analyzing it, or reacting to it. The task is to increase your capacity to simply allow how you are to be there. You are listening, sensing, and feeling how it is—how the emotion is—as if you're a friend for it.

You are present for the sensations of breathing, of the emotion, and how the emotion is expressed in the body. And for that, you make lots of room.

If it's helpful for staying present with the emotion, breathe with the emotion. Breathe through it. Let breathing be in the middle of the emotion, and on the edges: vast space. Openness that allows your emotion to be there as it is.

Checking in: how are you? Checking in without trying to disturb anything, just to see and feel as if everything is allowed to be just the way it is, undisturbed. You are seeing it, knowing it, as gently as the gentle breeze of breathing.

Making room for how you feel and feeling it in the body, the sensations of your emotions. It's okay. Let it be for these few moments. Breathing.

There is freedom to be found not by changing what's happening, but by changing our relationship to what's happening. One of the ways that change can take place is to know and be aware of what's happening in a spacious way, an open way—listening deeply, listening with respect to all things, while not disturbing anything.

As we come to the end of this meditation, without disturbing anything or thinking we have to do anything directly to anything, open your awareness wide, broad, and vast like the sky. Become aware of the people of your life: those you know, the neighbors you don't know, people on the streets, and places of commerce and work.

For a few moments, hold it spaciously, allowing—without a mind that disturbs anyone with our judgments or commentary, our preferences—just an awareness within which people are safe from us. Safe from our judgments, safe from our fixing, condemning, pushing away, or holding on. An awareness that helps people feel safe.

In that safety, in that capacity to hold people in our hearts and in our awareness, we wish them well:

May you be happy. May you be peaceful. May you be safe. May you be free. May we live together in such a way that we all can be happy, we all can feel safe, we all can be peaceful, and we all can be free.¹

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (14 of 25) Increading Capacity for Awareness

Good morning, good day everyone, and welcome to this fourth talk on mindfulness of emotions.

One of the great skills to develop in relationship to our emotions and how we're feeling is to expand our capacity to feel. Partly, a very powerful thing that can mean is to expand our capacity to be uncomfortable. Much of our reactivity in life—the challenges we have—is because something or other is making us feel uncomfortable. So then we don't like it, we want to fix it, we want to blame someone, and we get caught up in trying to do something about being uncomfortable. That discomfort might be physical, it might also be emotional, and there are a lot of things which are emotionally uncomfortable.

To become wise and skillful with situations where we feel emotionally uncomfortable, one of the ways to find our way with that is to be able to allow ourselves to feel what we're feeling without reacting to it. We do this without being pushed around by it, feeling trapped by it, or feeling like we have to do something because of it. All of this is subsumed under the idea of increasing our capacity to feel our emotional life without reactivity.

This allows us then to be more reflective of what we do, to consider what is the wise thing to do in this situation. If we feel pent-up anger or frustration, if we increase our capacity to feel frustration, then it doesn't have to be an automatic trigger to swear at someone. We just rest, we open to what's happening for us, and then we can reflect: what would be the skillful thing to do? What would be the wise or the compassionate thing to do with this phenomenon, with what's happening here? Chances are there are better things to do than to swear at someone.

Or, we might shut down. We might collapse, pull in, or shrink away if something is uncomfortable. It's certainly understandable; we can feel threatened and challenged and want to do that. But there is also the ability to stay open and feel afraid but without being influenced by it. It's there, and we are bigger than the fear; we have more space for it. Again, we can then be wiser about how we respond to the fear rather than shrinking. Maybe we take ten steps back without having to diminish ourselves or shrink or collapse in some way. Or perhaps we can assess the danger more carefully and have a wise response while standing our ground with it.

These are all just examples that maybe you can fill in, but the idea is that whatever is happening, it doesn't just have to be discomfort. Some things feel really good. Sometimes it can be quite stressful to be overjoyed, to feel delighted and happy. It's easy to get swept away in it; we lose ourselves in it, and lose our mindfulness—lose our presence—because we're so swept away in the excitement of the moment. There might be nothing wrong with that, but it's easy to make mistakes, to say the wrong things, to do things which later we regret we did in the excitement of the moment.

It's a wonderful thing to open up to a capacity to feel our joy—not to diminish it—but to allow it to live in us in a very different way than if we allow it to take over and get us activated around it. There are times when the best thing we can do is to just hold the good feelings in this broad, open way because there might be a deeper wellspring of responsiveness that has a chance to surface if we don't act from the surface joy and the excitement of it all. If we open and relax and feel, "Oh, maybe there's love here. Maybe there's generosity. Maybe there's being more inclusive of the other people involved," rather than caught up in our own excitement and joy and somehow losing track of the people around us.

So, the principle of increasing our capacity to feel our emotions without being reactive is like one of the "North Stars" that we're working with when we're practicing with mindfulness of emotions.

One way to do that is to find a different way to be with emotions than the way we are when we get activated or reactivated by them. Very often what activates us around it is the story, or the way we relate to it, the attitude we have towards it. To increase the capacity to hold an emotion, it helps to sit quietly, like in meditation. Breathe gently, be present, feel the emotions in the body, and then take a look and see: what is your relationship to the emotion being there?

Is your relationship—the way you're relating to it, the way you're reacting to it—making the space smaller? Are you getting narrower, contracted, or caught up in it? Or are you able to relate to it more spaciously and openly, and for these few moments at least, allow it to be there? So there's an expansive quality of the heart, of the body, of the mind, of awareness, so that, "Oh, it's like this."

Part of the task of mindfulness of emotions is to notice what is our relationship to the emotion. This is not meant to be analysis. It's not meant to be spending a lot of time thinking about it. It's just kind of asking yourself the question. If nothing jumps out as being obvious, don't go looking for it. But sometimes you say, "Oh, of course I don't like it. I'm trying to push it away," or, "I'm trying to fix it," or, "I'm trying to justify why I feel this way with the story."

If it's obvious, then see if you can expand and say, "Oh, it's just a story. It's just a way of relating to it. There's the emotion and the relationship to it." Then maybe it's easier to drop in and feel the emotion by itself, and you can just make room for the emotion and feel it and allow it to be there.

Another way of talking about expanding our capacity to feel emotions is developing an ability to stay quiet and still with the emotion. To develop a capacity not to automatically act or automatically think in response to what's happening, but find a place of stability and quiet and stillness inside. In meditation, in that stillness or that stability, we recognize the emotion.

Some people find that there's a kind of stability or a kind of stillness in the peripheral awareness. This is an analogy: that of sight. We have central vision and we have peripheral vision. When we look at something, we're engaging central vision. But peripheral vision is kind of always there, and we can tune into peripheral vision almost by not trying. We can't turn our central vision to look at peripheral vision; we have to relax and open and just sense and feel without a central focus being predominant.

In the same way, when we sit in mindfulness with our eyes closed and we're aware, there is a kind of peripheral awareness that is more like peripheral vision. When we're not caught in it, we're not fixating on something, we have spaciousness around it; we allow it to be there. There is a kind of stillness of peripheral vision, or non-reactivity of peripheral awareness. It's another way of developing this capacity to be with emotions.

It turns out that some of the wonderful emotions can become more wonderful when there's that space for them and we don't get involved tinkering with them. And some of the difficult emotions, when there's space and this kind of awareness, tend to be deflated. They tend to relax because they tend to be there because of tension, and the very thing of not being involved takes away the tension that comes from involvement.

To increase the capacity to feel and be is one of the great skills we're trying to develop here in mindfulness. It doesn't require getting rid of anything; it just requires a quiet, peaceful way of staying present with this. It's a skill that we develop over time, so don't be in a hurry.

I hope that this teaching today about increasing your capacity is something that is of interest to you, and you have a sense of, "Oh yeah, maybe I could do it a little bit at a time. Let me experiment with this."

For example, as you go through your day, there might be times through the day that you're emotionally uncomfortable, or maybe emotionally excited in some good way. You might spend maybe three breaths, maybe a minute, to see: what would it mean now to expand my capacity? Just allow this to be here with a spacious peripheral awareness, as if there's lots of room for me to be this way. If I have the ability to stay still and non-reactive—kind of an inner stillness or stability—just to be with it and to feel it.

What happens if you do that for a minute? Maybe you want to start with emotions that are not really strong. Maybe there are medium emotions that you can experiment with to expand your capacity. In the end, maybe what you learn is how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. That is a superpower. All kinds of things are available if you can do that, which are not available if you're reactive to being uncomfortable.

I hope that you have plenty of opportunities today to explore for a minute or two how to expand your ability, your capacity to be present for your emotions non-reactively—where you become bigger and more expansive as you allow the emotion to be there. Maybe you do this incrementally. Don't have a high standard for what this looks like, but it's a skill that gets developed over time.

Thank you, and we have one more talk tomorrow on this topic.