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Guided Meditation: Listening to Emotions; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (12 of 25) Sensing Emotions in the Body. - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 30, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Listening to Emotions

Welcome. The topic for this week is mindfulness of emotions. These emotions are to be respected, cared for, and attended to. They are a very important part of life, but they are also a very important part of Buddhist practice. They are integral to the whole unfolding of Buddhist practice. To not include our emotional life in the practice is to shortchange oneself in the richness and the unfolding of the path.

Because it is so important, we want to create the right conditions for being present for the emotions—the right conditions for our emotions to reveal themselves to us. We want to develop a capacity to hold whatever emotion comes through.

That begins with the posture that we assume when we meditate. Whatever way you are meditating—whether sitting, lying down, standing, or walking—the idea is to be careful not to just take a habitual posture. Do not just sit on the couch and not give any care or attention to the posture you are in. Find a posture that is appropriate for you, where you feel there is stability and a kind of postural alertness—an intentional capacity for the body and the posture to be the temple, the container that holds the emotions.

It is not just the mind or our thinking that is responsible for finding a way to be with our emotions. If it is just the mind—if it is just thinking and reacting—we do not really allow ourselves the opportunity to feel the emotions fully. We want to let the emotions be free within us without reacting to them, picking them up, or fueling them.

Spend a little bit of time adjusting your posture. It could be as simple as the way your hands are placed, ensuring there is a feeling of being grounded in the hands, a sense of strength. I usually keep my hands with palms facing down on my thighs. It is a posture of being ready for anything. It provides a kind of tripod effect for the rest of the torso.

Maybe the spine is a little bit straighter. Maybe the shoulders can roll back a little bit. Even lying down, it is possible sometimes to have the shoulders roll back and the shoulder blades go down the back a little so the chest is a little bit more open. If the chest is caved in, there is less room in our torso for feeling and sensing our emotional life.

With a stable, open posture that has some modicum of strength, one of the first things we try to do with emotions is to listen to them. We listen not for a message, thoughts, or stories connected to them, but with a deep attention to how they are felt and experienced in the body. It is almost like we are listening to the body. Many people benefit tremendously from being heard, from having someone who is a really good listener hear what is going on. Our body benefits immensely if we listen—not expecting words or a verbal conversation, but listening as a sensing where we make room for things to be felt deeply and fully as present-moment phenomena.

In this stable posture, assume the open, receptive attitude of listening, as if your body has important messages to tell you. Don't try to discern the messages; just listen. Feel how your emotions manifest physically in the chest, in the belly, or in the shoulders.

Gently close your eyes. Feel your body—the three-dimensional quality of the body, the weight of the body.

As if you can make more room in your body, breathe in deeply. Feel your torso fill your lungs with air so that your chest expands, and even your back rib cage stretches. Take a long exhale to settle in, to relax.

Let your breathing return to normal. Continue the process of feeling your torso expand as you breathe in, and relaxing as you exhale.

Notice your feeling, the emotion that is present, your mood, your mind state—the broad, general feeling of your state of being. Whatever way you are feeling, whatever emotions are present, it is allowed for this exercise. It is okay.

Find where in the body you most feel your state of mind, your inner state. Is it mostly in the torso? Mostly in the head? In your arms or your legs? Is it in your chest or in your belly? In the face or in the neck? Wherever the emotion is most active in your body, wherever the evidence of how you are feeling is located, trust the feeling. It is okay. Make room for it.

Become a good friend to it by simply listening, almost as if you are sitting next to it on a park bench. You are attending to and accompanying whatever feeling is there. Part of the purpose of listening in the body—feeling in the body with the emotions—is to give more room for those sensations to move and unfold. Emotions are always in motion if we allow them, if we give them space. Listen to the emotions not to hear a message, but in such a way that whatever movement the emotion wants to do—the physical sensations—allow them to flow, to move, to change in whatever way they want to change.

If you are listening to someone playing music, you are quiet so as not to disturb the hearing and the music. Let your thinking mind become quieter so you can hear the music of your emotions—how emotions are felt and expressed in the body. Give permission for the emotion to live in the body in whatever way it wants while you sit stably in a posture of stability and strength that can allow it all to unfold within.

Listen from a place deep within that has lots of capacity to just listen, just feel whatever the mood or emotions you have, however subtle. If it feels right to do so, you can breathe with your emotional state, your mood, or how you feel. Breathe through it.

As we come to the end of this sitting, take a few gentle, deeper breaths. Relax the body as you exhale. Breathing in, relaxing the heart. Softening in the chest. Breathing in and softening the thinking mind.

Consider that in whatever way you experience emotions, feelings, and moods, so do others. The moods, states of mind, and inner states of being of others are an important part of who they are. Regardless of what they do in their life, if we could just be attuned and feel their inner state, we would probably care for them. We would probably wish them well.

Let us end this meditation with a wish for the well-being of everyone. That the state of mind, the state of heart, the inner quality of being, and the emotions that circulate in people—may they be nourishing, healthy, and bring happiness and peace.

May the inner life of others feel happy, safe, and peaceful. May people feel untroubled in their hearts. May they be at ease in themselves. May they be free. And may they know that we wish them well. May all beings be happy.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (12 of 25) Sensing Emotions in the Body.

Today I am going to continue talking about mindfulness of emotions. Yesterday, the practice was to be able to recognize the presence of an emotion in a respectful way—to recognize it with some feeling of freedom, not participating, not activated by, and not reactive to the emotions. There is this beautiful way in which the mind can know something clearly and name something: "Ah, it's this." In the naming, in the recognition of what it actually is, there is a feeling of space, a feeling of non-stickiness, of non-entanglement. "Oh, this is how it is."

The exercise yesterday was to try to discover that, even just for a moment. You recognize this movement to be unentangled and not reactive to emotions—not judging them, not participating in them, not collapsing in them. Finding a certain degree of freedom with emotions is supported by mindfulness of the body. This is one of the reasons why, in this series, we do mindfulness of the body before doing mindfulness of emotions.

All emotions are, one way or another, manifested in sensations in the body. Sometimes they are very subtle and you have to be very attentive to feel them, but they are always there in the body. There is a way of dropping in and feeling the physical manifestation of emotions which is a wonderful alternative to living in the thoughts about the emotion, or living in the stories of the emotions.

Some emotions are really closely connected to the stories we tell ourselves. In fact, we can just be sitting peacefully and then we remember a story of being hurt by someone, or someone offended us. As we tell ourselves the story or remember the story, we can feel the emotions arise. The more we stay in the story—repeating what happened, thinking about it, or replaying the conversation—it fuels the emotion more and more. One of the reasons some people will go distract themselves is so that they are not repeating the harmful way of thinking that is causing difficult emotions.

To drop down into the body as an alternative to the mind thinking and story-making is a very significant way for us to start giving the emotions some freedom. Freedom doesn't mean that we act freely in whatever way the emotion seems to want to direct us. It is powerful and very significant. In meditation, we are more or less committed not to move, so we don't give in to whatever the emotion wants us to do. We feel it instead. We feel it with respect.

Another way of talking about feeling the emotion in the body that I like a lot is this idea of listening to it. All emotions are messages. All emotions have a purpose to be there; they shouldn't be dismissed. But for the people who do mindfulness meditation, one of the purposes of the emotions is to allow the momentum, the movement of whatever we are feeling, to move through us unencumbered—unencumbered by attachment, unencumbered by resistance, unencumbered by preferences and judgments, unencumbered by repression and pushing it down to avoid it. We learn that we have the capacity to feel the emotions of our life without being troubled by them. This applies to difficult emotions and beautiful emotions.

We start learning that the freedom to feel is a better pleasure than the pleasure of good emotions. Some people lean into the good emotions, hold on to them, and celebrate them in a way that is being caught in their grip. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing that, but there is something better to do, and that is the pleasure of being free in relationship to them.

So, it is not just allowing the emotion to be there, but listening deeply, like we are listening to the body. The body is almost like the transmitter of emotions, and so that is where we want to listen. The benefit of that is that it takes us out of the story-making mind, the thinking mind which can add fuel to the fire of the emotions or is how we get caught by them and identify with them. We drop into the body and allow the emotion to have its life in the body.

All emotions want to move. If the emotion creates tightness or contraction in the body, and then we make space to listen to it, it begins to relax and open. If the emotions involve some kind of nervous energy, as we listen to it and make space for the nervousness, it has a chance to settle in a way that it doesn't if we keep thinking about the scary thoughts. So, listening to the body—"Oh, that's where the nervousness is"—and now listening deeply as if it has a message, as if it is a friend in distress who just wants someone to accompany them and listen to them. "Oh, that's where it is—in the belly, or in the chest, or in the shoulders."

It is the same thing with anger. If anger is a feeling of pressure and forcefulness within us, a tightening... if your hand is clenched and a friend comes along and doesn't say anything, doesn't judge you, but just holds the clenched hand (you didn't even know it was clenched until you felt the warmth and softness of your friend holding it), then it releases.

We bring this capacity to hold, to feel, to listen to whatever the emotion might be. If the emotions involve tension of any kind, attachment of any kind, this practice of just feeling in the body and letting the body's expression have room and space to change and be tends to allow it to change by relaxing.

Some difficult emotions need to have the chance to get stronger before they can pass away. You might feel some anger, but as we feel the anger, the inner wellspring—the volcano—maybe needs to become strong anger or rage. So we learn to open up to the capacity to feel the rage in this meditative posture that we have. We make room for it and learn slowly over time that no matter what the emotion is, we have the capacity to be still, receptive, open, and kind so that it can process itself. In a sense, all emotions are processes unfolding, and there is something very significant about just making room for it in a body that is quiet and still.

There are certainly other ways of processing emotions. Sometimes it is good to walk; if there is a lot of anger, I used to like to just go for long walks to get it moving, and that allowed me to stay in the body. There are many ways of processing, but in meditation, this is the way it can be done.

If the emotion is a healthy one, a nourishing one, this making space and listening has a different effect than letting it relax. It allows the goodness—the warmth, the tenderness, or the good feelings of the happy emotion—to begin spreading through the body. It makes room for it to suffuse the body rather than being bottled up. Some good emotions can have a little bit of attachment connected to them, like when we are excited and it gets channeled in some way. But to make room for it, there is a kind of calmness and suffusion and spreading of that goodness throughout the body.

A huge part of mindfulness of emotions is the practice of embodiment—of feeling the emotion as it is expressed or felt in the body. The first step in doing so is just becoming familiar with how emotions are in the body, all the different ways that different emotions, different moods, and mind states manifest energetically and sensation-wise.

As we get familiar with it, the second stage is to make room for it. Make room to see and allow for how those sensations connected to the emotion change, how they unfold, and how they are part of an ongoing processing that cannot happen if we are living in the reactivity of the mind, the thoughts of the mind, the attachments, and the stories that keep fueling them.

So for today, if you would like, make it a day to explore the sensations of whatever mind state, mood, or inner state of being that you have, no matter how subtle it is. Chances are pretty high that there is always going to be something to feel, but it takes sensitivity. It takes pausing and looking. Through the day, you might find a way to pause and to feel carefully and respectfully: What are the sensations in the body connected to how I am feeling?

And if you want to do the second step, then just quietly listen to it as if it has permission to be there, as if there is no need to judge it. Just make room, listen, feel, and sense, and see what changes as you do so. Maybe you want to breathe with it; that is a nice way to connect. Sometimes breathing with an emotion makes it easier to stay present rather than drifting away.

I hope that doing this mindfulness of emotions in the body enriches your life. I found that it enriched my life tremendously. It is a fantastic foundation for deepening Dharma¹ practice, where the deepening of practice is through the vehicle of what could be called emotions or feelings.

Thank you, and we will continue tomorrow.