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Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Emotions; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (3 of 5) Emotions. - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on December 10, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Emotions

Good morning and welcome.

For this week, I am offering the most basic Insight Meditation instructions that I teach here at IMC¹, kind of in brief. Today the topic is emotions.

It is very helpful, in being mindful of emotions, to ground the attention in the body—in the physical expression of an emotion, the physical components of it. Part of the reason for this is that a big part of the life of an emotion is related to how stories evoke them, feed them, and keep them going. Stories can be wonderful and are not to be dismissed. However, stories can keep things going longer than they need to.

If the purpose of our practice is to be fully present to the moment and the advantages that come from that, it helps to be aware of the emotions in the body. We ground the experience of emotionality in something that is here and now, something present, something which is not the story. Thereby, we have a grounding that leaves the emotion alone and doesn't feed it or react to it as much.

Also, the body has a lot of intelligence. The body is not just a chunk of meat; it is actually an extension of the mind. The nervous system and the hormonal systems of the body work much better if we are aware of them—if we hold them in an open, attentive, non-reactive way. That helps a lot with emotions.

The odd thing is that the more difficult or unhelpful emotions tend to diminish with mindfulness, and the most healthy ones can grow and expand with mindfulness. Mindfulness of the body is key to this.

So, I'll offer you a little bit of a mindfulness of the body exercise as a stepping stone to being mindful of emotions in your body.

Assume a meditation posture. Maybe sway back and forth, forward and back, getting centered here. Maybe lift your shoulders up to your ears and let them drop. Maybe shake them a little bit. Rotate them a little bit. Then, with your hands well-positioned to let the shoulders be at ease, gently close your eyes.

To connect to this whole body, take some fuller breaths. Enjoy how you take those breaths. Relax and settle on the exhale, letting your breathing return to normal.

As part of this exercise of mindfulness of the body, sitting here quietly with your eyes closed, bring your attention to one of your hands. Explore the different sensations in different parts of the hand in a relaxed, open manner. Put aside your stories and interpretations of the hand in favor of feeling how the hand experiences itself.

Notice if there is tension there. Feel the back of the hand, the palm of the hand, the fingers. Maybe feel the contact of the hand against some surface. The temperature may be different on different parts of the hand.

As you feel the sensations of the hand, feel how they vibrate and oscillate. Notice how the attention naturally moves and floats between different parts of the sensations, different places where they occur. In a relaxed way, feel the hand. Tingling, buzzing, pleasant and unpleasant sensations. Minor feelings of tension or relaxation in the hand. Weight and pressure. Lightness and a kind of openness to the air.

Notice also how you are attending to the hand. Are you straining? Are you trying to figure it out or analyze it? Is there a story about how well you're doing? Is there resistance or boredom? Experiment a little bit to see how simply, lightly, and fully your attention can be within the hand itself. Maybe act as if you've never gotten to know your hand before, and this is a time to know it in a new way.

If it helps you stay present for the hand, you might breathe through the hand or with the hand, as if breathing supports you to stay connected. Imagine your breathing through or with the hand.

If the eyes are closed, there is a way in which the shape of the hand—the mind's picture of the hand—fades away. It is as if the sensations of the hand buzz, arise, and tingle without the shape, without boundaries and edges. Sensations floating in space, allowed to be there, with a mind neither for nor against the sensations. Just attending.

Now, find the place in your body where it is most engaging, comforting, or beneficial to feel the body's experience of breathing. In that area of the body, do the same exercise as we did with the hand. Simply feel the sensations that are alive and active in the part of the body where you experience breathing the most clearly or the most enjoyably.

When attention and awareness are filled with thoughts, we can't be very aware of things. But if you let your thinking mind become quiet and still, perhaps you notice how much more you can feel and sense of your breathing.

Now, shift to notice the clearest emotion, mood, or mental state that is present for you. Calm or agitated? Interested, curious, or averse, irritated? More on the side of happiness or unhappiness? More on the side of anger and ill will, or care and goodwill?

Whatever way you are feeling emotionally or mood-wise, can you find a place where that is active in your body? Where is it expressing how you feel? In the face, in the chest, in the hands, in the belly? It could be anywhere in the body. Notice where it is most expressed physically.

Then, feel what that expression is in the body. It might be tension, pressure, vibration, constriction, openness, a kind of buzzing, humming, or glow. Feel it in the body as you did with the exercise with the hand. Allow the sensations of the emotion to be felt and known. Allow them to be there. Give them permission to be just as they are. Simply explore, sense, and feel the physicality of it.

If it helps you stay present, you can breathe with it. Breathe through it. Put your mental energy into sensing physically, and not into any stories, judgments, or reactions. Quiet the "story mind" to be in the present with the physicality of the emotion.

Then, gently begin again with your breathing. Center yourself in the middle of where breathing is easiest to track and feel. If an emotion, mood, or mental state becomes strong, bring your attention to the physicality of that, recognizing what is happening. Maybe feel it for three breaths, and then return to the breathing.

As we come to the end of this sitting, feel emotionally and physically any ways in which there is a feeling of well-being or pleasure, however small, in your body, heart, or mind. If there are such feelings, take a few moments to feel it as you did the hand. Allow yourself to feel whatever good feelings there might be—calm, subtleness, quiet, inner warmth, a feeling of safety. Breathe with it as a way of letting that goodness be registered in your body and mind.

With the connection to however you feel—whatever goodness you feel right now—consider or aspire that this practice of meditation and Buddhism can be done in such a way that it benefits the world and benefits others.

May it be that cultivating mindfulness, subtleness, and inner stability serves so you can act for the welfare and happiness of others in ways that are nourishing and meaningful for you. Not an obligation, but an inspiration.

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

And may each of us, individually and collectively, spread the goodness, the benefits coming from this practice. May we spread it and share it out into the world.

May all beings be happy.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (3 of 5) Emotions.

Hello and welcome to this third talk in our introduction to mindfulness meditation. These are the core instructions given here at IMC, especially by me.

I like to think of this as a foundational teaching. When we know it well, it can be a basis to expand or specialize the instructions as needed, as people grow and develop their practice or as the circumstances of their lives change.

For each of these areas of this foundational teaching, it is really good to make them a study for a while. Really practice them to learn them well. Learn about mindfulness of breathing—how to do that in a way that is supportive and inspiring (a word which contains the Latin word for "breath" within it).

And to do so with our body. There is a hard divide between the mind and the body that our technology perhaps supports these days. Spending a lot of time on a monitor or getting signals from an electronic device all too easily leaves the body out. We can become wonderfully complete through becoming complete in our body.

Today the topic is emotions.

When I did my early years of Buddhist practice—certainly in Zen²—there was very little emphasis on emotions. Almost none. There was no sense of practicing with emotions and how to be with them wisely. When I was introduced to Insight Meditation in Thailand and Burma, bringing attention to emotions was certainly taught, but it was more like a sideshow. Just recognize it, but there wasn't too much said about how to do it wisely and completely.

It was when I came back to the United States and was introduced to how the Western teachers taught mindfulness that I began to see how useful it was to have a really good grounding and understanding of how to bring mindfulness to emotions.

Emotions are composites. They are made up of many different component parts. There is a strong tendency to be caught, trapped, or influenced by the total picture of the emotion—that kind of amorphous gestalt where it is not clear exactly what it is. It is a little bit hard to address, see, or recognize except through the story-making mind: the mind that reacts to it, or the mind that has thoughts about it (for and against it), or that makes meaning out of it and assigns purpose to it.

There is a way of learning how to be with the different component parts of emotions so that we find more freedom. We do this so that we are not reinforcing it or making the situation worse, but rather learning to be wise. We allow some deeper processing, freeing, and opening in relationship to emotions to unfold. We become more sensitive to emotions, more free and available to the rich world of emotions, which is a very important part of the information system that human beings are constructed to have.

It is almost as if emotions are messages. If we somehow only pay attention to the messenger, we miss what the message is. Emotions are a very important part of human life and understanding what goes on in the world. They are very important messengers about something going on with us, whether it is something psychologically healthy or not so healthy. We want to be able to stop and know how to take a good look at them and be with them. Not so much to solve, analyze, or fix ourselves as a self-improvement project, but ultimately to free our attention, awareness, and hearts from a preoccupation with them. We free ourselves from letting them influence us, from being for or against them, and from defining ourselves by the emotions we have.

As that freedom occurs, in some wonderful way, it doesn't really matter what emotion we have because we are not going to be influenced by it. We are not going to be defined by it. It is not going to push us around. We are not going to succumb to the weight of it. We can just see it clearly because we know how to see—we know what parts of it to see rather than some vague gestalt.

So, emotions are included as part of mindfulness practice. It is easier to be with emotions if you know how to practice mindfulness of the body. And it is easier to practice mindfulness of the body if you know something about how to use breathing as a stabilizer, as a settler, as something that keeps you out of the world of thoughts. For many people, the sequence of breath, body, and emotions works relatively well.

When an emotion is compelling, strong, or predominant, and there is a tension between staying with breathing and the emotion, then the instruction is that it is fine to stop paying attention to breathing and shift the attention to the emotion.

Sometimes an important thing to do is simply to recognize we are having it. There was a time in my life where even learning to recognize I had an emotion was a big deal; I just somehow had blinders on. Sometimes it is enough just to recognize: "Oh, that's what's happening. I'm angry. I'm sad." Sometimes a clear recognition is all that is needed, and then we can leave it alone and go back to the breathing.

Sometimes more is needed. Sometimes more is wonderful to do. We step forward to really be present for it, making it the subject of mindfulness. In doing so, one of the important things to do is to learn the art of leaving it alone—the art of allowing it to be there. Give permission to have your emotion, with the idea that sitting in meditation posture is a safe place to let whatever is there be there.

This is a powerful art we are learning. Even if it is rage, great grief, or great joy, there is an art to learning how to open to it and allow it to be there without succumbing to it, collapsing under the weight of it, getting attached to it, or resisting it. We don't give in to the drives and demands of the emotion, but we learn how to just be open to it, feel it, and stay autonomous and free in the midst of whatever we are feeling.

This is not disrespectful; it is the opposite. It is very respectful to just know the emotion for itself without getting entangled with it, without getting involved in it, and certainly without defining ourselves—using whatever we are feeling as evidence to come to some conclusion about oneself (e.g., "I'm a bad person" or "I'm a good person"). Just be very, very simple.

One of the things that is useful with "Stop, Recognize, Allow" is to then feel it in the body—the physicality of it. The body is not just the body. Whatever we feel and sense in the body is the working of the nervous system and the neurons that are firing. The mind includes the whole body wherever the nerve endings are. The nerve endings send signals to other places in the body; it is a complicated ecology of many things operating.

If we can be present in the body and feel the sensations of an emotion, we are beginning to allow this wider intelligence to operate and move. This helps to free up the emotions from the reactivity—the "picking the wound" that the mind does—and allows for healing. The heart knows how to heal. The heart knows how to process in its own time and in its own way. We are allowing the body to support us and allowing it to do what it does.

Sometimes it is quite subtle in the body, sometimes quite strong. Fear or anger might be in the belly. Joy and love might be in the chest, the heart area. Sadness or depression might be a kind of weight in the shoulders, a sinking feeling, a pulling in of the muscles on the face, or a tiredness somewhere in the body.

The idea is to feel it, to be with it, and to start monitoring and managing oneself with it. If being present for an emotion like fear produces more and more of the same, then something else is needed. You don't want to keep letting something that feels dangerous for you grow and develop under the gaze of mindfulness. Perhaps backing up and feeling the emotions quite broadly and widely, as opposed to narrowly, can mitigate this.

To really feel the emotion with respect and be there without reacting, without the story operating—maybe even letting go of the story-making mind—is a way of not "picking the wound." It is a way of not feeding it. It is a way of trusting what is happening.

I like to think that all emotions—grief, joy, love, even anger—are really precious. It is kind of sacred if we don't give in to acting on that which is harmful. We respect it. We look at it again. We let the body hold it. We make space for it. Many of the emotions we have grow because of the stories and how we are feeding them with reactivity. So, learn not to react. Feel it in the body. Maybe breathe with it so you stay present.

Sometimes it is helpful not to stay too long. I recommend that if there is a strong emotion, mood, or mental state, give your attention to it as fully as you can for three to five breaths, and then come back to the breathing. Do that a few times. Coming back to the breathing is a protection from the subtle ways in which we might be fueling it. Come back to the simplicity of breathing, and then go back to the emotion. Going back and forth a little bit might help free you from the thinking mind.

At some point, you might just stay longer with it. Really give it permission to be there. Feel very gently the physicality of it. Notice how it begins to shift and change. Inevitably, it will change. Become curious by an intimate sensing of the physicality of emotions. Start noticing how those sensations begin to shift, move, and maybe create a better state.

So, for today, I would recommend adding five more minutes to your daily meditation. On Monday I suggested ten minutes, yesterday fifteen, and today I suggest you find a way to meditate for twenty minutes. Do a bit of this mindfulness of emotions. Explore it like a practice run.

Throughout the day, periodically check in with yourself. At least once an hour, in some quality way—maybe put a timer on—check in to really recognize how you are feeling emotionally. Then, for maybe only a minute, breathe with it. Feel it. Stop. Be with it. Maybe it is only five breaths. Count to five and see what difference that makes in your day.

I hope that some of you will do this homework. A lot of the benefits that come from this practice come from doing the practice. So please try to do it during the day.

We will continue tomorrow with mindfulness of thinking.

Thank you.