This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Guided Meditation: Meditation without Identification

Hello everyone, and to all the places that you're connecting from. I value very much the wide network of people meditating right now in different time zones and continents.

The topic for this week is emotions. These are very rich parts of the human experience and to be respected, to be listened to, to really pay attention to them carefully for many reasons. I'll talk more about that as we go along here, but one of the wonderful possibilities, especially with this mindfulness practice, is to have emotions be simple. To not pile on top of our emotions evaluations, judgments, predictions, meaning. Just let the emotion be there in a simple way.

One of the ways of having our emotional life and other parts of our life be simple as we meditate is to do a simple shift, if you can. Instead of saying something like, "my emotions," or "I am having emotions," just refer to the emotions that are occurring as emotions. So if there is sadness, just recognize there is sadness, but refrain from calling it "my sadness" or to say "I am sad."

If you're angry, if you're happy, if you're delighted, if you're confused, one way to make it very simple is to free whatever the state is from the identification with it—"mine," "I," "I am." It's maybe reasonable enough to use the idea of "me" and "mine" in ordinary language, but it tends to come along with a lot of baggage. It tends to come along with a lot of ideas of who the self is, what it means to have certain emotions, and how it reflects back on ourselves. The world can get very complicated very quickly.

What we're aiming to do is to have the emotions be simple, and at least when we're meditating, just the simplicity of each pristine emotion in and of itself. So as we're sitting now, you might see if there's some simple way, without making it complicated, to periodically notice a shift. A difference between shifting from some unconscious pattern of identifying things as "my pain," "I'm having pain," "my distraction," "I'm distracted," "my thinking," "I'm thinking," to "just thinking," "just distracted," "just pain," "the pain," "the distraction." Whatever it is, shift to a non-identification way of being present for your experience. Not "my breathing," but "the breathing," with the goal to keep your attention very simple. It's a simplicity that allows things to settle and become peaceful.

Assuming a meditation posture. Not your posture, but a posture, the posture. Gently close your eyes.

Take a moment to see if you can notice the simplest way of being here now. The simplest things to notice about the present moment. The simplest things to notice about your body. The simplest things to notice about your breathing. Not my breathing, just the breathing.

And the simplest ways of acknowledging whatever mood or emotional state is present for you now, as if it's free-floating, without any reference to "me," "myself," and "mine."

Then, within this experience, settling into the experience of the body breathing.

On the exhale, relaxing.

Physical relaxation. Relaxation of the face, around the mouth. Of the shoulders, and relaxing the belly.

Perhaps allowing now the breathing to breathe itself. Not your breathing, but rather the breathing.

And as we go along here today, when it seems easy, see if you can switch from ways of recognizing what's happening—from identifying with it as "mine" or "I"—to simply the experience. The emotion floating free of identification.

Recognizing thinking as thinking. Not "my thinking," "I'm thinking."

Recognizing emotion as emotion. Not "mine" or "I am."

Pain and sensations in the body, whatever is happening, let it float free from identification.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, to bring forth the simplest sense of goodwill. Free of "I have goodwill" or "I am loving," just goodwill. Letting that goodwill live in your body.

To make a bridge between this meditation and our wider social life, have that goodwill now extend itself to the people around you and your communities: work, family, friends, neighbors, strangers.

Letting the focus be on them and not on you.

May others be happy. May others be safe. May others be peaceful. May others be free.

And now, to bring the attention to you, in this way it's useful that you say: May I contribute to this possibility. May I contribute to the welfare and happiness of everyone.

Dharmette: Wise to Emotions (3 of 5) Emotions and Self-Referencing

Hello, and we're here to continue on this topic of emotions. An important part of mindfulness of emotions is to recognize how some emotions arise out of an appraisal of the situation, an evaluation of the situation we're in. I like to call these "secondary emotions" that arise from the stories, the judgments, the meaning we assign to the situation. I call "primary emotions" those which don't require much appraisal, evaluation, or assigning a meaning to the situation.

Certain kinds of things can happen suddenly. You're working in the kitchen with a knife, and the knife suddenly falls off the counter, maybe towards your foot. There might be a sudden, very quick reaction of fear and a response that doesn't take much evaluation. It isn't like you look at the knife falling and say, "Oh, there's a knife falling, the point of the knife is heading to my foot, this wouldn't be a good idea to have it hit me." There's not enough time for that level of evaluation. It's just very quick. Or fear that arises very suddenly because maybe a car appeared out of nowhere right next to you, driving fast, and so there's fear.

But some emotions arise because of evaluation. Sometimes those evaluations have to do with "me, myself, and mine." The situation is what it is, but we then refer to ourselves, and we evaluate it in reference to how we identify ourselves, how we think about ourselves, how we consider ourselves.

For example, if we have this idea that I'm supposed to be in control all the time, in every situation, we bring with us a pre-established evaluation, meaning, or idea. When the idea of control doesn't work, then we're disappointed or despondent. That's a secondary emotion in my vocabulary because it arises not out of the simplicity or the basicness of the situation we're in, but the situation travels through our need to be in control. We have this idea that I should be capable of taking care of things, and so if we don't take care of it properly, it goes through that idea—"I should have been able to do it"—and then there's disappointment, or there's anger, or grief.

This idea of referring it back to some idea of self, and then emotion arising out of that, is not a primary but a secondary emotion. Being secondary, maybe it's not always needed. Maybe sometimes it is. But to be able to consider how this works and to be able to question it: "Is this emotion I'm feeling now more primary or is it more secondary?" Some emotions lend themselves to being primarily secondary.

For example, something like guilt. There are many reasons for guilt, but one aspect of guilt is when we have the idea that who I am myself, I'm wrong or I'm bad. I've seen people who feel guilty for no reason that I can tell that they have done anything wrong. But they have this almost preconceived policy that if anything in the world is going wrong, they should say, "I'm sorry," and they feel guilt or they feel somehow something.

We can have self-concepts about ourselves, and if those self-concepts are threatened or attacked, we can get angry. Sometimes there are other reasons for anger. But say I'm sitting here today, and maybe I read the news, and the news says that self-respecting Dharma teachers should only wear blue shirts, not red shirts.

And so then, wow, where is that coming from? Now I get angry. I chose this shirt carefully, and I'm happy and proud of my shirt. This is essentially a broadcasting of my importance as a Dharma teacher to wear a red shirt. Now someone is saying something different, and I'm angry with them for somehow threatening me or hurting me, perhaps because I have this idea of what a Dharma teacher should be like. Or perhaps I read the headlines and it says that Dharma teachers should wear blue shirts, and now I'm in front of all of you. You've read the same headlines, and now I'm afraid because I'm afraid of the judgments. I'm afraid that now I'm wrong and I'm going to be threatened in some ways, all about this image about who I am. I'm defined by the shirt I wear.

Sometimes boredom is a sign that a self-concept we have is not being pumped up, it's not being reinforced. Sometimes when our concept of self gets praised or gets criticized, we feel energized by that. Maybe we feel a certain kind of joy when we are praised. Maybe we're ready to be angry if we're criticized, or if something challenges our status or sense of self. But when nothing happens—it neither supports the self nor threatens it—then boredom can arise. A particular kind of boredom arises from somehow evaluating everything through the filter of my self-concept: who I am, and how I'm being supported or undermined by situations.

All these different secondary emotions can be primary emotions in the sense that they can come just from a moment's experience, without going through the channels of my self-concepts, my self-definitions, my ideas of who I am, "me, myself, and mine." But so many emotions people have are triggered by some idea that a situation is threatening, praising, or challenging some idea we're carrying around with us of how things should be.

Some of those ideas are probably fine and may even be appropriate, but some of them are not. Particularly the ones that are most painful have to do with the ones where we're attached to some concept, some image of ourselves that we want to hold up, or want to defend, or we want to use to create safety for ourselves. Some idea of self that has to do with status, conceit, that I'm better than others, and how does that get threatened? Some idea of what a self is, what a being is. We have ideas of what we're supposed to be to be a successful human being. So if we don't have that success, then we can feel despondent because that's what a good human being is supposed to be like.

And so with these secondary emotions, we do very well to ask ourselves: What are we believing? What are the stories? What are the evaluations? What is the appraisal we're making that has triggered this emotion?

If we don't do that investigation, we might think that the emotion is a primary one, that this is just built into the nature of the universe. That if someone says something about the color of my shirt, that casts some kind of character on who I am, and I need to defend myself for who I am. But maybe I could look at that and see in my mind that maybe even if people do judge a Dharma teacher by the color of their shirt, that's their problem, that's their thing to do. Why do I have to pick up what their judgments or their ideas are? I can be free of that, and I'll wear what I'd like to wear and let it be that way.

I don't know if my example is very good, but the point being that there are emotions that arise that are primary, that are core central emotions that are maybe important to listen to—they have important messages for us. And then we have some emotions where the message, what they're about, is not really to our best interest. They come from appraisals, they come from evaluations, they come from ideas of self-concepts that are not really well-founded or very useful.

When those ideas of self—or whatever ideas—encounter situations which threaten them, which support them, which offend them, then we can have these secondary forms of guilt and anger, fear, boredom, despondency, joy, excitement, or all kinds of things.

It's these secondary ones that I'd like to leave you with today as an investigation. As you go at some point through the day, a couple of times, or maybe at the end of the day, sit down again, maybe with a pen and paper, or with a friend, or going for a walk, and review a little bit some of the stronger emotions of the day. Ask yourself: did those emotions get triggered by some evaluation, some appraisal of the situation, some idea and concept that we carried with us? In and of itself, the situation didn't trigger an emotion, but it only triggered an emotion after it went through the appraisal.

And was that appraisal, that evaluation, somehow related to your self-identity, to the concepts and ideas of who you think you should be and how you should be in the world?

Then, once you do this exercise, ask yourself: is there a simpler way? Is there a way to be present for that experience, any experience, without the filter, without the curtain of these appraisals, evaluations, and self-concepts? Can we set our experience free of the sometimes incessant ideas and concepts we're using to constantly appraise situations, often in terms of what it does for "me, myself, and mine"?

I hope this is useful for you. We'll continue in this exploration of emotions tomorrow. Thank you.