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Guided Meditation: Making Room for Emotions

Thank you all for your greetings in the chat, those of you putting the greetings there. I take them as representative of many of you who don't have access to the chat, so thank you all very much for being here.

The topic of this week is mindfulness of emotions. One of the ways of thinking about mindfulness and emotions is that mindfulness is giving breathing room to our emotions. It's making more space for them to be there. And one of the remarkable things that can happen with meditation practice—as the mind becomes more calm, steady, or open—is that it can feel like there's actually a lot of space in the mind, in the heart, and in the body for everything. There is space for the inner processing that goes on, including for our emotions.

Rather than thinking that we have to solve an emotion, fix an emotion, or do something with an emotion, one of the options in mindfulness practice is to make more room for it. Increase the space in which it's held: the space of awareness, the space of the mind. Doing so allows us more clarity to see what's there. When we're crowded with the emotion or identified with it strongly, it's hard to see what's there, and sometimes what is there is something deeper. Some emotions are just something knocking on the door saying, "Come here, take a deeper look."

Relaxing is part of this path to making more room. Learning the art of simple recognition is part of this path.

So, assuming a meditation posture, wiggle around a little bit in your posture to loosen things up. When I was first taught meditation in Zen, I got the instructions to flap the elbows around a little bit to loosen up the ways in which holding happens in the arms and the hands. It's kind of like a chicken. And then find an aligned posture. In whatever posture you're in, is it aligned? Does it somehow allow the maximum feeling of the body being in position? This allows for a flow of deeper relaxation.

Lowering your gaze, softening your gaze, cooling your eyes. And then gently closing your eyes.

With your eyes closed, might there be a deeper sensitivity now for your body and its posture? Gently having the attention travel up the spine from the base of the spine, are there any small adjustments that you would like to make? Partly so that the spine itself feels more alert, more here.

Take a few long, slow, deep breaths, as if you have all the time in the world to savor the inhale, to ride the exhale. On that exhale, relax the body more. Maybe a global relaxation.

Let the breathing return to normal. On the inhale, let your attention roam around your body to pick up or feel any place where there's holding in the body. On the exhale, relax that part of your body. It's kind of random; whatever shows itself to you, relax as you exhale.

Relaxing deep in your belly. Softening the belly.

For about three or four breaths, settle into your breathing. Give yourself over to the inhales and exhales for just three or four breaths.

Now, notice how you're feeling. It might feel like an emotional state. It might be a mood, or a mental state. You might not think of it particularly as an emotion, but more that you're calm or agitated. It might feel more like a physical state. Whatever it might be, recognize it. As you exhale, is there any relaxation you can do around it, in the middle of it? Or is there any relaxation you can do in the mind's relationship to it?

As if you can have more space around how you feel, feel your way into that space. Maybe you can feel or imagine a sense of openness, spaciousness, or expansiveness around however you're feeling. Relax into that spaciousness.

Then, as if there's lots of space for breathing, let the breathing come and go in the space of the mind. Place breathing at the center—not to push away how you're feeling or deny it, but not to be involved with how you feel. Let it be there in the spaciousness of the mind, gently settling in on breathing in and breathing out.

If you are involved in your thinking, chances are there's no space for how you feel. If you're reacting to what's happening, chances are there's not much space for how you feel, and not so much space for breathing.

Release your thinking. Release your reactivity. Release any contraction or narrowness. Relax into the space of awareness so you can better breathe with what is, with lots of breathing room.

As we come to the end of the sitting, as you exhale, relax again. What are you able to relax and release at the end of the sitting? In the face, the shoulders, the belly. In the heart, in the mind.

The ability to relax can be seen as a gift that we bring into the world. If you're with small children and you're tense and anxious, by osmosis you're teaching the children that there are things to be afraid of, things to be tense about. But if you know how to relax and be with small children in a relaxed, open, non-anxious way, you teach those children that the world is a comfortable enough place to be happy, playful, and at ease.

If you go into the world and people around you are challenged by their health, by work, or by the world around them, perhaps it's a gift that you come into the world in a calm, relaxed, and appropriate way. By osmosis, we are spreading non-anxiousness and non-agitation, making room for others to relax as well.

May it be that as we do this practice, we support the world. We help the world around us to be less anxious, less agitated, and less tense. Not by making them or teaching them how to do it, but by our own relaxation, ease, calm, and non-agitation.

May we not keep the benefits of meditation for ourselves. Let us share it with others, maybe without them knowing that we're meditators, just by our presence.

May it be that this practice we do is for the welfare and happiness of all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings everywhere be free.

Dharmette: Emotions (3 of 5) Respecting Emotions

In discussing mindfulness of emotion, the theme for today is respect. We started with relaxation and recognition, and now respect. As we relax, it's easier to recognize. As we recognize, it's easier to recognize how we are relating to our emotional life. Do we have an attitude towards it that is making it more difficult than it needs to be? Do we identify with it strongly, defining ourselves by it? Do we have hostility towards it? Do we dislike it and push it away, or do we have shame or embarrassment about it? Do we have ideas that it should be different? Are we trying to get rid of things? Are we trying to force certain emotions, feelings, or attitudes toward the world, maybe even sugarcoating experience by trying too hard? Or are we holding on to things? Maybe we were happy yesterday, and so we're holding on to the idea that we still should be.

As we start recognizing the component parts of emotions, we see the extra reactivity we might have toward them. Seeing that reactivity is the beginning of respect. I really like this word respect because, from the Latin, it means to see again, to look again, like a spectacle. To start taking a deeper look at what's here. If we can see our reactivity, maybe we can put it aside enough that we can bring a respectful attention to the emotion itself, as if it's allowed to be there. Disrespectful ways of relating are often trying to change something or hold on to something, not allowing the emotion to be itself.

So the second look, the Vipassanā^[1] look, is really taking a deeper look, making space for it, and allowing it to be there. I like the idea that we're giving permission for our emotions to be present. It's a little different than allowing; it's a little more active. It's like a choice, a decision. I'm going to offer permission for myself to be the way I am.

As I said yesterday, sitting in meditation is a wonderful place to do this because you're committed to sitting still and not acting on whatever the feelings might be. There might be some anger that seems very undesirable and very strong, but in meditation, we give it permission to be there. If there's sadness, grief, joy, or happiness, we give permission for it to be there. As we give permission for it to be there and just allow it, without our reactivity or judgments—or with those put aside enough—we can really respect what's there.

I find it useful to think of emotions as either a message or a messenger. As a message, emotions are not random. They're not incidental or accidental phenomena that just come through. They have some kind of message in them. Maybe the message is asking for respect. Maybe the message is saying, "Here's an opportunity for you to discover how to be non-attached, how to not cling or resist, and make more space."

But it might be a deeper message. Anger might be a message that we feel hurt, or we feel threatened. Sadness might be a message that we feel really impacted. We really care, we love something, and that love now feels sad, but the love is underneath it. So it's a message of love. Rather than thinking of grief and sadness as a problem, see it as a manifestation, a movement, a process that love needs to go through to be whole again or to find its way again.

Sometimes emotions are messengers. I especially think of it this way when the emotions are afflictive, when they are bringing suffering along to us. You don't want to kill the messenger; you want to really see what the message is. The ability to respect, give permission, make breathing room, and allow for emotions to be there is such a big part of mindfulness. Then we start seeing more deeply into the cracks of it. What else shows itself? It's not digging or analyzing, but feeling our way deeply into the emotion. What else is there? If it's anger, perhaps what's there with it is hurt or fear, and that is what needs our attention; that's more primary. The messenger is pointing to these deeper underlying feelings.

If there is grief, sometimes the messenger is that there is love. It's like, "Hey, have you really taken into account how much love there's been for what you've lost?" Sometimes the message of despair is a message of healing fear or feeling inadequate in some way. Sometimes the message of the messenger is that it's time to take a deep, honest look at self-identity issues: the way we define ourselves, the way that we insert me, myself, and mine into our lives. Some emotions have to do with that. Our self-identity or self-definition has been threatened.

Boredom, for example, is sometimes a symptom that whatever is happening around us has no bearing on our self-concept—how we like to define ourselves or assert ourselves in the world. No one's praising me, I'm not getting any real praise, and no one's criticizing me. Both of those can be very riveting for some people. Without either one of those, the situation has no bearing; I'm not building myself up in it, or my identity isn't threatened, and so it's a boring situation. Boredom sometimes has to do with the complex of self-identity.

Hostility, fear, and all the emotions are closely connected to how threatened or how supported our idea of who we should be is. By really respecting emotions, taking our time, making room for them, and allowing them, we can start seeing the deeper underlying processes that are going on. Sometimes you can ask, "What is the message here in this emotion?" That way is also very respectful of emotions. They all have something to say. They're not accidental or incidental; they all represent some deeper thing that's going on.

It doesn't require analysis when you do Vipassanā practice. What it involves is this more sensitive looking, this more sensitive being present, breathing with it, making room for it, and allowing it to be there so that we can hear the subtler messages and see the subtler processes.

Part of this permission and respect for emotions is that the emotions themselves have the wisdom to process themselves, to find their way to peace, if we make room for it. If we really make space for them, if we don't interfere with them, grab hold of them, or repress them, they can resolve. Acting on emotions, especially when you're in meditation, interferes with that deeper process toward healing, peace, and the resolution that is inherent in the emotions themselves.

If you are challenged with an emotion, you know it's really caught you in some powerful way, and you would like to try this respect practice, you might put your hands together in Añjali^[2] and bow to your emotions. Just bow. If you want to really do something powerful, you bow and say, "Thank you. Thank you for what you're trying to do for me, the message you're bringing, or how this is the best I can do at the moment to try to work with this difficult world." Bow to the emotions as an alternative to being entangled, reactive, and judgmental.

You might try it. It's possible that one of the greatest goods you can do for your emotional life is to offer a deep respect to it, and maybe even a kind of reverence for it, that gets you out of the way of it. In meditation, it protects you from acting on it in ways that may or may not be healthy.

Thank you, and we'll continue tomorrow on this topic. For the next 24 hours, if this idea of bowing to your emotions is at all interesting for you, you might either do it physically, or you might actually do it in your imagination. Try bowing to your emotions and see what happens. Give room for your emotions; that's the most important thing. If you're in the middle of work or family life and you have a strong emotional response, and you have enough ability to take a break, see if you can take a walk around the block with it. Take the emotions with you for a walk. Use that as a time to make room for it, respect it, listen to it more deeply, and see what happens. If that's an alternative to how you usually are with emotions, try the respect thing, and see what happens. Thank you.