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Guided Meditation: (3 of 5) Foundations of Vipassana - Emotions

Okay, well, my name is Mei Elliott. We're doing a week-long study on the foundations of Vipassana meditation. Today's instructions are about emotions. This includes moods and mind states. This is a really wide field, and learning to practice skillfully with it can have a huge impact on our lives. On a really simple level, we're learning how to let emotions come and go without tampering with them, without fighting them, or without judging them.

So there's a new practice I'd like to introduce you to. It's called RAFT, and it's an acronym that stands for Recognize, Allow, Feel, and Tease, or Tease Apart. We'll be going through these four parts of RAFT in the meditation today, and then unpacking them further in the talk at the end. RAFT is particularly useful for difficult emotions and moods: sadness, grief, resentment, anger, etc. But for the sake of this meditation, if there aren't any difficult emotions present, you don't need to go looking for them. You can still apply this instruction to whatever mood or emotion is happening for you. It might be a really subtle mood that's in the background, and so we're not needing to dredge up anything intense with this.

Let's go ahead and start our morning meditation together. We can begin with a stable posture, both alert and relaxed.

You might connect with your primary anchor. That might be the breath for you, the sounds in the room, or a global sense of the bodily posture. I'll offer instructions with the breath to start, but go ahead and apply them to whatever your anchor is.

To help settle and collect the mind, we might take a few deep breaths.

Resuming a normal rhythm. Allowing the mind to become interested in the breath. Collecting here into the present moment.

If thoughts arise during the meditation, you can gently release them and glide right back to the breath.

As we sit, letting go of our preoccupations. Letting go into the body, into the felt sense of breathing. As we do this, you might notice if a particular mood or emotion is present. It's okay if it's overt, it's okay if it's subtle. A background mood. Maybe a little calm or contentment. Maybe a little agitation or striving.

We're going to begin with our emotions by simply recognizing what's happening. That's the first practice of RAFT: we're recognizing. Just knowing, "Oh, happiness," or "Oh, this is sadness, or self-judgment." Whatever is being noticed can be noticed cleanly and simply. And it's okay if you don't have a name for the emotion, if you can't figure out what emotion it is, that's totally fine. You might just note, "emotion."

Notice how it changes as we sit.

The second part of this practice is allowing. Whatever arises is welcome. There is no need to resist anything that comes up in meditation. Can you fold everything in, nothing excluded?

If the emotion is no longer predominant, we can return to your breath or your primary anchor.

Allowing whatever arises to be known in the light of awareness, nothing to fix.

We'll move now to the third instruction: feel. Connecting with whatever mood or emotion may be present. Can you experience it in the body? Can you feel it in the body? Emotions almost always have a physical manifestation. That might be tingling in the chest. A sense of lightness or heaviness. Contraction in the belly or the forehead, heat, pressure, etc.

See if you can connect with whatever emotion or mood may be present through the felt sense of the body.

If it's helpful, you can apply a soft mental note to whatever you're experiencing: tingling, tightness, warmth. Keeping the note light in the background, and the actual sensation in the foreground.

Whatever sensations we find there to be, investigate like a scientist. Nothing personal. Nothing's a problem.

This last piece of working with emotions is tease, tease apart. For this piece of the practice, it's supposed to be simple. We're teasing apart the difference between the storyline or any narrative associated with the emotion, and we're teasing apart the felt sense of the emotion and how it's experienced in the body. Seeing the difference between mental and physical manifestations. We're getting clear about what's extra. Maybe there's an extra layer of self-judgment, or resistance, or a wish to fix whatever emotion is present, so teasing apart to be able to see that. Teasing apart the emotion from the identification with the emotion.

Every emotion will pass away. At that time, we can return to our anchor. We can return to the breath, choosing to stay present in the body.

Okay, if we can learn to befriend our emotional life, when we're not at war with ourselves, with our inner world, we can show up more fully and more compassionately for others.

May the beneficial energy of our practice here together benefit all beings everywhere, so they may be happy, safe, and free from suffering.

Dharmette: (3 of 5) Foundations of Vipassana - Emotions

Welcome back everyone. I hope you enjoyed your sitting. For those just arriving, my name is Mei Elliott, and we are in the midst of a five-day series on the foundations of Vipassana meditation. We're on day three, focusing on emotions. Day one was on breath, day two was on the body.

So, I'd like to start with a story for you. In my early twenties, I got a one-way ticket to India, and at one point I was in Rishikesh on the banks of the Ganges. There were tons of monkeys around; it was really fantastic. I had left my backpack on the beach while climbing up on some rocks, and I looked down to see that one of the monkeys had his little hand in my backpack. My lunch was in there, so I think it was somewhat enticing. I scrambled down from the rocks and I shooed the monkeys away, only to gain the attention of a whole pack of monkeys. They didn't seem so threatened by my attempts to fend them off. Before I knew it, several monkeys had started closing in on me. They were surrounding me and had very aggressive expressions. I started feeling pretty uneasy, and I was backing up and found myself backed up against the rapid-filled river. I sort of hopped onto a tiny sliver of sandbar a foot or two offshore. I had a big stick, and I was trying to fend them off with the stick, which I think they perceived as pathetically unthreatening. It seemed ever more probable that I would be their lunch, when to my tremendous surprise, a group of whitewater rafters appeared from upstream. In a blink—I don't even know how it happened—I found myself scooped into their boat, and they kindly delivered me to safety on the other shore.

Some of you may be familiar with the Buddhist teachings on the pāramīs^[1], the Perfections. The term pāramī refers to the wholesome Buddhist qualities like generosity, patience, and wisdom. I actually love this word pāramī because it's an ancient Pali pun. It can be translated as "perfection," pointing to how these beautiful qualities of mind and heart perfect—or I guess I should say, how these practices perfect the mind and heart. But it can also be translated as "crossing over." In this way, through practicing, we learn to cross over to the other shore. We learn to cross over from the shore of delusion to the shore of awakening, from confusion to clarity, from hatred to love. There's a way that all of these practices we're doing together support us to cross over to the other shore.

You may remember a W.S. Merwin^[2] quote that I shared on day one of this series:

"Little breath, breathe me gently roaming, for I am a river, I am learning to cross."

When I was on the riverbank in Rishikesh, I was pretty scared, and in that moment of being rescued, I was freed from that state of fear and that state of despair. The emotional upheaval was transformed, one could say. So in the same way, whenever we're overcome with a difficult emotion, it can often feel like we're stranded. It can feel like we're overwhelmed or we're stuck, and we could all use the benefit of a lifeboat in those moments.

So the practice I'd like to discuss further that we covered in the meditation is this practice called RAFT. It's an acronym, and it stands for Recognize, Allow, Feel, and Tease, or Tease Apart. This practice is designed to keep you above water when struck by strong currents of emotion, and the acronym was originally coined by the Insight teacher Tanya Wiser^[3]. Let's take a little more time to unpack this.

Unpacking the RAFT Practice

First, when would we use RAFT? Generally in meditation, we would stay with the breath with emotions in the background, really giving the breath our sole attention. However, if an emotion becomes compelling enough to pull you away from the breath, that's when you shift to give the emotion your full attention. In short: if it asks for your attention, you can give it your attention.

When an emotion becomes predominant in this way, that's when we can apply these four aspects of RAFT. You don't need to apply all four aspects of RAFT at the same time. Sometimes we might focus on just recognizing, at other times just teasing apart, maybe just allowing, or maybe just feeling. You might use them all at once consecutively, or you might use different parts at different times. There's an element of creativity with this to see what works for you. Let's go through each now with a little more detail.

Recognize

Recognizing is a really basic principle of mindfulness practice. It's just knowing what's happening in the present moment. This might be as simple as acknowledging, "This is boredom," or "Oh, irritation," or "Oh, this is happiness." So often we don't know what's happening in our emotional life, and before we know it, we've snapped at our spouse or our co-worker when we didn't even really notice that what was happening inside was anger. The more clearly that we can get to know these different emotions, the more quickly we will identify them in the future, and the less likely it is that we'll be hijacked by them.

Just the simple act of recognition can sometimes unhook the power of the emotion. It's really simple. As Ajahn Sumedho^[4] would say, "It's like this." So we might be experiencing frustration, and we might go, "Frustration is like this." Or, "Contentment is like this." That's recognition.

Allow

The next is allowing. So often when difficult emotions arise, we find ourselves pushing back against them. We're aversive to them, we don't want them there, and we're trying to find ways to get rid of them. Often in meditation, without even realizing it, we'll have something difficult arise—a pain in the body, a difficult emotion—and then we'll try to meditate our way out of it. We're using meditation as a tool to get rid of something. If we notice that happening, we can just notice it and see if there's room to soften and release.

Meditation is not the only way we try to get rid of our emotions; that's maybe one of the more skillful ways. Humans do all sorts of things—excess food and drink, entertainment, argument, suppression, etc. When we reject our emotional experience, what ends up happening is that we add an extra layer of suffering. The Buddha talks about this process as being like being shot by two arrows^[5]. The initial painful emotion is like being struck by the first arrow: jealousy, longing, etc. But when we reject our experience and try to get rid of it, this experience of aversion or rejection is another layer of suffering. That's like getting shot with a second arrow. If we're sad, and then we say to ourselves, "Oh, this is ridiculous that I'm sad, I shouldn't be sad about something so petty," and then we're filled with self-judgment for feeling sad, then we've shot ourselves with a second arrow. The sadness is the first arrow; the self-judgment is the second arrow. We know from the Second Noble Truth that the source of suffering is craving. Aversion is just the other side of the same coin: when we reject our experience, we suffer.

Instead, this is where allowing comes in. Can we allow our experience? This doesn't mean that we are justifying or condoning our emotions, nor does it mean that we're necessarily expressing it. Instead, we're just making space for it to be as it is. Allowing the emotion to be, to express in the body without judgment. There's so much freedom that's available with difficult emotions if we can learn to relate to them as just tides that move through us.

If allowing is difficult, it can be helpful to remember that all of these emotions are impermanent. They will all pass on their own. Even if we tried to keep an emotion the same, we couldn't do it. Everything is subject to change.

There was once a spiritual master walking on one shore of a river, and his disciple was walking on the other shore. The disciple yelled across to the master, "Master, how do I get to the other shore?" In essence, how do I cross the river of saṃsāra^[6] and get to the shore of awakening? And the master replied, "You are on the other shore." When we practice acceptance, when we practice allowing, we realize that we don't have to strive to get to the other shore, or to get somewhere else, or get somewhere better. We don't have to resist our experience to try to get a better one. When we practice allowing, it's as though we've already arrived. Freedom can be found in the here and now.

Feel

Okay, so we've done recognize and allow, and now we'll do feeling, the 'F' of RAFT. This aspect of RAFT involves really getting to know the sensations of the emotion in the body. So often emotions are carried by a really strong narrative or storyline. In this practice, we're letting go of that narrative, of the thoughts associated with it, and really feeling the physical sensations associated with the emotion.

It's often these physical sensations that keep our stories spinning. Our storytelling mind is, in a way, often trying to think its way out of the problem. It's trying to come up with some solution to whatever is challenging us and causing us to feel how we feel in the body. For example, if we're compulsively rehearsing a conversation, it might be because we're trying to figure out the right thing to say. We really want to get the right comeback for this person that we're angry at. If we can just really nail that response, then we won't have to feel angry anymore. In a way, we're trying to think our way out of how we're feeling. The thinking mind is problem-solving in such a way that the body can stop feeling the emotion.

Instead, this practice of feeling subverts this tendency to try to think our way out of our feelings. It meets the emotion at its root; it meets the emotion in the body. It brings us back to the only place we can ever really address it, which is in the now. If you could use support in learning how to feel the body, I suggest you go back to the meditation and the talk that we did yesterday on mindfulness of body. It's really learning the language of how the body feels, speaking in the language of sensation.

Tease Apart

In this piece, we're teasing apart the different components of an emotional experience so that we can start to see the different parts more clearly. Emotions have many facets to them, both physical and mental, and we can tease apart the physical experience from the thoughts. We might notice heaviness, a slouched posture, maybe a lump in the throat. We recognize that part of sadness as distinct from the thoughts about sadness, which is distinct from the emotional tone of sadness. That helps us get to know what's really happening here.

When we can really see clearly and tease apart carefully, we can find where the suffering is. We can find where the source of suffering is, and we can also find where the freedom is. When we look more closely at the mind, we can tease apart the emotion from the reaction to the emotion. This is what we talked about with the first arrow and the second arrow. We can start to see the difference between the first and the second arrow, and we can see the difference between our grief and the embarrassment about the grief. Those are two different things, and we get to see what our judgments, expectations, and attitudes are that are functioning in relationship to the primary emotion. We might ask ourselves, "Are we afraid of how we feel? Do we grasp hold of our feelings? Do we hate them? Are we embarrassed by them? Are we identified with them?" These are all questions that we can discover through this practice of teasing apart.

Reflections on Wholesome and Unwholesome Emotions

So here you have it, that is RAFT: Recognize, Allow, Feel, and Tease, or Tease Apart. Just as a reminder, you don't have to practice all four aspects each time you focus on an emotion. Please feel free to experiment to see what works for you, and see what helps you relate to your emotions with less reactivity. What you may find is that through doing this practice, rather than needing to solve our problems, sometimes this practice can dissolve our problems.

What we find is the more we practice, the more clear it is that there are two classes of emotional experience. One class is of unwholesome emotions that involve craving, aversion, or delusion. These are often emotions based in wanting or not wanting. It might be desire, anxiety, competitiveness—particular feelings that RAFT is particularly helpful for.

Then there's a second class of emotions that are wholesome ones, that manifest from a peaceful heart. Emotions like joy, or compassion, the pāramīs like generosity, patience, loving-kindness. These wholesome emotions are cultivated in part just by knowing when they're present. We have so many moments throughout the day where it might even just be a flicker—just a little flicker of contentment, or a little flicker of joy. Don't miss these when they're present. Really pause and soak them up when they come to visit, because this conditions the mind for allowing these wholesome states to arrive more frequently in the future.

I hope that today, whatever emotions you encounter, you can meet them with the eye of practice, and I hope that you remember that you always have a raft on hand. You always have what you need to cross the river from delusion to awakening. May you all arrive safely on the other shore.

Thank you so much. I hope you have a lovely day.