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Guided Meditation-Attention to Detail

Hello everyone, and thank you for being here. As we begin this meditation, I would like to mention that one, I think, useful slogan for insight meditation is attention to detail. Sometimes if we take in our lives in generalities, it's hard to understand where we are attached or where we could benefit from what's happening. But as we begin distinguishing some of the details of what's happening, we can see and recognize what is useful and beneficial to rest our attention in, and what it's most useful to not avoid—like not have it, but avoid giving it a lot of attention, avoid giving it our interest.

Interest can be a little bit like food for some of the ways in which we are. And so if that food is a precious commodity, you want to be careful what you give it to. And so, attention to detail.

Sometimes we'll say that we feel a certain way: "I feel great," "I feel lousy." That might be definitely the case, but it's very general. The details are missing. What are the details of feeling great? What are the details of feeling lousy? What are the different component parts, and where is it useful to place the attention, and where is it useful to not place our interest so much?

For example, if I feel lousy or I feel great, and my interest is somehow evaluating myself because of that—"I'm feeling great, therefore I am great; I'm feeling lousy, therefore I am lousy"—and then to put interest in this "I" that's feeling this way, it might feed a kind of self-concern which is not in the long term very helpful, and maybe not even very accurate. But if instead we give our attention to the details of how it feels to be feeling great or lousy, what it feels like in the body, where in the body is that felt and expressed. If you feel it in the body, the body knows how to deal with it. The body knows the process by which it goes.

If we make room for the body to feel it, we might find it more interesting to be with the breathing, to breathe through how we're feeling, to breathe with it so that we don't add or fall into evaluating ourselves because of it. It can be quite a relief to just be present for what's here without relating it to "me, myself, and mine." Just that it's here, and I don't have to be either interested or disinterested. I just have to let it be, recognize it, breathe through it. It's useful to stay with the breath. The breath is a balancer, a mediator, a harmonizing force within us. See where the breathing takes you. I'll talk more about this in the talk, but attention to detail.

So, assuming a meditative posture. Relaxing the eyes and gently closing the eyes. And then in a calm way, as if you have all the time in the world, take some deeper breaths. As if you're getting a massage from the inside, feel the expansion of the torso on the in-breath and the settling back of the torso on the exhale. Breathing in and breathing out.

And then letting your breathing return to normal. And again, calmly, as if you have all the time in the world, as you exhale, relax your face. If there's pressure against the eyelids, maybe that can soften a bit. Against the teeth, maybe the teeth can part a little bit. And if there's pressure against the lips, maybe soften it. If there's tightness in your shoulders, perhaps you can release the tightness. If the belly is pulled in, perhaps you can let it fall out. Soft belly.

And then noticing how you're feeling now. What's your general mood, state of mind, or emotional state? Is there any way in which you're experiencing that through your body, with your body? Are any parts of your body activated because of how you're feeling? Is there any way in which you're putting your interest in how you're feeling beyond just recognizing it? Are you investing anything in it, being for it or against it? How simple can you be with how you're feeling?

And then to return to your breathing. Either just stay with your breath as it is, or you might try breathing with how you're feeling, breathing through it. Where your primary interest is in breathing, but allowing the breathing to accompany how you feel. As if you have all the time in the world, you can do it calmly.

Where's your interest going? If it's going into your thoughts, what is the emotion underneath those thoughts? How do those emotions feel in your body? And then return to breathing, breathing through that place in your body.

And then as we come to the end of the sitting, a gentle attention to detail is also helpful with other people. Sometimes we can get tripped up, anxious, or irritated by the generalities or the big picture. But to slow down and take in another person, the people you're with. Attention to detail may be ascertaining how they feel and what's happening for them. To use your ability to be present, mindful, to offer that mindful presence to someone else. You don't have to notice you're doing it, that could be awkward. But you're taking in the people, taking time to feel them, reflect about them, consider them, so that you're in a better position to be friendly, to be kind, to be generous. Kindness, generosity, and friendliness are not so much an addition, but an expression of the simplicity of being present and aware.

To consider how you can bring this practice into your daily life to be present for others in a way that supports them, cares for them, is friendly. May this practice that we do support us in promoting goodwill, friendliness, and kindness through our communities. May we do this practice for the welfare and happiness of ourselves and for all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free.

Dharmette: Emotions (2 of 5) Recognizing Parts of Emotions

So this is the second talk on mindfulness of emotions, and the focus of today's approach to mindfulness is recognition. To recognize what's happening is really a central feature of mindfulness, of the kind of careful attention that we're providing to the world and to ourselves.

Maybe some of you have had the experience of something being named, and then things just get relaxed, or let go, or settled when they're named. For example, someone might notice you're running around kind of frantic, doing something, and someone just mentions to you, "Oh, you're tense." And you say, "Oh yes, oh yes, I am tense." And only then do you stop and relax and shake it off a little bit. Or you're in a difficult social situation with a number of people, and everyone's kind of in the full swing of the social storm, and then someone says, "You know, there's a lot of tension in the room right now." And somehow naming that tension makes space. Everyone stops, "Oh yes, that's what's going on," and there's a chance to take that in and adjust accordingly. The naming of something, the recognizing of something, can be phenomenally useful.

Mindfulness practice builds on the power of recognition. "Oh, that's what's happening." Even something so simple as recognizing the inhale and the exhale, or recognizing the mind is drifting off into thought. "Oh, thinking." And there's something happening just, "Oh, that's what's happening. I'm thinking. I'm no longer with my breath. Oh, now I am with my breath. This is good."

So, the recognition of our experience. In terms of emotions, it's helpful to think of emotions as not single unitary things, but rather as composites, as made up of different elements. Because if we just have a general overview of how we're feeling, what the emotion is, it's hard to see where the attention, the recognition, is most useful to be placed. Or it's hard to see if there's attachment, or clinging, or resistance, some complication in how we're relating to the emotion. It's hard to see if we just see the general state. But if we notice some of the detailed aspects of the emotion, we might say, "Oh, that's the part I'm attached to, that's where the resistance might be."

So what are some of the different components of emotions? One of the things that I find particularly useful to notice is the physical aspect of it. Emotions pretty much always are expressed or felt somewhere energetically, emotionally, sensation-wise, in the body someplace. Some of those sensations are agitated ones, some of them are peaceful, subtle, depending on the nature of the emotion. And if you don't feel it in your body, someday you will as the mindfulness gets more and more settled and you become more sensitive and embodied. Then you start noticing, "Oh look, there it is. There's tension in my hands whenever I get anxious. Oh, that's where the tension is, in my hands, my fingers are ever so slightly pulled in." It could be all kinds of places in the body. So a physical manifestation is one.

The second one is there might be a story connected to it, and the story might be what's fueling it. We're telling ourselves, reviewing what happened in the past, and as we keep repeating it, we're triggering and fueling the emotion. So if it's a history in the past that you're angry about something that happened, you might be sitting peacefully meditating or something, and then you remember this anger-evoking experience a long time ago. And you can feel now you get angry, and you weren't angry a few moments ago. Now there is anger, and the anger arose with the story. There's something about the story that triggers the anger. So the story is a part of it. And even in the moment when it's not a story, but a living experience of the moment, the mind is a little bit making stories about it, interpreting it in ways often for us to have the emotions we have. So the interpretation, the assigning of meaning, the story that goes along with it, is a part of the emotion. Part of the value of feeling the physicality of the emotion is that the body is not a story, and so it's a way of stepping out of the story which is fueling the emotion and keeping it going, into a place where the emotion can be processed. In the body it can be processed. It can't be processed so well by just repeating the story.

Some emotions have motivation as part of it, something that we want. We want something to be different, we want something to have more of something, we want to have something, we want to push something away. There are approach motivations and there are pushing away or pulling away emotions. So what's the motivation? What's the relationship that we have that is being expressed to this emotion? So again, if it's angry, it's something like we want to push something away, or we want to assert something and make our point to someone. So there's a motivation as part of it. If there is something seemingly quite beautiful, it could be love, and but the love maybe has a desire, it's a longing, a wish, and that's the motivation that's part of it.

And then there's something a little bit more amorphous maybe, the emotion itself, which is a little bit the overall feeling tone of the emotion, and that has different details as well. Some of it just might be, is it pleasant or unpleasant? Some emotions are pleasant and some are unpleasant. And sometimes the hook to how we get attached, or involved, or resisting, or entangled with the emotion, sometimes it's nothing more or less than that we're reacting to it being pleasant or unpleasant, comfortable or uncomfortable.

And then another part of the elements of emotion to be interested in looking at is what is the relationship of you to the emotion? What relationship are you having? And one of them is, are you defining yourself through the emotion, somehow evaluating yourself? So if you're angry, do you now consider yourself a bad person because you're angry, you shouldn't be angry, and you should be different, you should be loving? All this references back to how I should be and how I shouldn't be. Or we justify why we're feeling some way because we want to be justified, we want to be someone who's right or doing the right thing, or know we're doing the right thing. So all this "me and my" self-concern in relationship to it.

If someone is walking down the street, and across the street on another sidewalk you see someone who's clearly angry, maybe they're talking into their phone and they're angry. You might look at it and wonder what it's about, or find it interesting. That person's angry and talking loudly. But it's across the street and the person doesn't see you and it has no bearing on you. And you're still there, "That's interesting, a person's angry." Can you do the same thing with yourself? Can you allow there to be anger without relating it to yourself, almost as if it's someone else's? Of course, it's yours, but we add this extra component part.

So all these things come together: the physicality of it, the energy, the sensations of it; the stories and the thoughts, the judgments, the interpretations that we have around it, the ideas we have around it, ideas of what should and shouldn't be, our values; there's also the motivation that's connected to it, what we want to see happen; and there's the way that we define ourselves by it, or get hooked by it, or want more of it, our preferences; and there's also the pleasant and unpleasant aspect of it. So these are some of the component parts that all get rolled up together into one big ball of the emotion.

And so if you say that you're feeling grief, that could be a very accurate statement to make. But then, attention to detail: what are the different component parts to it? And you go through the list of everything and you find out that partly why it's so difficult is the discomfort that comes. And the discomfort seems to be interpreted as something is wrong if I'm uncomfortable, it's not okay to be uncomfortable, and that's where the complication is. So the grief is not just simple, clean grief, but now it's complicated with this judgment: it should be different, I shouldn't be uncomfortable.

Or perhaps the grief is genuine in many ways, but there's a story connected to it. And the story might be, "Now I'll never," and you fill in the blank, "Now I'll never X, Y, Z." And maybe it's accurate enough sometimes, when something will never happen again, that's why we grieve. But when we recognize, "Oh, that's what I'm grieving, I'm grieving futures that will never come," that's a fascinating perspective on grief—that's grieving futures that will never come.

Or it could be that we're telling ourselves a lot of stories, and it's the repetitive stories, rumination, that is somehow driving the emotion we have and keeping it going and keeping us entangled with it.

So maybe what I'm saying today is not as articulate as I wish I could be. It's such an important topic and something to respect a lot, for each of us, our relationship to our emotional life. But I hope the principle that I'm pointing out is useful. The principle is: emotions are not unitary events; they're made up of different elements, they're composites, there are components to them. And as we settle into our mindfulness, it's helpful to look around and see what are these different elements? How is it in the body? How is it in the feeling tones, pleasant or unpleasant? What's the quality and mood of the mind as I have this emotion? Is it contracted or is it more spacious? Are there hindrances in relationship to it? Is there identification in relationship to it? What's the motivation connected to it?

And as you begin looking around, then you might ask yourself, is there one of those places that I'm caught, where I'm entangled? And if it is, maybe not denying the emotion or getting rid of it, but it might make it a lot easier to be with an emotion if that one place where we're caught up and entangled is no longer entangled. Then there can be a cleaner relationship, and there can be a clean emotion, clean anger, clean grief, clean joy, clean even desire in a certain way.

So you might do that over the next day before we meet again tomorrow. You might spend some time, maybe even with paper and pencil, trying to map out or understand the different component parts of your emotions. What are all the different streams that come into play that build to this singular thing of emotion that you have? And you might even do it with a friend. It might be interesting to brainstorm together what are all the different pieces and elements of your emotional life that contribute to the whole. And then to see where do you get tripped up the most, which of those components is a place where you most often get caught?

Recognition. Through recognizing our emotions carefully, attention to detail.

Thank you very much.