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Guided Meditation: Relaxing Emotions

So good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Monday as we begin our week on the theme of mindfulness of emotions.

It is one of the very important areas of mindfulness to be aware, to be mindful of our own emotions, and to be mindful and aware of the emotions of others as well. We want to learn the art, the skill of recognizing emotions, knowing how to be mindful of them, and learning how to discover what liberation is in relationship to emotions. For now, I would like to say that I think of emotions as belonging to a place in human beings that can be quite tender. Careful, caring attention—taking time to slow down and be with these things, that is to say, the moods, the emotions, the mental states that have a huge influence on our lives—allows us to really start recognizing more deeply what is going on with them, where they arise from under the surface. It is a tender place. So as we begin this week on emotions, remember that, and remember to hold yourself with care, with compassion, and with lots of generosity toward how you feel.

Slowly, through this practice of mindfulness of emotions, we are increasing our capacity to be with emotions—the whole range of them, difficult ones and beautiful ones. We are also increasing our capacity to be with them in a way that is free, a kind of freedom that allows the best of the emotions to thrive inside of us and allows that which is difficult and maybe debilitating around emotions to relax, to settle away, and to no longer limit us in our lives.

Today's topic is relaxation. What we learn about relaxation of the body has a lot to do with our ability to relax with emotions, and around emotions. It isn't so much today that I'm going to emphasize relaxing emotions, like maybe trying to make them relax away, but rather to relax around them, to soften the boundaries of them, and any reactivity, holding, or preferences we have in relationship to them.

So, entering into your meditation posture, maybe spending a little time swaying and rocking around, so you can slowly come into a still place that feels balanced and aligned. Lower your gaze and have a loose focus; you're not really looking at anything in particular. Let the eyes relax, and then, if it's comfortable for you, gently close your eyes.

As if you are caring for something tender within, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Three-quarters full or full, whatever is comfortable for you, with an extended exhale. On that exhale, allow your body to relax and settle in.

Then, letting your breathing return to normal, continue on the exhale to relax your body. Part of the value of relaxing is that there is greater bodily sensitivity to feel when we are relaxed. On the exhale, soften and relax the muscles of the face, around the eyes, and cheeks. Then, if you feel any activated energy or tightening in the face, as you exhale, maybe you can allow it to get cooler, a coolness across your face.

On the exhale, relax the shoulders. Relax the belly, softening the belly. And if there is any way that the thighs are tight or gripping, maybe you can also relax the thighs.

Then becoming aware of how you feel: what is the emotional state that is most present, or the mood, or state of mind that's present for you? It could just be that you're sleepy or calm. See if you can feel how it manifests in the body. The feeling of your emotional state or your mood, is it mostly felt in the head, the face, the chest, the arms, the belly, or all of the above? Is there a location that seems to be the center of how you feel?

Then, as you exhale, relax the physical place where you feel your mood, your emotions. Allow the physical softening, or in other ways relax around how you feel.

If the mind is preoccupied in some way or caught in thought, on the exhale, soften the mind, relaxing the thinking muscle. Then coming back to your breathing, just settle into the rhythm of your breathing.

If there are ways in which your mood or emotional state can be gathered in to support you to stay with the breathing, make use of that support. Or you can just let your mood or emotional state recede into the background as you stay with the rhythm of breathing.

But if what seems most predominant is your mood, your emotional state, see if you can find where it is most expressed in your body and relax there. Relax around it. Relax the physicality of it. And then begin again with your breathing.

Is there any tension associated with how you feel? If so, can you relax it? If what you feel is pretty nice and relaxed itself, can you relax other parts of your body around it to allow the good mood or state to spread through your body?

Recognizing whatever mood or emotional state you have, and relaxing with it, relaxing around it. Relaxing through it, softening the edges, and breathing with it.

Wherever your emotional state, mood, or state of mind is located in your body, as you exhale, soften, relax. Or if you have some place in your body, like around your heart, that is your emotional center, soften, relax.

As we come to the end of this sitting, maybe for the next two or three breaths, relax again on the exhale. And on the inhale, open your mind's gaze out into the world—your world of people you'll encounter and engage with, communicate with. How is it that relaxing in your body, relaxing around your emotional states, helps you be more prepared for meeting other people, for relating to other people?

In whatever ways we benefit from doing this meditation practice, trust that we do it not only for ourselves but for others as well. These benefits allow us to be in a better place to care, to connect with others. May we consider how, with the foundation of meditation, we can now engage in the world in a more useful way, perhaps in a more generous or empathic way.

May whatever ability you have to relax with your emotions awaken a care and sympathy for others, so we have space and time to consider how to speak, how to act, and even how to think in ways that are for the welfare and happiness of others.

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

Dharmette: Emotions (1 of 5) Relaxing with Emotions

So, I begin this five-part series on mindfulness of emotions. The structure of these five talks will be: the first one will be about relaxation, the second about recognition, the third about respect, the fourth about restoration, and the fifth about release. All of these are aspects of mindfulness and ways to practice mindfulness. Just bringing this careful attention to what is happening tends to evoke or bring about these kinds of relationships to our emotional life. And as for today, it is to relax.

One of the remarkable things about mindfulness meditation is that you are allowed to have your emotions. In many places—in public life, at work, or other places—sometimes if we have very strong emotions and feelings, it maybe isn't so appropriate to show them. If we get angry at someone at work, at our boss for example, maybe we want to be a little careful how we express it. I remember when I was a relatively new parent, there were sometimes where I felt angry about what was going on with the children, but I could see that it was mostly my own inner struggles, not really about them. I found it best not to express the anger. Sometimes I even left the room and came back a few minutes later when I had cooled down.

So there are many places, in some families, some cultures, where the idea of expressing emotions is not really so welcome. It might feel that you have to keep it in check, that it's something internal that we process, but not something we are allowed to talk about. In mindfulness meditation, you are allowed to have any emotional state that you have. You are allowed to feel whatever feelings are there. Especially when we are doing mindfulness in meditation, meditation is a wonderful laboratory for investigating, getting to know, and understanding our inner emotional life. That laboratory works best if we allow ourselves to feel whatever emotions are present, as if meditation is this special time where you are allowed to feel anything at all. You can have murderous rage, and as long as you stay in your meditation, don't move, and don't go out to hit anyone—just don't move, don't speak—then you discover what it is like to let the anger course through you, and relax with it, relax around it.

I am very fond of the idea that the word emotion comes from a Latin root where 'motion' means movement, and the 'e' means out—moving out. All emotions are processes. They are not things; they are in process. They are ways in which we process our lives, the ways in which we respond to life, the ways in which we understand what's happening in life, and the ways in which we express ourselves. They are a very important part of our life.

Some of them are afflictive, some of them are suffering-producing, and some of them are not. Some of them are actually part of the wonderfulness of life—the joy, the happiness, the well-being. The beautiful feelings that can arise are the non-afflictive ones, sometimes called beautiful emotional states. There is a very interesting phenomenon that the afflictive emotional states come with tension, stress, some kind of contraction or tightness, or some kind of directedness where we lose a certain freedom and peacefulness. Sometimes the directedness and the power of afflictive emotions can be seductive. The power that comes with anger, for example, or the allure and promise of lust, can be quite compelling. But if you are deeply mindful—this is why meditation is such a good place for this—you can feel how it is also afflictive, how it is also stressful to have it. And so, the idea of relaxing around the afflictive emotions begins to settle some of that stress, some of that tension.

On the other hand, the non-afflictive emotions in their essence, in their simplest form before we react to them or have agendas of what to do with them, just in and of themselves tend to be nourishing. They tend to be comforting, warm, and comfortable. They tend to have a nice feeling to them. If we relax with this simple aspect of non-afflictive emotions, there tends to be more space for them to grow into. They tend to be able to be more open and more settled in a nice way.

Except if we are attached to the positive emotions, the beautiful emotional states, if we are clinging to them, then they don't necessarily grow when we relax. What we might be relaxing is the extra fuel we are giving them by our agendas, our attachments, our desires, and what we are trying to feed it and pump it up. So as we meditate, that pumping them up might relax. A person might feel like they are much less emotional, and in fact, they might be less emotional in an expressive way. But hopefully, as we settle and allow for the emotions to be there in their simplicity, we actually feel them more fully. They become more exquisite, more embodied, opening to a deeper sensitivity to what is happening that can't be there if we're spending a lot of time celebrating our joy or indulging in emotional pleasures.

The idea in meditation is to neither indulge nor push away, neither celebrate nor condemn, neither be for emotions nor against them. When we relax around emotions, one of the things we are relaxing is the ways in which we get caught in them: indulging, getting involved, jumping on board, justifying them, holding on, resisting, pushing away, condemning, being angry, or feeling shame or embarrassment for them. There are all these secondary reactivities we have. It is those secondary reactions that we learn to relax.

One of the ways to relax is to feel the physical expression of our emotions. It has sometimes been said that all emotions have a physical expression, a physical corollary that's part of it, and without having some physical basis for our feelings or emotions, we might not know what the emotion actually is. Whether that's always true or not, I can't tell you, but certainly, I have found that is predominantly true, regularly very true. I make it a regular practice when I feel some emotions, especially in meditation, to find the location where it is in the body.

I might feel fear in my belly as tightening or butterflies there. I might feel some kind of aversion as a little bit of tightening in the face, and an upwelling kind of tightening in the back of my neck. I might feel love as a kind of warmth in my heart area, or a softness in my cheeks that might come along with an easing up of the tension in my eyes. There are all kinds of little subtle changes that happen in the body. Part of that maybe is because emotions are meant to help us engage and be actively involved in life. They are in some ways adjusting the body for some new way of being. But that new way of being might not be healthy for us, it might be misplaced, it might not be a healthy way of relating to what's happening.

So, finding out where the emotion is in the body, and then breathing with that area. Feel it and sense it, and see if there is any tension or any tightening in that place that can relax. If it's easy to relax it, relax the tension, soften it. If it's not easy to relax the tension itself, maybe it is possible to relax around it, to soften around it. Sometimes the resistance we have to fear might be what we can relax; we can't necessarily relax the fear itself. Or maybe it's just a softness around it, a softness that comes in allowing ourselves to feel what we're feeling and saying, "Okay, I'm just here with this. This is what's happening now. I'm here with it now. I'm meditating, I'm not going to cause any problems in the world with that feeling." So this is the time to just allow for it and be mindful of it.

Sometimes it is not possible to relax the tension or tightening around emotions, but if we simply breathe with it and allow it to be there, accompany it with our breathing, it removes some—maybe even subconscious—way in which we are reacting to the emotion's presence. Just shifting our focus to breathing rather than feeling, but breathing through it so we're not ignoring it, can sometimes allow something to settle and relax.

If they are afflictive emotions, they might dissipate. If it's a beautiful emotion, and there is no extra attachment we overlay on top of it, then you might find something delicious happens with those. They might grow and swell and expand through the body in some nice way, or they might transform into a different emotion or mind state that has a wonderful, different expression—that's not what you were feeling first, but now it is something very different that's beautiful.

So the theme for today is relaxing with your emotions, relaxing through your emotions, and around your emotions. The more you can do so physically, if you have a physical location for it, I think the more effective this can be. I would encourage you throughout today, the next 24 hours, when you have a strong enough emotion that you feel it, practice relaxation and see what happens in the wake of that relaxation. If you have the opportunity to meditate—or just stand still, close your eyes, sit down, close your eyes—and do this relaxation in this attentive, meditative way, all the better.

Developing the skill of this kind of relaxation will help a lot with further deepening our relationship to emotions, which we will talk about these next days. So thank you. May you enjoy your emotional life.