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Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation with and : Class 3 Emotions - Tanya Wiser, Kodo Conlin

Reflections on the Previous Week's Practice

Tanya Wiser: Welcome back, and welcome for the first time, David. Come on in, make yourself comfortable. Hello YouTube people out there, welcome. If you have questions along the way, feel free to place them in the chat, and we'll be checking that periodically.

So, how was your practice this week? I invited you to continue to sit every day. Let's see, there was an invitation to spend a couple of hours with your body, being aware of your body as you were engaging. What else were you invited to do? Anybody remember my homework assignments? Mindful eating; have a meal mindfully. Great.

I'm jogging your memory, and then I'll also summarize a few of the key things that we focused on last week in the class, at least the ones that were key to me. One was that sensations are the language of the body, and feeling them is the way that the body is heard. Tuning into them and doing it ideally trying to meet those sensations without a lot of mental interpretation and projections, but more in the raw data kind of way of listening.

We talked about how the body is a gateway to the present moment. When we connect with the body in the present moment, the sensations and the breath are only happening right here, right in this moment. It's a nice way for us to help bring our awareness into the present moment.

We also talked about pain and its conditions. Kodo talked about the conditions that create the formations of different clouds. Different conditions come together and, like clouds, they keep shifting and changing. With pain sensations, can we be with them in a way that tracks and notices the changing nature of the experience instead of seeing it as a fixed, unmoving thing?

With those prompts, I'm wondering if anybody has any reflections, questions, or anything they'd like to share from their practice this week. Sveta has a microphone, so if you can speak into it, that would be very helpful for everyone's sake. Maybe Richard will come get the microphone and help hand it around.

Q&A: Bodily Sensations and Emotions

Practitioner 1: I have a question which may be helpful as a bridging point between the last meeting and today. How can you stay present and aware, and not get involved with mental narratives when bodily sensations are closely tied up in emotions? For example, difficulty breathing or tightness in the solar plexus. In my experience, when I tried to be with it, it launched me right into the emotional part of things.

Tanya: As you remember that experience, how can you describe the physical sensations that you experienced? Are there words that you have?

Practitioner 1: Just tightness or constraint. It clearly impeded breathing activity. Tightness, constriction, and an impeded breathing.

Tanya: "Impeded," great. So that's all descriptive language pointing to an experience or a feeling. The one that's maybe a little bit more mentally complicated is "impeded." Can you notice the pressure and be with it? Can you notice if it changes with the inhale and exhale? Are you able to do that? You're able to say all these things, but you find that the mind then wants to go into the emotional content and maybe explain why you're feeling this way.

Practitioner 1: Yeah.

Tanya: You clearly saw that was happening, and then you would bring yourself back to the sensations?

Practitioner 1: I definitely tried, but I found myself flowing right into the sensation of, "This does not feel good. This is not going right."

Tanya: This is where the practice of vedanā^[1]—naming something as unpleasant—can be really helpful. Having some of these key, simple words to realign can be really helpful: "Unpleasant. This is unpleasant." There's neutral, unpleasant, and pleasant. This is great. Then what else happened?

Practitioner 1: I found myself leaning into the emotional experience instead of the bodily one, which is where I felt like I was getting off track.

Tanya: You just described it beautifully. You found yourself leaning into the emotional experience because it's more compelling, right? It sounds like you were practicing with difficult emotions, trying to bring awareness back to the body, and describing what it feels like to have the experience of difficult emotions, which can be quite powerful.

It is a beautiful lead-in to today's topic. I'll save saying more about working with the emotions themselves, but I really do want to highlight all the things that you were able to describe. This is the practice we're cultivating. You clearly were trying to stay with the body, which is building this capacity. Going back to the way the class is structured, it really does build in concentric circles. We start with breath awareness, then we add body-based sensations, and this week we're going to add emotions. Then you'll find pretty quickly what's next: thoughts. They're going to show up there too. Doing our best to try and help ourselves notice—just even noticing how entangled we are and how difficult it is to resist—is beautiful.

Do you want to add anything, Kodo?

Kodo Conlin: I think that was the perfect segue into week number three. Thank you.

Expanding Awareness to Emotions

Kodo: As Tanya was just saying, the way the class is structured is beginning with the breathing, including the body with the basis of the breathing, and then moving to awareness of emotions with the basis of awareness of breathing and the body. Then we develop our skills with thinking and open even more broadly.

The arc here is that we're cultivating this very simple faculty of attention in order to be more free with all aspects of our experience, with nothing left out. We develop our facility in a simple place first with the breathing right in the core, and then we work our way out. Throughout this, something we're practicing is maintaining a simple relationship to experience.

To go back to the breathing, the practice has been to direct the attention to the sensations of breathing—a felt sense of breathing through the body, experiencing it almost from the inside out. By basing ourselves in that felt sense, we have a more simple relationship to the experience. Experience can easily become complicated by drawing out a story in the past or the future about the breathing. Instead, we stay just here, with just the felt sense of breathing. So simple.

We're using our attention to go more deeply into our own experience and to discover something about how attention can be free. Something we cultivated while working with the breathing and the body was based on a recognition many of us have seen over these weeks: the mind keeps generating thoughts and emotions through the body. Knowing that, we're developing a skill of foreground attention and background attention. If we're meditating on the breathing, keeping those sensations in the foreground, and a thought comes up, it can just pass right through. It doesn't have to take all of our attention, but it doesn't have to interfere either. By sustaining contact with the breathing and the body in this way, more and more of our experience gets revealed. We notice details of the breathing and details of the body as they shift and change, and then something else arises.

The practice has been to focus on the breathing. When something else becomes compelling enough to interfere—to draw our attention away from the breathing—then the practice is to turn more fully toward that and get to know that sensation. Once that has run its course, we come back to the breathing. I'm reiterating all this in part because this is the basis for what we're about to expand into, which is practice with emotion.

The Body as a Container for Emotion

Kodo: I'd like to say by way of preface, practicing mindfulness of the body can facilitate a very long awakening of the body. I think it's really fruitful to spend a lot of time with mindfulness of the body to develop that skill, and we'll see why as we turn to mindfulness of emotions.

One of the things we come to learn through mindfulness of the body is how the body is big enough. Metaphorically, it's a big enough container to hold the pleasant and the unpleasant. It's big enough for anything to pass through, whatever the experience.

Let's turn more directly toward emotions. First, emotions in general are a very important part of our human life. I actually like to say that this mindfulness of emotions practice is one of the most explicit invitations we have to bring our entire humanity into the mindfulness practice. Everyone is welcome. For the purposes of the practice, there is no inappropriate emotion. If any emotion arises during mindfulness practice, nothing is inappropriate. It could be anything. It may be uncomfortable, and in fact, the chances are pretty high that we will run into some discomfort as we practice with emotions. But everyone is welcome.

Practicing mindfulness of emotions is also one of these areas where we really get to know how the practice takes time. For an emotion to arise and to process through the body is a process that takes time, and it works really well if we have trust. Trust that the body can hold the emotion, and trust that the emotion will work its way through.

One of the most important principles of mindfulness of emotion is that we recognize and experience our emotions through the body. You can even pause now and think for yourself: when I'm happy, how does it register in my body? How do I know? Maybe there's a little lift to the posture, maybe a little smile comes to your face. Maybe there's some bright energy in the body. How do you know sadness through the body? How do we know anger, fear, appreciation, or gratitude through the felt sense of the body?

It's very easy for the energy of an emotion to draw us into a story. It's fascinating how that happens. It's like emotions have their own gravity, their own orbit. We're just gone. Something that's very interesting to me in terms of mindfulness practice is that a story can strengthen the sensation of emotion in the body. And the sensation in the body, if it's not observed and given its time and space, can also reinforce the story. It loops.

But with the practice of mindfulness, the story can be there, but we parse the commentary from the felt sense of the body. We bring our awareness down into the body and watch. How does it play out? What do we notice? And we give it its time.

The Riverbed Metaphor

Kodo: In terms of the capacity of the body, I want to mention that I grew up near a very broad river, the Brazos River Valley. It runs diagonally across Texas. It's one of these really wide rivers. You can imagine these riverbanks with shrubs and trees, and this flat, still water. At the end of the river, there are 3,000 meters a second going out into the ocean. There's a lot of movement happening.

I imagine the body is like the riverbed. So much passes through this riverbed. Whether the water is moving quickly or slowly, the riverbed just holds it and allows it to pass through. It's the same with the body and emotions. If the body is like the riverbed and the emotions are like the water, sometimes they flow through quickly, sometimes they flow through slowly. But all the while, the body holds it all.

[A brief pause occurs as Kodo attends to a medical device]

Great timing. I'm a type 1 diabetic, and I have a little beep, so I'm actually going to pay attention to my body and care for this. It'll take me about 30 seconds.

One of the things I'd like to call forward with this image of the riverbed and the holding of water as it passes through is that change is part of the process, and change is totally fine. Sometimes big thunderstorms would roll through and fill the river with a rush of water and sticks. You can imagine waves, and the water might be cloudy and rough. But still, the riverbed was right there. Other times, we wouldn't have rain for months, and this riverbed would be so still. Any variety of emotion can pass right through the body.

One thing I also want to draw out from this image of the river is that we want to take care of ourselves so as not to be in overwhelm when we're practicing with mindfulness of emotions. You can imagine if there's too much flow or a flood in the river, that can actually harm the banks, or we start eroding from the edges. So take care of yourself.

One more idea about mindfulness of emotions is that, in terms of mindfulness, we're not condemning and we're not condoning any emotion at all. This is part of the fact that whatever object arises, it can be met with clear attention in such a way that our mindfulness is strengthened, even if it's uncomfortable. This all points toward a simple relationship with emotions as they arise.

The Second Arrow

Kodo: There's a classic story of the Buddha. He's with an assembly, and he gives them a pop quiz. He says, "Monks, suppose someone were struck with a dart or an arrow. Would that hurt?"

The monks were sharp, and they said, "Oh yes, that would hurt."

"Good. Now, if someone were struck with a second arrow, would that hurt all the more?"

"Yes, yes it would."

"Good," he says. "You're right. The first arrow is the discomfort, the pain, the suffering that is part of this human life—a function of having a human body. The second arrow, the third arrow, the fourth arrow are the complicated relationships we stack on top."

Generalizing this as far as emotions are concerned, being with them simply means they run their course. They come and they go. So much of how we suffer in relationship to emotion is how we complicate it—what we add. The stories of self-judgment, criticism, doubt, or "they shouldn't have," or "I shouldn't have," and on and on.

Gil Fronsdal^[2] has a hilarious anecdote of walking along and stubbing his toe. First arrow: the pain of having a human body. Then he adds: "Gil, you've been teaching for 35 years. You're a mindfulness teacher. You're a Buddhist teacher, you should really be paying attention." Second arrow: a little self-judgment. And then it gets worse: "Gil, you are the worst walker." The self-criticism intensifies. Third arrow: more complication. And it could go on and on from there. "They really should not have put that sidewalk there. That curb really shouldn't be there. That is totally their fault." Fourth arrow. And on it goes: fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and so on. At some point, we wake up and we realize, "Oh, a hundred arrows."

While we're emphasizing a simple relationship, in that moment of waking up, you're right back here. It doesn't matter for the purposes of mindfulness practice if you wake up at arrow 99. Just that you're right back here.

We will stub our toes, I imagine, or hurt our fingers. We will have an emotional life. The encouragement here is to investigate for yourself: What are the ways in which I can have a simple relationship with the emotions that are coming here? And then, what are the ways that I complicate it? What are the ways that I magnify or multiply the suffering?

Guided Meditation: Working with Emotions

Kodo: I think it's a good time for us to move a little deeper into this in a guided meditation.

We find ourselves in an upright, alert, balanced posture. We're looking for a posture that can express our attentiveness. Awake, yet relaxed. Before we move into the meditation very far, the invitation for this exercise is to feel into whether there's any mood or emotion present for you now. Almost always there's something there, so maybe give it a moment if it's not obvious. What kind of state is there?

From here, the invitation is to begin directing our attention to the breathing. It may help us settle in to take a few long, slow, deep breaths, just at your own pace. Then let the breathing return to its natural rhythm, awakening this felt sense through the body. Relaxing any places of obvious holding. A gentle relaxation of the face, the eyes themselves, mouth and jaw, maybe the back of the head. Shoulders down the back. Inviting the front body to relax. The arms and hands. The hips, seat, legs, and the feet.

And now sensing into the breathing, taking just a little bit of priority. Notice any shift in your relationship to the breathing from simple to complicated. And noting that, returning to simplicity.

Now, I would like to invite you to let go of the priority of attention to breathing, and turn your attention to the prevailing mood or any emotion or state. Sensing into that emotion through the body. Where do you feel it, and how? In the language of sensation, the felt sense.

As you attend to the emotion through the body, how are those sensations shifting, changing, or seeming to stay the same? If the emotion disappears, just notice what happens next.

Now, having given some attention to the emotions, I invite you to bring your attention back to the breathing. As this sitting comes to an end, take a few deep, long breaths. Welcoming yourself. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes.

Q&A and Reflections on the Meditation

Tanya: So, an introduction to mindfulness of emotions. How was that for you? Anything you'd like to share about the meditation, or any questions about what we're practicing with so far?

Practitioner 2: I was wondering if it matters if our attention naturally wanders between breathing, emotions, sometimes thoughts, and awareness of the body? Or is the goal in meditation practice to intentionally draw our attention to one or the other?

Kodo: Great question. It sort of naturally comes up, doesn't it? There are these separate or different but interrelated modes of attention: directed attention and receptive attention. Sometimes our instructions are to look at something particular and stay with it, and at other times it's to be wide open. Over the course of our five weeks together, we're gradually moving to include more and more in the experience. That means the mind or the attention will move between breathing, the body, emotions, and thinking.

The question that remains is: are we with it? Are we a companion with the attention as it moves from thing to thing? There's no ultimate right answer to your question, actually. If we're doing a mindfulness meditation with these kinds of parameters, a lot of movement of attention can happen. If we're doing something that emphasizes more samādhi^[3] or concentration practice, we may direct the attention more deliberately to one thing. In some sense, it depends on the practice you do. But in this arc, we're including more and more, and along the way, it can be really useful to direct the attention to certain zones, like the body, emotion, and thinking.

Practitioner 3: I identified the emotion and I sat with it. I started to feel just like tightness and heaviness in my chest, on the right side, not quite the heart. That was interesting. So I just paid attention and tried to breathe through it. Eventually, that lifted, but then it just kind of hovered over my forehead, and that's how it ended. Nothing exciting, just something I noticed.

Tanya: I appreciate the tracking. Very nice.

Practitioner 4: I just had a question. When we were meditating and I started to relax more, I saw a ball of energy, like a white thing, and then it started having colors around it like green and purple. Does that mean low blood pressure or something? I don't know what that means.

Kodo: Blood pressure, I'm not a doctor! [Laughter] What's interesting to me here is that as far as what it means, we don't know. But in terms of the mindfulness practice, you had a very clear observation of it and how it changed over time. The sense of sight is very direct, even behind closed eyes. Then there's this extra layer that's a little bit removed: "What does that mean?" There's observation, curiosity, and then the meaning up in the mind. The invitation would be to let the "What does it mean?" hang out in the background and focus on the direct sensate experience.

Staying Mindful in the Midst of Emotion

Tanya: Do you guys want a little story? I feel like we're calm, but emotions are not always so calm, right?

I was watching 13 Lives, has anybody seen that? It's about the soccer team in Thailand—the 13 boys and the coach that got stuck in the Tham Luang cave. It's a movie, but it's very much based on the facts. They show the boys and the coach a couple of kilometers into the cave. There are these tight passages filled with water and stalactites dropping from the ceiling. A monsoon rain had trapped them inside for a total of 18 days.

At some point, before they even got them any food, some divers finally made it all the way in. The kids turned on their flashlights when they heard the sound, to see the divers come in. And then the divers had to leave. They couldn't take them back right away. The kids were trying to get settled again, and one of the kids started to get activated and afraid. He was having trouble sitting still in this small space.

The coach went over to the kid and said, "Okay, so fear is here. Fear has come into the body, that's what's happening here. So, okay everybody, let's sit down and calm our minds." And that's what they did. The coach taught them how to meditate to make it through this time.

Fear is like lightning. It's so intense. If you can imagine it in a small space with water and a little cave, fear coming into that would just ignite and fill you up. What guides us and helps us is building our capacity to be mindful with emotions. It helps us sit down and be with it in a way that it doesn't just blow up.

Another analogy: fear is conducted in our systems if we aren't mindful. There was a recent story of three people being hit by lightning near the White House under a tree in a rainstorm. One woman had on high platform Dr. Martens shoes, and she survived. It's not that she wasn't affected by the lightning, but the rubber didn't conduct the lightning in the same way. To me, this is a simile for what awareness can do with emotions. Emotions can't kill us, but they can make us very miserable. Emotions without a lot of "Dr. Martens awareness" can really move, undulate, and impact us. We can get caught in circles with our thinking and the feedback loops of the emotion itself.

If you measure it biochemically in the brain, a particular emotion lasts about 60 to 90 seconds. Why then does it feel like we have a feeling or an emotion for hours or weeks? We keep reigniting it. We keep feeding it. I'm trying to bring a little life and connect us to this facet of our life that is so impactful.

Practitioner 5: With meditating and sitting with emotions, I've been having a hard time differentiating between being self-aware and feeling self-conscious. I know one is rooted in negativity, but it's like, "Okay, I know I'm feeling bad, what do I do about it?" I've been trying to shorten my 10-minute unguided meditations, and I haven't been alert for them. So I think, "Oh my gosh, I want to be alert, but I guess I'm not really taking enough time to take care of myself." Now I'm back to where I started: feeling frustrated, measuring how I'm meditating, comparing sessions, and thinking, "Oh, this wasn't as successful as I wanted it to be."

Tanya: Now you're starting to see a pattern in your mind. You just described a pattern. You feel like, "I'm not doing it right. I'm not doing it well enough." So how many arrows might we have there?

Practitioner 5: I feel like the arrows are so deeply lodged. I catastrophize everything. But it's just something that I've done for a long time.

Tanya: It's compelling. It's a habit, a pattern. Kodo used the word magnetic energy. Emotions have an intention to get you to do something. We know what we do when we feel sad: we lose our energy, we fall forward, we slump. There's a different thing we do when we're angry. Emotions have energy in them, they come with a lot of energy.

What you're describing is having a spurt of self-criticism or doubt. You get a release of that emotion, and then that emotion triggers the same, but maybe stronger, creating a perpetual cyclical cycle. Is this familiar to you all? Maybe your words are a little different, but you are not alone. What you are seeing is amazing. The fact that you can see it and name it right here is amazing.

Now we just need to get disenchanted, to learn how to ride that 60, 90, or 120-second wave of emotion when it bumps up the energy. We watch it fade. The mind is going to want to grab onto another arrow, but can we learn to enjoy even 15 seconds before the next one? We try and stretch it out, make it less intense. This is our work. The work is in not responding, not reacting, not following the compulsion. And that's a lot of work. It gets exhausting, but it also brings us freedom.

This is what we're learning how to do: to let it move through, and to see those extra arrows and lose interest in them. "Oh, there's another one. Okay, I don't buy it. It's not a fact." We'll get to thoughts next week, because it's all connected.

The RAFTT Practice for Emotions

Tanya: Ordinary awareness, when we're not mindful, is the experience of getting carried away in our thinking, carried down the river by our emotions. It's the ship that isn't anchored. That's the untrained mind.

Daniel Goleman^[4] says, "Self-awareness is a neutral mode—a mode of being that maintains self-reflectiveness even in the midst of turbulent emotions." That's what we're wanting to grow. There's an innate capacity inside each one of you to be aware in this way. It gets covered over by reactivity and our thoughts, but it's here.

We may want to do spiritual bypassing around emotions: "I don't get angry, I'm not jealous." We want to be that better person. But we're humans, and we're going to have all kinds of emotions. You can't block the negative without blocking the positive; it's a flow. We have to learn how to be wise with them. We have to learn how to be that riverbed. Maybe we're not ready to be a big, wide riverbed, but maybe we can be a small riverbed for two minutes at a time to let it move. Then we need to take a break, and then we come back for two more minutes of letting it move. Bit by bit, this is how we grow our capacity.

I'm going to introduce a practice now. It's called RAFT, and it has several steps to it. In my version, it's RAFTT with an extra 'T'.

The Buddha taught that growing mindfulness is like building a raft that carries us from the shore of suffering to the shore of freedom. We build this raft by bringing twigs and ropes together. While we're not tying sticks together, we are using our mindfulness practice and our breath to build a raft that holds us up and helps us cross the river.

• R - Recognize: Recognizing is absolutely essential. We need to recognize the looping, recognize that we're suffering the emotion. It can be really simple: "Oh, I'm angry," or "Oh, I'm frustrated." "Oh, I guess I'm being self-critical." Just this simple recognition is the necessary beginning.
• A - Allow: We must work to allow ourselves to be with what is. This means being able to ride that 60-to-120-second wave of the emotion without trying to get rid of it or adding to it. It's that capacity of being with that allows things to move. When we don't allow, we're trying to block and shut down something that should be moving. Allowing is different than endorsing. It's working with an experience we're having in the present moment.
• F - Feel in the body: We're helping ourselves not just get carried into that emotional thought stream. We're going to slow it down, find it, and feel it in our bodies. Track the sensations.
• T - Tease apart: At some point, the emotion may resolve, and there's nothing more to do. But if it's a complicated situation or tends to get re-triggered, we start to tease apart the thought patterns. "This is a thought, this is the judgment, and here is the feeling. Oh, and here's a memory." I like the image of having a large dining room table with lots of chairs. All the stuff that comes up, you invite them to have a seat. You're creating room for these pieces to not be entangled with each other.
• T - Trust: It's really important to have a trust in our capacity to be with the emotion, to know the emotion won't kill us, and to know it will move through. Finding what we can trust helps us let go and find a sense of groundedness.

Guided RAFTT Meditation

Tanya: Find your meditation posture. I'm going to invite you to bring something to mind to work with that is connected to emotions. I highly encourage you to choose something you know you can be with, not the hardest thing going on.

Feel your breath, taking three longer, slower, deeper breaths. Feeling your feet. Thank you, feet. Thank you, body. Right here, giving your weight to the chair, to the floor. Taking a minute to resource yourself before you bring an emotional event or memory forward.

When you're ready, bring to mind something that you feel you can be with. We're using our imagination, bringing forward some story, images, or words. Remember what you were feeling.

When you're ready, turn toward what you're aware of feeling right now. Practice in the present moment with what you're feeling right now, based on the memory or story.

Recognize: Simple naming. Whatever emotion you can name right now, say, "Okay, this emotion is here right now. I see you and I sense you."

Allow: "Can I allow this experience to happen right now?" If there's a sense of yes, find and feel it in your body. If there's a sense of no, "I can't allow this," then work with that. Can you allow the resistance to be known?

Feel: Take a moment to scan the whole body, noticing areas where the body feels neutral and fine, and noticing where you're feeling the emotion. Maybe noticing pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. I'm going to give you 60 seconds to see if you can ride the wave of the emotion that's present.

Tease Apart: Now, notice what's here. Open up around it, creating a sense of spaciousness. Imagine that giant round table. Are there things that you would like to invite to have a seat that are part of this experience? My mother, my boss, my kid? Recognize and allow each part—the memory, the story, the belief, the interpretation, the reactivity. It all has its own place. Be generous and curious. Nothing needs to happen right now, just get to know what all is present. It's possible to have tea with any one of these visitors. It's also possible that you might need some of them to wait a while before you're ready to sit down with them, and that's okay.

Trust: Shift when you're ready and connect with what you can trust here. Trusting the dharma, trusting the fact that you can be with these emotions. Can you trust that giving spaciousness helps? Pausing helps? Breathing helps? Being present helps? Just take a minute to cultivate a space of trust by attending to it, resting in it. Maybe noticing that you're okay.

We tend to want to move away quickly from what resources us. I invite you to linger here for three to five conscious breaths. Breathing with what we trust.

Reflections on Trust and Concluding Thoughts

Tanya: So, RAFTT: Recognize, Allow, Find and Feel, Tease apart, Trust. Any response or reflection? What did you trust? What could you place your trust in?

Practitioner 6: I'm doing this practice as part of therapy—Internal Family Systems (IFS). I trust the lazy part of me. It's a sloth, it just wants to sleep and sit all day, so this is perfect. I can just rest with this and be still.

Practitioner 7: There was a lot. It was like a dam overflowing. At first I thought I could deal with a disappointment, and then something else took over that was masquerading as what I thought I was going to think about. But I trusted myself, knowing that I could have the awareness to be a small riverbed. After 90 seconds, I told myself not to get carried away with the same story. That table was there, and on the other side was faith and family. I thought, "They can have a seat at the table, but I don't have to keep serving or feeding the one thing that I choose not to feed."

Tanya: Yes, choice. Beautiful.

Practitioner 8: I trusted that I could make space for this thing that I'm feeling. You had said you can allow yourself to confront it, or not. So I was like, "I see you, but I'm not gonna talk to you. You can have a space here."

Tanya: It's so helpful to be wise and to say, "I see you here, and I know I can't quite dance with you right now. Have a seat, maybe we'll tangle later." [Laughter]

Practitioner 9: I went into a memory that brought about strong emotion. Usually, how I deal with strong emotion is to exercise, so I went outside and did some push-ups. I was just thinking, I really need to lift weights right now to get the endorphins in. But it was a nice setting to explore emotion.

Tanya: That's so wise. I'm so glad you gave yourself permission to trust your wisdom and what works for you. I commend you for taking care of yourself.

Kodo: We've just about come to a close. Breathing, body, emotions. A couple of suggested bits of homework for the week: If you meditate between the sessions, it can really help prepare you for the next one. We will encourage you to lengthen your sessions to 25 minutes daily. At least once during the week, see if you can get an opportunity to ride out the emotion that Tanya was talking about—60, 90, 120 seconds. When that emotion comes on, if you feel up for it, take a seat and say, "Just for those 90 seconds, I'm not going to get up. I'm just going to stay right here and feel this out, and see what happens."

As we're working with emotions, it's important to keep our resources full. One of the ways you can practice this throughout the week is to tune into any tiny sense of well-being, contentment, or pleasant emotion throughout the day. We can dip into it throughout the day.

You can also give a little bit of attention to noticing patterns. What kind of emotions draw you into story most easily?

A lot of what we're covering here and much more is available in the book called The Issue at Hand by Gil Fronsdal. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for your practice, and I look forward to more next week when we move into thinking.