This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Introduction

Just a comment before I start: when I just sat down now, the YouTube screen on my laptop here had frozen, so I had to refresh it. Yesterday, I noticed that there were a few—maybe three, four, or five in a row—comments from people whose screens had frozen too and needed to be reset. But mostly it seemed to go fine after that.

I just want to say, last week we had a big problem with this, and I finally got it to work by switching our service provider. We have two here at IMC (Insight Meditation Center). If this should happen again today and it becomes a big deal, I will switch the service provider. It will probably take me a minute or two to make the change, so hopefully, you'll come back if that's what's going on.

Guided Meditation: Mindfulnes of Emotions

Good morning, and welcome to the meditation.

This week, I'm going through the sequence of basic instructions for mindfulness practice that I teach here at IMC, where we focus on breathing first, then the body, then emotions, thinking, and then something interesting on the final day. So today is the day on emotions.

Certainly, emotions are an important part of life, but I think it's useful to consider that emotions are probably not what you think they are. They're probably more important in ways that you can't imagine or don't really know, at the same time as being less important than maybe you realize. For people who have very little contact with their emotions, they're probably more important than they realize. And for people who are very much in contact with their emotions, there's a way in which maybe they're less important than they realize. Either direction is a corrective in the direction of becoming free—a kind of freedom to emote, a freedom of emotions in a particular Buddhist way.

In the teachings of this mindfulness practice, there are four dimensions or aspects of mindfulness of emotions. These can happen all at once in some kind of holistic way, or they can happen distinctly, as is appropriate, useful, or whichever one is the most freeing in the moment. That begs the question of what "freeing" means.

The first is to simply and clearly recognize an emotion which is there. It is powerful to recognize that we're happy, to recognize we're sad or grieving, to recognize we're angry, discouraged, or inspired. There's something that happens in that recognition. If the recognition is very simple, just the recognition that "oh, it's like this," there's something freeing in that. It just allows it to be there, almost like making space for something.

The second aspect is allowing. Whatever the emotion is, allow it. In meditation practice, whatever your posture is—whether it's sitting, walking meditation, or standing meditation—there's something very special about the posture that we settle into or intentionally place ourselves in when we meditate. It becomes a posture that's meant to be able to hold and make room for anything that we're feeling inside.

In daily life, it might not be possible to allow all our emotions their freedom to just flow through us. We might make a mistake in what we say and do; we have to care for people in ways that sometimes our emotions wouldn't if we just let them be expressed. But meditation is meant to be a place of real allowance: no shame, no embarrassment, and no blame. There is no need to run away from, no need to collapse, lean forward, and grab. Just sitting upright, allowing it to course through us, and staying present and aware.

So once we recognize it, we can allow it. The third aspect is to feel. To feel is to really experience the physicality of the emotion, the physical expression or manifestation of it. Almost all emotions that we feel have some kind of physical manifestation that lets us know that we're having an emotion. It could be that the chest is tight and compressed, the jaws are clenched, or the stomach has butterflies in it. It could be a warmth that radiates from the heart that feels so good, the hands feel delightfully tingly, or there's a wonderful thrill that runs through the body when there's joy. To feel it is to trust the body's experience.

One of the reasons it's so useful to feel the physicality of emotions is that it's a way of stepping away from the story-making mind—the stories, ideas, projections, planning, and reactivity of the thinking mind, which has a way of fueling and continuing the emotion. It's a little bit like someone who reaches down to grab a beach ball on the ground, and as they do so, their foot kicks the ball further. They walk up to the ball, reach down to pick it up, and they kick it. They're never able to pick it up because they keep kicking it forward.

It is the same way with our emotions. There's a way in which our story-making mind or ruminations about what's going on keep kicking the emotion forward, so we're never quite able to get a clear view of it, or clearly step back and hold it in a loving, compassionate, or liberated way. Feeling is not the same thing as a story. It's a way of allowing the body to process the emotion.

The fourth is something that sounds a little more complicated: teasing apart. This is meant to be something very simple. It means to begin distinguishing between different aspects of the emotion. For example, distinguishing the physical manifestation from the story-making mind, or the difference between our attitude towards the emotion and the emotion itself. These very simple distinctions make breathing room to be present, so it's easier to be there with it without having things knotted up with each other. When our reactivity and attitude are knotted up with the emotion, it can be very difficult. In some ways, we keep kicking the ball forward.

These four—Recognize, Allow, Feel, and Tease apart—make up the acronym RAFT. With this raft, we can float on the wonderful current of our emotions rather than drown in them.

So assuming a meditative posture, and gently closing your eyes—or keeping them open if that's your practice.

Sitting just like you are, check in with yourself. How are you feeling right now? What's your mood, your emotional state? How is it?

Have a few moments of clearly recognizing it, and see if that recognition can be very, very simple. Just the recognition: "Oh, it's like this." If how you're feeling is very vague, you can just recognize that you're having a feeling. You don't have to name it more specifically than that. Or if there are no feelings, emotions, or mood states, then recognize the absence.

However you are feeling, what does it mean for you to allow it now? Give room for it. Do not assume it should be different. In a sense, give unconditional permission for however you're feeling to be there.

Perhaps give permission as if your emotional state has never had permission to be out in the sun—the sun of awareness. Finally, it's allowed to just exist and be felt and known.

Then feel it in your body. What parts of your body are most active, alive, or filled with sensations associated with how you're feeling? It could be anywhere: the face, the hands, the belly, the chest, the head, the back, the feet.

Then to tease apart: notice, distinguish between your thinking, your reactions, your judgments about what you're feeling, and the simplicity of the feeling itself. Tease apart the stories you're telling yourself about it from the embodied experience itself.

With this beginning of recognizing how you are, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Breathe in until you are about three-quarters full, perhaps inhaling into the body that's feeling. On the long exhale, soften and relax the body around how you're feeling. A long exhale, settling into your body here.

Then let your breathing return to normal. Let the breath breathe itself. On the exhale, relax the muscles of your face, letting those muscles fall away from the bone. The muscles of the face do so much work throughout the day, and now sitting here, you can let them rest.

Maybe on the exhale, soften the shoulders. Release the shoulders. There is no need to carry the weight of the world for these minutes you're here.

Soften your belly.

Within your body, as part of your bodily experience, become aware of how the body experiences breathing.

When you're exhaling, perhaps from time to time, you can let go of your thinking or quiet your thinking, so you can better ride along with the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

And then quietly, calmly, without disturbing things too much or at all: how are you feeling now? What's the emotional tenor or mood that's present for you? Calm or agitated? Content or discontent? Happy or sad? Irritated or friendly?

Whatever it might be for you, recognize it for what it is, without being too concerned with how accurate the recognition is—as if it has to be the exact word. Maybe it's a silent recognition, an acknowledgment. In that recognition, is there some freedom, some non-entanglement, like stepping back and having non-involvement?

Make room for how you're feeling. Allow it to be there. In that allowing, is there a kind of freedom? Non-entanglement?

Then gently ask, how does the body experience your emotion? How is it felt in the body? Trust the body's experience.

Then, tease apart the simplicity of your emotion or mood from any way that you define yourself by it, judge yourself by it, or identify yourself by what you're feeling. Those are two different things. The emotion can be independent of any conclusion you make about what it says about you or yourself. Tease apart those conclusions, and maybe the conclusions can drift away.

And then, as we come to the end of the sitting, consider the respect and care that we give to our emotional life. The ability to be physically sensitive—a heightened sensitivity to the manifestation and arising of emotions—is the same sensitivity that makes room for compassion, kindness, love, and goodwill. It brings a sense of care and caring, a tenderness of heart. It is a tenderness that has room for a sympathetic resonance with others.

In coming to the end of the sitting, perhaps with whatever sensitivity, tenderness, and warmth you have, bring into your mind and heart the people in your life. Consider the people around you in your neighborhood and your communities, people you communicate with, your extended family, or strangers you are liable to run into today.

Regard them kindly. Kindly gaze upon or consider these people, and perhaps consider how wonderful it would be if some of them could be happy. What if some of them could be peaceful and contentedly inspired in their lives?

Wish that it was so. Let yourself have some goodwill towards them: May it be so. May these people I know or meet, may they be happy.

May these people I might meet today, may they be safe.

May the people that I meet today, think about today, communicate with today, or learn about today—may they be peaceful, and may they all be free.

Finally, in ways that are appropriate and inspiring for me, may I contribute to this possibility for others. For each of us, in ways that are right and inspiring for us—not as an obligation, but as an inspiration—may we live this day for the welfare and happiness of others.

May all beings be happy.

Dharmette: Harmony of Zen and Vipassana (3 of 5) The Suchness of Emotions

Emotions are probably not what we think they are. More often than not, the way we think about and conceive of emotions might keep us from being liberated and free. It might even keep our emotions from having a certain kind of freedom.

I am very fond of the idea that in English, the Latin root for the word "emotion" includes "motion," which means movement, and the "e-" prefix, which means "out." So, "moving out." I like to interpret that as meaning all emotions are processes. They are activities, they are movements, and they all want to move out. They all want to spread or process themselves.

Our inner life has an amazing capacity to process emotions—to let them unfold or dissolve in a way that has its own wisdom. We often interfere with that wisdom; we interfere with the natural process.

I love this analogy: If I am cutting vegetables in the kitchen, I might cut my finger and it might bleed. I have a responsibility—or an opportunity—to take care of it by washing the wound and putting a band-aid on it to protect it. But the actual healing, I can't do. That is a physiologically much more complicated event than I could ever possibly engineer, understand, or figure out. I can't send the right antibodies, proteins, and hormones in the right combination to make the whole thing heal again. What I do is keep the wound clean, safe, and protected so the body, which has the wisdom, can heal the wound.

It is the same thing with our emotional life. Our hearts, our inner life, know something that, if we get out of the way, will allow emotions to unfold and move toward some resolution, solution, or unfolding, depending on the emotion that's there.

Many times, we don't allow that because we're so involved in either reacting to the emotion or spinning the story even more. For instance, they say that one of the leading causes of depression—not the only cause, I don't want to give that impression, but one of the leading causes—is rumination. One of the things that makes grief a lot more difficult than it needs to be is rumination. Thinking, rehearsing, remembering, and feeling guilt and blame get in the way of really trusting and respecting the grief.

So it's like the beach ball analogy: we are constantly kicking the ball forward before we can pick it up and hold it gently in the palms of our mindfulness. Instead of keeping the momentum going all the time, in mindfulness practice, we're learning how to get out of the way with a deep respect for emotions.

I very much like the word "respect" as a kind of synonym for mindfulness or Vipassanā^[1]. "Respect" comes from the Latin prefix re-, meaning "again," and spec, like "spectator" or "spectacles," meaning "to see." So, to look again. To respect our emotional life is to give it a second look, ask "what is this?", see it clearly, and allow it to unfold and be there.

Whether that's useful in all circumstances in life, I don't know, but it is very powerful and effective to do in certain circumstances, and meditation is one of them. Sometimes when I have strong emotions that are difficult for me, I will go for a long walk in the mountains. I find walking very useful because there's something about the movement of walking that keeps me from getting locked into the emotion and the thoughts. I can let all of it just flow and do what it needs to do.

Other times when I've had strong, difficult emotions, I will sit in meditation. I don't try to stop anything. I don't even try to stop my thinking mind per se, but I will constantly come back and compost the strong emotions in my body. For me, that means I keep returning to feel what's happening emotionally in my body. I make space and really feel it. When I do that, I'm stepping a little bit away from the thoughts that are spinning. If I only thought, I'd probably get into all kinds of trouble and go crazy. But I step away from it—not to stop it, but to change the context and really feel what's there, trusting that the body knows how to process and unfold it. And then I'll do it again and again as I compost what I'm feeling.

There are some emotions that are clearly a byproduct of what we think. I've sat in meditation and had a perfectly lovely, peaceful time. Then, for reasons I have no idea why, I'll think about some conversation I had with someone 20, 30, or 40 years ago—now getting to be almost 50 years for some of them. Somehow, this thought comes through the mind, and boom: I get angry, irritated, afraid, or something. As I keep telling the story—"She said, I said, I should have said, why didn't I say..."—I can feel the emotions and the heat operating. It is clear that the thinking, the thoughts, seem to be central to keeping this thing going.

I've also had times when I've learned to quiet the thinking mind and just be with the feelings and the emotions. When I do, it's clear that I'm no longer feeding it. I'm not pouring gasoline on the fire. Then, something different begins to happen: something cool, quiet, and subtle. Rather than solving our emotional problems, sometimes they dissolve.

Sometimes, emotions that many of us feel have nothing to do with our external life, but maybe have to do with physiology. It's not a matter of what we're thinking, but a feeling in the body. The practice is not identifying with it, not making a story out of it—like a story about, "Oh, I'm bad or I'm wrong that I should feel this way"—and making a lot of space for it. This ensures that the mood or emotion we have is not a filter through which we see ourselves and see life.

That ability to not let it be a filter has a lot to do with this ability to really stop, look, and respect what's happening. Acknowledge it, recognize it, really feel it, know it, tease it apart, and just let it be simple for itself. That's a kind of liberation. That's where freedom can happen: where we're no longer entangled and caught up, and we can just allow everything in its uniqueness to be there for itself.

This is a beautiful, generous thing to grant: to give all the particularities of our life their freedom. To give an emotion its freedom to emote, to be there in the quiet and safety of just being present for it. To allow our reactions and identifications with it to be free. That means we don't get involved; we don't keep thinking about it, scratching the itch, scratching the scab. We just let it be: "Okay, you're there, and okay, you're free, but you're free in the sense that you're not casting a light back on me, and I'm not defining myself by you."

This wonderful and rich part of mindfulness practice is bringing careful, respectful attention to the fullness and richness of our emotional life, but not becoming involved with them, not celebrating them, and not denigrating them. You just allow them to be there in their simplicity.

What happens with that? At some point, we start seeing that there are two classes of emotions or attitudes in our emotional life. On one side are the ones that clearly arise out of our reactivity, out of our contraction, resistance, pushing, wanting, and not wanting, and the ways in which we build ideas of self—"me, myself, and mine"^[2]—or our attitudes towards others. These are a little more compulsive, a little more automatic, and they involve what in early Buddhism might be called some level of craving^[3] or drivenness—a lack of freedom.

There is a whole other class of emotions that come when there is no reactivity, but rather the free and unfettered response of our psycho-physical system. Some people might say they are the responses of our hearts. Those feelings and emotions seem to grow and expand the more we're present for them, rather than dissolving because we're no longer feeding them with our attention and stories. These are beautiful states like compassion, kindness, warmth, generosity, and love.

These are wonderful states that can be pure and simple and spread out throughout our body, seemingly spreading from us throughout the whole world in their simplicity. Somehow, learning to get out of the way—not being entangled with "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts," not defining ourselves by them, and not trying to do something with them—allows us to just relax. By allowing the simplicity of these good states and this good sensitivity to be there, these beautiful capacities for heart-centered emotions can grow and develop.

To develop a heightened respect, sensitivity, care, and attention to our emotional life is one of the great benefits of Vipassanā practice. It is one of the great gifts, too. Life seems so much richer with this liberated emotional life.

So thank you for today. I will continue tomorrow with the mindfulness of thinking. And there also, thinking is not what you think it is. Thank you.