--- ai_generation_date: '2026-09-07' ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview audiodharma: talks: - date: '2020-09-07' mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/12065/20200907-Gil_Fronsdal-IMC-mindfulness_of_emotions_1_of_5_introduction.mp3 speakers: - speaker_name: Gil Fronsdal speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: Mindfulness of Emotions (1 of 5) Introduction url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12065 video_unavailable: false location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: ft7Hl6ib0Io imprecise_upload_date: '2021-05-04' title: 'Dharmette: Mindfulness of Emotions (1 of 5) Introduction' upload_date: null uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft7Hl6ib0Io --- # Mindfulness of Emotions (1 of 5) Introduction - [Gil Fronsdal](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/1) _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._ ## [Mindfulness of Emotions (1 of 5) Introduction](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/12065) As it is the beginning of the week, there is a new theme for this week, and that is mindfulness of emotions. I think many English-speaking people would say that emotions are a central and very important aspect of life. For some, emotions are how they navigate and understand the world, and understand themselves; it is what they orient around. Some people are not so centrally focused on emotions, but they still play a very important part of life. Without what we call emotions, life wouldn't be as interesting. The stories we tell, books we read, and movies we watch would be phenomenally dull if the characters in them were emotionally flat. There would probably be very little drama and excitement in these stories if that were the case. For some people, emotions make life worth living and really infuse them with inspiration and purpose. In some ways, that is true, but it turns out, oddly enough, that no one really knows what an emotion is. If you try to study this, there are actually many theories about what an emotion is. We often assume we know what emotions are, and we will very quickly say, "Of course I know! I know what anger is, I know what sadness is, I know what happiness and joy are." But as a category—which some people have very strong opinions about—it is actually hard to pin down exactly what it is and define it. Where is the line between what is an emotion and not an emotion? Is peace an emotion? Is calm an emotion? Some people would say yes. But is it the same kind of emotion as something like anger, joy, or delight? Someone who wrote a book on the history of emotions made the amazing statement that in the English-speaking world prior to 1830, no one experienced emotions. That is a stunning statement. It seems that the word "emotion" entered the English language in the early 1800s, so English-speaking people have only been using this word for about 200 years. Before that, there were other words that were used, but rather than there being a single equivalent word, you needed a variety of different words to encompass what we now call emotions. If you go back to the ancient world of the Buddha and try to find an equivalent in his language for the English word "emotion," you will have a hard time finding one. I know of no Pali[^1] word that can be translated as the English word "emotion." Now, did the Buddha not experience emotions? Did the people before 1800 not experience any of the things we call emotions? Of course they did. They felt anger, sadness, joy, and happiness, and we find words in the ancient texts that translate that way pretty easily. But are they a perfect fit? There are words in Pali for things that can be sadness, maybe. We are not quite sure how to translate some of these words, or if we are even supposed to translate them into the words that are used in our English language. Emotions are a cultural phenomenon, just like everything else, but they are deeply connected to our evolutionary instincts, reactions, and responses to the world. So the line between culture and conditioning, and the physiology and psychology of emotions being independent of culture, is a very loose and ambiguous line. We don't find the word "emotion" very much in ancient Buddhism. If you go through the Buddha's instructions for mindfulness practice—there are very clear instructions in a text usually translated these days as the Discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness[^2]—he doesn't talk about emotions in a very obvious and clear way, the way we would expect. One way of understanding this is to look at human experience as a pie. You slice the pie to offer your friends a piece. That human pie of experience can be divided up in many different ways, and different cultures divide it up differently. So, the Buddha, in these instructions for mindfulness, was seemingly taking and dividing up human experiences in a different way than we would necessarily do it here in the English-speaking Western world. It is very interesting, then, to practice his instructions in relationship to what we call emotions, because it challenges us a little bit not to get too hung up on what we think our experiences are. Just as Buddhists tend not to want to see our experience through the lens of self and self-identity, they also don't see it through the lens of this particular idea of emotion that we have in English. And just as in modern clinical studies of human psychology it is difficult to pinpoint what the self is, it is also hard for modern researchers to pinpoint what an emotion is. If you go back to ancient Buddhism, it doesn't really support our usual ideas of who we are and how we are. This is not meant to disorient us, but rather it can help free us from the fixed categories and ideas that we sometimes struggle under and limit ourselves by. These Four Foundations of Mindfulness are an alternative way of organizing the human pie of experience. If we take emotions—whatever you want to include in that category—it is possible to use these four different slices of the pie the Buddha talked about to get a new perspective. This is for the purpose of becoming free—not free _of_ them, but free _with_ them, while still having them. One of the great gifts we can give our emotions is freedom. Not freedom to wreak havoc if you are angry or full of lust, but rather giving them permission to be there, free like a cloud in the sky. To allow them to morph, change, and unfold in whatever way they want. The four slices of the human pie that the Buddha uses are: 1. To experience things through the vantage point of our physical, embodied experience. 2. To experience things from the vantage point of the subjective feeling of whether things are pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant. This is what would be called _feelings_[^3] in Buddhism. 3. The state of the mind. This includes both the motivational state of the mind—what drives us to be involved in the world or the orientations we have towards the world and activity—and, more deeply, the overall state, quality, and characteristics of awareness itself: the mind. 4. The reactivities and activities of the mind in relationship to having an emotion. If we go through these four different areas and look at emotions, we see an emotion not as a singular thing, but as a composite. This is exactly what modern researchers are coming up with in their different theories of emotions: that emotions are never a singular thing, but are a composite of a variety of different things that come together to create the particular emotion that we're talking about. Mindfulness can be a process by which we begin seeing clearly what these different elements are. Not for the purpose of validating, repressing, or denying emotions, or having an aversion to them. In the end, not even to give emotions their freedom—which can be a little bit confusing, this idea of giving emotions freedom. From a Buddhist point of view, what we are really doing is learning a radical non-clinging and non-attachment. That is a phenomenal thing to grant our inner life. For our inner life to exist without any clinging allows some of the most creative, intelligent, compassionate, and loving parts of our life to come through. This week, I will go through these Four Foundations of Mindfulness as a way of looking at emotions, four different perspectives or aspects of it. In doing so, I hope you find it instructive, interesting, and useful to look at and understand emotions in new ways. And maybe it will support you in discovering this phenomenal capacity for freedom, which in Buddhist language means non-clinging to our emotions. That is the plan for these next four days, and I look forward to our time together. Thank you. --- [^1]: **Pali:** The ancient language used to preserve the Buddhist scriptures of the Theravada tradition. (Note: Original transcript said "holy word," corrected to "Pali word" based on context.) [^2]: **Four Foundations of Mindfulness:** Based on the Satipatthana Sutta, this refers to the mindful observation of the body, feelings (vedanā), mind (citta), and mental phenomena or principles (dhammas). [^3]: **Feelings (Vedanā):** In Buddhism, "feeling" does not refer to emotion, but to the initial hedonic tone of an experience, categorized as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.