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 (2 of 5) Emotions in the Body

So, certainly here in California and elsewhere, our sympathies go out, our love goes out to the people who are displaced from the fires, who have lost their homes, and are struggling with the smoke and challenges of the heat. This is such a big part of our world that learning how to be with our emotions is such an important skill. Because as we get wiser with our emotions, it allows us to be present and offer more of our care for the world, rather than our distress.

So, this is the second talk on mindfulness of emotions. One of the things I tried to say yesterday is that the English word 'emotion' doesn't really have a clear definition, and no one really knows exactly what it is. It's a vague kind of category term, and many people assume they know exactly what emotions are, taking it for granted that this is a huge part of human life.

But there's a number of things that we take for granted—that we assume are just built into the nature of the universe—that are really partly a product of our conventions, our culture, our ideas, and our concepts that we use to organize our life. There's nothing wrong with that, but sometimes we're limited by the concepts, the ideas, and the stories we have. It turns out that maybe it's useful to think that emotions are not what you think they are. Just that little phrase, "emotions are not what you think they are," might help you to kind of open up to be more with a direct experience, rather than being a little bit removed with the thoughts, ideas, opinions, and stories about the emotions that we have.

Now, the alternative in the Buddha's teachings for how to be with something we call emotions is to look at our experience through four different perspectives: to look at it through the perspective of our body (how is it being experienced physically?), through what he calls feeling^[1] (which means the subjective experience that leads to a sense of pleasant and unpleasantness, liking and not liking), from the point of view of the mental state that's present, and then some of the activities of the mind and reactions in response to the emotions that are there.

So today, the topic is to use the body, and to really feel the experience in the body. When the Buddha started teaching about mindfulness of the body, he first taught mindfulness of breathing. I kind of see breathing—if our life is a mandala or concentric circles—that for a meditator, breathing is at the center. And then, as we expand outwards from that and hold more of our experience, we hold the next concentric circle, which is our embodied physical experience. The next concentric circle is the mind states, and then it's the activities of the mind that lead to suffering or lead to freedom.

With that kind of image, the idea is that we stay at the center with the breathing, and just breathe with these things. As I said in the meditation, if we can breathe with the emotions, that can be a great support to not get pulled too far into the world of thinking about emotions. That's why the statement "emotions are not what we think" is meant to dislodge a little bit this strong pull that we sometimes have into the world of thinking, stories, meaning, and our relationship to all of this. Rather, we learn to use breathing as a way to be a little bit free of our thinking—not focused on our thinking, but rather focused on breathing. It keeps us fluid and relaxed.

And then, to begin feeling a wider field of experience—the wider bodily experience—happens in the middle of that breathing. The Buddha called it the experience of the whole body. As we start feeling the whole body, there's a reference point for our emotions, which is phenomenally useful, and that is to feel the physicality in the present moment of the emotions we're having.

Our involvement with emotions, especially if it involves stories, ideas, and events of our life, might not really be focused on the present moment. Instead, it's focused on who said what, what I said, what happened, what the person did, what I want. It's a whole world of stories that keeps the emotion stirred up. In fact, the French word from which the English word 'emotion' comes from—I think it's pronounced émouvoir—apparently means to stir up and to set in motion. So we keep stirring it up with our thoughts and ideas.

Consider the physical manifestation of an emotion: the ways in which our stomach gets maybe tight or has butterflies if we're afraid, the ways our shoulders get up if we're angry, or the ways that the eyes go wide if we're afraid. All over the body there are muscles which have direct lines to what we would call our emotional lives. Those muscles are being tugged, pulled, energized, and activated in different ways. There are some people who have said that we probably wouldn't be able to recognize the emotion we're having unless we had the physical evidence for something happening in our body related to it—some sensations that are an expression or a manifestation of that emotion.

So what we do in meditation and mindfulness is we center and bring our attention to the physical component of the emotion. It's a way of respecting the emotion, feeling it, and allowing it to be there. We're stepping away from the thoughts about the emotion—the stories—and we're offering a profound kind of respect to the emotion, allowing it to be there. But we're allowing it to be there as a present-moment phenomenon, as it's manifesting in the present moment, and we can start to feel it in our body. The Buddha talked about feeling the experiences of the body through the sensations of the body—all the different sensations that come into play in relationship to emotions.

There are a few advantages to bringing attention to the physicality, the physical experience of emotions. One is that emotions are not a story, so it's a way of connecting to the emotions without continuing to fuel and stir them up. The body is very honest, and sometimes you can feel more clearly and more honestly what's happening than you can if you're looking at it through the filter of thoughts, ideas, meanings, associations, biases, and all kinds of things.

But one of the most important parts of experiencing it in our body is that the body has a lot of intelligence. In a sense, the body is not a thing. It's not like a hunk of meat. The body that the Buddha talks about is a dynamic and active field of sensations, nerves, activities, and movements that are going on. It's a process, just like emotions are processes that move and unfold unless they get stuck, or they get into a loop going around and around.

The body is a process, and as we make room for how the emotions feel in the body, it's kind of like the body is giving room for the process of the emotion to unfold. It's like the psychophysical body, the somatic body, if really left alone in awareness, often knows what to do. It knows what needs to relax, what needs to unfold, what direction the emotion goes. That doesn't mean that difficult emotions necessarily get better right away. Sometimes difficult emotions need to get stronger; that's the movement they have until some kind of resolution comes. Grief might need to be stronger for a while—it needs its time. Fear might need to be stronger for a while—it needs its time. Anger might need its time. But we get out of the way in the sense of our thoughts, our ideas, or our projections, and we just feel it in the body.

That's not always easy. If there are really intense emotions, or very difficult, painful emotions that have a long history or difficult associations with events in our lives, then doing this might not be the right thing to do. There are other ways of working with the mindfulness of the body in relationship to things which are too difficult to touch directly.

But if it is not too difficult to bring your attention to how emotions are feeling in the body, then for difficult emotions, the way I think of it for myself is that I'm composting them in the body. I just keep coming back and feeling my body. It might just be for a few moments because I'm stirred up by something, but then I remember, I come back and compost it in the body. I feel it in the body and allow the body to handle it; I trust the body to handle it.

If it's some of the more beautiful emotions we have, it isn't so much that they get composted, but by feeling them physically in the body, it's like you give more room for them to grow and to unfold. They also want to move, and so they also can become more expansive. With joy and happiness, when we start feeling them in the body, we realize the deeper kinds of joy and happiness actually get limited by thinking about things. The deeper joys and happiness become more expansive and grow in a certain way as we keep relaxing into the body and feeling them.

To end this, I want to say that one of the great ways that the body can support emotions—both the difficult ones and the ones that are quite wonderful to experience—is the idea that we're trying to help our emotional life to feel safe with us. Let the body be that place of safety. Let the body hold it; open to the body and allow the fear to feel safe within you. Allow the anger to feel safe. Allow the joy to feel safe. Allow the love to feel safe within you, and hold it and be with it. That can mean breathing with it through the body, feeling it in the body and breathing with it, or accompanying it with breath, or simply resting in a loving, caring, soft attention. Just feel where this emotion is present in the body and make room for it. Give it permission to be there, and see what happens in that quiet mind that's not preoccupied by thoughts.

Whenever you start thinking about things and about the emotions, take all those thoughts and compost them back into your body. This idea of coming back to your body is one of the great skills in meditation practice. It's a skill that takes a while to learn—how to feel safe about, and learn how to be wise about. But this is one of the component parts of what the Buddha had to teach. One of the four big areas^[2] where we bring attention is with attention to where things are in the body. The more we're in our body, the more it's a foundation for the next three so-called foundations—the next three other ways in which we can bring attention to the emotions, which I'll continue with tomorrow.

So, thank you so much for being part of this. I hope that in this process you become friends with your emotions, and that your emotions feel that you're a support and a friend to them. Thank you.