The previous lesson had a lot of information about emotions. Here are two big things I hope you took away from it:
- Emotions are universal — EVERYONE FEELS THIS WAY.
- Every emotion will pass.
And while we may understand this on a cognitive level, it’s a bit harder to grasp on a … well, emotional level, especially when we are in the grips of a strong emotion!
The guided meditation below is about developing awareness of our emotions. We will use a technique called “noting” – which means we simply note whatever emotion is present (similar to how we noted our thoughts). As you sit in meditation, if you notice an emotion arise, simply say to yourself, in a kind voice, “sadness, sadness,” or whatever emotion is present. If no emotion has arisen, simply note the sensations you do experience – “touch,” “cold,” “breathing,” etc.
When you note the emotion, you don’t need to investigate it with your mind – “Why am I sad? When will I feel better? This is just like the time when…” or “Will this happiness last?” – because then you’ll get lost in the story, in the thinking.
Just experience the emotion itself. Where is the sadness? Is it a heaviness in the chest? A fuzziness in the head? What does happiness feel like? Use the same “watching a movie” technique that we have used with our thoughts to observe the emotion – let it ride through you, and simply be curious about what happens.
Jon Kabat-Zinn describes this technique as simply being able to recognize, “I am feeling X right now, and X feels like this.” He writes, “the intentional knowing of your feelings … contains in itself the seeds of healing…. awareness itself has an independent perspective that is outside of your suffering…. The awareness is not part of the pain. It is what holds the pain, as the weather unfolds within the space of the sky.”
In this way, we learn to be with an emotion, instead of suppressing it or avoiding it. This is what allows us to fully inhabit the joyful moments of our lives, and to heal from the devastating moments.
In Brene Brown’s latest release Rising Strong (which I highly recommend!), she talks about the fundamental importance of wading into our emotions. As a culture, we can sometimes be emotion-phobic — we’re uncomfortable when people “get emotional” or when we have to talk about our feelings. But life is about FEELING ALL THE FEELS. And as Brene Brown’s research reveals, getting comfortable with feelings is something that wholehearted and resilient people do!
How do we do that???
A popular mindfulness practice for investigating emotion is RAIN, shown below:
Recognizing is simply noting that an emotion is present — what is here? What am I feeling?
Allowing means it’s already here. Sadness, anger, frustration — this is what it is like right now. No need to push the emotion away, or feel bad for feeling this way. It’s here.
Investigate the emotion, and the thoughts and sensations that accompany it — where is the sadness? What does it feel like? We do this with kindness and compassion. We don’t judge ourselves for being angry, or criticize ourselves for ‘flying off the handle.’ We observe what’s happening.
Non-identifying with the emotion is, I think, the most important step. We often DO identify with our emotions — think about how we say, “I am angry, I am sad, I am frustrated,” as if we have become the emotion. In Spanish (from what I remember from college), we would say, “Tengo miedo” — “I have fear,” not “I am afraid.”
I don’t think it’s just semantics. When we say we are an emotion, it has taken us over. We’ve completely identified with it. When we say we have an emotion, we recognize that it is present, but we can hold it. We realize we are vast and spacious — we can hold the emotion in awareness without letting it overwhelm us.
We can experience anger without becoming anger. We can feel sadness withoutbecoming sadness.
There is so much power in being aware of emotions and not identifying with them, and in being aware of our emotions and not resisting them. One of my mindfulness teachers says that
suffering = pain x resistance
The more we resist feeling, the more we suffer.
Another practice for working with emotions comes from neuroscientist Dan Siegel. He calls it the “name and tame” (or “name it to tame it”) strategy — as soon as we name and allow the emotion, we begin to tame it.
I’ll walk you through the practice of noting and using the RAIN strategy in this lesson’s meditation download. This meditation guides you through analyzing your feelings of overwhelm. Remember that if the sensations ever get too intense, just go back to your breath.
“When held in awareness, the storm is no longer just happening to you, as though you are the victim of an outside source. You are now taking responsibility for feeling what you are feeling in this moment, because this is what is arising in your life right now. These moments of pain are as much to be lived fully as are any others, and they can actually teach us a great deal, although few of us would seek out these lessons willingly. But relating to your pain consciously, as long as it is here anyway, allows you to engage fully with your emotions rather than be a victim of them.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn, in Full Catastrophe Living