Week Two: Mindfulness of Emotions

I want you to imagine, for just a moment, what it would be like to not have emotions……

Crazy, right?!?

Life would be incredibly different! While we may sometimes think how wonderful it would be to never feel sadness or pain, when we imagine having no emotions at all, we realize that emotions are what give texture and meaning to our lives.

Humans have the greatest emotional range of any animal (as far as we know!). Our emotions have an obvious evolutionary function – they point us toward the things that need our attention, and they motivate us to approach safety and avoid threats.

It is indeed a powerful thing to have the ability to know what we are feeling when we are feeling it, and the wisdom to discern how to use that knowledge. In Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan says “happiness is a skill that can be trained. That training begins with deep insight into mind, emotion, and our experience of phenomena.”

Mindfulness is about learning to be with the entire range of the human experience – the joyful AND the painful. The nonjudgmental aspect of mindfulness reminds us that no emotion is necessarily “good” or “bad” – all emotions are valid because they are what we are feeling in that moment! We can approach them with equanimity – non-fighting, or allowing.

We don’t need to judge our emotions, or tell ourselves that certain emotions are “inappropriate”: anger can be destructive, or anger at an injustice can motivate us to take inspired action to make the world better! This week is not about trying to suppress “bad” emotions. It is about bringing greater awareness to our inner world of emotions and feelings, and responding skillfully and compassionately.

So what IS an emotion?

According to Eve Ekman, an emotion researcher at UC-San Francisco, an emotion is “a process, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and [then] a set of physiological changes and behaviors begin to deal with the situation.” Our emotions are fundamentally about “Is this okay? Is it pleasant or unpleasant? What, if anything, should I do about it?”

Researchers generally agree that are seven universal human emotions:anger, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, contempt, and happiness. Paul Ekman (Eve Ekman’s famous father) travelled to remote locations around the globe and found that people from Pittsburgh to Papua New Guinea make the same facial expressions when they experience those emotions!

The word e-motion conveys something we’ve probably already noticed: that emotions are things that move through us, and are felt with the body. An emotion is a combination of physical sensations, feeling tone (positive or negative), and thoughts/perceptions.

Emotions rarely occur by themselves – we often experience many at the same time. Sometimes we’re not even aware of an initial emotional reaction (like fear), and we may only realize we’re experiencing something when we feel the anger that emerged in response to the fear.

It’s important that we distinguish between an emotion (like anger) and a judgment. Sometimes we say something like, “I feel like you never listen to me!” That is actually a judgment. The underlying emotion is likely anger, or sadness. As we explore emotional awareness, we want to learn to tap into the sensations and experience of emotions, and not the thoughts that often accompany them.

If we really want to make things simple (and who doesn’t like simple?), we can pretty much reduce all of our emotional experiences to “things I like” and “things I don’t like.” We can add the in-between category of “neutral” to make it three options, but that’s pretty much it – events and feelings are either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And somehow, we manage to build an entire emotional vocabulary and lived experience on that very basic foundation!

Building emotional awareness

As we enter this week of exploring emotion, set an intention to be aware throughout your day of your tendency to immediately react to things with either grasping (“I like this and I want it to stay this way”) or aversion (“I don’t like this and I want it to go away”).

One thing you may notice, if you can simply observe your reaction with curiosity, almost like you’re watching a movie, is that the negative or positive feeling tone passes pretty quickly. The irritation at the driver who cut you off subsides by the time you reach the next stoplight. The elation you feel when someone retweets you (neuroscientists know this actually does activate the “reward centers” of our brain) passes pretty quickly.

You’ll notice, much like you are beginning to with your thoughts, that emotions are like clouds passing through the sky – they are transitory and impermanent, and ultimately, we have a CHOICE of whether we act upon them or not.

A true emotion (as distinguished from a mood or a trait) lasts for only a fraction of a second, or possibly up to two minutes, but generally not longer. If we have the sense that the emotion (sadness, anger, etc.) is with us for a much longer time (which we often do), it’s probably because of the second arrow.

The first arrow, shown below, hurts.

Something happens. We immediately react – “This is unpleasant! I don’t like this!”

Once the arrow has hit us, there’s nothing we can do about that initial stimulus. It has already happened – someone made a nasty comment to you, your child threw a tantrum, you lost an important client at work.

Recognizing, and allowing, that what has happened has happened, we could stop there – “Ouch! That was painful. I didn’t like it.”

But we often don’t stop there. The pain continues, but this time, it’s from the second arrow. And the second arrow is the one we control. This arrow, unlike the first, is optional.

Do you throw any of these second arrows at yourself?

If you’re smiling right now, it’s because you can see yourself in this image. We can ALL see ourselves in this lady’s position – throwing the second arrow is part of the human condition.

When we start throwing the second arrow, we have become lost in the story. Our initial emotional reaction has transformed (and enlarged) into thinking and analyzing and rationalizing and catastrophizing…. We’re wondering why we feel this way, or thinking we shouldn’t feel this way, or remembering the last time we felt this way and wishing we would never feel like this again!

Certainly, reflection after a painful event can be helpful. But the second arrow usually isn’t about honest reflection and introspection – it’s often about blame, worry, and negative self-talk.

The more we become aware of the actions of the mind, the more we become aware of our emotions and how mental tendencies contribute to our emotional experience. One of the first things we can do to build our emotional awareness and intelligence is to recognize when we’ve thrown the second arrow, and then learn to drop the story. We can learn to identify the emotion, and explore it with curiosity. (See today’s guided meditation).

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We’re going to start our week by setting the intention to be more aware of our emotions and our second arrows.  You can get started with your first guided meditation for the week, which is a 10-minute practice focused on mindfulness of emotion.

Weekly practice: This week, I am gently encouraging you to increase your daily practice time to 10 minutes. You are your own best teacher, so you can decide for yourself when and if you are ready to “up” your practice time.

The previous lesson had a lot of information about emotions. Here are two big things I hope you took away from it:

1. Emotions are universal — EVERYONE FEELS THIS WAY.
2. 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.

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“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

In us, there is a river of feelings…. To observe it, we just sit on the bank of the river and identify each feeling as it surfaces, flows by, and disappears…. If we face our unpleasant feelings with care, affection, and nonviolence, we can transform them into the kind of energy that is healthy and has the capacity to nourish us. By the work of mindful observation, our unpleasant feelings can illuminate so much for us, offering us insight and understanding into ourselves and society.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

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In this lesson we’re digging into the neurobiology of emotion – which is the stuff I get really excited about!! You’ll find me in full-on teacher mode in the video – get ready to learn about your nervous system and the bodily basis of emotion!

Here’s a quick summary/preview:

We have three main emotional systems:

1. Threat-detection and self-protection: to identify dangers in the environment and respond. This system is both activating (causing us to flee or fight) and inhibiting (causing us to “shut down”).
   1. Associated emotions/feelings: fear, anger, anxiety, disgust
2. Drive and resource-seeking: to detect resources for survival (food, social connections, money) and motivate us to acquire them (by making us excited or happy when we do so)
   1. Associated emotions/feelings: excitement, pleasure, joy
3. Soothing/affiliation system: to help us calm down during times when we are not threatened or trying to get things we want (i.e., when we are not avoiding or clinging).
   1. Associated emotions/feelings: content, peaceful, safe

Check out the video!

I can’t say enough times that none of these systems are inherently “bad” – we need to be able to detect threats, we need to have nervous system activation to engage in the world, and we need to have time to recover. (As I said in the video, we need to be able to pendulate between these systems).

Your funsheet for your Brilliant Binder for this lesson looks like this:

You’ll see three circles, one for each your emotional systems. In each circle, identify the activities you engage in each day that fit into that category – what excites and energizes you, what causes anxiety, what calms you down? Don’t worry about making it perfect – just write down the activities that you can think of. You may return to the sheet over a couple days as you pay more attention to the messages from your body.

Once you’ve completed the circles, take a look at how you are spending your days. The key here is balance – you will have items in all three circles! But maybe you’ll notice you’re not engaging in a lot of calming behavior, or that you’re not spending a lot of time on things that excite and delight you. Maybe you’re spending a lot of time in threat-detection mode.

Awareness of these patterns is the first step to meaningful change. What circle do you want to spend more time in? How could you do that?

This is all about considering the small changes you could begin to make to harness the calming and healing capacities that your body already possesses! What’s working and how can we do more of it?

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Click to download the pdf: Emotional Systems

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— Jelaluddin Rumi,
translation by Coleman Barks

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I absolutely LOVE that poem! So eloquent, so short and sweet, so brilliant! How can we learn to be gracious hosts to our emotions?

One way we can greet our emotions as welcome visitors is … to literally greet them! I first learned of this practice in Sarah Napthali’s Buddhism for Mothers. Napthali writes that when she senses herself getting angry, she says (to herself), “Hello anger!”

It feels really cheesy to do this, but I swear to you, it works! If I sense frustration, I can say, with a kind voice, “Oh, hello frustration. It’s you again…” Compare this to how we might normally react, getting lost in story rather than identifying what’s going on.

I will try to greet my anxiety — “Oh, anxiety is here!” I recognize anxiety as my body’s response to a threat. I let it move through me without taking me over. It’s simply a temporary visitor, after all. As obnoxious as our house guests can be, they all eventually leave, right?

When we approach our emotions in this way, with a kind and compassionate greeting, we create space.

In that brief space, we can gain some valuable perspective, welcoming our emotion, learning from it, and responding effectively.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Victor Frankl

I think the lines above from Victor Frankl summarize the essence of mindfulness. We are learning to pause. Even if it’s just one full inhale and exhale, we can find space — to calm down, to center ourselves, to reflect, to think, to RESPOND, instead of REACT.

If you could have more of anything you wanted, BESIDES time and money, what would it be?

For many of us, what we desire is space — even if it’s just the space between one in-breath and one out-breath. As we cultivate mindfulness of emotions, and as we continue our daily practice, we will find it easier to drop into that mindful awareness. We will find the space to greet our emotions as welcome teachers.

Download the funsheet below for a copy of the poem above, and some reflection questions about what it would be like to greet and entertain emotions as welcome visitors, even if they do try to destroy our homes!

Guest House Reflection