Welcome to week 2!
Get ready for a powerful journey!
We’ve started our mindfulness practice by training our minds to pay attention to one thing – the breath, physical sensations, or sounds. This week, we will work on bringing that awareness to our emotions.
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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).
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 check-in: How did 5 minutes a day go last week? 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.
Your turn: What is your second arrow? If you’d like, share your insights, or any questions, in the Facebook group!