24. Meditation 12

Discover how thoughts and strong emotions can alter experience.

Once again, find your seat. However, you’re comfortable. And just feel the weight of your body resting in space. At this point in the practice, you can pay attention to anything. Sounds, sensations. You can sit with your eyes open or closed. But most people still find it useful. To pay attention to the breath. At least in the beginning. So wherever you feel it most clearly. See if you can catch each inhalation. The moment it comes. And follow it with your attention. Through the duration of the breath. There’s no special effort to make here. Just noticed these sensations appearing. All on their own. In the space of awareness. And the moment you notice, you’ve been distracted by thought. Pay attention to the thought itself. See if you can catch the image. Or language in the mind. And notice how it dissolves. Where do thoughts go? When they disappear. As I’m sure you’ve begun to see, thoughts can color your mood. In each moment. They can invoke a wide range of emotions, sadness, anger. Joy. So I want you to play with this. For a moment. I want you to think of something. That annoys you. Whether it embarrasses you. Maybe some event. In recent memory. Well, think of something coming soon about what you’re anxious. Once you do strategically invoke a negative emotion here. Surely there’s something you can think of. That doesn’t make you feel good. I want you to feel this process. How does that happen? And the moment you feel something negative. As an emotion. Feel it clearly. Feel it without resistance. Where is it that you feel anger? Or annoyance or anxiety. Or embarrassment. Is it in your face? In your chest. See if you can. Capture the signature of this emotion. How is it that you know, that you feel anything at all? So just become interested in the emotion itself as a pattern of energy. In the body. In the mind, wherever that is. Feel it completely with a real interest in what it is not as a method of getting rid of it. You might take a moment to come back to the breath. And refine your attention there. Feel the sensations of inhalation and exhalation. As clearly as you can. Listen to the sound in the room. Notice how they appear on their own. And then do this exercise again, think of something negative. And pay attention to the thought itself. As an image or his language? Is it a memory? Is an image you’re forming of a future event that worries you. And then feel how these thoughts Kindle. The relevant emotion. See if you can get the feeling. To arise, clearly. Whatever it is. And then feel that. Again, with the same kind of attention. You’re bring into the breath or to sounds. Just relaxed interest. And then as you let the thoughts go. Notice how the emotion to. Just subsides. It has its own half-life. And it’s quite short, in fact. Unless you once again begin thinking about the reasons why you should feel this way. And now for the next exercise, I’d like you to do the opposite. And think of something that makes you happy. Something that you’re pleasantly expecting. Something that you hope happened. A memory that makes you feel good. And if you find it difficult to find something here, you might think of someone you love in a state of great happiness. Picture your child. Or your spouse or your best friend. Really getting what they want in life. Picture them smiling. Picture them free from any concern. You can even wish that for them. But picture that wish fulfilled. And whatever you can notice about your change of state here, notice. Is there a kind of smile that appears in your own mind? The energy of a smile. Without it actually emerging on your face. In fact, you might notice that you can actually put a smile in your mind. Without doing anything with your face. And as you just did previously, notice how thoughts. Change the feeling tone in the moment. What is the footprint of happiness or joy? Were pleasant expectation. Is it in your body? Your face. Somewhere behind your eyes. Where is this happening? And don’t try to prolong this feeling, just become aware of it. And as it subsides, become aware of that to. In the last minute of the session. Give up all efforts to do anything. Leave your mind wide open.

OK. Well, today, I introduced a new kind of exercise where you’re trying to actually manufacture specific emotions because not something one does a lot in practice, I don’t do it a lot. But it’s interesting to play with from time to time to sharpen your sense of how the mind works. Normally, thoughts are coming incessantly enough and there’s no reason to intentionally think any of them, they will come and they will drag with them all of their attendant emotions. And our job is to just pay attention to this process. But in the beginning, it can be useful to try to invoke this consciously. So I hope you found that useful and we might come back to that in future sessions, but for today. I hope your emotions don’t get the best of you if you find that they do in any moment, if you find yourself reacting strongly to something that’s happening, just take a moment, even half a breath, to be aware of the emotion itself as energy in your body. This is an incredibly powerful thing to do. Because when you can do it, when you can really do it from a place of mindfulness, it cancels the meaning of the emotion. If you are, say, going to give a public talk and you’re nervous about that and you come out on stage and you’re feeling nervous. To feel nervousness as a mere pattern of energy in your body changes its content. It no longer has the psychological implication it had a moment ago, it really actually has no more meaning in that moment than any other sensation does in your body, a feeling of indigestion or a pain in your knee. Right. Those don’t capture you in the same way that anxiety does when you’re feeling anxious. You can equalize those experiences with mindfulness and then you can function quite differently in subsequent moments. So the practical utility of this really can’t be exaggerated. And if you keep practicing, you will eventually discover that.