Emotions

We are all learning to live with the new Covid restrictions required to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

Most people I talk with are experiencing some sense of loneliness, isolation, frustration, or sadness being separated from the ones they love and the ones that love them. Whatever feelings arise during this time can be taken right into our practice of Compassionate Awareness of Feelings. We do a short version of this practice as part of most of our sessions, but this can be a full practice on its own. You can access this practice at sustainablecompassion.org.

And here are a few words from a section of an article called “The Heart Calls to You,” by Barry Boyce, the editor of Mindfulness magazine, that highlights the importance (and necessity) of being present to our emotional feelings as we travel on the spiritual path.

What will inevitably come to the fore as we spend more and more time sitting with ourselves — becoming familiar with the texture of our mind and what lurks within – is emotion. In contrast to a simple perception (of heat, or light, say) or an abstract thought (like, there goes a cat), emotion carries a lot of energy and color. It manifests throughout the body and it can repeat itself, taking the shape of a mood. What begins as anger can develop into a highly irritable mood state. In the same way, a moment of happiness can blossom into a cheery mood.

I have known no meditator who has stuck with the practice for whom the emotional landscape has not become an area of intense interest and curiosity. It’s not something you sit around idly thinking about, though, or wring your hands over. It’s something you sit with, time and time again, seeing up close the life cycle of an emotion.

You are getting to know yourself in a very intimate way. The bit of stability gained from basic attention practice (usually awareness of the breath) allows you to probe more courageously into your emotional terrain. When you find it too intense, you can see the need to fall back on cultivating more self-compassion. And if you do so, you may be able to probe further. It becomes a virtuous circle, more attention leading to deeper probing to more attention, and so on. We alternate resting and probing.