Mindfulness and Emotions

Lighten Up Meditation Up MeditationGuest Posts, How To Practice Mindfulness, Managing Thoughts & Emotions

You meditate. You do yoga. You know to be mindful.

And yet… Someone cuts you off on the freeway and you’re a maniac with a middle finger. What on earth is up with that? It’s easy to feel like a spiritual failure when your emotions take you for a ride.

Being spiritual does not mean being emotion-less

It can be helpful to recognize that the ultimate goal of a spiritual practice is not to never experience emotions. Emotions are part of the package of being human on this earth, yet spiritual types often come into conflict with the whole idea of having emotions in the first place. We have this image of The Buddha in our culture as either solemn and staid, sitting on a lotus leaf with eyes slitted closed in the bliss of his emptiness, or as perpetually jolly in the version we get of the bald laughing monk who’s perched in the entrance to your local Chinese restaurant. (The chubby bald guy is not actually The Buddha; he’s actually Budai, also known as Hotei, who is sometimes called The Laughing Buddha. But he’s not The Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama from India. He’s a monk who understood the nature of life, and found it exceedingly funny!)

Even the language we use in certain Eastern teachings about emptiness leads us to believe that when we have attained the ultimate spiritual goal, that there will be nothing there. Nothing to rile us up. Nothing to excite us. No reason to get stressed out when we get stuck in a traffic jam. We’ll just be sitting in nirvana with a small smile on our faces with nothing to push us off course.

That’s not really realistic, and this idea that this is what spiritual attainment must look like can get in the way.

Why?

Because a very common reaction for someone who’s working on mindfulness will be this:

  1. Emotion comes up
  2. Instead of allowing the emotion to be there, a reaction sets in – Oh no, not this again
  3. Either one of two things:
    • Internal struggle where you deny that the emotion is happening and try to tamp it down or force it to stop
    • Or, give in to the emotion and let the monster come out

If you struggle against the emotion, you’re imposing your own ideas on how you “should” feel and censoring reality. You’re in conflict with your own self, and it’s impossible to experience peace. The emotion is there, and you are here, and you’re fighting, trying to insist on a different reality than is actually occurring inside you.

If you give in to the emotion, then you’re indulging in it, fueling the tidal wave that rushes through you which inevitably creates more separation. Now, the conflict is out there; you merge with the emotion and let it carry you off, and justify it by lashing out against the world, your loved ones, your life.

What’s the alternative?

When we recognize that difficult emotions are always a form of fear – meaning, at the source of the anger or the frustration or the hurt feelings is a misperception of the truth that all you are is love, through and through – then the first step to find your way back to that truth is to acknowledge what’s arising.

Don’t fight it, by trying to squash it, or deny it, or prevent the emotion from being experienced.

Don’t indulge it, by justifying your own sense of self-righteousness and launching full force into the drama and artificially exploding it.

Instead, just be with it.

Acknowledge it.

Name the emotion. You can even do this out loud. Try mentally stepping back a little bit from your experience, and identify what you are experience.

“Oh, that’s interesting. I’m feeling irritation.”

Watch what colors your attention. By labeling exactly the sensations that are coming through your mind and body, it can give you a little bit of distance from them, so that they don’t tidal-wave over you and take you out of control.

Then, be brave enough to welcome the experience. The emotion is coming, whether you like it or not. See if you can simply experience it. Stay with it. Examine it. Be present to it. This is what mindfulness is.

As Shakespeare said, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

We have been trained by society to label certain emotions as “bad” which means that a frequent reaction is to shy away from them, and not want to have them. And yes, many emotions are challenging if not downright unpleasant or even truly painful to experience. But that does not mean you need to suffer when they arise. Try staying with it – staying mindful – even when the emotion is negative. You may be surprised at what unfolds in your awareness.

Becoming awake does not mean turning into an emotionless droid. It means being alive to whatever arises. It’s possible for emotions to come through and not be taken for a ride by them.

And if it happens again – which it will – where you lose control and snap at someone you wish that you hadn’t, forgive yourself for it. Learning to be more mindful is a process. We’re all doing the best that we can. Being mindful sometimes makes it seem like you’re worse than before, since now you’re paying attention. All that’s required is to keep trying! Find out more at www.lightenupmeditation.com

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Lighten Up Meditation Up Meditation

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Lighten Up Meditation helps you to brighten your life through meditation! Meditation is the simplest difficult thing you'll ever do. Real meditation is hard, like a workout for the mind, with just as many payoffs as physical exercise. You don't have to sit for hours and hours; even five or ten minutes brings benefits. If you meditate today, your whole day will shine! Tips, tricks and truth available at www.lightenupmeditation.com