Key Steps for Developing More Friendliness Towards Your Emotions
Embodiment
The first key point or step I'd like to share here today in relation to befriending our emotions is embodiment. Embodiment can mean a lot of things, and for me, embodiment has been a core aspect of my practice for the majority of the years I've been practicing. Obviously, movement can be a form of embodiment, so if that's something you like to do, that's great. For me, the kind of embodiment I'm talking about relates more to sitting meditation and feeling and opening through awareness to the more subtle aspects of my feeling world: sensations, emotions, and energies.
The idea here is that we're both developing a practice of groundedness through embodiment and exploring our own felt experience a little bit more. Some of my struggles with embodiment and developing more friendliness towards emotions have related to forms of suppressing emotions I don't want to feel, distracting myself, or other methods of control. Overanalyzing is something I've worked with over the years and tried to develop a healthier relationship with. I often see these themes not just in my own experience, but when I'm working with mentees one-on-one or in groups or classes, I see people struggling with these habit patterns as well.
So, for some of you, you might also be struggling with this. For me, there's a key point in developing an embodiment meditation practice where we're not pushing our emotions down, and we're also not constantly overwhelmed by them. We try to find an in-between where we're not rejecting or suppressing what we're feeling, but we're also not overtaken by it.
The basic idea here is that friendliness is a form of welcoming, kindness, and not trying to control or manipulate something. Just like how we would treat a friend or how we would want to be treated as a friend. We don't want to be talked down to, pushed away, or ignored. We want to be met with warmth and kindness. A basic principle related to embodiment is basic kindness, and this can be challenging because when strong emotions arise, especially overwhelming or uncomfortable ones, we often don't want to feel them. We may strongly identify with these emotions, and our sense of self is linked to them. When we work with embodiment meditations, we learn to find some space where we can simultaneously feel the emotion, but at the same time, we're cultivating meditative awareness with the felt sense, emotion or energy. So, we create some space. Spaciousness is something we often need so we're not completely overtaken and overwhelmed by strong emotions.
But what our emotions need is kindness. They need non-judgment, in the form of not trying to overanalyze them and having another way to feel and bear witness to them.
Working with Speediness
The next key step is working with speediness. Speediness is a form of overactivated energy. In the Tibetan medical tradition, we would call this overactivated wind energy, or "lung." When the wind energy, which is a subtle energy in the body, gets overactivated, it's like a fire that intensifies whatever emotion we're feeling. Even though our initial emotional reaction might not be very disturbing, when there's speediness, it's like there's a fire underneath, and suddenly it becomes much more intense than how we initially felt it. Sometimes, what we need to do is remedy speediness by bringing down that wind energy.
Breath practices can help with this, as well as embodiment practices and activities like yoga. Finding or connecting with practices to bring down that speedy energy can be really beneficial.
Awareness
The third key step is awareness. Awareness is a natural quality of the mind that we cultivate and strengthen within meditation. It's a quality of watchfulness, a natural aspect of the mind connected to knowing. It's like a double knowing where we not only know we're having an emotion but also become aware of the emotion itself.
Meditation is not about creating distance from our emotions, which some people mistake it for. Using awareness as a form of dissociation is not a friendly approach to our emotions. Instead, we need to feel with awareness, meaning we feel the emotion in the body, which is related to the embodiment techniques I discussed earlier. We cultivate awareness, the sense of watchfulness that is developed in most meditative practices.
This is a major key step because we need to create spaciousness to not identify too strongly with our emotions, while at the same time cultivating kindness toward the emotions. Awareness and feeling are part of cultivating an embodiment practice where neither awareness nor the feeling overtakes the other. This is something that requires practice and matures and grows over time.
Courage To Feel
The fourth key step is developing the courage to feel. When we approach an embodied meditation practice, balancing awareness and feeling can be challenging. Often, it's difficult to feel the emotion because we associate it with pain, overwhelm, and sometimes fear of annihilation, especially if it's a strong and disturbing emotion. Here, we need to develop courage. This courage doesn't come from trying to conquer or rise above the emotion; it's about understanding it. We aim to develop a deeper relationship and connection to our emotions, all while maintaining our space. Kind courage is key here, the courage to feel, but doing so with a sense of ease and kindness, which develops over time.
Dropping Judgment
The fifth key step is dropping judgment. Related to kindness, when our thinking mind is highly activated in response to an emotion, it often leads to self-judgment, self-criticism, and even harshness towards ourselves. It's essential to let go of this judgment. For me, and perhaps for you too, it's a challenging aspect. Letting go of judgment allows us to meet our emotions with greater compassion and understanding. This step is about being gentle with ourselves, just as we would with a friend, and it's an ongoing process.
Dropping the judgment is easier said than done, but through all the principles or key steps I mentioned earlier, we'll be able to release judgment over time. We'll start to feel safer connecting with the body and resting in the body, and naturally, our thinking, judging mind will start to reduce. Sometimes we just need to recognize throughout our day that we're spending way too much time overthinking or judging a certain emotion, rather than feeling it with awareness.
Time and Space
The next two key steps are related to cultivating a lifestyle that supports friendliness towards our emotions, as well as an intention for long-term cultivation. The first one is time and space. When I'm really busy and have a lot going on, it's challenging to provide the space and time to actually feel and embody. It's difficult to cultivate a friendlier relationship with my emotions because I just want them to go away so I can finish the task at hand or get things done. Busyness in the beginning of cultivating friendliness towards our emotions can be an obstacle. You may want to set aside some time and space each day to work with this. It can be within a formal meditation practice or small breaks throughout the day where you're conscious of what you're doing. You might do a practice of embodiment or deliberately cultivate friendliness through one or more of these key steps. Time and space are really helpful.
Slow and Steady Effort
The last one is slow and steady effort. Emotions are not just thoughts; they are energies that get lodged in the body. The body is much slower than the thinking mind. Just think of a physical injury; it takes time to heal. Emotions, especially the more felt body qualities, take time. Our habitual patterns have been cultivated over many years, and what I call constrictions, these tighter patterns in the body related to uncomfortable or painful emotions, also take time to release. The beauty in all these steps is that as we apply them through meditation practice, we don't have to force the release; it will happen naturally. Slow and steady effort also relates to cultivating a sense of ease. We can't force ease onto our emotions, but we can cultivate a sense of ease and spaciousness that supports the practice of friendliness towards our emotions.
As you probably noticed, a lot of these relate to the basic element of kindness, developing more kindness towards our bodies, our connections with the world, and others around us. Kindness in the form of non-judgment and not trying to control, just learning to be.
