First published on January 30, 2023, this is the third talk in a replay of a series of four mindfulness talks by Don Thompson. There will be one more talk in this series: Mindfulness of Thoughts.
Embark on a transformative expedition into the heart of your emotional landscape, uncovering the subtle nuances between primary and secondary emotions, and learning the art of emotional mindfulness. As your guide, I'll share insights influenced by the profound work of Carl Jung and the timeless wisdom of Buddhist philosophy, promising you a journey toward emotional wholeness. Together, we'll dissect the layers of our feelings, understanding how unchecked cascading emotions can lead to delusion, and how to harness them towards cultivating compassion and equanimity.
This episode isn't just about emotional intelligence; it's about embracing the full spectrum of our emotional experiences with loving awareness and kindness. Through guided meditations, we'll practice labeling and understanding our feelings, transforming the way we relate to them. Notice the shift in your own emotional tides as we learn to become the sky behind the clouds — constant, open, and free. I invite you to join me in this intimate exploration, where the end goal is a more balanced, present, and emotionally attuned self.
PLEASE READ - Terms of Use: https://www.nextpixprods.com/terms-of-use.html
Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.
First published on January 30, 2023, this is the third talk in a replay of a series of four mindfulness talks by Don Thompson. There will be one more talk in this series: Mindfulness of Thoughts.
Embark on a transformative expedition into the heart of your emotional landscape, uncovering the subtle nuances between primary and secondary emotions, and learning the art of emotional mindfulness. As your guide, I'll share insights influenced by the profound work of Carl Jung and the timeless wisdom of Buddhist philosophy, promising you a journey toward emotional wholeness. Together, we'll dissect the layers of our feelings, understanding how unchecked cascading emotions can lead to delusion, and how to harness them towards cultivating compassion and equanimity.
This episode isn't just about emotional intelligence; it's about embracing the full spectrum of our emotional experiences with loving awareness and kindness. Through guided meditations, we'll practice labeling and understanding our feelings, transforming the way we relate to them. Notice the shift in your own emotional tides as we learn to become the sky behind the clouds — constant, open, and free. I invite you to join me in this intimate exploration, where the end goal is a more balanced, present, and emotionally attuned self.
PLEASE READ - Terms of Use: https://www.nextpixprods.com/terms-of-use.html
Note that Don Thompson is now available as a coach or mentor on an individual basis. To find out more, please go to his website www.nextpixprods.com, and use the 'contact' form to request additional information.
Speaker 2:
This is our third talk in our mindfulness meditation course, our introduction to mindfulness meditation, and this particular talk will deal with the mindfulness of emotions. And first off, I want to congratulate you for persevering, for still being here in the course. If you persevere, I believe you'll see results. Of course, if you don't persevere, you won't see results, which is the natural outcome of not doing anything. But if you persevere you'll see results and that's a good thing. You want to keep going. I would suggest that, and I believe you'll be happy if you do so. Let's talk a little bit about emotions and I'll get into a little definition of emotions from a psychological perspective, touch on a few theories regarding emotions, what they are and the different categorizations, you might say from a psychological perspective, and then from a Buddhist perspective, you might say from Buddhist philosophy I'll get into what's called the hindrances and how those relate to emotions and how the hindrances can really cause issues related to delusion, and delusion is something we want to try to avoid, of course, but I'll get into that related to the hindrances in a little bit. So let's talk a little bit about emotions and a little bit about what kinds of emotions there are From a psychological perspective, you have what they call primary and secondary emotions.
Speaker 2:
So primary emotions are the emotions that you feel, that we all recognize from stimulus in the world. You know things that happen in your life, so that can be anger and fear and joy, and so on and so forth. These primary emotions are then related to secondary emotions that come up in reaction to the primary emotions. So, for example, you might get angry, you know, and then, as a result of getting angry, you might get depressed about being angry, you might feel jealous and you might get angry about, you know, becoming jealous in a certain situation. So the secondary emotions, again, are reactions to the primary emotions and this can cascade, this can continue forward and create real problems, as we'll see when we get into the hindrances.
Speaker 2:
Now there's also what's known as the unconscious. The unconscious has been, you know, defined by psychologists, by Buddhist psychologists and psychologists, and we can, you know, think about it in terms of probably most of you are familiar with Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. So the hero's journey is the great cycle or circle of the hero's journey, and there you have this line in this that demarcates the unknown from the known. So the unknown really could be said to be the unconscious, and the hero's journey or heroine's journey becomes a metaphor for a journey into the unconscious. And what the hero or heroine does is brings back gifts from the unconscious, and these gifts, from a psychological perspective, can also happen.
Speaker 2:
So what the psychologist Carl Jung discussed was working with the unconscious in a way that you want to bring the unconscious into the, into the conscious. You want to become more aware of what the unconscious is in order to become more whole or more complete and go through a process of what Jung called individuation. So let me read a quote from Carl Jung here. My life story is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. In the end, the only events worth telling are those when the imperishable world erupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences. All other memories of travels, people and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings. Everything else has lost importance by comparison. That's what Carl Jung said in his book Memories, dreams and Reflections, which is called by some to be his autobiography Carl Jung.
Speaker 2:
So when we work with emotions. What's interesting is that sometimes the work itself engenders the opposite, engenders what the Buddhists would call the antidote. Specifically when working with negative emotions, the antidotes can be the antithesis of, or the opposite of, the emotion that we're working with. And so, as a result, as you're working with sometimes negative emotions, you can develop qualities such as perseverance and equanimity and compassion, and it seems to be somewhat counterintuitive, but this is actually what happens during the process is the process itself engenders the antidote, or the, in some cases, the inverse of the emotion that you're dealing with. And it's a very intriguing thing, but also a very important aspect of it of the process of going through and working with the emotions mindfully. So what you want to do is you want to work with the emotions mindfully, as we'll do in our guided meditation. You don't want to judge them, you want to accept them, you want to look at them and in some cases, you want to label them or perhaps whisper the emotions and then bring them to the forefront and bring them from the unknown into the known. You know, per Carl Jung, and by doing this you help, in my thinking, the the process of individuation, in the process of becoming more whole.
Speaker 2:
So let's talk a little bit about also the fact that emotions are contextual, because I think this is, you know, when we look at emotions, we want to realize that emotions can be contextual. They can be based upon you being within a group, or within a country, or within a culture, because people have an impact on you, of course, and their emotions, their moods, can impact you very, very profoundly. So, for example, the recent pandemic in the United States, the, the emotion of fear, has become quite pervasive, you know. Perhaps you know realistically so, but it has become quite pervasive because the culture has taken on or, you know, it has has sort of absorbed this feeling of fear and this Permits throughout the society, into the individual, and it affects you personally, of course. So you know, emotions can be contextual and there are a lot of emotions.
Speaker 2:
You know you might think that there are just maybe a dozen emotions or 15 emotions or whatever Would be the top list, but in actuality some people have categorized up to 500 emotions and they developed what they call the ABC list of emotions. So this ABC list is quite interesting and almost entertaining to look at. Now I'll just go through a couple of the examples of what you have on the list. So, for example, you have an e, you have an eager and easy-going and ecstatic and edgy and efficient, egotistical, and and whatever. And for B, you have bad and baffled and bashful and beautiful and belittled and betrayed, and List goes on. So you have 500 or so categorized emotions. So this gives you a sense that you know when you're looking at emotions, don't, you know, be open-minded? There's a variety of emotions, there's a pantheon of emotions. So you could be dealing with emotions.
Speaker 2:
You might think, well, you know, what is that or why is that really an emotion? Well, yes, it is. So, you know, consider it to be an emotion and you can work with it. This is just something to be mindful of as you go through your guide to meditation or look at emotions mindfully. That's very important to consider that.
Speaker 2:
So now, what can cloud our emotions are, as I mentioned before, what's called in Buddhism, the hindrances. Buddhist psychologists have picked up on this and and use it in their, in their practice. And the hindrances, the five hindrances which I'll show here, are Want or grasping, hatred and ill-will, stupor or sloth, agitation, rustlessness and doubt. So these five hindrances really the issue with them is they can cloud your mind, they can create really delusion and, as a result of delusion based upon the hindrances, we can have secondary emotions that come up from, you know, primary emotions that are based on delusion, for example, and, and these secondary emotions are based upon delusions and the cascade effect. So, all you know, you can see where there could be a real problem, because you've got, basically, the foundational emotion a reaction is delusional, based because it's based upon the hindrances, and so we want to be aware of the hindrances and we want to be, you know, factor them in when looking at emotions.
Speaker 2:
Is this emotion based upon a hindrance of some kind? And if it is, you know, you can look at it as Perhaps being a good candidate for being a little bit off base or a little bit delusional in terms of your reaction. If it's, if it's coming out of one of the hindrances, that doesn't mean that necessarily all negative emotions are coming out of the hindrances or delusional. As a matter of fact, negative emotions can also be telling us something. So we want to respect All emotions, including negative emotions, and we want to realize that they can be at times, coming from a place that's, you know, attempting to tell us something, and In those instances we want to work with them and you know and respect them and realize that they might be Prompting us to look at something.
Speaker 2:
An example of this might be social injustice, so we might get, you know, angry at some social injustice. This would be an example of something that's not delusional. It's. It's. It's an anger that comes out of something that's unjust. It could also be something on a personal level. It could be some interaction with another individual I, your family and friends, I could be that perhaps we're making a racist statement or something like that. Well, these feelings of anger that might come up are, you know, justified perhaps, and you know you should, you should accept them and respect them as being justified and you can, you know, take action on them in some fashion.
Speaker 2:
You know, being mindful that you yourself don't want to fall into some kind of delusional Overreaction and based based your reaction based on a hindrance. You don't want to respond with hatred, for example. You don't want to respond, perhaps, violently. You want to respond in a in a compassionate way, in a kind way, in a loving way that allows you to have a perspective, but you want to, you know, take action perhaps. You know, some of the mindful people that I know are Really advocates and they, they are activists, perhaps even in terms of certain social injustices.
Speaker 2:
So being mindful doesn't mean you're passive, it doesn't mean you don't do anything. It doesn't mean that you Ignore or brush under the carpet Issues that are negative. You look at them, you deal with them and you, in some cases, if they're, if they're appropriate, if you're you know, if you're mindfully looking at them, the appropriate response Might be to take action in against that injustice or against that particular situation in a mindful way. So I mentioned this because, you know, really it's Important to realize that mindfulness doesn't make you some kind of a passive person that accepts everything Is okay. You know that's not the idea. We want to become an individual that's engaged, an individual that's awake and aware, that takes the unconscious you might say shadow side of the self and brings it into the, the known, brings it into our, our known Persona, so that we can become more whole, as I mentioned before and is Carl young has described in his process of individuation.
Speaker 2:
Okay, so that's a little bit about mindfulness, of emotions and again, as I mentioned, it's a big topic. So what we'll do now is we'll proceed into the guided meditation and what we'll do in the guided meditation. A lot of it has to do with looking at the impermanence of emotions and how emotions are ephemeral. They move through you really, you know, like smoke through the air or like waves on the ocean. They're ephemeral, they pass through you, and it's the same thing with thoughts, and we'll get into that as well when we look at mindfulness of thoughts. And the bottom line is you want to apply a sense of presence in the present moment. In the present moment, you want to apply loving, kindness and compassion to the emotions and in doing so, they can transform. And doing the work itself, again, as I mentioned, can become the antidote to the negative emotions.
Speaker 2:
If the negative emotions are something we need to deal with and get you know, we want to move them to the side, we want to work with them in a way, to you know, quiet them down, so to speak, so that we're more effective, so that we have more clarity, so that we have more perseverance, so that these good qualities arise out of the work itself. That's what we want to do. So, again, thank you so much for persevering to this point. So you're already developing the quality of perseverance as a quality of mindfulness, and so I would suggest just to keep at it. There's more good stuff to come, and right now, let's go ahead and dive into the mindfulness guided meditation related to emotions. So thanks again and keep on going. Thank you, this is the third meditation in our mindfulness meditation class and this will be related to mindfulness of emotions.
Speaker 2:
So the first thing to be aware of is there will be pauses and you want to wait until the bell rings at the end, and that will indicate that we're finished. So I invite you to get into a comfortable seated position, sitting firmly in your chair, relaxed but yet alert and awake, and I invite you to go ahead and close your eyes as we start. Now you can take a few deep, cleansing breaths. Let's go ahead and take three deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling slowly. Let's go ahead and do that so you want to notice if there's any obvious tension in the body and you just want to let it go, so you can feel or sense if there's tension in the neck and the shoulders and the back, just go ahead and let the tension go. Let it go. You want to let the eyes and face soften. You want to relax the shoulders and let the arms and hands rest easily on the thighs. You want to let the belly be soft and you want to breathe naturally. You also might want to sense the area around the heart and soften there as well.
Speaker 2:
We're going to be inviting in feelings of love and compassion and kindness, and these will arise from the heart. So you want to just place some gentle, kind awareness there in your heart to allow these emotions to arise. If they don't, that's fine, we'll work with that too, but just focus a moment on the heart. You want to feel a sense of embodied presence. You want to feel like as if you're a witness to these aspects of your life that we explore in mindfulness, in this case emotions.
Speaker 2:
Emotions can be seen as transitory. They pass through your consciousness like smoke in the air and at the end the smoke clears and the air is left. You can think of the air as being the loving, kind awareness that we're bringing to this effort, the backdrop, the witness, the observer of these aspects of our lives, in this case, emotions. So you want to bring your attention to the breath or to your chosen anchor and just breathe naturally and bring this loving, kind, gentle presence, this awareness, to this moment right now. Let's go ahead and do that for the next minute or so.
Speaker 2:
Now, as you breathe, you might notice the sensations of the breath in the nostrils and the throat. You might notice a tingling in the throat. Just bring that loving, kind awareness to all these sensations. We just want to try to let a sense of calm and ease and relaxation to grow. Now, if your mind wanders, as we've done before, just bring it back to your chosen anchor. Your breath hands on the thighs another chosen anchor. We just need to accept that. The wandering mind is a natural thing. It's going to happen. Just bring it back gently to your anchor when that happens.
Speaker 2:
So, now, thoughts will arise, emotions will arise, perhaps even images will flash in front of you. Just let them occur and be like waves on the ocean or smoke in the air. Now, after a while, I invite you to notice your emotions. We're going to focus and call attention to our emotions. You want to bring the same gentle, kind awareness to your emotions as you have done so far with the breath. You just want to allow the emotion to occur without judgment. You want to invite it in. You know, like a friend, you friend the emotion and then, as we've done in other mindfulness practices, you can go ahead and label the emotion that arises. If it happens to be anxiety or joy or whatever, you can just label it and maybe even gently whisper what the emotion is to yourself Anxious, anxious, joy, joy, excitement, bored. So as you go through this process, you might notice where you feel the emotion in your body. You want to notice that it could be a constellation of sensations, a variety of sensations in the body related to this emotion. Go ahead and notice that and you want to try to notice if, in reflecting on the emotion and bringing this kind awareness to the emotion, you have a response, a different emotion in response to the primary emotion, you have a different response. Is there some kind of resistance? You want to notice that and just be aware of it. You know, bring the loving and kind awareness that we've engendered to that resistance, if there is any. You also may want to try to notice if the reaction is strong or if the reaction is mild, or if there's no reaction. You might notice the story that's associated with the emotion. What is it that we're telling ourselves about this emotion? What is the story surrounding it? You just want to acknowledge the emotions or emotion kindly.
Speaker 2:
Now, once you bring this kind presence and awareness to the emotion, you want to notice what happens as it dissolves. Does it get more predominant? Does it become stronger? I invite you to notice these things as well. What is the effect of loving, kind awareness have on that emotion? Now, after noticing the effect of your attention, your kind, loving attention on the emotion, I invite you to bring your attention back to the breath or to your anchor. Bring it back to the breath, back to your anchor.
Speaker 2:
So the idea here is that we can now bring loving, kind awareness to our emotions, any emotion that arises, as a witness, as an observer to the emotion and that process will itself affect the emotion. And if it doesn't affect the emotion, we notice that as well. We aren't really trying to fix anything here. We're just trying to notice and become aware of emotions and observe them and look at how we're reacting. They try to take a step back, mindfully, as a witness, and observe all emotions as, in a sense, waves on the ocean or smoke in the air. They dissipate, they move, they're a continuum. They never stop really.
Speaker 2:
But what is there is a presence. There's something like the sky is there always behind any experience. In a similar fashion, we can, in a sense, identify with that sky or with the air as a metaphor for this loving, kind awareness that we're bringing to any effort, any situation, any emotion that might arise in our lives. As a result, you'll become more open, more balanced and more free. So let's rest for a moment in this gentle, kind, loving presence and just watch emotions as they pass by and pass through us, judging the emotions, being kind to the emotions, not judging the emotions, letting them pass through like smoke in the air. So I invite you to open your eyes, take a look around and notice how you feel now as compared to when we started. Ideally, there'll be a sense of kind, awareness and almost like a sheen on reality, and that's a good thing, thank you.