Being with difficult thoughts and emotions
In short, we have two systems for dealing with difficult thoughts and emotions:
- Avoidance: this is an unsuitable strategy for dealing with difficult thoughts and emotions, as it leads to exclusion, suppression, and denial and we react to our own thoughts and emotions as if they were an external threat.
- Approach: which is what we use when we practice mindfulness. We approach difficult thoughts and emotions with curiosity, openness, engagement, and willingness and practice accepting, letting go, or letting be, only to discover that they will often change on their own.
More specifically, we will find that:
• When we stop trying to force positive thoughts and emotions to be present, they are free to emerge on their own.
• When we stop trying to fight negative thoughts and emotions, we find that they drift away on their own.
• When we stop trying to make something specific happen, a world of new and unexpected experiences opens up to us.
Through mindfulness practice, we practice being with what is difficult instead of doing something about it. We respond instead of reacting. We meet the emotion exactly as it is expressed in the body, right now, with open, spacious, and loving attention. We focus on sensing rather than thinking, and we breathe with the uncomfortable rather than holding back.
The voices in your head will often quiet down when thoughts are set free. You simply let them come and go without acting on them. Therefore, when no thoughts or emotions are forbidden in meditation, when everything is allowed, like small ripples or larger waves on the surface of the ocean, they will eventually let go.
This session balances on the one hand accepting the thoughts and emotions exactly as they are, even making room for it to be difficult. On the other hand, we also explore our judgmental thought structures - and what they do to our relationships with ourselves and others.
We are now in the more tricky part of our mindfulness practice because thoughts and emotions are often either partially or completely unconscious to us, and because we usually allow ourselves to be consumed by them and thus believe them wholeheartedly. But thoughts are not facts, they are not truths, they are just interpretations of reality, and if we are not aware of them, they can have a significant impact on how we react.
You are now ready to get started with this week's mindfulness and yoga exercises!
