"Meditating with Emotion" with Jane Rauenhorst this Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,

Sunday 10am Community Practice & Discussion

From Jane:  Last Sunday Benjamin lead us in an exploration of Larry Yang’s Lion’s Roar article, "In the Moments of Non-Awakening.”  I found what Larry and Benjamin had to offer very true in my life, so I have continued to explore this; along with some guidance from Pema Chodron on how our ability to explore a “felt sense” of our emotions is a significant part of this practice.  I would like to invite folks to join me this Sunday for further exploration of how our ability to experience a “felt sense” of our emotions is a central aspect of our practice.  Registration and Zoom information available here.

In the first paragraph of Larry Yang’s article he states, “We give short shrift to the places where we get caught, where we are not inspired or really not living up to our vision of who we aspire to be. From my perspective, spending our time longing for some idealized state of mind is not genuine Buddhist practice but merely spiritual bypassing. If we focus only on awakening, we miss most of the spiritual practice. I’m much more interested in how we practice with not awakening, with not being enlightened, because, frankly, those states of being are more present in my life than not.”

Boy, do I resonate with that!  But the question arises for me, HOW do I “practice with my experience of unawakening”?  

Pema Chodron in an article entitled "Meditating with Emotions: Drop the Story and Find the Feeling" gives us guidance in working with the difficult emotions that are a central part of our “non-awake” moments.  She states that being able to experience the “felt sense” of our emotions is pivotal to this practice.   

In the article Pema states: “Ponlop Rinpoche said, “In the process of uncovering our open, unfixated quality of our mind, we have to be willing to get our hands dirty.” In other words, he was saying that we need to be willing to work with our disturbing emotions, the ones that feel entirely dark. But Ponlop Rinpoche added something really important to this statement. He said that without having a direct experience of our emotions, we can never actually hear the message of awakening…. But what does this word “experiencing” mean? And how can we experience emotions? How can we experience this negative, disturbing, unsettling stuff that we generally avoid? How do we get our hands dirty with them?

Ponlop Rinpoche says, “It’s only by really tasting your experience of emotions that you get a taste of enlightenment.  “Buddhanature and the natural state are not just made up of happy, sweet emotions; buddhanature includes everything. It’s the calm, and the disturbed, and the roiled up, and the still; it’s the bitter and the sweet, the comfortable and the uncomfortable. Buddhanature includes opening to all of these things, and it’s found in the midst of all of them.”

Pema goes on to say that this can be difficult to do because: “We always associate our emotions with thoughts—we’re scared of something, or we’re angry at somebody, or we’re feeling lonely or ashamed or lustful in relationship with either ourselves or somebody else. Our emotions have a lot of mental conversation—and, in my experience, it is often hard to discern between what is the thought and what is the emotion. In any given sitting period, in any given half hour of our lives, there are a lot of things that come and go. But we don’t need to try so hard to sort it all out. We don’t have to attach so much meaning to what arises, and we also don’t have to identify with our emotions so strongly. All we need to do is allow ourselves to experience the energy—and in time it will move through you. It will. But we need to experience the emotion—not think about the emotion.  I often describe this as having a “felt sense” of our emotions.” 

With metta (loving-kindness),
Minneapolis Insight