Emotional sensitivity - exploring and welcoming emotion

Okay. And let’s take a lot of care over the transition into meditation. So it’s really, really common that when we begin to meditate, a whole load of pressure and sort of preconceptions and expectations are kind of dumped into our psyche. So just, just don’t do that. Instead, maybe we can adopt the attitude of the explorer or the playing child. We’re more investigating with a kind of lightness. So let’s just from the very start, have that as our compass. Rather than, I need to get somewhere, I need to change my experience, I need to be someone in particular. And then we just kind of descend into the body, into a immediate embodied awareness can often feel like a kind of darkening or a deepening of the space of awareness as we kind of plunge down into inhabiting the body. It’s always helpful to just meet the ground as part of this process. Be really clear that your body is meeting something solid underneath it. And just spend a moment steadying, landing your awareness into these sensations and then just tuning to the general felt sense of the body. How does it feel to be here today in this body? This might be really obvious. It might be that there’s some very clear way that you feel your body to be. That maybe even has a word, an easy label. But even if so, let’s never accept any answer to be final and just take the invitation to look a little bit deeper. If there’s a main theme of tiredness or grumpiness, maybe we can find some sort of nuance to that as well. We can notice exactly what that feels like. Maybe there’s a sort of downward motion in the body. Maybe there’s a kind of sense of the body being a bit distant. If there’s a theme of anxiety, how is that showing up physically? Is there a kind of fizzing in the chest? What’s the ratio of anxiety to excitement? Is it clearly one or the other, or is it a kind of cocktail? And as we check in in this way, we want to be really sensitive to the whole body. It can be helpful to just make your way around the body briefly to sort of visit various parts. Sensing in the toes the world of sensation that’s constantly fizzing and popping. Subtle tingles, subtle prickles, feeling the sense of space in the legs, there’s typically less going on, maybe some subtle areas of tension. Sensing the shifting patterns of tension in the face, sense of pulling or tightness. And then with a real gentleness, taking in the belly and the chest and the throat. These centres of life. It’s here most prominently that emotions are going to be showing up in the body as discrete sensations, as a vibration or as movement or as a sense of block. And even if emotionally we feel pretty neutral, neutral is something that can be felt and is something that will be showing up in some way, in a kind of vagueness, maybe a kind of spaciousness. And as we check in with ourselves deeply turning towards this world of sensation, we really want to get the attitude right, the demeanour, the intention. We’re not trying to focus on anything, we’re not trying to achieve anything, we’re trying to start a conversation. At least when we’re practising in this way, establishing this deep sense of listening, it can be really helpful to use the breath to sort of lead us into a deeper sense of intimacy with the body, a deeper sense of subtlety. We’re not looking for the easy answers, we’re not really interested in the labels. We want to get really close to the subtlety of what’s going on and meet it. Well, meet it with this sense of listening kindness. That way we would listen to a good friend telling us something that matters to them. Can you listen to the sense of stuckness in your throat or the fizzing in your chest, or the tightness in your belly, or the warm glow of relaxation in your belly, whatever it may be? Can you listen to this with prescience, with kindness, with curiosity? So it’s not just this thing that I understand, this thing that I know and I’ve seen maybe a thousand times before. It’s actually something completely unfathomable, ultimately, the mystery of being, showing up in this moment in this very unique way. This is the attitude that will allow things to unfold and to reveal more. And it may be an attitude we need to perpetually resurrect if we get dragged into any kind of resistance or judgement. So there’s this awareness permeating the whole body, receiving the whole body. There’s the breath moving in the whole space of the body, animating it, nourishing it. There’s this shifting play of sensation, informed and coloured and flavoured by our emotional atmosphere, by whatever’s happening in our hearts. There’s the way that we meet this with this deep listening, this care, this warmth, welcoming, allowing. It’s these three aspects to our awareness that we’re practising, that we’re reasserting. If they fall away, this wide open sensitivity to the whole body. And if this falls away, you can find your toes again, find your fingers and your face, sensitive to the many, many, many micro sensations that always show up in these places. And then you can include the rest of you, your centre. And it’s not that we’re trying to constantly flit around the body with attention, it’s more that we kind of relax the pointed sharpness of attention into something softer and more spacious. And we could stay here. And in many kinds of meditation practise, we might. We’re bringing a little bit more active curiosity today to our emotional life. Showing up in this galaxy of experience is the body. This shows up both as identifiable sensations, but also as the kind of background texture of the body. It’s almost the background texture of awareness. And there’s some anxiety. It can be like this sort of buzzing or movement or jitteriness. We can see it in certain parts of the body, but on a more subtle level, the level that we want to move towards, it’s kind of there in the very fabric of the space of the body, the very screen on which the body is being projected. If there’s some peace or some subtle joy, this too can be felt as a kind of warm glow that actually, it’s kind of everywhere. If you really look, maybe most strongly in one particular area, like the heart, the belly, it’s not confined there, even a sense of numbness or vagueness, dullness. This too shows up as a kind of duvet, cotton wool, fog kind of quality we can notice kind of everywhere. Maybe it’s centred on the eyes or somewhere else, the head. And then just as we meet these sensations with care, with curiosity, with a kind of divine ignorance, where we choose not to pretend we understand for now, we can also do this to this background sense, this more subtle atmosphere flavouring that’s present, really open to it, this mysterious inhabiting of this emotional state in our awareness. Yes, it’s here and there in the body, but also it’s kind of colouring everything. It’s like tinting the lens through which we see the body. So really allow it to do so, allow it to be here. As we practise in this way, a couple of things might become clear. The first is that when we ask how we’re feeling and give an easy answer, we’re missing quite a lot of nuance, quite a lot of subtlety. There’s always more. We can always listen more deeply and uncover more, more richness. And in doing so, we can sort of unlock our emotions to give them back their dynamism and their life, rather than just locking them in a box marked anxiety. Or sadness or neutrality. And the second thing we can begin to notice is that our emotional state is kind of glued to our perception in a way. It’s like we can perceive it as an object, we can perceive an emotion in the body treated as something that’s there sort of to be regarded by our awareness. We can also notice though that it’s kind of flavouring our awareness. And as it does so, it will highlight certain experiences and hide others when there’s anxiety, flavouring awareness, it will highlight threats and problems and hide peace and joy. When there’s a sense of stillness, open heartedness, it will highlight space, openness, pleasantness. Of course, this is never static emotional life. As we pay this close attention and really welcome open to our experience, we can’t help but notice its dynamism as well. The more space, the more care and the more curiosity we can bring, the less that difficult emotions will remain sort of entrenched and stuck and the more we can move towards a sense of spaciousness in the body, spacious awareness. So we’ll practise like this in silence for the last few minutes, sensitive to the whole body, curious about our emotional life, meeting it with a spacious kindness and curiosity.