HOW TO NAVIGATE DIFFICULT EMOTIONS

BY SHARON SALZBERG

Sometimes when a painful emotion comes up, we layer shame and blame on what’s already difficult. For example, we may think to ourselves, “I should be able to do my job better.” We also tend to project into the future and worry about what the pain may feel like tonight, next week, or next year. When we do this, we’re not only facing the pain of present difficulty, but the anticipation of pain, which is actually in our imagination. The first thing we can do to cultivate our resources for managing difficult emotions is allow ourselves to feel the emotion, shift our attention to noticing the sensations present in our body, and forgive ourselves for what we feel. We’re human beings, and feeling this way is natural.

1 Sit comfortably and close your eyes or leave them slightly open in a soft gaze.

2 Begin by listening to the sounds around you. Relax and allow your experience of the sounds to come and go. Just let them wash through you.

3 Bring your attention to the feeling of your body sitting. See if you can feel the earth supporting you.

4 See if you can feel space touching you. Space is always touching us. We just need to receive it.

5 Bring your attention to the feeling of your breath. Just the normal, natural breath, wherever you feel it most distinctly— in the nostrils, the chest, or the abdomen. Find that place, bring your attention there, and just rest. You don’t need to worry about what’s already gone by. You don’t even need to anticipate the very next breath.

6 Recognizing that your attention is going to wander is critical to understanding meditation as resilience training. Your mind will go to the past, to the future, or you might fall asleep. It’s OK. Recognize that you’ve been gone, see if you can let go gently, and bring your attention back to the primary object of your attention. We let go and we begin again, we let go and we begin again. That’s the actual practice.

7 When you feel ready, you can open your eyes or lift your gaze.

of choice on how we learn to act when these emotions are present in our mind and also in our bodies.”

We Are Not Our Emotions

The emotions themselves are not the problem, Zindel reminds us. Emotions convey important information about what we need. The problem is that “hot” emotions get prioritized in our brains, taking parts of the brain offline that can help us identify them and relate to them in a more intentional way.

Dr. Sará King agrees, noting that emotions are automatic. King, a postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Oregon Health Science University, says that emotions are not good or bad, per se, they just…are. She says that people often conflate their emotions with the negative feedback they might get from others about those emotions and conclude that “this is who I am and this is who I’ll always be.” She adds, “That can be really difficult to hold with compassion, because then people start having thoughts like I’m a bad person who does bad things and thinks bad stuff and has bad emotions. Mindfulness practices are really training us to constantly bring our attention back to the body, back to the breath, and remembering that no matter what we’re feeling inside of our bodies, it’s temporary. It’s passing. It’s just a phenomenon of our experience. But it is not who we are.”

The practice of mindfulness is really a practice of building awareness, adds Segal. “That awareness is an opportunity to shine light on things that we didn’t really know about ourselves,” he says, “and make choices about which ones you want to strengthen and which ones you might want to let go of.”

Loewenstein also urges us to make space to bridge this gap. “It seems to me that pausing is not sufficient. It’s what you do with the pause that’s really important.” ●