A Key Nuance of Mindfulness

Hi, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, we're going to talk about being with emotions. The first thing I want to say is feeling an emotion is different than becoming it. And I'll say that one more time because it's an important nuance that we often miss. Feeling an emotion is different than becoming it.

So many of us fear feeling our emotional experience, because we feel like we're going to take it on, and especially difficult emotions like sadness, grief, or just feeling overwhelmed. There's this sense that if I go close to that, if I let myself open up to that, I'm going to be more overwhelmed and I don't want that, which is very understandable. But there is a way to relate to our emotional experience that allows us to hold space for it without getting sucked into it. So one strategy for that is to just change how you relate to it with your language, how you frame the experience. So for instance, when we're angry, we might often say something like, I am angry.

Well, what would it look like to switch that to I'm experiencing anger or there is anger. Same thing with sadness often, if we're feeling sad when might say something likem I am sad. And can you hear the identification in that? There's a, an inherent being consumed by the experience and just the language we're using. I am sad. Well, what if we switched that to I'm experiencing sadness or there is sadness.

You can even do this with positive emotions too. You might feel some resistance to it at first cause it, it could appear that you're reducing some of the, the juice of the emotion, but it should actually give you more space to feel what is here with an openness and less of an attachment. There is happiness. I'm experiencing happiness. I'm experiencing joy.

And so this is just a way that you can relate to your emotions differently by changing the language that you're using and how you identify with them. And the key takeaway for today is just to remember that it's possible to feel your emotions without becoming your emotions. And that's a big part of the mindfulness journey. Thank you for your practice. Let's settle in for today's meditation.