Emotions Have Their Own Intelligence
During a guided lovingkindness meditation one afternoon at a weeklong silent retreat, I imagined smashing things. I’d gone expecting to find inner peace and was shocked when rage stomped through my body instead. I could feel a satisfying crack with every piece of wood I wanted to bring down. Then self-judgment showed up. I wasn’t doing this right. I tried pushing it all down so I could focus on the phrases I was supposed to be repeating, but my anger came back stronger.
During a later session, one of the teachers said, “Before you can influence something, you have to accept it.” When I began to allow myself to feel the rage, I started understanding it. Something about the silence and lack of choice had triggered an old experience of feeling stuck without agency. This teenage version of myself didn’t understand how to feel safe. Once I recognized what was happening, I was able to show her tenderness, sit next to her, and reassure her. Then my rage dissolved into tears.
In that room, I felt these strong emotions integrate into my body, settling in my chest and throat. Metabolized. When I stopped trying to get rid of them, I began noticing what they had to convey. Paying attention gives us information about how to work with them. And it can be very confusing. When I feel afraid, should I run? When I feel angry, should I fight back? When I feel sad, is something wrong?
I can write off my emotions to hormones, exhaustion, being wrong, or being tough enough. But that doesn’t make them go away. An emotion tells us that something is happening. It just doesn’t tell us what to do about it until we can be with it long enough for wisdom to show up. Over time, I began to see that many of my emotions were messenger pigeons from inside carrying information about:
exhaustion and burnout
unmet needs
unspoken grief
crossed boundaries
old wounds that were being touched again
When I tried to get rid of them, they got louder. When I learned how to listen, they softened. They had messages about what I needed and how to be with myself.
Practicing with Emotions
In mindfulness practice, we’re not trying to manufacture better emotions. We’re training our capacity to be present with the ones that are already here. In practice, here are some simple steps to begin working with an emotion:
Name it. Notice what emotion is present. You might name it softly in your mind: fear, anger, anxiety, love, sadness.
Locate it. Notice where you feel it in the body. Is it stationary or moving? Firm, soft, neutral? Does it have a texture?
Allow it. Can you be with this just for a few minutes, even? No fixing, judging, or explaining.
Offer compassion. What do you need in this moment? Can you offer it to yourself? It might be rest, a hand on your heart, a boundary, a movement. Sometimes it’s just permission to feel what’s here.
When we stop fighting or trying to control emotions, they begin to help us know how to meet our needs.
A Larger Container
Early in my practice, I thought meditation would make difficult emotions go away.
Instead, it did something better. It expanded my container. Imagine that your container is a thimble of water, and you add a teaspoon of salt (your emotions in this example). If you drank this, it would taste terrible. Now make that container a gallon and add a teaspoon of salt. This is much more tolerable. Meditation helps us expand our own containers for our emotions.
I became more capable of feeling fear without panicking, and connection without trying to possess it. My trust in my own capacity to be with my strong emotions grew, and that became a safe place inside where we have many more options out in the real world.
We don’t practice mindfulness to become emotionally neutral. We practice to become emotionally wise. Emotions are not the problem. They are part of the intelligence of being human. When we learn how to listen to them with kindness, they become one of our greatest sources of guidance.