Emotional Ease Meditation
March 18, 2007 by simplybeing
My most recent podcast episode is a guided meditation for “emotional ease”. Those words may conjure up a vision of euphoria or floating in a comfortable cloud, but that’s not what it means. Although you’ll hopefully feel more relaxed and at ease after the meditation, it will be a result of being able to actually stay present to your emotions rather than resisting them or becoming mentally involved with them. Emotional ease is about being present to what is happening without struggling with it, and that includes feeling all emotions including those you may not want to feel, such as sadness, grief and anger.
Ease in living is not about life being easy. Life isn’t easy! It’s about the ability to flow with what happens, the “good” and “bad” events and the “pleasant” and “unpleasant” reactions to those events. While some guided meditations give us some respite from life’s storms and a chance to relax by encouraging visualizations of beautiful, relaxing places, my approach is to encourage surrender to whatever is happening right here, right now. While it can be helpful at times to escape, peace in life ultimately comes from being able to remain right in the heart of the storm (whether it is a storm of events or an emotional storm). I hope this latest meditation will help some of you with that!
Just tried this one and realised some important ideas. The idea of separating emotion and thought, though the two always seem to go together for me. The idea that emotions, like thoughts, come and go.
I find it hard to sometimes live with my emotions. I have emotional states that can last weeks, if not years, that are deeply unpleasant. Admittedly they’re not continuous but are always underlying everything.
I guess, like most things, patience is the key.
Thanks for this interesting comment, Paul. The experience of meditation can sometimes lead to some insights and the possibility of seeing and experiencing things differently.
Thoughts and emotions do become “entangled”. Both could be seen as a flow of energy. Often the flow of emotional energy becomes blocked or intensified by the thoughts that get associated with the emotions.
It seems that either reading this post or listening to the meditation caused some insight for you, or shift in how you perceive things. There’s lots here you can investigate. For example, you say that the emotional states are not continuous and yet they are always underlying everything. When you observe your experience, you see that the emotional state is not continuous, and yet there is the impression that they are “always underlying everything”. If you see that emotions are not continuous, where does the impression come from that they are always underlying everything? Are those emotional states truly always underlying everything?
“The idea that emotions, like thoughts, come and go” (to quote you) could change your experience with all of this quite a bit. You might also try using the meditation more than once to see what happens.