An Internal World

Excerpt from "The Brain's Ability to Look Within: A Secret to Well-Being," by Emma M. Seppala, Feeling It: Psychology Today Blog, December 10, 2012:

Most of us prioritize externally oriented attention. When we think of attention, we often think of focusing on something outside of ourselves. We "pay attention" to work, the TV, our partner, traffic, or anything that engages our senses. However, a whole other world exists that most of us are far less aware of: an internal world, with its varied landscape of emotions, feelings, and sensations. Yet it is often the internal world that determines whether we are having a good day or not, whether we are happy or unhappy. That’s why we can feel angry despite beautiful surroundings or feel perfectly happy despite being stuck in traffics. For this reason perhaps, this newly discovered pathway of attention may hold the key to greater well-being.

Although this internal world of feelings and sensations dominates perception in babies, it becomes increasingly foreign and distant as we learn to prioritize the outside world.  Because we don’t pay as much attention to our internal world, it often takes us by surprise. We often only tune into our body when it rings an alarm bell –– that we’re extremely thirsty, hungry, exhausted or in pain. A flush of anger, a choked up feeling of sadness, or the warmth of love in our chest often appear to come out of the blue.

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How Disgust Influences Our Moral Beliefs

"We have sort of a built-in poison detector. You can see this as early as even in newborn infants. If you are willing to do this, you can take a couple of drops of a bitter substance or a sour substance, and you'll see that face, the tongue stick out, the wrinkled nose, as if they're trying to get rid of what's in their mouth.This reaction expands into adulthood and becomes sort of a full-blown disgust response, no longer just about whether or not we're about to be poisoned, but whenever there's a threat of physical contamination from some source. But the face remains strikingly similar. It has expanded more, though, than just keeping us away from physical contaminants, and there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that, in fact, this emotion of disgust now influences our moral beliefs and even our deeply held political intuitions."

~David Pizarro, from "The Strange Politics of Disgust," TED Talks, May 2012

Individual Capacity

Rain on the Car Window, from Photography at the Speed of Life

My Weather
by Jane Hirshfield, from Poetry (September 2012)

Wakeful, sleepy, hungry, anxious,
restless, stunned, relieved.

Does a tree also?
A mountain?

A cup holds
sugar, flour, three large rabbit-breaths of air.

I hold these.  

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See also:

• Weather and the Four Noble Truths
• There's Diversity in Me

Letting the Cage Rattle

July 21, 2012

"When something emotional happens in the present it opens up channels into that pool of the past.  When you are skillfully focusing on the present emotion you are pouring clarity and equanimity down those channels — a main line into the deep mind. This gives the deep mind the fuel it needs to boil the poison away forever.  The problem is that it takes a little while for a critical mass of clarity and openness to build up.  When it finally does, the experience of 'I am suffering' turns into the experience of 'I am being cleansed.'  But before this happens the feelings may intensify, but this is not inevitable. They may also dissipate just by focusing on them. It’s ironic that the biggest potential problem associated with focusing on emotional discomfort is closely linked to one of its most powerful payoffs: our cage may get rattled a bit before it collapses."

~ Shinzen Young, from Bringing the Monastery Home

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See also: Setting the Stage

The Emotions Didn't Change

Brigham and Women’s Hospital Neurosciences Research Center, Boston, March 2012

Excerpt from "Looking Back: My First Year as a Meditation Practitioner," by Kenji, Unready and Willing, June 2012: 

Ever since I started meditating regularly last year, one question I continued to ask myself was: “Am I happier?”

For the first three months, my answer was “no.” Contrary to my expectations, I often felt more emotional turmoil than I had before. It seemed as though any event, no matter how trivial, would set off a wave of depression, or sometimes an unstable rush of euphoria, the comedown from which was never fun. I’ve always considered myself to be emotionally sensitive, but this was ridiculous.

The reason for this intensification of emotions was not apparent to me until just recently. Much of it had to do with the meditation techniques that I practiced, techniques which were supposed to raise my awareness of every physical and emotional sensation, thus grounding my attention in my body and in the present moment. As a side-effect, it also made emotions feel stronger, and thus much harder to ignore.

Most every day, sometimes for one hour, oftentimes for two, I would sit on a cushion with my eyes closed and attend to any sensation, be it painful or pleasant, that manifested in my body, and would endeavor to remain detached from them. If a certain area in my lower back ached, for example, I focused all my attention on the ache, and tried to experience the pain without labeling it as either “good” or “bad.” In the clearest moments, thoughts and judgments about the pain became hushed and subdued to the point that I could regard the pain as nothing more than what it was: sensation. Although it wasn’t the goal, the pain itself would often subside not long thereafter.

Because I worked to improve my awareness of sensation, it was only natural that the physical sensations that characterize emotions like anxiety, sadness, or melancholy would be felt much more strongly than they had been before. Sometimes some small misfortune would trigger an unpleasant emotion and because I was more sensitive to this emotion, I felt as though meditation, rather than improving my overall sense of well-being, worsened it.

In reality, the emotions didn’t change. What changed was how I experienced them. The more I practiced, and the more I read about the practice, I realized that meditation was not meant to purge our minds of negative emotions or thought patterns, but rather meant to help us experience them without judgment. We were to let go of our resistance to pain at the deepest level and understand that we suffer not because pain is bad, but because our mind labels it as bad.

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