Getting to Know Our Emotions
Many people find it hard to know exactly what they are feeling in any given moment. This practice is a simple way to learn which emotions you are experiencing. Because it encourages you to notice the body sensations associated with an emotion, it can build a familiarity with your emotional states over time.
Mindfulness and emotions are well paired: through practice, we tend to find we can navigate the often challenging waves that move through us a little more easily. The worksheet invites us to label whatever feeling presents itself, without judgment or attachment. By noting the presence of, for example, love or shame, without attaching a sense of “I” to that feeling, we can be with the experience without it overpowering us. Where trauma is present, it may be gentler to begin with loving-kindness practices before diving deeper into emotional work, and you might also find support from an experienced practitioner or therapist. This practice complements professional care and does not replace it.
How to Increase Mindfulness of Emotions
The worksheet offers these steps, to be practiced as it feels safe to do so. For more on staying with strong feelings, see our Mindfulness of Emotions guide.
- Settle into a comfortable meditation posture.
- Breathing normally, bring your attention to your emotions. Notice if you are feeling any emotion, no matter how faintly.
- Once you detect an emotion, see if you can label it. A short, partial list of possibilities: joy, interest, sadness, shame, pride, anger, fear, love, embarrassment, and guilt.
- Try to stay simple and basic with the labels. It is okay to guess if you are not sure which emotion you are feeling.
- Label the emotion mentally, repeating the label every five seconds or so while feeling the emotion in your body. If you are feeling sadness, you might note “Sadness… sadness… sadness” in a gentle, matter-of-fact way, feeling the sensations of that emotion with each label.
- If more than one emotion is present, you can focus on one or “stack” the labels, such as “Joy and love.”
- Continue labeling for as long as you wish.
Clarifying our emotions matters because without it we can get caught up in racing thoughts that add to what we are feeling. Scanning the body to find out what is present gives us another way in. If anger is present, for instance, we can compassionately hold the sensation in our awareness while mindfully noting, “anger… anger… anger.” All things come and go, and feelings tend to shift as well. It’s not about pushing emotions away; it’s about letting them be present without fear or judgment.
History and Notes
According to the worksheet, meditating on emotions is a traditional part of Vipassana practice in Buddhism and is one of the four main techniques covered in the Visuddhimagga, an important Buddhist text. The version presented here is a summary of a practice given by American Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young.
Don’t get caught up in the finer differences between labels. For this exercise, anxiety and terror can both simply be labeled “fear.” The point is not to get perfectly accurate labels, but to get a handle on which emotions are occurring and how they express in the body. The worksheet suggests repeating the practice daily for at least 10 minutes over at least a month.
