Jack Kornfield, a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center, leads a guided meditation on emotions. It invites resting in the space of loving-awareness while acknowledging strong emotions.
Emotions can be among the most confusing and challenging of human experiences, and many of our difficulties are rooted in the emotional landscape. This guided meditation on emotions by Jack Kornfield invites us to understand the nature of emotions, witnessing them as energy bodies that move through us but are not a part of us.
Guided Meditation on Emotions as Passing Waves
The moment you recognize an emotion in open awareness, you turn the emotion into practice. This, Kornfield explains, is ‘wise effort.’ The more we practice witnessing and recognizing rising emotions for what they are, the less likely we may be to get swept up by their current. Emotions become more like passing waves as we practice embracing a larger perspective. We might say that we become the entire ocean rather than the waves themselves.
Loving Awareness of Emotions
When a difficult emotion moves through us, we can note its presence as a challenging experience and bless it with loving awareness and compassion. We often forget to be kind towards ourselves when we are experiencing difficult emotions. Instead, we might have a tendency to move into judgment, guilt, blame, or shame. If this is the case for us, we can draw on our capacity for self-love and compassion through a variety of loving-kindness and compassion exercises.
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