The small emotions

This week I am meditating on emotion. It's been a while since I've listened to Mingyur Rinpoche's teaching on this. I'm struck by how much I've forgotten. Particularly the teaching on starting with the smaller emotions.

I was struck by the wisdom of this yesterday when a fight erupted with Ben.  A big enough fight that I found myself retreating to my room, trying to sit with anger and follow the instruction on how to make the destructive emotion the object of the meditation, not the object of the emotion.  In other words, feel the anger itself and watch it de-iterate, rather than focussing on the object, which will only cause the loop of anger to grow stronger.

Later in the evening I watched the teaching on small emotions and I realized that if I'd been working with smaller emotions, I might have caught the irritation, the spark that started the fight, and I might have seen a better solution towards negotiating what it was that was irritating me.

This fits interestingly in with the computational thinking principle we've been teaching recently, decomposition.  Take big problems, like a lifetime of chronic and intense anger and break them down into smaller parts, irritation.  See if you can catch things in the irritation moment, and slowly, I hope, I can find myself caught less and less in the bigger more draining situations that my anger takes me to so often

Sound and Thought

I seem to be writing less and less.  That's what a full time job can do to your writing and meditation practice.

But I have been sitting.  I've been following Tergar and exploring once again the practices of visual objects, sound and thought as support for meditation.

Sound is always a revelation because of course sound has been the source of a lot of trauma in my life. I was the victim of a lot of screaming and bickering when I was a kid, and I have struggled to spare my son that, but I know I haven't always succeeded. Slowing down and listening to my own words and thoughts has a very strong impact on my growing feeling of well-being.

Then there is thought meditation, the meditation that I''m the worst at.  Or at least that feel is the most challenging for me.

So far my favourite meditation is still "non-meditation."  Don't meditate, don't get lost. Just be aware of what the present feels like, and keep going there.