Monday, May 28, 2012

Emotional Intelligence


Lectio for this morning is another helpful snippet from Jack Kornfield (on working skillfully with our feelings, from The Wise Heart). Again--as with all awareness practices--it's only helpful when we regularly work with it. 
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As we develop recognition, acceptance, and investigation of feelings, we can also recognize their impersonal and empty nature. We can notice how a feeling arises, how long it lasts, and what happens afterward. Usually we think that feelings and emotions last for a long time. We speak of a morning of anxiety, a day of irritability…. But as we investigate closely, we discover that most feelings last no longer than fifteen or thirty seconds.

Suppose we feel a state of anger or longing. If we sense it carefully in the body and mind, it will inevitably begin to change, to expand or intensify, dissolve or shift from one feeling to another.

Feelings arise like a series of waves in consciousness; each feeling can bring the sense of being young or old, spacious or contracted. As we learn to track our feelings, our emotional intelligence grows. With mindfulness, a natural intuition and discrimination begin to tell us which feelings call for action and which, if acted upon, will lead to unnecessary suffering.

Some feelings hold important messages, and we need to respond and address the conditions from which they arise. Equally often, feeling states are simply present, the atmosphere in which we live. Even when they are strong, we don’t need to suppress them, nor grasp and identify with them. Through all these permutations, we don’t have to worry: no emotion is final.

With mindfulness we can learn that even powerful feelings and emotions are not to be feared. They are simply energy…we can choose…we can act on those that need a response and let others become freed as the energy of life.