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.
