Probably the best way to work with it on you own would be to copy it and read it several times slowly yourself--highlighting the bits that give you a glimpse of something helpful.
Then either take a few minutes to 'sit' with one of those bits contemplatively--or to work with it by journaling.
---
Ordinary
Mindfulness, May 14, 2012: Primary Feelings
“Working
with the primary feelings is a direct route to enlightenment,” explained one of
my Burmese teachers. The stream of primary feelings is always with us, but we
often have the mistaken notion that life is not supposed to be this way. We
secretly believe that if we can act just right, then our stream of feelings
will always be pleasant and there will be no pain, no loss.
So when a
painful experience arises we often try to get rid of it, and when a pleasant
experience arises we try to grasp it. When a neutral experience arises we tend
to ignore it. We’re always wanting the right (pleasant) feelings and trying to avoid
the wrong (painful) ones. And when they are unpleasant we react endlessly,
struggling to get it right.
As we become
wiser we realize that fixing the flow of feelings doesn’t work. Primary
feelings are simply feelings, and every day consists of thousands of pleasant,
painful, and neutral moments…. Sylvia Boorstein, my colleague, writes, “What a
relief it was for me to go to my first meditation retreat and hear people who
seemed quite happy speak the truth so clearly—that life if difficult and
painful, just by its nature, not because we’re doing it wrong.” –Jack Kornfield , The Wise Heart
Controlled
processing (our conscious mind) requires language. You can have bits and pieces
of thought through images, but to plan something complex, to weigh the pros and
cons of different paths, or to analyze the causes of past successes and
failures, you need words. Nobody knows how long ago human beings developed
language, but most estimates range from around 2 million years ago, when
hominid brains became much bigger, to as recently as 40,000 years ago, the time
of cave paintings and other artifacts that reveal unmistakably modern human
minds. Whichever end of that range you favor, language, reasoning, and
conscious planning arrived in the most recent eye-blink of evolution. They are
like new software, Rider version 1.0. The language parts work well, but there
are still a lot of bugs in the reasoning and planning programs. Automatic
processes (like fear, anger, pleasure, passion), on the other hand, have been through thousands of product cycles and
are nearly perfect.
The
automatic system was shaped by natural selection to trigger quick and reliable
action, and it includes parts of the brain that make us feel pleasure and pain
(such as the orbitofrontal cortex) and that trigger survival-related
motivations (such as the hypothalamus). The automatic system has its finger on
the dopamine release button. The controlled system, in contrast, is better seen
as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant
make better choices. The rider can see farther into the future, and the rider
can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps,
but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will. –Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothosis
