Disarming Harmful Feelings.

The old Zen texts don't have an awful lot to say about what we in the west call 'feelings' or 'emotions'. In the traditional zazen instructions, as discussed previously, we're just told to drop stuff off - 'drop off body and mind' - without much discussion of the implications of this, or of the qualitative content of it.

A bit can be teased out around feelings though, I think, because many of us will have 'emotional baggage', patterns of reactivity around feelings which arise from our life-experience, and practice can bring this to the fore in our experience.

Feelings, in zazen, can be seen as just that. In the calm clarity that we sometimes settle into in practice we can sense directly that a feeling is a sensation in our body to which we mentally ascribe a name ('anger', 'grief', 'shame', 'happiness' etc) and very often a 'good' or 'bad' designation... we assign attraction or aversion to the base feeling that sometimes amplifies it and sets us off on an habitual way of reacting to the feeling - it might evoke situations from our past that we associate with, we might relive situations from our past with memories seemingly attached to the feeling... various things can happen that we can observe. Importantly, we can notice that we can stop our thinking about the feeling and just leave it as it is.

A feeling then might be described as a sort of interaction between a physical feeling in the body and the thinking mind that we can free up by stopping the thinking that intensifies it or prolongs it.

The instructions are not really to dwell on this in zazen, but at other times when we're quiet and relaxed we can evoke a feeling, maybe one that we've had trouble with, and just feel it very directly in the body in this way, and notice our thinking and labelling around it. It can be a very powerful and transformative practice to work in this way with feelings that may have burdened us for a long time, and that have been quietly zapping a lot of our emotional and mental energy. We can change all that by becoming directly aware of how it happens, and just letting the physical feeling have space and do what it wants to do. Those feelings need then no longer dictate who nor how we are.

And feelings can change when we begin to see them for what they really are. I was brought up in 1980s conflict-riven Belfast around a lot of anger and discontent, and a lot of anxiety and fear-in-the-gut about the whole war situation, but when I looked at it closer I found a lot of grief underlying that, and accepting that grief began to change the rigidities and certainties of fear and anger... the body can process and disarm such potentially explosive and harmful emotions, when we begin to allow it to.

At any time we can begin to learn that we don't have to think and react to the feelings in our bodies in the habitual ways that we have learned to. Via the direct view and experience of our practice we can begin to make our very own histories and cast off the burdens of the past.