The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So today I'm going to continue talking about mindfulness of emotions and yesterday the topic was or the practice was to be able to recognize

the presence of an emotion in a respectful way to recognize it with some feeling

of freedom not participating not activated by not reactive to emotions but this beautiful way in which the mind

can know something clearly name something and in the naming and the recognition of what it actually is, there's a feeling of space

or feeling of non-stickiness, non-entanglement. Oh, this is how it is. And the exercise yesterday was to just

try to discover that just in a moment, not that it had to last anything more than just a moment in which you're recognizing.

This movement to be unentangled, not reactive to emotions, not judging them, not participating in them,

not collapsing in them, not collapsing in them,

but finding a certain degree of freedom with emotions is supported

by mindfulness of the body and this is one of the reasons why in this series we do mindfulness of the body

before doing mindfulness of emotions.

All emotions are one way or the other are manifesting. are manifested in sensations in the body.

And sometimes we have to be very, they're very subtle

and you have to be very attempted to feel it, but they're always there in the body.

And there's a way of dropping in and feeling the physical manifestation of emotions, which is a wonderful alternative to living

in the thoughts about the emotion, to living in the stories of the emotions.

Some emotions are really closely connected to the stories we tell ourselves.

And in fact, we can just be sitting peacefully and then we remember a story of being hurt by someone

or someone offended us.

And as we tell ourselves a story, remember the story, we can feel the emotions arise and and so the more we stay in the

story of mind repeating and repeating and repeating what happened or thinking about it or

...