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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So good day everyone and welcome to this fourth talk on mindfulness of emotions.

And one of the great skills to develop

in relationship to our emotions and how we're feeling is to expand our capacity to feel.

And partly that means, and a very powerful thing that it mean is expand our capacity to be uncomfortable.

Many of much of our reactivity in life challenges we have is because something or other is making us feel uncomfortable.

And so then we don't like it, we want to fix it, we want to blame someone,

we get caught up in trying to do something about being uncomfortable.

And that discomfort might be physical, it might also be emotional.

And there's a lot of things which are emotionally uncomfortable.

And to be to become wise and skillful with situations that we feel emotionally uncomfortable,

one of the ways to find our way with that is to be able to allow ourselves to feel what we're feeling without reacting to it, without being pushed around by it or feel trapped by it or

feel somehow like we have to do something because of it.

And all of which is subsumed under the idea of increasing our capacity to feel our emotional life and without reactivity.

This allows us then to be more reflective of what we do,

to consider what's the wise thing to do in this situation?

If we feel that we want to swear at someone

because we feel pent up anger or frustration, if we increase our capacity to feel frustration, then it doesn't have to be an automatic

trigger to swear at someone. We just kind of, oh, you would rest, we open to what's happening for us. And then

we can reflect what would be the skillful thing to do, what would be the wise thing or the

compassionate thing to do with this phenomena,

with this person, what's happening here.

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