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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're going to So hello everyone and welcome.

and now we're continuing this week with mindfulness of emotions.

When I practice in Burma, there was no strong emphasis on emotions.

However, there was a very strong emphasis on staying in the body being mindful of the sensations that were at play in the body as we were meditating.

And the consequence of that was that when we had emotions coursing through us,

the focus was not the emotion per se, but on the sensations in the body the physical expression of the emotion.

And then the consequence of that is that we learned not to judge the emotions, not to

react to them, not to make a story of them or participate in the story making which sometimes fuels the emotions,

but rather in a sense to kind of a radical leaving the emotions alone, not interfering with them, not getting involved in them,

and just feeling how they were being experienced in the body.

So that was what we were taught and now that we're teaching this mindfulness practice in the modern West there seems to be tremendous value in actually naming

mindfulness of emotions to make it a subject for mindfulness. There's no reason not to. The way I was taught in Burma was in principle

was that we could learn to be mindful of anything and everything. It's just they never mentioned emotions there.

And so here we can learn to be attentive to emotions.

And there's many ways, wise ways of being with emotions. You know you can journal with it and go for a walk

and feel them you can talk with a friend about what's happening for you with emotions

there's many things you can do around emotions. There's many things you can do around emotions so that are wise and

useful. But what we do here in mindfulness is also a very a approach, which is useful to learn, and in some ways it will

support other ways if that's what you want to do, but it's also very powerful for itself. And so what it came to then is that to learn how to be

present for emotions without interfering with them. To be present without

judging them, without repressing them, without celebrating them or getting involved in them in any kind of way. It's a very simple and the consequence of that

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