Session six

Úvod

Summary of the last session: we were looking at stressors and stress reaction, with the emphasis on mapping the difficult terrain of stressful situations, rather than exercising control over it. An important feature of the dynamics are stressful thoughts, rigid patterns of “thinking”/judging which get triggered. Among the typical ones is self-judgment, associative generalization, overemphasizing the negative and similar. Being clearly aware of such thoughts being activated is one of the ways out of the threadmill of stress reaction (which is itself stressful).

We followed with a sitting meditation (the full version, with attention on breath, body, sounds, thoughts, feelings, open awareness).

Challenging feelings

Home practice

Group work about challenging feelings: using the table from the workbook, in groups of 2 or 3, choosing a feeling from the table, or one which is less challenging. Describing the feeling, how the body reacted, what thoughts were emerging, how did I act. Others simply listen, with the awareness of what is happening inside: body/feelings/mind. And then coming back with the attention to the spoken again.

At home, one can substitute this practice by recording yourself talking about the difficult feeling for about 3 minutes, followed by mindful listening to the recorded voice.

Introduction to the topic

We already practiced awareness of the body and thoughts in challenging situations; today we put feelings into the spotlight. “Stress” in popular speech is often used as an unspecific word for challenging feelings which one does not see clearly. Challenging feelings do play a certain role in the dynamics of stress, thus they deserve our attention (e.g. anger, fear, restlessness, dispair, frustration, being overwhelmed, failure, etc). The topic is really interesting, yet inherently somewhat uncomfortable.

Feelings are a part of human experience, part of our interaction with reality inner and outer. Healthy access to feelings and dexterity in dealing with them is an rather important resource. As an example, with chronic illnesses, besides the physical issues, fear can be a challenging aspect of the experience (of aggravation of the condition, of being bed-ridden or dying); this fear might be an extra massive load, contributing to worsening of the condition of the body.

No feelings are harmful. There are, however, two extremes in approaching feelings which are:

  1. “drowning” in the feeling, identification with the feeling, blowing its significance out of proportion; it results in loss of autonomy and space;

  2. “blocking” / suppressing the feeling, ignoring it, not knowing about it; this results in non-experiencing and loss of vitality.

We learn to walk the middle way consisting in:

  1. acceptance of all feelings;

  2. suspending the judgment about feelings being “good” or “bad”;

  3. naming the feeling clearly when it arises.

Primary and secondary suffering

Primary suffering are painful events out of our control (outer — e.g. sickness, physical pain; but also inner — e.g. a sudden feeling of loneliness or depression); the simile used in the Buddhist tradition is the “first arrow” which hits the body. If the mind is unmindful and reactive, the reaction to the first arrow causes the “second arrow” to hit, secondary suffering: painful emotional reaction to the first arrow which was not recognized as an arrow, and the mind tries to avoid experiencing it.

Secondary suffering takes the form of one of the extremes: “blocking” (active) or “drowning” (passive); their typical manifestations, especially with chronic dis-ease, are shown in the table.

Use the table at pg. 55 to fill in some stress/difficulties/suffering which is unavoidable (primary — out of our control) and which is avoidable (secondary — reaction which might, at least theoretically, not happen).

An interesting feature of the dynamics, which you might notice, is that secondary suffering, which has already arisen, thus becomes primary suffering, which can again trigger further reactivity. Thus e.g. feeling of helplessness (first arrow, came by itself) causes anger (second arrow, reaction), from anger (first arrow, already present) comes violent action (second arrow, reaction), from violent action (first arrow, already happened) self-reproaches (second arrow, reaction). The chain of reactivity can be rather long. Each moment is a chance for mindfulness to break or slow down the chain, as much as its capacity for that has been trained through the practice (formal or informal).

Guided meditation: Contact with difficult feeling

Try this guided meditation, you will need about 15 minutes of not being disturbed.

Kontakt s obtížným pocitem

13 min

Conclusion

See Constructive with unpleasant feelings (pg. 59). Read other texts for week 6 in the workbook as well.

Challenging feelings realted to this course itself are part of the game. If you feel e.g. sadness, doubt, frustration, lack of motivation, or keep finding excuses why not to come the next time: learn to identify those feelings with clarity, without getting lost in them. The mind has its ruts, its habitual pathways, e.g. “when it stops being exciting, I go”, and is often rather creative and elusive in finding excuses to justify those. It is not frustration/sadness/despair/anger coming from the course; it is merely the tendencies of the mind manifesting, just like in daily life. (Anger does not come from the horn of the other car, but it is an opportunity to learn about ourselves in dealing with such feelings.)