morning cleanse

from how to meditate by pema chodron

"when you say 'everything is a dream,' another way to say that is, 'there is just so much room.' we have an enormous amount of room to move around in. our minds are really vast. we're not constricted by anything. but the opposite is our habitual experience. our experience is usually quite claustrophobic, and we carry with us a very strong sense of burden, of things being solid. if we can loosen the grip of our thoughts, regarding them as dreams, we've just made the world and our ability to experience this world evermore larger."

"the instruction i've been giving for years is: when you're meditating, and even in your everyday life, notice when you're hooked. notice when you're triggered or activated. that's the first step: you acknowledge that emotion has arisen.

next, i advise students to drop the story line and lean in. just pause, and for a second connect in with spaciousness, with openness. i call this the 'pause practice.' it's like taking a time-out for yourself. then you lean in to the quality or the texture or the experience, completely touching in to the emotion, without the story. how does the sadness feel? how does the anger feel? where is it in your body? you let the feeling of the emotion become the object of your meditation. and the reason that i've been so committed to teaching on this is emotion itself is a radical and very potent way of awakening.

without a doubt, this is where everyone loses it. we have so much fear of our emotions, so much aversion to them. you get caught in the momentum of the emotion, and it sweeps you away as if you were in its control. but i've found that we can take another approach, which is to enter the emotions that arise in our practice. emotions are actually very empowering; i call working with the emotions 'accelerated transformation.' when you experience difficult emotions in your sitting practice, and you let go of the words and the story behind the experience, then you're sitting with just the energy. and yes, it can feel painful to do this."

"one of my granddaughter's conclusions was that we're changing all the time; everything about us is always changing. my granddaughter said, 'when you hold a fixed idea of yourself, you have to leave out all the parts that you find boring, embarrassing, difficult, or sad. you leave out the emotions you don't want to feel. and then when you do that, when you leave out all those parts, when those parts are not acceptable, then it eats away at you underneath. these unacknowledged parts are like a hum in the background that's eating away at you, and you have to find an escape to get away from that. and my mother's escape was alcohol.'

in order for us to be fully present, to experience life fully, we need to acknowledge and accept all our emotions and all parts of ourselves -- the embarrassing parts as well as our anger, our rage, our jealousy, our envy, our self-pity, and all these chaotic emotions that sweep us away. looking for an exit from experiencing the full range of our humanity leads to all kinds of pain and suffering. meditation gives us the opportunity to experience our emotions naked and fresh, free from the labels of 'right' and 'wrong,' 'should' and 'shouldn't.'"