Listen to the Quality of Your Feelings

Hello and welcome to your meditation practice as part of the Open Heart Project.

My name is Susan Piver and I'm very happy to give you meditation instruction.

And today we are not going to sit together for 10 minutes.

We're going to do something a little bit different.

If this is your first time with the Open Heart Project,

Welcome.

And this is a little bit different than what we normally do.

Today I've been talking about how to work with the strong feelings,

The difficulty of being in a world with so much suffering.

And of course it is extremely difficult.

And I have often said something that Pema Chodron taught,

The American Buddhist nun,

When talking about how to work with strong emotions,

And that is to feel the feeling and drop the story,

Which is a brilliant piece of advice.

Feel the feeling means you feel angry.

What does that mean?

Does it feel hot?

Is it in your chest?

Does it make your heart pound?

Does it make your face go like this?

Or you know,

You feel sad.

What does that feel like?

Do you feel kind of weighted down?

Does your face feel like this?

You know,

Is it a hot feeling or a cold feeling?

Basically,

Where do you feel it in your body?

Not why are you angry or why am I sad,

Or this is how I cannot be angry or it's this person's fault that I'm sad.

That's called the story.

The feeling itself is separate from the story actually.

So okay,

Maybe that sounds all well and good,

But how do you actually do that?

So today I'm going to demonstrate how to do that and I'm going to ask you to do it with me.

And we are going to do that by listening to a piece of music together.

And it's two minutes long.

And today our meditation is going to be a meditation on music.

So normally we place our attention on the breath and when it strays we bring it back.

Today we're going to place our attention on a short piece of music.

It's an instrumental,

There's no vocal.

And what I'm going to ask you to do is to place your ear on the saxophone.

Just follow the saxophone.

And when it strays to another instrument or to What's for Lunch or whatever,

Just come back.

And this particular,

It's a very beautiful melodic piece of music,

Has a feeling tone.

It will feel,

You know,

It might feel mournful,

It might feel passionate,

It might feel sad,

Whatever it is that you pick up,

That's the feeling tone.

And we're going to connect with it by listening to the sax.

And again when your ear strays,

Bring it back.

And that's how you listen to yourself when you're feeling something.

You listen to the quality of the feeling,

The mournfulness or the heat or the frustration.

Those are feeling tones and you listen to those or feel those as opposed to the story.

So I'm not going to explain it much more,

We're going to do it together.

So please take your meditation posture,

Which means sit up straight but with a sense of ease and dignity.

And you might want to listen to this on headphones,

But if you can't,

You can't.

It will still be fine,

It will still work.

So I'm going to start the music in a moment and I'm going to listen.

And you can do this with your eyes open or your eyes closed.

But remember,

Just give yourself to this instrument,

In this case the saxophone,

And just track it.

Follow it,

Be with it,

Feel what it feels like to do that.

And please,

In the comments that go with this particular post,

I'd love to hear how this went for you.

So thank you for doing that together.

And feeling and listening,

Really listening,

Are very closely related.

So the next time you feel something strong,

Whether it's joyful or despairing or confused or furious,

Keep feeling that.

I'm not saying don't feel it and I'm not saying don't think about it or try to figure it out,

Where it came from or why.

But I'm saying also,

Find a way to stay with the feeling tone as you stayed with the saxophone in this particular piece of music.

Go with it,

Feel it,

Be curious about it.

When you stray,

Come back.

And when it fades out,

Let it go.

So I hope this was useful and interesting and thank you very much for your practice today.