Dearest Friends,

Thank you for your presences and your participation in today’s gathering.

In today’s session, we explored the fifth of the “filters” that shape our perceptions of reality, which is the filter of our emotions. Like I shared in my brief reflections, our emotions are evolutionary adaptations that allow us to rapidly organize our responses to environmental threats and opportunities in service of survival. The rapidity of our emotions involves a tradeoff: Precisely because they arise so immediately, our emotions permit us to respond to our environment without the delays that accompany conscious deliberation. At the same time, the absence of conscious deliberation can lead to mishaps, mistakes and misunderstandings—especially because our emotions color our perceptions in ways that can make benign or neutral events appear hostile, overwhelming, threatening or urgent.

For example, when we’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that we need to accomplish in a day, a benign remark from a partner (e.g., “We’re running out of toilet paper”) can be perceived as yet another onerous item on our checklist…when no demand was even being made in the first place.

Mindfulness helps in loosening the grip of emotional distortion in several ways:

• First, awareness helps us notice the somatic markers of intensifying emotion, which helps us intervene before our emotions escalate even further.
• Second, awareness helps us notice and name the specific emotions that we’re feeling (like we do in the first stage of the RAIN Meditation), which helps clarify what kinds of emotional “distortions” might be coloring our perception.
• Third, meditative practices are often down-regulating in their own right; being mindful of the breath or doing a lovingkindness practice can help reduce the intensity of our emotions.
• Fourth, mindfulness training makes it easier for us to practice restraint when we’re caught in the grip of powerful emotions. Even when we can’t shift the energies that we’re feeling, at least we have enough wherewithal to avoid causing (further) harm to ourselves or to others.

SUGGESTED PRACTICE:

Sit quietly and attend to your breath with your gaze lowered or your eyes closed. After a minute or so, recall a situation where you knew (on hindsight) that you were caught in the grip of powerful emotions. With kindness and compassion towards yourself, name the emotion that was most prominent. What thoughts, stories, interpretations and beliefs accompanied the emotion? What was the experience like in your body? How did experiencing the situation through that particular emotional filter add to your suffering and those of others? Then take a deep breath and try to imagine that same situation without the emotional overlay. Hold both perceptions with a sense of interest and curiosity—the perception with the emotional filter and the one without it. Notice the difference between both with loving awareness.

REFLECTION PROMPTS:

1. In the situation that you recalled, what emotion was prominent and how did this emotion filter your perception of the situation?
2. What changed when you imagined the same moment without the emotional overlay?
3. How might mindfulness help you meet similar situations with more clarity and compassion?