Mindfulness

and Emotional Intelligence

an excerpt from the book The Mindful Geek

by Michael W. Taft











created for the
Mindful Emotions Training program
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Reach Out with Your Feelings

It’s time for the Rebel Alliance to make their desperate attack on the
Death Star. As Luke Skywalker rolls his X-wing fighter in toward the
canyon-like surface of the battle station, the voice of Obi-Wan
Kenobi speaks right into his head. “Luke, trust your feelings.” Luke
taps his earphones in confusion. Kenobi, after all, was recently killed
by Darth Vader in an epic light saber duel.

After a few more urgings from the disembodied voice of Obi-Wan,

Luke intuits that he doesn’t need the X-wing’s targeting computer in
order to sink a pair of MG7-A proton torpedoes into the Death
Star’s unprotected thermal exhaust vent. Folding the computer away,
Luke decides to use the Force and trust his feelings, and so (with
some timely intervention from the Millennium Falcon) destroys the
Empire’s shiny new planet killer, moments before it can vaporize the
rebel base on Yavin IV.

Although some would contest whether emotions are a good

substitute for a targeting computer, it’s interesting to ask what
emotions actually are good for.80 Most of us consider our emotions to
be something inconvenient, something we’re in conflict with, or are
trying to manipulate to our benefit, or maybe something that gets in
the way of our logical thinking.

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Virtually everything you do every day you do in order to feel good

emotionally. You date your partner to feel good, you work out to not
feel bad. You earn money to not feel afraid of starving or to feel
happy about the shiny products you line your nest with. And so on.
Emotions rule your life. Based on that fact alone, understanding the
background and function of emotions is clearly of supreme
importance. The clearer picture you have of emotions, the clearer
picture you have of your entire life, and mindfulness meditation is a
very effective method for gaining clarity and insight about your
emotions.

Human beings have long had a conflicted relationship with emotions.

Philosophers and theologians have been almost uniformly negative in
their view of emotions, which they named the “passions”: something
hot, irrational, wild, and uncontrollable within us. They compel us to
do things that are embarrassing, dangerous, and irresistible. They are
the drivers behind tragedy and make it “impossible to think,” as Plato
put it. For the Christian theologians, the passions were the cause of
temptation, sin, and damnation, and for Buddhists, many emotions
are delusional and poisonous, something to be strictly guarded
against. Even early proto-scientific thinkers like Descartes and
Spinoza felt that intense feelings were to be handled with care lest
they overwhelm, degrade, and destroy a life. In short: thinking good,
emotions bad.

This prejudiced view of emotions was retained to a large degree when

science came into ascendance. “Men of rationality” continued to look
down on the hysterical, unreliable, irrational emotions. Emotions
were “feminine” and not to be trusted.

Despite Charles Darwin and William James each putting forth

interesting (and largely correct) theories about them, emotions
remained on the margins of respectable science well into the second
half of the twentieth century. The behaviorists refused to
acknowledge that they could be studied at all, and even cognitive

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psychologists were only able to approach emotions by seeing them as

something cold, mental, and rational.

Looking at all this, you might say that humans have an irrational fear
of emotions! So buckle up and get ready, because we’re going to take
a long, slow, clear look at these dangerous, slippery, fickle things
called emotions. You’ll even end up meditating on them as concrete
physical experiences.

Evolutionary Guidance Systems

As we saw in the case of the fight-or-flight module of the human
brain, certain emotional reactions have been highly conserved by
evolution,81 suggesting that they are vital components of animal
survival. When you see similar structures and responses in a mouse
that you do in a human being, you can bet that those structures and
responses are pretty useful for staying alive.

As Darwin himself asserted in his bestselling book The Expression of

Emotion in Man and Animals (1872), emotions in human beings didn’t
just arise out of thin air—they evolved from their animal
precursors.82 83 From an evolutionary perspective of Darwin’s
Dharma, emotions evolved to help us survive and thrive, and they do
this by motivating and directing our behaviors. That is, they act like a
guidance system for the human organism.

An example of this is the emotion of fear. Let’s say you’re crossing

the street, when suddenly you notice an 18-wheel semi truck roaring
toward you at high speed. First of all, I feel it’s my duty to warn you
to never forget to look both ways before crossing the street. Second,
you will likely experience an intense surge of fear. Organisms who
didn’t feel fear under similar dangerous conditions (even in the days
before semi trucks) won the proverbial Darwin Award. They didn’t
become your ancestors. Therefore, almost all of us will feel afraid
under these dangerous conditions. The surge of fear is a strong signal
to get out of the way right now.

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That’s an example of your emotions functioning as they’re supposed

to—guiding your actions toward survival and wellbeing. Looking at
emotions in this way instantly cuts through a lot of b.s. that you
might tell yourself about what you’re feeling. Feeling jealous about
your love partner? Your emotional guidance system is trying to help
you successfully reproduce. Feeling guilty about eating that last piece
of pizza? Your emotional guidance system is trying to help you stay
in the good graces of your in-group (and successfully reproduce). In
this sense, your feelings are in line with Obi-Wan’s after-death
instructions to Luke to trust the guidance of his feelings instead of
his computer. Your emotional guidance system has, after all, been
around a lot longer than any system on an X-wing.

This way of looking at emotions is so useful that there is a short

mnemonic I want you to use whenever you’re trying to understand an
emotion that you’re experiencing: just say to yourself “guidance
system.” It forces you to look at an emotion for what it really is: an
evolved response. In this sense, there’s no such thing as a positive or
negative emotion. They are all positive emotions, because they are
part of the evolved human guidance system trying to get you to
behave in a survival-enhancing manner.

I have to make an important warning here: I’m not saying that your
emotions are correct or that you should always act on them. Most
human evolution occurred a long time ago under very different
conditions, so it’s not that our emotional responses are necessarily
good ones in the current environment. The example of Lisa Nowak
shows that our ancient drives are still in place in our brains, but out
of place in society. Nowak is the former NASA astronaut who
famously wore diapers on a long drive so she could (presumably) beat
a romantic rival in the head. Clobbering the “other woman” in the
Paleolithic would’ve won her the man, but trying to do it in modern
Florida landed her in jail. The “guidance system” model isn’t there to
justify you doing whatever you feel like, or to follow every urge.
Instead of saying that emotions are right, I’m saying that emotions
are natural responses—not to be suppressed or denied, not

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something to feel guilty or ashamed about. If you wanted to be a little

more accurate about it, you could call them an “ancient guidance
system,” one that may feel a little out of date or off the mark
sometimes.

To go a little deeper into this way of understanding emotions, let’s

look at them one by one. The basic emotions are generally agreed to
be fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and joy. (There are a surprising
number of different lists.) They all shape our behavior in direct and
specific ways. Fear gets you away from dangerous situations. Anger
defends something you want, or drives away something you don’t
want. Sadness lets you know when you made a mistake, essentially
saying, “Don’t do that again.” Disgust keeps you away from disease
agents and poisons. Joy lets you know when you did something right,
saying, “Do that again.” These are evolved responses to motivate and
direct us to make the most of various threats and opportunities.

What about more complex emotions such as guilt, shame,

embarrassment, and pride? Human beings evolved for millions of
years to function as part of a group, and these emotions are
specifically for social situations, helping us to navigate our behavior
with our clan, tribe, or in-group. Guilt, shame, and embarrassment are all
slightly different, but they essentially say, “I’ll never do that again” in
a way that the whole group can read. Because the emotion plays a
role in social interaction, it’s important that those around us can
actually see our embarrassment and grok that we are embarrassed.
The skin flush is therefore a clear signal to everyone around us.

Pride, on the other hand, signals to the group that we did something
right, and we’re showing off how great we are. It’s intended to up our
status in the group, as well as to encourage group cohesion by
showing what is correct or rewardable behavior. Pride displays are so
hardwired into us that blind athletes who win at the Special Olympics
do exactly the same arms up, chest puffed out gestures that their
sighted compatriots do.

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Besides actually inventing and expounding the theory of evolution,

Darwin was the first to dig into the evolutionary view of emotions.
By the 1950s, however, his evolutionary view of emotions had fallen
into disfavor, mainly because theories based on genetics sounded too
“Nazi” so soon after the war. Most scientists felt that emotional
expressions were entirely culturally constructed—sort of a language
each society invented and used to signal between members. Seen this
way, emotions and emotional expressions should vary widely from
culture to culture. Maybe people in other cultures laughed by farting,
or something. But Paul Ekman, the researcher who the television
fiction series Lie to Me was based on, demolished this view in the
1970s. He traveled to Borneo to gather support for the hypothesis
that emotions were culturally determined. To his amazement, he
found that people in Borneo understood all his emotional
expressions, and he theirs, without any cultural translation. There
seemed to be little or no difference between the emotional
“language” of Americans and that of Borneans.

In the intervening years, this research has been supported and

expanded considerably. Emotions, just as Darwin theorized, are part
of our evolutionary heritage, and today we can back up this idea by
looking at the relevant brain structures and neurochemistry. The
amygdala, for example, which is involved in the fight-flight
mechanism, and is similar in lower mammals and a human being.
Nature nailed this brain network long ago, and it’s been preserved in
evolution and upgraded ever since. People don’t culturally construct
fear and aggression. These emotions—and all the others—are built
into our biological machinery, part of the firmware. Emotions
represent our biological inheritance from our ancestors, a sort of
built-in survival guidebook.

In a way, emotions are like a more complex version of the advance-

retreat mechanism at the base of the nervous system I described
earlier. Big-name researchers like Joseph LeDoux and Richie
Davidson have done a lot of work that supports this (although they
usually call it “approach and avoidance” rather than advance-retreat).
You could almost think of emotions as a second layer of that system,

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one that adds in a lot of complex behavioral and societal options

specific to higher animals. And, like the pleasure/pain coding of the
nervous system, emotions come in two basic flavors, pleasant and
unpleasant.

Where There’s a Positive...

Seeing emotions in their evolutionary context can really help you to
understand how to work with them in your daily life. For example, a
guidance system is useless if it is stuck on one setting. Imagine a
compass needle that couldn’t turn, or a maps app that only told you
to turn right at every intersection. You need both north and south,
right and left, as well as straight ahead, for a guidance system to
function.

The same thing is true of your emotional guidance system. It won’t

work unless it has both a positive and a negative with which to
motivate and direct you. Do this; don’t do that. In other words, both
pleasant and unpleasant emotions are absolutely necessary if the
system is going to function. Having a clear understanding that both
positive and negative feelings are natural, adaptive, and useful will go
a long way toward engendering a sense of acceptance toward them.

This is bad news, if you were under the impression that—if you just
made all the right decisions—someday you’d feel good all the time.
This misconception is ubiquitous, and has been peddled from every
corner of the ideological spectrum. Many people believe that it’s
possible and desirable for them to feel good all the time. Some
religious beliefs around meditation claim that with enough practice
you’ll experience constant bliss and never feel bad. Some
pharmacological corporations would like you to believe that if you
take the right psych meds, you’ll only ever feel happy. Even certain
positive psychology systems sell the idea that, with the right
combinations of thinking and imagining, you’ll always feel just great.

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If I were impolite, I would suggest that the idea that you were going
to someday feel good all the time is a childish fantasy, which even the
slightest scrutiny by a reasonable adult would reveal to be utterly
non-viable. There are at least two problems with the glittering dream
of permanent joy: (1) it couldn’t work, and (2) you wouldn’t like it if
it did.

It’s impossible to be permanently happy because the system always

corrects itself. No matter how far you push the needle away from
zero into the realm of super happiness, your biology will adjust and
make that place the new zero. It’s a self-adjusting, homeostatic
system, and its tendency to return to a set-point is called “hedonic
adaptation,” or the “hedonic treadmill.” (Hedonic, comes from the
same root as “hedonism,” and means to pursue pleasure.)

There are many examples of this phenomenon. One famous study

concerns the happiness levels people from the two ends of the
spectrum: lottery winners and victims of tragic accidents.84 It would
seem obvious that lottery winners would be happier than most
people, and accident victims who lost the use of their limbs would be
less happy than average. While both of these ideas were true for the
first year or so after their life-changing events, after that their
happiness level returns to whatever it was before the event.

Half of the study examined the fate of 22 lottery winners. The dream
of winning big in the lottery caused Americans to spend over $65
billion in 2012. Yet the reality of winning doesn’t deliver, because
after a short time, the excitement of your new lifestyle wears off. It
becomes the new norm, mundane. The small things you used to
treasure, the little things in life that gave you pleasure previously, no
longer do anything. Your emotional guidance system has adjusted to
your new circumstances and migrated back to your original zero
point.

The study also looked at paraplegics who had lost the use of their
legs in tragic accidents. You may think that that would be the worst
thing that could happen to you, and that you’d never feel happiness

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again. These victims did feel incredibly bad for as long as a year after
their accidents. Yet even though they had permanently lost the ability
to walk—a personal catastrophe by any measure—their hedonic
system gradually adjusted, and after that, they were as happy as they
had been before the accident.

How did this seeming miracle occur? The same way as with the
lottery winners, but in reverse. Their brains adjusted to their new
lifestyle, and they began to find pleasure in the simple things of life.
In other words, their emotional guidance system had reset itself to
zero, and they were back on track.

So it seems that no matter what you do, it’s impossible to feel great,
or awful, all the time. Whether your circumstances rise or fall, your
brain will just adjust to that and make it the new normal. This has
huge implications for acceptance, obviously. No matter what you’re
feeling right now, it’s helpful to realize that it won’t last.

Even if you could be happy all the time, it would be a very bad idea.
Why? Because, much like little Roberto who can’t feel pain, you
would lose the ability to correctly navigate your life. The classic
example of this is Phineas Gage, the man who, in 1848, was working
as a highly respected and well-liked foreman on a railroad
construction crew, when an explosion drove a metal rod clean
through the front of his head. The accident severely damaged his
frontal lobes, particularly the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

Although Gage recovered, he was never the same person afterward.

His family and friends couldn’t deal with him, and he lost his job on
the railroad. He seemed unable to make decisions, couldn’t control
his emotions, drifted around working odd jobs, getting in fights, and
eventually having to live with his mother.

Today we know that such behavior is indicative of damage to the

prefrontal cortex of the brain. Modern researchers have looked into
other people with damage to this area, often with similar difficulties.
One of these unfortunate individuals, referred to in the medical

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literature simply as “Elliot,”85 had lost parts of his prefrontal cortex

when he had a brain tumor removed. Afterward, he was seemingly as
before: charming, intelligent, and informed.

But Elliot lost the ability to make decisions. He would agonize

endlessly over trivial decisions, but rush headlong and half-cocked
into very important ones. Unable to hold a job, he squandered his
money by making wildly unsound speculations, eighty-sixing his
marriage in the process.

There are many other such cases, which demonstrate that damage to
the PFC severely impairs the ability to make self-interested decisions,
and leads to ruin. But why?

The PFC connects many different areas of the brain, including those
concerned with reasoning and those concerned with sensing the
feeling state of the body. When human beings go about making a
decision, they collect data about the subject, much of which may be
external and concrete, the kind of things cost-benefit analyses are
made of. But that is not the whole story. We also consult memories
of the past emotional states of the body, noting how we felt as the
result of making similar decisions in the past. Most or all of this
consideration goes on outside conscious awareness, but eventually
the process gives rise to the feeling that one possibility is better than
the rest. Even this feeling requires the ability to sense the emotions in
the body,86 and to coordinate this sensation with the decision-making
function in the PFC.

The gist of all this is that emotions are central to decision-making. As much
as we might like to imagine that we are calm and Spock-like in our
choices, this is almost never the actual case. Although economic
theory likes to assert that human beings are rational actors, studies
have shown repeatedly that we are anything but. Somewhere under
the hood, our emotional body sensations are playing a key role in
every decision we make.

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Neuroscientist and author Antonio Damasio calls one idea about

how this works the “Somatic Marker Hypothesis,” or SMH. To
understand the SMH, you first have to understand that emotions are
primarily somatic events—that is, we know we’re having an emotion
because we feel it in our body. This idea is usually a little weird for
Westerners to accept; after 50 years of behavioral and cognitive
psychology, we tend to think that these are primarily mental events.
And while it’s true that the brain is in charge of deciding, for
example, that we should feel fear at the sight of an onrushing train, it
makes this decision far below the level of conscious awareness.
Furthermore, it triggers a whole series of bodily changes (faster heart
rate and breathing, sweaty palms, energized limbs, etc.) that
characterize the feeling of being afraid. Emotions may be orchestrated
deep in the unconscious mind, but it is upon the soma—the feeling
body—that their symphony is played out. In short: emotions are
mainly embodied events.

Although we believe emotions are mental, the salient part of

emotions actually occurs as sensations in your body. There is a
fascinating study that demonstrates this in a very concrete way.
Subjects who had received Botox treatments had blunted emotional
responses to movie clips compared to people who had not received
Botox.87 Having your facial muscles (which are involved in the
expression of emotions) paralyzed makes it harder to feel your own
emotions. Furthermore, because we understand what other people
are feeling by subtly mimicking their expressions, a second study
showed that women who received Botox treatments had a much
harder time empathizing with others.88 A third study capitalized on
this outcome by using a facial treatment that made the subject’s
muscles work harder to make expressions, which rendered them
easier to feel. Sure enough, these people were much more accurate
than controls at determining what others were feeling.89

So, emotions are mainly bodily (i.e. somatic) events, and you can
learn to feel and track these events in your body sensation. Damasio
hypothesizes that the brain uses such somatic markers to assist it in
decision-making. These are memories of previous similar situations

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and the emotional tone associated with their outcome. As an

example, you can imagine somebody trying to decide whether to buy
a lottery ticket (rationally, always a bad idea). They may feel very
excited about the possibility of winning, since the jackpot happens to
be unusually huge. Yet, consciously or not, they remember feeling
disappointed and downcast after all their previous attempts to win
the lottery. This remembered emotional tone serves as a marker to
aid in decision-making, guiding the person away from buying a ticket
this time, because they remember (at least unconsciously) that they
felt bad after all the other times they bought lottery tickets and failed
to win.

Researchers devised a fascinating experiment to test this hypothesis.

They created a game involving four decks of cards. Each deck
contained cards that granted the participants actual money, or caused
them to lose money. Two of the decks had a random number of
positive and negative cards. But secretly, the other two decks were
rigged to have many more negative cards than positive ones. This
meant that some decks were “good,” and would cause the subject to
win money, and some were “bad,” and would cause the subject to
lose cash.

Healthy participants stopped choosing the bad decks after about 40

selections. Fascinatingly, they showed a stress response—as measured
by changes in galvanic skin response—when choosing from the bad
decks after only 10 draws, suggesting that their unconscious brain
was already aware that these decks were no good. People with damage
to the PFC, however, kept drawing from the bad decks as long as the
game continued, meaning that they quickly went bankrupt and had to
beg the researchers for additional funds. Furthermore, they did not
exhibit a stress response to the bad decks—demonstrating that they
did not have the emotions necessary to make good decisions.

Which brings me back to why you wouldn’t actually want to feel

happy all of the time. If emotions comprise a guidance system, a sort
of compass to find your way in life, feeling only constant euphoria
would be like sticking a huge magnet to the side of the compass. You

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would lose all ability to tell direction. Every decision would seem just
wonderful, and you would soon end up deep in a ditch. Evolution
has “figured this out” and created a system that constantly resets our
emotional baseline to zero, whatever our circumstances. That way,
we always have a useful and functional emotional guidance system at
work in our lives.

This is also a big reason why taking drugs and alcohol can be so
damaging. Besides the physical problems they can create, they lead to
poor decision-making. We’re taking them is to manipulate our
emotions, to monkey with our emotional tone, but it also screws up
our decision-making process.

Thus you cannot feel happy all the time, and it would actually be bad
if you did. Imagine if Luke folded away his targeting computer and
trusted his feelings to destroy the Death Star while he was immersed
in a sea of bliss. He’d probably just skip off in space somewhere,
giggling like a newbie stoner. The fantasy that when you have a better
job, find the right partner, buy the right car or home, have a baby, or
when you (fill in the blank), you’ll finally live happily ever after is
simply not true. You may find these things satisfying, and they can
contribute to your quality of life, but they’ll not make your emotional
tone change to a permanent or even abnormally high state of
happiness. You will adjust and that will become your new normal,
and—at least in terms of emotion—you will be back to zero. And
that’s a very good thing.

Finding Flexibility
All of the biological and evolutionary background of emotions and
emotional responses leads to one big conclusion: it’s a good idea to
accept your emotions as they are. First, see that most or all of your
behavior every day is directed toward doing things that you think will
make you feel good, or removing things that you think are making
you feel bad. In other words, notice that you are utterly controlled in
virtually every moment by your emotions. Even if you think that

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you’re doing something that you don’t like because it’s a moral,
positive, correct, or rational thing to do, deep down, you’re getting an
emotional reward for doing it.

Second, recognize that human emotions are responses that were

programmed into our biology over millions of years. We like to think
that our emotions are personal, intimate, and special things about us,
but actually, they are largely mechanistic and programmatic. Yes,
human beings are so complex that we can have very unpredictable
and individual responses. But recognizing that the emotions you’re
feeling are not necessarily “yours” as much as they are a reaction is
very useful.

Admitting this means that you can stop taking so much personal
responsibility for every little thing you are feeling. Not every emotion
you are having is one that you decided to have, especially not
consciously. Taking personal responsibility for your emotions makes
about as much sense as taking personal responsibility for aspects of
your liver function. Instead, accept that you’re feeling how you’re
feeling. If you want to change it later, you can try to do that. If you
want to let go of habits that are making you feel bad, you can do that,
too. But beating yourself up for how you are feeling at this moment
is counterproductive.

Third—and this is the big one—feeling bad doesn’t always mean that
there’s something wrong with you, or that you did something wrong.
We as a society are very intolerant (resistant, even) to the presence of
unpleasant emotions. If you’re feeling bad, something is terribly
wrong and we rush to fix it immediately. We do this even when the
feeling response makes perfect sense. For example, Americans even
take antidepressants after the death of a loved one, because the grief
can be so intense. During the recent updating of the DSM-IV—the
manual psychiatrists use to diagnose patients—they wanted to
categorize grief as a mental illness! A suggestion that was thankfully
vetoed. Grief feels very unpleasant, it’s true, but is that negative
feeling actually a problem? Isn’t it a completely natural response to

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feel grief after someone you love dies? Would you want to somehow
not feel it?

When we see emotions in this light, we can begin to have an entirely

different relationship to them. You start to understand that they are
simply happening, like your heartbeat or your breathing. They are
there to guide your behavior, not to make you feel good.

It’s possible to take this concept too far, however. If you are
experiencing clinical depression, anxiety disorder, or some other
emotional malfunction, for example, taking a psychopharmacological
medication could be an important step in your return to wellbeing.
Getting your emotional system in good working order is crucial, and
sometimes the process requires medicine, psychotherapy, and other
interventions.

In mindfulness meditation, however, the main way that we will work

with emotions is to both accept them, and to try and acquire a great
deal of sensory clarity about them. Acceptance I’ve already described,
and the sensory clarity aspect we’ve worked with to some degree.
You will learn to be very precise, detailed, and specific with regard to
emotional sensations.

When I describe this form of meditation, it’s common to get the

response, “Why should I do that?” But I can assure you that it’s a
powerful and helpful technique, and there is a good deal of science to
back me up. Meditating on emotions in the body will, like other body
sensation meditations, develop your insula,90 which is that part of
your brain that is associated with (among other things) the feeling of
visceral sensations. Body meditation practice will help you get better
at sensing such sensations over time, something that Shinzen calls
“skill at feeling.”91 Skill at feeling has a number of important benefits.
One is that it will give you a better and better look at how you’re
feeling. Many people have a difficult time describing what they’re
actually experiencing emotionally. It’s not so much a lack of
vocabulary, but a lack of the ability to contact emotional sensations
with clarity. They just know that they’re feeling something. By

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developing skill at feeling, you will have a much better idea of what
you’re experiencing at any moment in time. Given that emotions are
so important in decision-making, being able to feel them more clearly
could be very helpful in making good decisions.

Not only will you know better what you’re feeling, but you’ll get a
much better idea what other people are feeling. As I mentioned, we
tune into other peoples’ feelings by subtly mimicking their
expressions in our own faces as “microexpressions.” We are normally
not consciously aware that we are doing this. It’s part of our built-in
mechanism for working together in a group of hominids, as our
ancestors have done for a very long time indeed. Meditating on
emotional sensations begins slowly to make the feelings of these
microexpressions noticeable, which—much like in the experiment
mentioned above—makes it much easier to accurately read what
other people are feeling. That’s a crucial skill for deepening
connection with others, which builds not only relationships, but also
resilience—the ability to recover after difficult experiences.92

Viktor Frankl—the neurologist, psychologist, and Auschwitz

survivor—once wrote that “Between stimulus and response there is a
space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our
response lies our growth and our freedom.” This brilliant quote
points to one of the deepest and most important benefits derived
from meditating on the emotions: it increases your behavioral
flexibility. Human beings display a surprising amount of automaticity
in their behavior; that is, under the same conditions, we tend to do
the same things over and over again. Regardless of whether the
behavior is effective or desirable, we automatically repeat it with a
kind of mechanical predictability. To put it in Frankl’s terms, there is
no distance between stimulus and response. For the same stimulus,
you get the same response, every time.

Meditating on the emotions, however, does something very

interesting: it builds a kind of gap, or as Frankl puts it, a “space”
between the stimulus and the response. It’s hard to describe, but it’s
something that’s shockingly obvious the first time you experience it.

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There will be, for example, a loud BANG!, and you expect yourself
to jump. But instead, it’s like an hour goes by and you’re still waiting
for the jump to happen. It does, eventually, but only after you’ve had
plenty of time to consider it.

By cultivating this space between stimulus and response, you gain

something every human being ever born has wanted: the ability to
choose whether to respond to an emotional urge or not. The
emotions haven’t changed; you’re not submerging yourself in some
numbing sea of bliss. Instead, you feel everything very keenly, but
have the ability to not act on it if you don’t want to.

Think of all the times you’ve done something rash and regretted it
afterward. Said something out of rage or spite that should never have
been spoken. Think of all the urges, maybe even compulsions or
addictions that you automatically respond to, even when you don’t
want to. Meditation on emotions allows you to gain some measure of
control; one might even dare to say wisdom, with respect to the
expression of emotions. You are able to respond, rather than simply
react.

This is such a life-changer that it’s hard to exaggerate its usefulness.

There is, of course, a reason that all those ancient philosophers and
theologians were so negative about the passions. It’s so easy for a
human being to do something terrible and irreversible in a moment
of emotional intensity, and then to regret it for the rest of their lives.
Meditation on emotion can help to make sure that you think before
you act.

Feeling Emotion in the Body

Let’s talk about how to actually do the practice called Focus on
Emotion. Just like the Focus on Relaxation technique, Focus on
Emotion is about contacting a subset of general body sensations. In
this case, the subset is composed of sensations that “feel emotional.”

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Feeling emotions in the body, in a precise and continuous manner, is

the goal of the practice.

When I first describe this technique, people tend to imagine that

emotional body sensations are something really special, or something
really large. Usually they are neither. Most of the time, emotional
body sensations are pretty subtle and normal. The trick is learning to
separate them out from all the other sensations going on, to extract
the signal from the noise.

Let’s begin with a little taste of how this works. If you are alone right
now, and nobody is watching you, make a big smile on your face. It
doesn’t matter how fake it is, just instruct your face muscles to
generate the features of a smile.

Now, bring your awareness into contact with the sensations in your
face around the smile. You can feel some rather large physical
changes in your muscles. The corners of the lips pull up, the cheeks
bunch up, the lips themselves thin out, and so on. Tune into the
sensation of all this muscle activity, and the feelings in the skin
around it. Rack through a few reps of the meditation algorithm on
these sensations. Get really clear about how they feel.

Next, take it further, into something a bit subtler. See if you can feel,
in your face, the slightly pleasurable or pleasant sensation associated
with the smile. For most people, this can be very subtle at first. It’s
not big, obvious, or brash, just a small sense of pleasure that comes
from smiling. This sensation—no matter how small—is also a major
component of the emotional experience in the body. Use your
meditation algorithm on the sensations in your face, attempting to
feel this pleasant smile sensation as clearly as you can.

Now feel both things at the same time: the gross sensations in the
muscles, skin, and flesh, and the subtler pleasant sensations. You can
either contact one at a time, pendulating back and forth between
them, or contact both at the same time, using a larger area of focus.
Stick with this for a minute or so.

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These sensations are one example of contacting emotion in the body;

in this case, the emotion is joy. You may feel that such a small,
insignificant pleasant sensation in your face—if you were even able to
contact it at first, and some people aren’t—is much too mundane to
be called anything as substantive as joy. But it’s just a matter of
degree. There are smaller or larger amounts of joy possible, but it’s all
the joy response, just the same.

Many people also reject the idea that simply making this mask of a
smile has any relationship to real joy, however small. But my
experience is that it absolutely does, and science backs this up neatly.
Experimenters in the 1970s attached electrodes to the faces of
subjects reading cartoons. The electrodes forced the faces of the
subjects into smiles (using a cover story about measuring muscle
activity) and then had them rate how funny they thought the cartoons
were. Subjects whose faces had been electrically forced into a smile
thought the cartoons were funnier—presumably because they were
smiling physically, and this generated the pleasant smile feeling.

This experiment was reengineered in the 1980s by Strack into

something much more elegant.93 He had subjects rating the humor
value of cartoons, as before, but manipulated their facial muscles by
asking them to hold a pencil in their teeth. There were two ways to
hold the pencil, one that caused a smile and one which caused a
frown. In this case, too, subjects who held the pencil in a way that
caused a mechanical smile rated the humor value of the cartoons
significantly higher. And those who were tricked into frowning in this
manner found the cartoons much less funny.

So even creating the mechanical approximation of an emotional

response can generate a measurable change in how you feel
emotionally. Even if the reason is unconscious (which it probably
was in the above experiments), your system responds like it’s a “real”
emotion. I would contend that it is a real emotion, just one that’s
being stimulated from the other end—the tail wagging the dog.

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I lived in Los Angeles for a long time, and many of my students there
were actors. They often remarked how closely this idea matched the
“method acting” techniques they learn in acting classes. By putting
your body in posture of anger, and making the facial expressions of
anger, you will end up feeling angry, for example.

The Focus on Emotion technique reverse engineers this, in a way.

The idea here is that by very closely monitoring subtle emotional
expressions in the face and body, you can understand what you’re
thinking and feeling with much greater clarity. Given the utter
centrality of emotions to our daily sense of wellbeing, it should be no
surprise that cultivating this sort of skill with regard to feeling
emotions is so effective.

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FOCUS ON EMOTION — GUIDED TECHNIQUE

Before you begin, find your meditation seat, either sitting

in a chair, on a bench, cushion, or on the floor.

Sit up straight, extending your spine upwards toward the

ceiling. Make sure your chin is pointing just slightly (5
degrees) below horizontal.

Next, relax your entire body. Take three deep breaths, and
let each one of them out long and slowly.

Now you’re ready to begin the Focus on Emotion practice.

Scan your face for any emotional body sensations. These

could take the form of scowls, smiles, furrowed brows, or
other small muscle contractions. It could even be the case
that you just “feel some emotion” there, without being
entirely sure why. Bring your meditation algorithm to bear
on these emotional body sensations. The label you can use
is “emotion.” Contact the emotional sensation deeply, be
as specific as possible about what you feel there, and try
to accept whatever it is.

If there are no emotional sensations present, that’s fine.

Still meditate on the body sensations in your face region
for a little while. The label you can use is “none,” meaning
no emotional sensations. If, while you’re doing this, an
emotional sensation arises, focus on that, and switch to
using the label “emotion.”

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Move on to the throat region, and scan for any emotional

body sensations. If you find any, focus on them using the
meditation algorithm and the label “emotion.” If you don’t
find any, focus on the lack of emotional sensation for a
shorter time, using the label “none.”

Move on to the chest region, and scan for emotional

sensations. This can be a particularly rich zone for
emotions.

As you’re working your meditation algorithm in any of

these regions, make sure to emphasize the acceptance
aspect with regard to emotional sensations. Whatever
emotions you’re feeling are fine in this moment. Even if
they are unpleasant or upsetting, just let them be
whatever they are. Try not to resist or to struggle with
them.

Move on to the belly region, and scan for emotional body

sensations. This can also be a strong area for emotions.

Now scan your whole body for emotional sensations.

You can stop here, or go back to a region of particularly

intense or interesting emotional body sensations and work
with that for a longer time.

When it’s time to finish, spend at least one minute just

sitting quietly, meditating on relaxed sensations in the
body before continuing on your day.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Coping with Too Much Feeling

In the movie Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty, played by Rutger
Hauer, has a problem. As a genetically enhanced human-like Nexus 6
organism, he’s been given a brilliant mind and a super-human body
by the Tyrell Corporation that created him. He is used to performing
dangerous and difficult work in space and on off-world colonies. Yet
to keep him and others like him under control, the replicants have a
built-in four-year lifespan limit. Batty and his replicant friends—Pris,
Leon, and Zhora—are programmed to die any day now, and they’re
not too happy about it. In a desperate attempt to extend their lives,
the four replicants illegally travel to Earth, in search of somebody
who can help them.

Although Roy is a genius, he is still like a three year old child

emotionally. The feelings of fear and outrage he is experiencing are
enormous, and he cannot deal with them. When he faces the head of
the Tyrell Corporation, his creator, he angrily demands “more life,
fucker.” When Tyrell makes it clear that there is no possible way to
do that, Roy is overcome with anger and frustration and kills the man
with his bare hands.

As all of his friends are killed, his overwhelming feelings push Roy to
more and more extremes. Yet at the very end, worn out and dying,

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Roy comes to some kind of acceptance of his situation, and speaks

hauntingly of the beauty he has seen in his short life.

In most mindfulness meditation, the idea is to accept what you’re

feeling, and to greet all emotions with curiosity, openness, and
nonjudgment. Even if they are painful and negative, you investigate
them in detail. Sometimes, however, digging directly into a big,
difficult emotion just isn’t possible or desirable—it might be too
gnarly to deal with effectively, like in Roy Batty’s situation. Rather
than meditating on the waves of emotion breaking on the beach of
awareness, it’s more like a tsunami of feeling obliterating the beach.

This can happen for a number of reasons. If you have experienced

trauma, it’s common for certain situations to trigger overwhelming
feelings. If you are under an unusually large amount of stress, say
losing a job or a big housing change, it’s possible that your emotions
could feel much more difficult to cope with. Another possibility is
that you are experiencing chronic anxiety or depression, and
connecting with the core of these feelings starts a feedback loop that
spirals out of control.

Whatever the cause, emotional overwhelm can feel like it’s going to
make you crazy, cut you in half, tear you apart, or even kill you. You
might feel like you cannot bear another second of it, and that nothing
can relieve it. Emotional overwhelm sucks, and it’s not a good place
to hang out.

It can also make you dissociate. Dissociation happens when the

feelings are so bad that you cannot bear to feel your body anymore at
all, and you, metaphorically, “leave your body.” That means to lose
direct conscious contact with most body sensations. It’s a common
response for people who have PTSD. Dissociation feels like spacing
out, blanking out, being half in a trance, or slightly on drugs. And in a
way that’s exactly what it is. The overwhelm feels so bad that you’re
checking out—usually into some mental activity—in order to avoid
feeling it.

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Hopefully these are not common occurrences in your life, but they
do happen to all of us sometime, and it’s important to know how to
cope. In all of these cases, meditating directly on the intense feelings
of emotion in the body may not be the best course of action. It’s
good to connect with your feelings under normal conditions, but
wading directly into an enormous flood of emotion that threatens to
drown you is not recommended.

There are two basic strategies for working with overwhelming

emotions in the body: focus on a neutral spot in the body, or focus
on something external.

Focus on a Neutral Spot

Although emotional sensations can arise anywhere in the body, they
are much more likely to arise in the belly, chest, throat, or face. These
are the emotional hotspots in the body, the regions where emotional
sensations can get huge. That means that other areas are much less
likely to host gigantic emotional sensations, which turns out to be a
useful and convenient thing. You can meditate on those emotionally
“cold” spots, such as your hands and feet, and stay in touch with
your body. As long as you’re in touch with your body, you won’t be
completely dissociated. You’ll be anchored in the sensations, rather
than checked out into a dream-like state. And since the emotional
sensations in these locations are typically much smaller or
nonexistent, you won’t be overwhelmed either.

The easiest practice is to feel your hands, your feet, or both.

Concentrate on the emotionally neutral sensations in these areas. For
example, explore the sensations in your palms, the back of your hand,
each of your fingers, the spaces between the fingers, and so on. Even
your arms and legs, if they are not filled with too much emotional
sensation. Contact as much of the body as is “safe”—meaning areas
not filled with overwhelming feelings.

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Intense emotions can be seductive, even if they are unpleasant. They

are like whirlpools that suck your attention toward them, so avoid
allowing yourself to be drawn into the emotional hotspots. Just stay
focused on your hands and feet. This is an effective way to work with
big feelings.

Focus on Something External

When the body is too emotionally hot, a second good idea is to
meditate on something outside the body. External sights and sounds
are powerful meditation objects, especially when they are interesting,
beautiful, or compelling in some way.

I remember one time when I was going through a terrible

relationship breakup. It felt like I had no center, and my guts were
dragging on the ground. The feelings were so large and so negative
that I didn’t feel I could deal with them for another second.

I knew that one possibility for working with such intense feelings was
focusing away from them. Looking up, I noticed a large cumulous
cloud over the nearby mountain. It was stunningly white against the
penetrating blue of the sky. It seemed to be a mountain itself,
composed of voluminous floating marble. The beauty of it really
captured my attention. I began to meditate on it. Staying open and
curious and exploring it visually. Every little detail.

Then the horrendous feelings would pull me in again, but I simply

accepted that. I didn’t fight it at all. As soon as I could, with a lot of
relaxation and openness, I just brought my attention back to the
beauty of the cloud. Because I love painting, drawing, and
photography, and have developed an aesthetic eye, I knew to
concentrate on the details of color and shape, and that helped in
staying focused on the cloud.

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That cloud saved me. It gave me something to place my attention on

that was safe and pleasant and emotionally neutral. You can do
something similar with music, although the caveat is to not use music
that is too emotionally stimulating.

Pendulation
I said that there were two techniques, but I’ll toss in a third for free.
It’s called pendulation, and it’s slightly more difficult than the above
techniques. It often takes some previous experience of focusing on a
neutral spot. If you can do pendulation, however, it’s worth it.

To pendulate, you first locate an emotional-neutral spot in the body

and meditate on it for a little while. The next step is the tough one. If
you have a huge emotion occurring, but you think you can contact it,
or contact somewhere near it, without getting totally overwhelmed,
then do that. Contact some part of the huge emotion and meditate
on that for a very brief time. If you feel yourself getting
overwhelmed, immediately come back to the neutral spot.

Then you continue to go back and forth (i.e. pendulate) between the
neutral spot and the emotional hotspot. You concentrate on only one
at a time, giving it your complete attention. Neutral — Hotspot —
Neutral — Hotspot… back and forth for the entirety of the
meditation.

Going back and forth like this is tremendously integrating. It sort of

allows the two different spots in the body to “talk” to each other.
Eventually, the emotional hotspot may calm down a bit. It’s
important to remember that you’re not trying to make it calm down,
or force it to be neutral. You’re practicing acceptance with it. But
nevertheless it may sometimes become markedly less intense.

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Pendulation is so effective that it’s the core practice of several PTSD

treatments. For example, the work of Bessel van der Kolk and Peter
Levine use something comparable (although not exactly the same).
Of course, if you have PTSD or other intense traumatic reactions
happening, you’ll want to get professional help to work it through.

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Specifically, What they show is that brain activation in secondary somatosensory cortex (SII) and posterior insula
(associated with the sensory domain of pain processing) greater in mindfulness than a baseline condition
correlates with decreasing pain unpleasantness in mindfulness practitioners, but increasing pain unpleasantness
in controls.

80 Notably Han Solo: “It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.”

81 )Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New
York: Harcourt Brace.

2)Davidson, R. J. (1994). Complexities in the search for emotion-specific physiology. In P. Ekman & R. J. Davidson
(Eds.), The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions(pp. 237–242). New York: Oxford University Press.

3)Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. New York: Oxford
University Press.

82 Here’s a free online version of the entire book. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1227/1227-h/1227-h.htm

83 Yes, even though it’s still heretical to suggest it, it seems pretty clear that animals have emotions—given that
they have similar brain structures, similar neurochemistry, and similar behaviors under similar conditions, calling
them “sham emotions” like the behaviorists did seems like splitting hairs.

84 Brickman, Philip; Coates, Dan; Janof-BUlman, Ronnie, Aug, 1978, Journal of Personality and Social psychology
36.8, 917-927

85 Damasio, “Descartes’ Error” 1994

86 Panksepp, J., & Northoff, G. (2009, March 18). The trans-species core SELF: the emergence of active cultural
and neuro-ecological agents through self-related processing within subcortical-cortic... - PubMed - NCBI.
Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18485741

87 Davis, J. I., Senghas, A., Brandt, F., & Ochsner, K. N. (2013, July 10). The Effects of BOTOX® Injections on
Emotional Experience. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2880828/

88 Neal, D. (2011, October 31). Embodied Emotion Perception: Amplifying and Dampening Facial Feedback
Modulates Emotion Perception Accuracy. Retrieved from
http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/04/21/1948550611406138.abstract

89 ibid
90 Britta, B. K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramesetti, S. M., Gard, T., & Lazara, S. W. (2011,
January 30). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Retrieved from

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004979/

91 As shown by alpha modulation in the primary somatosensory cortex by Cathy Kerr Kerr, C. E., Jones, S. R.,
Wan, Q., Pritchett, D. L., Wasserman, R. H., Wexler, A., . . . Moore, C. I. (2011). Effects of mindfulness meditation
training on anticipatory alpha modulation in primary somatosensory cortex. FUEL AND ENERGY ABSTRACTS, 1-8.
doi:10.1016/j.brainresbull.2011.03.026

92 Ozbay, F., Fitterling, H., Charney, D., & Southwick, S. (2008). Social support and resilience to stress across the
life span: a neurobiologic framework. Current psychiatry reports, 10(4), 304-310. Retrieved from
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11920-008-0049-7

93 Strack, F., Martin, L. L., & Stepper, S. (1988). Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A
nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 54(5), 768-
777. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.54.5.768

94 Many of the lines were cribbed from a book entitled, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which espouses
the view that life is so awful it is better to never have been born. I certainly do not subscribe to this view.

95 Ray Bradbury: Writer, 1920-2012 | Harvard Square Library. (2000, November). Retrieved from
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/ray-bradbury/

96 from My Life and the Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Pele, By Pele, Robert L. Fish, Shep Messing

97 http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.09/czik_pr.html

98 Psygrammer |. (2011, February 10). The Flow – Programming in Ecstasy | Psygrammer. Retrieved from
http://psygrammer.com/2011/02/10/the-flow-programming-in-ecstasy/

99Richard Chambers, Barbara Chuen Yee Lo, Nicholas B. Allen, R., Yee Lo, B. C., & Allen, N. (2007, February 23).
The Impact of Intensive Mindfulness Training on Attentional Control, Cognitive Style, and Affect - Springer.
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