Following loving-kindness meditation, a woman remarked, “I can feel. I can really feel my feelings. I wondered, before, if I could still feel.”
[This post is part of a series that begins here.]
Through each individual practice, I imagine people felt an even wider range than they expressed to me, but what they did name represented an array of emotions. Sometimes they share the emotion that they recalled feeling during the meditation itself; other times the feeling arose in the space that followed, in reflection and conversation.
Plotting each emotion against the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence Emotional Granularity chart, I find the most concentrated sets of emotions, in aggregate, landed in the “pleasant to feel” quadrants, both high energy (think: happy, hopeful, connected), and low energy (think: calm, peaceful, grateful). And, a few experienced emotions with low valence, that is, unpleasant to feel (think: guilt, shame, sadness). Even these I do not consider “bad” emotions, but rather signposting something important to the feeler of it.
An emotional inventory over the course of the first three months of this experiment, as expressed by the meditator following these meditation practices, would look like this:
Calm, Relaxed, Safe, At Ease, Comforted, Respected, Grateful, Thankful, Content
Hopeful, Joyful, Playful, Pleased, Surprised, Compassionate, Connected, Euphoric
Guilt, Sadness, Shame, and “a smidgeon of discomfort”
Feelings of sadness came to the surface when meditators reflected on those in their lives, or in the world writ large, who are suffering. “People are so loved; it’s sad, some do not even know how loved they are.”
Feelings of guilt or shame arose for some when admitting to whom they chose to offer loving-kindness (for example, one person shared such emotion when landing on a pet over a family member… and then added, with a bit of a laugh, “and, on top of that, the pet is no longer living!”). For others, the practice brought up past transgressions with unresolved guilt (“this had been the most meaningful relationship to me, and I messed it up”). And for (at least) one, the practice as a whole shined the light on what they considered to be their selfishness (“I realize I should be doing this [offering loving-kindness to others, or directing my energy towards other beings] more; I spend most of my time focused on myself”).
In each of these instances of an emotion that was unpleasant to feel, it signaled something important, and this practice, and the time following, created space for that need to be known. In the example of one meditator who felt a deep sense of guilt, they shared, “and for the very first time, I could decide to forgive myself.” This decision precipitated a release of something that felt so heavy, for so long, and was followed by a lightness and great joy. Amazing, the power of this practice! (My thoughts - and what they said, too.)
After sharing a bit of past experiences with trauma as context, one meditator mused, “I realized through this that I can feel my feelings, I really can. I had felt so numb. I wondered, before, if I could even still feel anything. Turns out I can…”
One young meditator connected the specific emotion felt with a place in their body. “When I felt happy and pleased, I felt it in my hands. When I felt sad, I felt it in my throat. When I felt hopeful, I felt it in my heart.”
And as another person shared, with some degree of revelation, “Wow (laughs), I get why they are called feelings. (Gesturing to the body): As in, we feel them!”