Yogic advice for Troubled Times

Your story about an experience can both define and direct your emotional response. The way you choose to interpret things will deeply effect the future of that encounter, or the future relationship with that person.

But when you put the story aside, emotions are simply emotions. At the heart of all these emotions is energy itself. Love is a particular kind of energy. Sadness is another. Anger is another. Each of these emotions has a characteristic felt sense -- for anger, a hardness of the heart or the gut; for love, a melting, rippling heat in the heart; and for sadness, a sinking, heavy feeling through the chest.

In times of upheaval one of the most powerful things that you can do is to practice catching each wave of emotion as a felt sense in the body, without acting on it or attaching to it. This is a kind of meditation practice; you keep bringing your attention to the sensation of the emotion in your body, just as you would bring your attention back to the breath again and again. You sit in the felt sense as long as you can, noticing the stories and thoughts that arise, constantly bringing attention back to the present moment and to the feeling of the emotion in your body.

As you do this, the feeling will begin to change. It might dissipate, or it might just lead to a different series of feelings. It's in that gesture of learning to be with emotions as sensation and energy, and then letting the shift, that you will begin to realise the path you are meant to follow.

-- excerpted from Yoga Journal, Feb 2008