Mindfulness doesn’t provide some kind of magical exemption from discomfort. Not at all. It's actually the opposite.
It means when practiced consistently — with or without meditation — we can sometimes change the degree to which we fight against some present discomfort.
Read MoreIt wasn’t until I stumbled clumsily toward a daily mindfulness practice in my mid-thirties that I discovered that there were ways I could get better at feeling my feelings.
Before intentionally working on my attentional skills, I had no idea how often I escalated my unpleasant feelings and zipped past the pleasant and subtler ones.
The kind of self-awareness that mindfulness exercise develops has helped me become more objective about my subjective experiences.
Read More"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."
~ Michael Taft
Read MoreThinking your way through unpleasant emotions takes time while a single repetition of any mindfulness exercise only takes a few seconds. The skills of attention strengthened by mindfulness practice enhance both the resolving of unpleasant emotions and the acceptance of them.
Read More"Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job. We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth."
~ John Tarrant
Read More"We are surrounded at every instant
by sights that ought to strike the sane
unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute
with gratitude and terror. However,
"I think attentional skills are fundamentally under siege today. Never before in human history have there been so many seductive distractors in a person’s day, in a given hour, or in ten minutes. There are pingings and pop-ups and all kinds of sensory impingements on our attention that want to pull us away from what we’re trying to focus on."
~ Daniel Goleman
Read MoreHere's a great strategy for working with unpleasant emotional sensations in the body from Phillip Moffitt.
Read More"What I find most rewarding is how well Search Inside Yourself has worked for ordinary folks in a corporate setting right here in a modern society. If Search Inside Yourself had worked this well for people from traditionally meditative cultures doing intensive retreats in zendos or something, nobody would be too surprised. But these are ordinary Americans working in a high-stress environment with real lives and families and everything, and still, they can change their lives in just twenty hours of classroom time spread over seven weeks."
~ Chade-Meng Tan
Read More"In designing Search Inside Yourself, a popular course at Google, early Google engineer and personal growth pioneer Chade-Meng Tan (Meng) has distilled emotional intelligence into a set of practical and proven tools and skills that anyone can learn and develop."
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