Practical Meditation: Caught In A Mood
There are good moods and bad moods, states where we are enveloped in emotions.
If these do not give us a sense of Love, Harmony or Beauty they are "Bad Moods". They totally influence our perception of life events, and they are stressful, creating unwanted thoughts, speech and action!
They are like a spell cast upon us, usually arising from past trauma, fear, or anger over situations which we can't yet seem to make peace with and let go. We don't want to repress these moods and we don't want to act out but we can hardly stop ourselves from doing so - we feel trapped, even held prisoner by them.
What to do?
First, we have to break their hold, then find a way to step out of them, to step above them so we can see from another perspective, with a different light not clouded by their influence.
In short we need to find a way, to find the strength to be able to acknowledge them, yet watch them and not react. When we do this, they do not go away but neither do they exert a hold on us. They still come but we recognize them coming, we hear their footsteps and understand how they make us feel - this very recognition robs them of their power and returns that power to us. Theie influence upon us grows weaker until they are simply like flotsam passing by in the water of our consciousness.
My Spiritual Teachers would say to me: "What you have to do is learn to Watch your Breath". Indeed, if we can learn to watch our breathing, observing it, we also learn to 'watch your thoughts and emotions' - we develop a power in ourselves to become aware of our thoughts and emotions before they influence our action. So just as you don't go around always holding your breath, you no longer hold or grab on to your thoughts and emotions, you become aware of them and some you choose to act on and some you let go. You also learn that your thoughts are not you! They are what they are - often conditioned upon events of the past, or reactions to the present.
In my experience the practices of personal freedom that systemically allow us to break the hold of "Bad Moods" through the power of self-awareness are ZAZEN, Balanced Breathing, and Pranayama. I will share a few of these practices in the next blog.
If these do not give us a sense of Love, Harmony or Beauty they are "Bad Moods". They totally influence our perception of life events, and they are stressful, creating unwanted thoughts, speech and action!
They are like a spell cast upon us, usually arising from past trauma, fear, or anger over situations which we can't yet seem to make peace with and let go. We don't want to repress these moods and we don't want to act out but we can hardly stop ourselves from doing so - we feel trapped, even held prisoner by them.
What to do?
First, we have to break their hold, then find a way to step out of them, to step above them so we can see from another perspective, with a different light not clouded by their influence.
In short we need to find a way, to find the strength to be able to acknowledge them, yet watch them and not react. When we do this, they do not go away but neither do they exert a hold on us. They still come but we recognize them coming, we hear their footsteps and understand how they make us feel - this very recognition robs them of their power and returns that power to us. Theie influence upon us grows weaker until they are simply like flotsam passing by in the water of our consciousness.
My Spiritual Teachers would say to me: "What you have to do is learn to Watch your Breath". Indeed, if we can learn to watch our breathing, observing it, we also learn to 'watch your thoughts and emotions' - we develop a power in ourselves to become aware of our thoughts and emotions before they influence our action. So just as you don't go around always holding your breath, you no longer hold or grab on to your thoughts and emotions, you become aware of them and some you choose to act on and some you let go. You also learn that your thoughts are not you! They are what they are - often conditioned upon events of the past, or reactions to the present.
In my experience the practices of personal freedom that systemically allow us to break the hold of "Bad Moods" through the power of self-awareness are ZAZEN, Balanced Breathing, and Pranayama. I will share a few of these practices in the next blog.
