You cut your fingernails and brush the clippings away. A moment ago they were you. You don’t go back for them.
Settle. Let the body be heavy, the belly soft, awareness wide enough to hold the whole of it. Then listen. A car, a voice, the hum of an appliance. As each sound arrives, label it silently and lightly: not me, not mine. This one is easy — obviously the sound isn’t you, obviously you can’t keep it. Notice what happens when you say so anyway.
Widen from there. The pressure of sitting, an ache, the rise and fall of the belly. The breath has been going all day without your permission; the air was outside a moment ago and will be outside again. If you were going to possess a breath, which one would it be, and how would you hold it? Then feeling — warmth, unease, whatever tone is here — already shifting as you turn to look. Then thoughts. Where did that one come from? Was there a decision before it arrived? Thoughts happen on their own; we take the credit after the fact.
Then look for your sense of self. It might be tight, everything glued together and about you. It might be loose and open. Either way, it is arising. Not me, not mine.
Nothing here is being got rid of. A rainbow is vividly there and has nothing solid in it. Open your eyes, look around the room, and keep looking that way.
Something has bothered you and the thought will not stop turning. The body is tight, the shoulders drawn in, the world narrowed to the size of the problem. On another day you are out walking and everything is roomy and unhurried. The difference is the grip.
Clinging, craving, aversion, grasping — different words for one movement: taking hold of experience and trying to keep it fixed. It is felt in the body. Which is useful, because what is felt in the body can be released there.
Settle, then let awareness fill the whole body, part by part, until the whole space is bright. Tune into the felt sense of it — the overall tone, like dialling in an analogue radio. Notice the clear sensations, and what is vague and murky. Whatever you find is fine.
Now look for the holding. A contraction somewhere. A pull for this to be other than it is. It is in thought too — the mind solving, fixing, reaching towards something later. Find it. Stay with it a moment.
Open, soften, allow.
Take resistance the same way: soften around the sleepiness, the agitation, the doubt. Let it be here. Take the pleasant that way too. Released from the grip, what is pleasant tends to open further; what is unpleasant tends to dissipate.
Then feel the whole body again. Tight, or roomy. Solid, or moving.
You do not let go. You stop holding on.
Drawn from Rob Burbea’s teaching on ways of looking.
A sound wakes you in the night. Nothing much has happened, and within a minute the body is tight and the mind is looping — what was that, who caused it, why this, why me. Hours later you are walking in the sun and everything is fine. The body is open. There is nothing to cling to. Same person, same day.
Place a number between zero and ten on what is being felt. Zero: the self-sense faint, thin, perhaps completely gone. Ten: contracted, fixated, everything is about you. Most of the time you are drifting somewhere in the middle without noticing.
Sensation first: what you can hear, see, feel. Then feeling — not the story of the emotion, just its energy in the body. Then thought: distinct images and inner sounds, or a stream bubbling away.
Then ask: what is my self-sense right now?
It’s a strange question. It doesn’t land the first time.
Now watch how the mind binds it all together. A sound, an agitation, a thought about who did this — glued into a solid, fixed, “you”. When the gluing runs unwatched, the contraction is strongest. See it clearly, and relax.
Suppose a magician were to hold a magic show at the four crossroads, and a keen-sighted person were to see it, reflect on it, and examine it radically. Even as they see it, they would find it empty; they would find it hollow; they would find it void of essence.
— Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta, SN 22.95
Examine the self-sense that closely and release clinging. Not gone — vividly appearing, but without the solidity it seemed to have. Rest as what knows this.
See through the lens of change. Sounds arise out of silence and disappear back into it, and even the constant ones waver. Bring the body forward: look at the edge of a sensation that feels solid, and find the flicker there. You never take the same breath twice. Then thoughts — each with a beginning and an end, or one stream, flowing, never the same for long.
The mind gives solidity to what has none. Look this way for a while and notice what loosens. There is often relief in it: nothing here to hold.
Then open your eyes, and notice what lens you are looking through now.
— Vajrachedikā (Diamond) Sūtra, translated by Rob Burbea
When your experience of life deviates from life as it objectively is, the lens is revealed. Between the world as it is and the world as you meet it, there is a way of looking. It involves everything: from how you have slept to your beliefs and emotions. Like squeaky-clean glass, you look straight through without noticing it.
Sense what is here now. A warmth, a tension, a sound, a passing thought. With each, notice its tone: is this pleasant, or unpleasant? Stay for the small movement that follows — the mind leaning in toward what it likes, drawing back from what it doesn’t, quietly sorting the world into good and bad.
That leaning is the lens. When you catch it, relax. Let the pleasant be pleasant without chasing it, the unpleasant be unpleasant without turning away. If resistance comes, let the resistance be here too. Then take one step back toward the thing itself, before the mind decides what to make of it. Even here, the lens is shaping what appears.
Find one steady thing. Your seat, the uprightness of the body, or an object across the room. Notice the solidity already present. Rest your attention there. Borrow its steadiness, and let it spread.
Thoughts will come, wanting to be solved, wanting to carry you off. You don’t have to feed them. Each time you notice, that noticing is a fork in the road — be glad you caught it, and choose to come back to what is steady. It doesn’t matter how many times.
This is a way of looking: not something you force, but a stance you take, and then wait. Give the body, the heart, the mind their time. Peace of mind is only a short way off, on the other side of habit. Get out of your own way and the system settles on its own. The steadiness was always its birthright.
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
— Mary Oliver
We learn early to feel the good emotions and put the rest away, so that we are easy to be around. Fear, anger, sadness — set aside, the lid held down.
Here we lift the lid. From a ground of stillness — the weight of the body, the breath, somewhere in you that feels stable — we turn towards a feeling we would rather not feel. Not somewhere safe, exactly. Somewhere brave enough to feel it.
Evoke a scene. Recall a memory. Let the feeling come, and let it be here — not pushed away, not acted out, but received as a signal, something deep in you speaking for a reason not yet clear.
Then look closely. Where does it live in the body — warmth, pressure, weight? Notice it is already changing. Search for the anger, the sadness, the fear itself, and find only sensation, shifting. Search for the one who feels it, and find no one there.
Happiness, love, delight. Don’t hold back — let one of them in. Recall the feeling in the body and give yourself permission to feel it fully.
Bring a scene to mind, remembered or imagined — the delight of slowly making coffee, the easy company of a friend — and let it carry the feeling forward. Take a deeper breath. Can I be with this?
Now look closely. Start with the sensations — where there’s warmth, lightness, an upwelling of energy — and notice they won’t hold still. They are already shifting, patterns of light dancing on water. Give the feeling its name, happiness or contentment, then search for the thing the name belongs to. You can feel it moving through you, but you can’t land on anything solid. Look for the one who feels it. Only more shifting sensation, a sense of density that also can’t quite be found.
What remains is simply presence — a knowing beneath the feeling. Here you can rest. The feeling doesn’t need anything from you but to be known. Let it move through, like light dancing on the surface of a pond.
The Buddha asked his monks: What happens when you drop a spoonful of salt into a glass of water? It turns undrinkable. How about the same spoonful into the Ganges? You can’t taste the salt at all.
This is something awareness can do. Open it wide enough and there is room for anything: the leftover charge of the day, an emotion you’d rather not feel, a discomfort you’ve been carrying since this morning. Nothing has to be solved. Held in a space this big, the feeling diffuses and shifts on its own. Awareness itself does the holding, with warmth and tenderness.
Begin with sound. Listen for the most distant noise, then notice the field that holds it — open, roomy, extending in every direction. Let the body appear inside that field. Then gently let whatever you are feeling come forward to be met.
Stay with it, and the feeling loosens. Where you thought there was a solid thing — sadness, or fear — you find movement, a shifting texture. Look for the one who is feeling it, and that too can’t quite be found.
What’s left is spacious knowing. Let the feeling move through it like a ripple through water.
It’s late, you’re winding down, and a notification arrives on your phone. Nothing serious. But there’s a flicker of irritation, a small charge moving through the body against the quiet you were just resting in.
The nervous system is always moving like this — across a spectrum of activation and rest, energy and ease. All of it is good. The charge that sets a boundary, the rest that restores, even the freeze that was once trying to keep you safe: each has its place, just as every part of the mind does. When nothing blocks the way, the system regulates itself. It rises into activation and on its own it settles again.
In this practice we bring a little activation in on purpose, in order to watch it shift and settle. Swing the arms for a minute, then stop. Feel the warmth, the quickened heart, the breath. Notice what happens as you pause and get out of the way.
Then bring something to mind — something small and irritating, an email you didn’t want, whatever brought a bit of feeling. Hold it in whole body awareness and tune into how it feels for you. Stay with the heart, the breath, the charge, with no need to change a thing.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
— Dune, Frank Herbert
Life is uncertain. There are things we can’t know, things we can’t control — the body ageing, the world shifting through change with no clear path ahead.
Begin by settling. Ease in, collect the mind, find an anchor that feels stable and grounding. Then open to the whole body and let the mind rest into it. Notice the felt sense — the overall tonality of this space, vague and murky, more than words.
Now bring to mind something uncertain: a situation, an area of life where there’s turbulence, unknowns, something out of your hands. Small or large, whatever feels alive. Doing this on purpose lets you meet it on your own terms. Let the fear, the worry, the concern arise, and find where it lives in the body.
Open, soften, allow. Don’t brace against the feeling — go towards it. Every cell of your body dilating to accommodate this texture of experience. Let it move through you, shifting and changing, a trickle from a deep well.
Let it fully envelop you, and you’ll emerge on the other side. What remains is the one who can hold all of it. Untouched. Whole. Nothing missing.
In a moment of reactivity, there’s a part of you that jumps into the driver’s seat. It stresses you out with anxiety, defends you with anger, or entices you to reach for that coping strategy. It’s so sure it has an important job to do, trying so hard to protect you. However, there’s a cost to that strategy.
Most of meditation invites us to see through and deconstruct. Instead we let the part stay solid, and turn towards it with loving attunement — the way you might turn towards someone who’s been carrying something heavy by themselves, weary and alone.
First ground into the weight of the body as a steady anchor that you can return to. Bring the part to mind. See it as a part of you, not the whole of you. Notice its cost. Then, rather than trying to change it, sense how it’s been trying to help.
Ask how it feels. Let it answer — in sensation, in an image, in words. Ask how it protects you. Acknowledge the effort: “I see this is how you protect me.” Then offer your thanks.
Met like this, a part will often soften on its own. As it settles back, you are more than the part — you’re the awareness holding it.
If you could have a cup of tea with one part of you, which one could use the company? Is it the part that gets anxious you’ve forgotten something every time you leave the house? Or perhaps the part of you that is always trying to find the next problem to solve?
All parts of the mind are wholesome, just not all of them are skilful. The inner critic is driving you to achieve your greatest aspirations. The part that is stressed wants to make sure things get taken care of so you don’t let others down.
Realising this, you can offer genuine kindness and appreciation for just how hard this part is working for you — even when it seems to cause difficulty. Embracing it just as it is lets this part feel appreciated. When truly seen, the part relaxes.
9:00 – 5:00 pm AEDT (Sydney time) Sunday 5 July 2026 Online via Zoom
Description
After some time in dedicated practice, you’ve seen first-hand that formal meditation and the content of your life cannot be cleanly separated. You sit and realise how dysregulated you are. Or you find yourself still stuck after many silent retreats — the practice hasn’t yet integrated into life. The general instructions — follow your breath, return to the body — don’t quite bridge the gap to the rich and complex specifics of your thoughts and feelings.
To find this integration, you can work directly with feeling as the nexus of life and meditation. There are two primary practices for working with feeling: contacting and being with, and seeing through with insight. In contacting, you offer loving attunement to all parts of yourself. In insight practice, you see feeling as impermanent, flowing energy. Each opens space for the other to deepen.
By practising feeling in different ways, the felt experience of meditation and the felt experience of daily life begin to integrate. Emotions and felt senses become the practice itself as you move toward being fully free and fully feeling.
The foundation of the workshop is awareness of the body — grounding, attuning to felt senses, and creating space to hold the complexity of feeling in awareness. To work with emotions and patterns of mind, we’ll use parts work, drawing on Aletheia and Internal Family Systems. You’ll learn to recognise parts, disidentify from these patterns, and acknowledge their good intentions. Through offering yourself a kind, loving presence, these patterns soften and relax.
Once emotions are allowed to be present, we use insight meditation to open to emptiness and experience emotion as energy, allowing the experience to transform. Contacting and insight deepen each other, like two strands of practice that need each other to spiral open.
About this format
This workshop is taught through embodied experience: guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, grounding movement and breathwork, and group exercises.
You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice for first-hand, direct experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to group activities and to listen generously as part of the community.
The event is structured as a full day to provide the opportunity for deep focus, while you temporarily put aside other concerns.
Please attend for the whole day. It can be highly beneficial to be in silence for the day, and especially to minimise technology usage. However, full silence is not a requirement. We encourage you to do what you can to create a supportive environment for your practice.
This is an online event. You will need a device with Zoom installed. Please ensure you have a stable internet connection.
This workshop is suitable for practitioners with some experience of meditation. This work can open up some challenging territory — please consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable.
The Elephant Path is an ancient meditation teaching, believed to be a transmission from the Buddha-to-be Maitreya and written out by Asanga in around 500 CE. It describes the Nine Stages of Calm Abiding — a map of how experience shifts as the mind deepens in meditation. In this meditation, we traverse all the stages, using the appropriate antidotes and techniques at each stage to progress to the next. Through this we move from scattered monkey mind all the way to effortlessly stable attention. By practising The Elephant Path, you learn how to navigate the mind and how to cultivate different states of mind. This makes the mind a nice place to be — not only from landing in calm and clarity, but also from the confidence of knowing how to move the mind appropriately to whatever is present at any given moment.
The practice of calm abiding culminates in effortlessly stable attention — you sit and focus, returning again and again, until it becomes automatic. There’s also a way to begin with effortlessness. Start by opening to effortless spacious awareness. Release the body and mind. Drop all effort, relax to the max, give up. Rest as the awareness that is already here and knowing. From that place of spacious ease, gently intend to care about the body. Through just the slightest intention, the body appears brightly and vividly in the foreground. Attention is stable without tension nor doing. Let go of everything and rest into the body.
The path of calm abiding leads to effortlessly stable attention with equanimity and tranquility. A key to this part of practice is first building up to complete staying and then, when the time is right, easing up in effort. This easing up is a releasing, softening, and relaxing in such a way that the practice starts to flow by itself. Because of all the work done to establish stable attention and bright metacognitive awareness, the mind can, with only the slightest intention, rest into the body. This occurs at stage seven of the elephant path. You will ease up gradually, bit-by-bit, noticing if distractions again interrupt your continuity. When this works, it feels like the less you do the more focused you become, that there is no difference between meditation and non-meditation, and that there is a profound background stillness.
I’m sitting on the beige, scratchy carpet in the spare room of my unit in Maylands, a quaint-yet-growing suburb of Boorloo (Perth). I’m trying to meditate and have a growing sense of failure. I gaze at the light slowly crawling across the carpet. Restless and bored, I get up and do something else. Maybe meditation just isn’t for me.
Much earlier, I’m sitting on another carpet. This time I’m young, maybe nine years old, and Dad has offered to teach me to meditate. I’m thrilled, it’s all so mysterious to me. What happens when Dad goes off and sits quietly in the evenings? It could be anything! We sit on the floor in the front room of the house with the lights dim. Dad guides me to notice the sensations of my breath. I picture it like I’m watching an animation: breath coming into my body like flowing coloured lines moving through my nose, filling my lungs, then releasing on the exhale to rejoin the atmosphere. I enjoy the feeling of being calm, but I get sleepy straight away. I also feel like I’m somehow doing it wrong — I’m picturing something but it feels like I’m making it up, using my highly active imagination instead of doing it “properly.” Is this what meditation is meant to be? In the ensuing years I only meditate when in bed as something to do while waiting for my mind to drift off. I don’t recall us sitting together again.
I’m in a chair gazing over a busy Sydney street on a cloudy weekday afternoon. The recent move has been challenging and I’m in the middle of a spell of depression and anxiety. I can’t seem to break out of feeling this way through my usual methods and I’m starting to feel desperate. I come across a book: “The Mindful Way Through Depression.” While it sounds like it’s just what I need, I’m short of spoons and can’t summon the energy to get further than the title. Instead I read a short article online, remember yoga teachers talking about mindfulness, and try to do a practice. I bring my mind to the present moment sensations. I watch myself from a more objective viewpoint. I see myself drinking tea, walking up the stairs, feeling sad, obsessing about a stressful event. I watch a thought arise and pass and suddenly feel a freedom and relief I haven’t felt in ages: I don’t need to be so caught up. But this is only fleeting, fading away mere moments later. After I stop practising I’m right back to rumination. I know that if I could continue this mindfulness it would help but have no idea how to make it stick. It feels like I opened a doorway to a vast beautiful view that closed again in the blink of an eye. I have no idea what the key is to get the door open again, or to keep it open.
In each of these scenes, I felt like I had started school without books, anything to write with, or language to communicate with others. Without a framework and map, I got lost at every turn.
//
Once I got my head above water from the period of depression, anxiety, and burnout, I had a moment of insight. I realised that I needed to find some way of working with the mind. It was suddenly clear that my mind was turning an objectively good life situation into something miserable. I felt like I was stuck playing a cursed game that I had invented; I was trapped in a prison of my own creation. Something in how I was relating to experiences wasn’t working. I knew I needed something that would help me learn from these experiences.
A friend happened to give me a copy of the book The Mind Illuminated and I began practising consistently. I moved up and down the stages of The Elephant Path. The guidance I received in that book, combined with a few chats with more experienced practitioners, brought the practice to life. As I sat, I felt more calm and clear. I learned how my mind could so easily shift into criticism and place blame on myself, or feel responsible for things I couldn’t control, such as a moment of distraction. I saw, moment-by-moment, how my mind constructed this prison.
One morning a few months later I’m sitting on a cushion, this time on parquet flooring. I observe the sensations of the body and the breath. I watch thoughts about my unfinished thesis chapter, what to cook for dinner, an idea for an artwork. There’s a gentle sense of calm and comfort. The bell goes off after 45 minutes and I open my eyes to a soft light angled in through the apartment window. I take a moment to appreciate the warmth of the rays in the cool air. I realise that I’m just…fine. It’s another day and my mind isn’t a bad place to be.
Over the months that followed, I knew that I’d never experience the same difficulty with anxiety and depression. Each day, each week, I noticed the patterns of the mind and saw how intention and attention shaped my world.
//
Looking back, it became clear that I was lucky to find a foundational practice that helped make meditation not only function, but also to feel good. The Buddha said that practice should be “good at the beginning, good in the middle, good at the end.” That on its own is a vast beautiful view and a doorway worth opening.
I’m delighted to go back to my roots and to bring this practice to life through a full-day of exploration on the 8th of March. Come join me : )
This practice uses the breath in the whole body as a technique to lead to completely staying with the meditation object. In the Stages of Samatha, the transition from Stage 5 to Stage 6 is accomplished through bringing more curiosity (intensifying) until there is an increase in sensory clarity. This then allows for *complete staying* with the meditation object, where there is exclusive attention that no longer scatters or alternates to distractions. Here we use the whole body as the meditation object and then notice the subtle level of sensation, then opening to noticing the breath through the whole body. This leads to a quality of engagement and interest where the body is seen as rich and complex, often becoming a cloud of sensation or waves of energy rather than something solid and fixed. Practising at this level cultivates more calm and clarity than is commonly though possible — the mind becomes both more at ease and brighter than in typical conscious experience.
Through meditation practice, we can make the body a comfortable place to be, relating to the body in such a way that the body feels like home, no matter where we are. Even when there is pain, discomfort, or tiredness, the body can be a place to rest and settle. This practice explores using whole body awareness as the meditation object. This whole body awareness includes all of the sensations of the body, as well as tuning into the overall texture or felt sense of the body space that can be rich, complex, murky, and have a more-than-words quality. Use whole body awareness as your practice of calm abiding, or use this as a support to insight, open awareness, or imaginal practice. By opening to the whole body and resting here, you can gradually cultivate a sense of settling, ease, and okness — deeply shifting the state of the body towards rest and nervous system regulation, while also shifting the relationship with the body such that whatever arises can be held in awareness with equanimity.
Effort is a key aspect of meditation practice. Too much effort and the practice becomes tight and frustrating; too little effort and practice becomes slack and directionless. Progress, especially in calm abiding (śamatha) practice, is greatly aided by finding the right balance. In the Elephant Path, this is done through phases of intensifying, where more curiosity is brought in and the meditation object is engaged with more and more, then phases where the practice becomes about easing up until a balance is reached. This practice explores alternating between strong effort and ease, gradually settling into an eased up effort that is both calm and clear. The possibility of continued practice is effortless effort — where the mind stays with the meditation object just through the slightest intention and everything arises and ceases brightly and clearly, without any doing or paying attention whatsoever.
Rest, while under-appreciated in our culture, is an essential part of being human. When we rest, we recover resources and capacity that allows us bring goodness forward. Well-rested, we show up with presence, patience, and kindness. This practice explores this intention and how we can practice towards rest, gradually doing less and less, resting more and more into our deepest nature. Beginning with setting a Presence Anchor and finding a sense of grounding, you will then use the breath as a tool to allow the mind to gradually calm and settle. The breath then becomes a tool to rest more deeply into the body, continuously releasing into this embodied presence. Finally, you rest as awareness — without doing anything, without meditating at all, you can rest in complete effortlessness. Rest as this awareness which is totally eased up yet brightly knowing.
Meditation presents the opportunity to cultivate both calm and clarity at the same time. This leads to a quality of mind that is, compared to ordinary states of mind, more alert while also being more relaxed. This is a state of deep resource. It allows for nervous system regulation and being connected and engaged. From this collectedness of mind, craving and aversion arises much less intensely. In this practice you will use the sensations of the breath at the belly as a way to ground and settle, allowing experience to simplify. Then you can bring in the practice of focusing on the inhale to bring more energy, drawing upwards; while using the exhale to relax and settle, drawing energy downwards.
Attunement is picking up on the relational field so that you have an embodied felt sense of what is going on for you, both individually and collectively. It’s about openness and acceptance of another. It’s seeing and hearing the other person, just as they are, without trying to change them. It’s much easier for me be kind and compassionate when I have a sense of what someone else is feeling – this is when I can really understand what they are going through and connect with their suffering, regardless of whether there’s anything I can do about it. By attuning to another, I am meeting the other person’s need for contact, while also allowing my own need for contact to be fulfilled.
For me, I’ve found difficulty with self-attunement, that is, knowing what I’m feeling. Sometimes this is not knowing I’m dysregulated until after the fact. Other times it’s letting frustration or anger build up without being clear about what factors are contributing to it. Sometimes it just takes me some time to realise I’m sad. I also sometimes have had trouble picking up on other people’s emotions, especially if they aren’t communicated explicitly. I just find it hard at times to know whether someone’s body language and slight change in affect means they want something or want to be left alone. The practice of attuned noting has been a great help.
Relationships require attunement. When we are spending time with others, and especially if we are close to someone or spend a lot of time with someone, we pick up on how the other person is feeling and base our actions on that, at least to some degree. The trouble arises if it isn’t so easy to know what the other person is feeling or if we ignore certain cues and signals. There’s three aspects to this: 1) I have my own feelings that I may be more-or-less consciously aware of. 2) I am expressing these feelings in some way. My feelings are influencing the relational field. 3) The person I am with picks up on the relational field.
For a lot of people, knowing your own feelings can be tricky. Feelings shift and change, and your awareness of them comes and goes. This influences what we express, and how skilfully our feelings are expressed in our words and actions. This then influences what the other person will pick up on.
It’s a relatable human experience to be told something about what you are doing and to only in that moment learn that you are feeling a certain way. For example, I didn’t know I was frustrated until my partner pointed out that I’m hunched over and making grrr sounds through gritted teeth while trying to fix a broken electronic device. The expression of feeling and emotion is always happening, even when unconscious.
Ideally, I would know what I’m feeling, I’d express it in skilful ways (appropriate to the situation), and people around me would pick up on this and in turn respond appropriately. This clearly isn’t always the case. It is also an area that can get more and more attuned and refined.
Noting Feeling States Meditation
We can practise noting “feeling states” in order to be more consciously aware of what is arising and to be able to put into language the present moment experience so that it can be picked up on by others.
In this practice the term “feeling state” covers emotion (anger, sadness, joy), mind states (boredom, curiosity), and also the sensory experience in the body that I have that co-arises with emotion or mind states (when feeling anger I feel warm in the face and tension in my arms and hands, or when I notice a mind state of curiosity there’s a lightness in the chest and head). The emotion, mind state, or sensation are all equally valid doorways to knowing what is present for you in that moment.
Importantly this practice held within a container that is agreed upon and made explicit. There’s a set time for the practice and the intention is clear. Try to ensure that the method is understood. This means that it can become a space where there is an appropriate level of intimacy and vulnerability. The goal here is to create a space for simply connecting with how things are right now. It’s not about complaining, or trauma dumping, or oversharing. If it starts to lean towards stories, blame, or trying to understand why a feeling is present, be cautious. Acknowledge what is present on the level of the feeling state (the sensations and emotions are something that you can agree is the present moment experience) – try to bring it back to what is present and how this feels in the body.
This is a practice of out loud labelling, with one person noting their present moment feeling tone and the other person attuning to what they are saying and feeling.
The practice is straightforward once you get the hang of it. Here are the dot point steps:
Instructions for Noting Feeling States – Dyad Practice
Create a container
Find a space that is calm and quiet enough that you can do this without interruption. It helps to face each other, or at least be able to see each other. You might like to sit in a different location from regular activities.
Make sure you both know enough about the practice intention and structure to feel enough safety to proceed, and discuss if there is some hesitation or apprehension. Acknowledge these feelings.
Set an intention together. Something brief tends to work, such as “to find connection”, or “to explore attunement together”, or “to know how we are both feeling right now”.
Decide on a length of time to practice for and the steps to take. Set a timer if that’s helpful. Choose who will note first.
Time in silence – 1 minute
Take some time in silence, optionally with eyes closed. Connect with your internal experience. Notice what is present for you. Allow whatever is there to be there, without exclusion. You may notice physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, and stories or parts of the mind.
Noting and Attuning – 2 minutes each
The noter begins labelling their present moment feeling tone experience out loud (eyes can be open or closed). Aim for a steady pace, around 5 seconds per label tends to work well. You might say things such as: “calm”, “bored”, “agitated”, “happy”, “love”, “anxious”, “humour”, “tender”, “vulnerable”, “frustrated”, “stressed”, “excited”, “joyful”, “murky” etc. There’s always a pressure release option – you can say “don’t know” or “unclear” or “pass” or simply be silent.
While the noter is saying this out loud, the attuner listens and watches, holding space for the noter and connecting with what they are saying and feeling. Tune in to the noter’s tone, rhythm, breath, and subtle facial expressions. The attuner might notice correlations, or they might even intuit what feeling state is arising (there might also be guesses that don’t match up). Notice how it feels to attune and if there is a sense of alignment or misalignment. Listen with presence and allow whatever is taking place to unfold.
Check in and debrief – 3 minutes
Take some time to debrief and talk through the experience. How was that for you? What did you notice? What was challenging? What came more easily? What helped you engage with the practice?
Conclude the practice. Take turns to speak about how you are feeling now, and if there’s anything you need, or some way you will move forward from here.
Extra Tips
The time durations here are just suggestions. Start with something short that is easy to commit to as a low-cost experiment. You can even spend just one minute on each phase.
When noting these feeling states, there’s a few interesting things that occur.
You might find that the states change more rapidly than you expect. This happens because when paying attention to the feeling state it brings more clarity to the emotion and sensation, leading to identifying more complexity and richness, as well as a faster rate of change than you may have previously noted. By saying the label out loud, you are also palpating the feeling state, meaning that you are giving it a little massage that makes it change or shift in some way. The degree of equanimity and acceptance also contributes to this, allowing those present moment states to be there without any need to change them allows them to shift more rapidly. Acceptance leads to change.
The states that you notice might vary wildly, even moment to moment. You might be noting “humour” and then the next second “anger” or “sadness”. There might be “strength” and then shortly after “feeling small”. You might also find it helpful to label things like “thinking”, “story”, “belief”, “remembering”, “planning”, “fantasising”.
There are also a range of labels that are worth familiarising yourself with as they help when you aren’t quite clear on what is there, labels like “something”, “blank”, “vague”, “murky”, “unsure”, “don’t know”. You might also notice that the feeling is changing rapidly, in which case acknowledging this might help, such as “changing”, “shifting”, “flowing”, or “feeling”.
It is normal to find it challenging at first to locate the feeling tone and to note continuously. It’s perfectly fine to say you don’t know or to label “blank”. It might take some time just noting blank before you discover a distinct feeling tone. No problem. The key here is to tune in to what is present for you — the truth of your present moment experience is whatever you are aware of, even if that’s nothing distinct!
For me this has been a high value practice. There have been plenty of times I’ve felt like I didn’t want to do it before we started, but I don’t remember a single time when I didn’t feel glad to have done it afterwards.
Find a friend and try it out – see for yourself if this is valuable. If you are curious and want to try it out in a welcoming space, you can come along to Sit For A Bit, or get in touch with me.
