Emotions are essential to being human, yet we often aren’t taught emotional literacy or provided models for feeling into and skilfully respond to our emotions. This practice works through different levels of experience — sensations, mind states, and emotions — in order to understand internal experience. Beginning with sensations, you will notice where there is body sensation in terms of warmth, coolness, pressure, texture, tingling, or vibration. Then you will look at mind states: boredom, curiosity, focus, clarity, dullness, sleepiness, etc. You’ll then tune into emotions and see where hearing the words of certain emotions resonates with you — feeling into anger, sadness, happiness, calm, strength, or fear, and the many variations and flavours of these feeling states.
Tag: guided meditation
Liberating Positive Emotions
Note: This practice invites you to bring up positive emotions, which can at times also have the effect of bringing up anything that is not that emotion. Be gentle and cautious.
Positive emotions, when freed, become boundless and unconditional. In meditation practice, we can intentionally bring to mind love, compassion, joy, peacefulness, trust, gratitude, kindness, friendliness, humour etc. by intentionally recalling a situation when we felt that way. Through feeling into the felt experience of that emotion, we can notice that the sensations felt in the body, such as warmth, openness, uplifting, groundedness, or connection, don’t have a solid, inherent existence but rather are insubstantial and changing. We can also sense that the self that feels the emotion is insubstantial. The emotion is vividly expressing, without needing to have a solid core, or a separately existing self that is feeling it. This frees up the emotion to be fully expressed and fully felt. The emotions then transform and become boundless and unconditional — compassion for the suffering of all beings, including yourself equally; boundless love for all others; or a deep gratitude for being able to be part of this complex dance of life.
Liberating Emotions (Guided Meditation)
Note: this practice involves intentionally working with challenging emotions. If you are currently not feeling grounded and resourced, you may want to choose a different meditation. If at any point during this practice you feel overwhelmed or disconnected from experience, open your eyes, come out of the meditation, and do something that you find grounding such as gentle movement, walking, eating, or resting.
When related to in skilful ways, all emotions become part of the practice. Here you are asked to bring to mind a challenging emotion of medium intensity (around 5 out of 10), such as frustration, tiredness, sadness, anger, or shame. You can recall a situation or memory when this emotion was activated, using the visualisation in order to bring the experience forward more clearly. You are then invited to look closely at the sensations and thoughts associated with the emotion, seeing them as insubstantial. After searching, you’ll find that there is no substantial, permanent core of the emotion that is inherently existing. You can also search for the self that feels the emotion, also coming to the conclusion that this is ultimately unfindable. In this forge of emptiness, the emotion may then shift and transform, allowing anger to shift into strength, sadness into tenderness, frustration into clarity, tiredness into deep rest, and shame into integrity.
Releasing Clinging
When we experience painful sensation, we generally resist it, want it to change, or otherwise have some form of craving and aversion. This is wanting things to be different from how they are, either by trying to get something better, or by trying to get rid of what is present. The way of non-clinging releases this resistance. You can notice the sense of clinging through detecting contraction, stuckness, or resistance in the body, then you can release this by opening, softening, and allowing. Be present with this experience exactly as it is. This will open up a different way of being, with more lightness, openness, and freedom. Note that this is equanimity in regards to the primary experience in the moment, which still allows for taking action as appropriate to the situation.
Beholding Awareness (Guided Meditation)
In becoming aware of the sense of self, it greatly helps to have a practice that enables shifting out of habitual modes into a more open and spacious awareness. One key to this is noticing the awareness, rather than objects of awareness, which creates a shift towards allowing. The self is known by this awareness (as well as body sensations, thoughts, and emotions). This beholding awareness can know the self as it arises and passes, as the sense of solidity increases and decreases. This also helps us tap into the sense of completeness of being awareness — where there is nothing missing and no self-deficiency.
This practice begins with belly breathing while counting the length of inhales and exhales, moving from equal duration, to longer exhales. This is a powerful practice for quickly calming and grounding.
The Body Knows Itself
This practice weaves together two threads: relaxing and calming the body by gently bringing attention to the whole body space; and knowing the body from the body. Awareness is effortlessly already aware, without you doing anything or needing to make awareness happen. So too does the body know itself — the body space is filled with bright, clear awareness. In order to get a sense of this, you allow the body and mind to settle through calming and collecting, then tune in to how it feels to inhabit the body, from the body. Allow awareness to drop down into the body space and behold itself.
Sit With Dignity (Guided Meditation)
Sit upright, with care and respect. Sit with dignity. When you sit in meditation practice, you dignify yourself, the community, and the practice. Recognising that each passing moment is constantly changing, you open yourself to the uniqueness of each experience. This body, this breath. The body calms and eases into comfort and stability. As you sit, poised and balanced, you begin to notice this palpable sense of presence, a quality of knowing awareness that is immovable, imperturbable, and fully awake to each passing moment.
In-Person Events
Upcoming events in Sydney!
Day of Practice
Sunday 5 October 2025, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney
The opportunity to go on retreat is special. To have the time and space to focus on practice is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately, many of us don’t get this opportunity very often, so we try to carve out bits of time that allow us to do this in the midst of a busy life. The Day of Practice is an opportunity to practise deeply in the city, without leaving our lives.
You can look at this as a detox from communications and electronics, or a nervous system reset. It can be a deep exhale and shift towards relaxation. It also fosters time to go deeper in practice and explore what is meaningful to you about meditation and the path. The day becomes a container to hold your practice and assist cultivating different states of mind.
Learn more here and register with the Buddhist Library.
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Śamatha – Practices for Deep Nervous System Resourcing
Tuesday 14 October 2025, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney
Śamatha (calm abiding) is a meditation practice that leads to degrees of samādhi (collectedness and unification of mind and body). This calming is a powerful resource for regulating and balancing the nervous system. Beyond simply relaxing, these practices open up the possibility of deep states of effortlessness and equanimity – which can be directly linked to states of deep nervous system regulation.
Attuning to the state of the body and mind in the present moment provides clues as to how to navigate both meditation and daily life in a way that leads to more grounding, settling, and the state of energised calm that is both a resource in itself and sets the stage for freeing insight to arise.
This session will include lecture, guided meditation, and discussion to provide a first hand experience of these practices. All levels of experience are welcome. If you are interested in a deeper exploration.
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Vipassanā – Attuning to the Felt Sense of Freedom
Tuesday 21 October 2025, 7:00 – 8:30 pm
Buddhist Library, Camperdown, Sydney
Vipassanā (insight) is the practice of Buddhist meditation that allows for seeing through obscurations to recognise our deepest nature. But how do you know that your insight practice is moving forwards?
As insight practice deepens, there is a felt reduction of clinging and suffering in the moment. You can track this with an awareness of the body and by tuning in to the sense of lightness and openness that is revealed when habitual tendencies relax. We will explore ways of tracking this felt sense of lightness and noticing the fading of perception that reveals deep insights about the fabrication of experience.
This session will include lecture, guided meditation, and discussion to provide a first hand experience of these practices. All levels of experience are welcome, however previous meditation experience is recommended to get benefit from these teachings.
If you are interested in a deeper exploration, Kynan is leading a 10-day retreat starting October 24.
Everything Within Awareness (Guided Meditation)
Awareness is knowing, spacious, and welcoming. Awareness allows everything; rejects nothing. Awareness effortlessly holds all experiences within its tender embrace. Here I offer a practice of somatically grounding through movement and breathing, relaxing and stabilising whole body awareness, and then pointing out this awareness that is already here, already knowing. Allow the instructions to be poured in. Notice any shifts that occur in response. Rest as awareness.
Equanimity – Open, Soften, Allow (Guided Meditation)
Equanimity is being with experience without the push and pull of craving and aversion, without trying to change how things are. To practice equanimity you can shift into a mode of receptive awareness, tuning in to what is present and cultivating a relationship of being with. The phrase “open, soften, allow” can be particularly helpful here as a way to encourage a gentle welcoming of all experiences. Here there is an emphasis on whole body awareness as a way to attune to the present moment that is embodied and direct.
This practice is from the Tending the Fire Retreat in September 2025.