Tag: guided meditation

Meditation Workshop: Liberating Feeling

~ A full-day Dharma Deep Dive ~

Event details

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.

Caring, Even for This

What if each meditation practice you did was an act of care? What if, no matter what came up, there was a tender, gentle presence? Can you care for aversion just as you care for love?

Practising care, all in your field are touched by this loving presence.

This caring presence itself turns towards experience. It greets the experience warmly and tenderly, like seeing an old friend, or as candlelight gently illuminates.

All is welcome — even bracing or resistance. Trying to control and manage experience is just what we do. Rather than a problem to be rid of, this too wants care and love. Ask “can I be with this?”

In difficult moments bring in the phrase: “may I hold this lightly.” You can also imagine yourself placing the difficulty next to you so you are sitting next to it. When called for, imagine the Buddha or Quan Yin as a figure of loving presence — giving you the capacity to be with and hold this tenderly.

Archetypes of Self and Path

There is always an image at work in how we hold ourselves – running below the surface, shaping what we can do, what we can’t, what we even let ourselves want. This practice brings some of that into the light by trying on other images, one at a time, and noticing what stirs.

Settle. Let the mind rest into the whole of the body – steady, collected, unhurried. Tune into the texture and tonality of how you are right now. Then, one at a time, drop into each archetype like trying on a new coat in a mirror. Amplify it. Let it move into the body. Notice what resonates. Notice where something in you resists. Notice what surfaces. Each movement is its own kind of discovery.

The disciple – in reverential study of a tradition.
The artist – endlessly making, combining, evoking.
The outsider – inhabiting the in-betweens and the undercommons, outside of systems, speaking truth to power.

Each brings a quality of presence. Try them on. See what they make of you.

For further reflection, see Rob Burbea’s talk In Love with the Way.

Desire that Builds Worlds

There’s a kind of wanting that moves underneath the everyday wants. It flows like an underground river. This is deeper than the wanting that has an object – the next thing, the better version, the destination. A current. A yearning that animates us. Try as we might, it can’t be ignored.

To be human is to want. To want is, at times, to suffer – to take on the big creative project, to welcome another into the family, to move toward what we love knowing it may also break us. Many traditions offer ways out of this. This meditation moves the other direction: into desire, and then through it.

The practice has three movements.

First, set aside what you’ve been told about desire – that it’s the cause of suffering, that it’s un-spiritual, that it should be renounced. Let those teachings rest for the duration of this sit. Trust that desire is holding something important for you.

Second, find the wanting in your body. Let a particular desire come into focus, whatever it is. Then go further: under the surface want, what’s the deeper need? Under the need, what’s the yearning at the very core?

Third, when you’ve arrived at something true, open to it. Receive it in your whole body. Let it move through you as a current rather than as an idea or a problem to solve.

What’s discovered, met this way, is that the yearning was never really about lack. The quality we were reaching for is already here, already moving through us. The yearning reaches for itself.

The practice comes from Rob Burbea, whose talk Opening to the Current of Desire goes further into the territory.

Evoking the Imaginal Body

The body is already image, in the sense that our mind is always creating the sense of the body, holding a way of looking at the body that renders it a certain way. In this practice we intentionally bring in different images to notice what happens in the body space. Sitting as a mountain, as empty space, as a vast sky, or wrapped head to toe in fine cloth — each of these does something to the felt sense of the body, shifts or alters it in some way, even just subtly. Then we open to letting an image form, becoming receptive to whatever might appear in the mind, trusting the image as having meaning. This all points to the insight that images are always occurring and that the way we relate to the body and to image is always intertwined.

Calm Abiding with Curiosity and Openness

This practice plays in the space between samatha and imaginal practice. The unifying quality here is curiosity. This allows calm abiding practice to develop by making the meditation object more interesting and therefore easier to stay with. Curiosity also is key for opening to the imaginal and welcoming in imaginal senses and figures. Through first stabilising in the body and calming the mind, we can then release into a sense of trust, dropping into other depths of experience. Openness then becomes a key to reveal emptiness — that things are not as solid as they might initially seem, but instead are open to interpretation and ways of being perceived.

Figures of Loving Presence

I stumbled into this practice when following a Tara Brach guided meditation. The instruction, distinct from other metta practices I’d done, was to bring forward the phrase “may I be held in Loving Presence”. Almost immediately I felt a sense of receiving love and compassion and of being held in a warm embrace. This feeling was accompanied by an image of my grandparents, Ah Ma and Ah Kong. I sensed that I was receiving this love from them, from this image, as a form of unconditional love. It was incredibly touching and nourishing — I felt deeply seen and known, cared for, and safe. By feeling into this image, I could receive in a different way, not solely coming from my own intention, but rather held in this whole field. Imaginal practice opens up the possibility of opening to these qualities in a deeply nourishing and healing way — allowing us to be held in Loving Presence. Here you will be invited to bring this phrase to mind and to allow any images that arise in response — people from your life like friends, family, partners; teachers of significant figures you have known; or mythical or iconic figures such as Quan Yin or the Buddha.

Image: wood carving of Kuan-yan (Guanyin) with Amitābha on its crown (c. 1025). Northern Song dynasty, China, Honolulu Museum of Arts.

Credit: By Haa900 – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7146040

Opening the Imaginal Felt Sense of the Body

Images are always at play in the way we feel our body and make sense of our experience. In meditation practice we can bring in different images as a way of cultivating different ways of looking — each image shifts our relation with experience, opening new ways of being. In this practice, you will sit like a mountain: imperturbable, solid, unmoving. Then you will open to whole body awareness, tuning in to the felt sense of the whole field of feeling. By being in relation with this field, you come to see it as insubstantial, shifting, and open — like patterns of light, or a lava lamp. Finally you can bring in the image of sitting as Buddha-nature — clear, pristine awareness expressed through your body.

The Nine Stages of Calm Abiding

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.

Meditation Workshop: Exploring Imaginal Practice

~ A full-day Dharma Deep Dive ~

Event details

9:00 – 5:00 pm AEDT (Sydney time)
Sunday 3 May 2026
Online via Zoom

Description

Why does practice come alive for some people and not for others? Often this has to do with the sense of the path itself. When practice is alive and full of fire, there is a rich sense of the possibility and vision of the teachings, and a sense of the capability of the practitioner. This is the guiding image of practice that can be sensed into, played with, and reignited through imaginal practice.

This workshop will open up possibilities of Imaginal Meditation Practice. More than just imagination or visualisation, this is the exploration of how images (seen, felt, heard, and known in the mind) arise in meditation. When we move towards images rather than passing them off as distractions, spontaneous experiences of meaning and depth arise. Opening to the imaginal also opens to resource and creativity, even becoming a source for novel ideas and drawing connections that can be taken into art, work, and relationships.

We begin our exploration by tuning into the felt sense of the body and then bringing in different images of the body that can shift perception. Sitting as a mountain brings grounding and stabilising, seeing the body as filled with light is often energising, or seeing all experiences as waves in an ocean of awareness opens up spaciousness. Practising with images reveals that experience is more fluid and constructed than we tend to assume. This also makes Imaginal Practice a way to open up insight and to understand emptiness.

The power of images comes from embodied experience — a kind of poetic perception. They reveal more than just the physical world or the mind, opening to unexpected resonance. These practices draw from the work of Rob Burbea, who taught extensively on extending insight meditation into other dimensions of experience to open more freedom and meaningfulness.

About this format

This workshop curriculum will be taught through a method of embodied experience delivered through guided meditations that point out key insights, supported by talks, Q&A, and group discussion. The day will include grounding, breathwork, and anchoring practices to support your exploration.

You are asked to participate by engaging in the practice during the session so that you get first-hand experience. You are also asked to bring your questions and practice experiences to the whole group and to your practice pod, as well as 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, you are not required to be in full silence. 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 consistent internet connection.

A background meditation practice is recommended. You do not need prior experience with imaginal practices or a strong capacity for detailed visual imagination. This workshop is geared primarily towards practitioners with an established practice, but open to those who sense possibility here. This work can open unexpected territory — please consider your own situation in terms of feeling grounded and stable. After registration you will receive further information and resources.

Pointing out the path through the mist

Imagine yourself atop a misty mountain, fog obscuring every direction. As you stand here, you know the terrain is complex — mountains and valleys, rivers and ravines. You gaze around and see only haze. Peaks rise over clouds, the way there shrouded in mystery.

“Wow, that’s some nice mist. Now mist that nice must be covering something pretty specky.”

Climbing a mountain in Liuzhou, from the series “Picture Book of Chinese Poems (Toshi gafu no uchi)” by Totoya Hokkei
Original public domain image from Art Institute of Chicago

You know that you aren’t on the highest peak, yet it was a long climb to get here. It took everything you had, for all of your life, to move higher, to do better. Hesitant to begin descending, you take off your bags. You get cosy where you are. Thoughts arise in pensive moments: “well, this isn’t so bad, I’ll just make the most of this” as you open a can of beans from your stash. You’ve become stuck in a good place. Then something calls to you. The possibility of higher peaks. More mountains to climb. To more deeply know yourself. To see what you are capable of. To experience the full range of freedom and meanginfulness.

When you go to take the next step you realise it must be downwards. Stepping down is awkward and your feet hurt when landing on uneven rocks. Trying anything from here is a tad uncomfortable. Whatever comes next challenges you and makes you question whether to stay or try for the next peak.

This is where a guide comes in handy: someone who’s been to a higher mountain can share tales of that place, the path to get there, and what the view looks like from the next peak.

To follow the guide you have to be willing to trust — to set off on a journey that first leads down the mountain, then hopefully up the next one. You commit to following the path long enough to really see if it leads to a higher mountain. Without momentum, you’ll take a few steps then turn back. A good guide instils trust and confidence that each step has its place in the whole journey.

Rediscovering the Joy of Being Taught

For a long time, I attended teachings but they somehow didn’t land. Even when talks were interesting and enjoyable, I sat thinking “this won’t change my meditation tomorrow.” Worse yet, techniques would get mixed and I’d find myself looking for landmarks that were off in the other direction entirely. Something changed in the past 18 months. I’ve attended retreats and workshops where the teachers were doing something genuinely different. I rediscovered the joy of being a student and having things to learn. I delighted in the voyage to get to the next peak.

One time I was learning a new framing of the practice of calm abiding. I was already very familiar with this practice from another set of teachings. I found the first few meditations challenging — I was grinding through, trying to make sense of it, comparing and contrasting to what I already practised, thinking I’d made a mistake to ever leave my cosy hilltop. I was homesick. Realising that this was a golden opportunity right in front of me, I gave in to the new instructions; I trusted the guide. Once I stopped resisting, I quickly landed in effortlessness — not through sitting a long time as I had been taught, but through following elegant, efficient moves. This felt experience of tranquility is now right there, just a few steps away.

Rather than learning from a book, I was being welcomed into a new landscape and invited to play there. I was given new frameworks and maps, but more importantly, I was told where to step so I could feel it in my body. I could sense, in real time, how my understanding shifted and opened up.

From this experience I realised I could do more to show others the views I’d seen myself.

The guide first meets you exactly where you are. Then they point out the way to the next vista. Each step unfolds into the next. When you really land in where you are, the questions begin to form of where to go next, the fog opens up with each step you take until you are steady on the path under your feet.

Meditation Workshops

Let’s unfold a path of meditation that feels alive in your bones. We can walk the trail to the next summit.

My new offering is Meditation Workshops — a full day deep dive. The ask is a full day of your time for a chance to explore the teachings, coming out with a view from the top of a new mountain, and a map to guide you back there.

Feb + Mar — The Elephant Path of Calm Abiding
Apr + May — Exploring Imaginal Practice
Jun + Jul — Meditation, Emotions, and the Nervous System
Aug + Sep — Cultivating Insight Through Ways of Looking
Oct + Nov — Insight into Emptiness and Nonduality
Dec + Jan — The Freedom of Spacious Awareness

These are on the first Sunday of the month, alternating in-person and online. There’ll be a curriculum with teachings on specific topics: instruction, guided meditation, q+a, practice pod chats, plus recordings and resources. Lots of chances to get support and guidance. Coalescence Sangha will also explore each theme in the lead-up to each workshop.

Okay that’s enough talking, let’s go explore some trails. I’ve got the map and I’ve packed plenty of snacks. Come join me and I’d love to show you some of the views that I’ve had the pleasure of exploring.

Spaciousness with Stability

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.

Easing Into Effortless Calm Abiding

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.

Calm Abiding with Whole Body Breathing

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.

At Home in the Whole Body (Meditation and Talk)

Guided meditation 30 minutes, talk 4 minutes.

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.

What do you yearn for?

In this practice you will be invited to consider deep questions about your practice, what you love about the path, what it is you yearn for, and what the next step you can take is. This can be a welcome refresh of intentions or provide an antidote for when practice feels stuck or lacking inspiration. Importantly, these answers don’t need to be final and also don’t come from a place of thinking, but instead are felt as arising from deeper in the being. In this practice you are guided to do this through a gradual relaxing and focusing, coming into the body and tuning into the felt-sense of the whole body space. The self-guidance compass is the sense of trust and confidence that the practice is unfolding in the way it needs to, being cared for appropriately and leading you in the direction you would like to go.

Balancing Effort

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.

Roomy Awareness

This is an equanimity practice accessed via resting as spacious awareness. While awareness is sometimes felt as spacious, it is other times felt as roomy, meaning that it has enough room to hold whatever arises. This roominess is about allowing whatever is present to be there, held within this field, rather than getting contracted or stuck with a particular sensation, thought, emotion, or sense of self. You can also take a universal view, tuning into the vast expanse of the universe that is all-encompassing, and noticing that the universe itself doesn’t reject anything — everything is accepted and welcomed in the universe. Eventually this acceptance allows everything to be like rain drops falling into the ocean, everything is held and melts into awareness.

The Many Facets of Rest

Rest for the benefit of all beings.

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.

Thinking as Flow of Sensation

Thinking is a gift. Thinking enables us to live in this world and to act compassionately. We don’t want to stop thinking. However, we do want to make sure that thinking doesn’t obscure, that it doesn’t get in the way of us practising and contacting deeper levels of experience. One way to do this is to try and calm the mind. Another is to see through the thoughts, so that even the act of thinking doesn’t get in the way. Here we tune in to the sensory aspect of thinking, examining how thoughts can be parsed into mental image, mental sound, and feeling. You’ll use imagination to kickstart this process and get familiar with how you experience thought. Then you can observe thought like watching a mental TV — observing what is happening without getting attached or treating it as fixed and solid. Finally you can rest as the knowing awareness in which thinking arises, tuning into the field of pre-thought knowing as the ground of being.

The Insubstantial Self (Guided Meditation)

The ordinary, lower case “s”, relative self is vividly appearing, yet empty. This emptiness is a lack of inherent, substantial, permanent existence. Seeing through the self means to notice that it isn’t fixed, solid, or permanent and doesn’t have to be where you are coming from. This practice investigates the ways in which you feel the self — body sensation, sense of location, thoughts, inner coach/critic, dialogue, or self image. Then you will look closely and see that there isn’t any substantiality to this, that the mind is gluing together sensations and treating them as solid. You’ll find that the self is ultimately unfindable. Once you reach a sense of conviction here there will be a lightness and relief.

You will also explore how the sensations, thoughts, and emotions don’t encapsulate your being and instead notice how when you put all these aside you are left with either a Presence or Absence, which points to a knowing awareness — an awareness that knows itself by itself, without having to be coming from the small self.

Note: these practices can be somewhat destabilising or lead to a sense of disconnection. If you are feeling under-resourced or unbalanced, please be cautious. If you find the practice leads to disconnection then re-ground yourself by noticing present moment sensations and doing normal activities. Reach out or speak with a qualified teacher if you experience continued difficulty.

There is a short talk at the beginning. Guided meditation begins at 3:15.

Sounds as Waves in an Ocean of Awareness

Take the view that all sounds are like waves emerging out of an ocean of awareness. Each sound is known the moment it arises, by this awareness — the sensation and the knowing are inseparable. By tuning in to this quality of sound, you can take the view that all sounds are washing over you, known as expressions of this spacious awareness. Then you will turn towards internal experience and see that thoughts, emotions, and the sense of self also all arise within spacious awareness. Seeing this allows all internal experiences to be there, held within this bright ocean of awareness. This leads to a sense of being deeply connected with everything that arises, fully allowing all of these expressions to be there, while not having to be the self that it is happening to. Instead, you can simply be the spacious ocean of awareness.

Balancing the Energy of the Mind

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.

Attuning to Emotions (Guided Meditation)

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.

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.