“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Feel the breath. Not just as sensation, but as something arising out of everything else. Lungs. Air. The trees.
This breath leans on all the breaths before it. Thousands upon thousands.
The feeling of sitting. A sound from outside. The mood you’re in. Each one held in a web of causes and conditions. The specifics don’t matter. Feel the web.
Then watch for the next thought. Where did it come from? You didn’t decide to think it. Leave it as it is. It belongs too.
Open out. Spacious, at ease. Look past the separate things.
What if this moment is made in relationship with everything?
When you open your eyes, notice how things appear.
The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
— Sengcan, Hsin Hsin Ming
Sound and silence. Calm and agitation. Pain, and what is not pain.
Each one known only against the other.
For a while, try having no preferences. No likes, no dislikes. Just being.
Feel what’s here, murky and hard to name. Ask, can I be with this?
Notice the mind wanting stillness, pushing restlessness away. Soften around the wanting.
Then relax the distinction itself. Put it down, like a heavy bag.
No self. No other. All just happening.
When you open the eyes, look for where the meditation ends.
A chariot cannot be said to be different from its parts; it is not identical with the parts, nor does it possess the parts.
– Chandrakirti, Madhyamakāvatāra 6.151
Look for the self the way you’d look for the chariot.
First, call it up. Recall something from today and notice where you held on – this is me, this is mine. Or picture yourself sitting across from you, as in a mirror. Or imagine someone pointing at you and shouting, thief! Something rises to defend. What is it protecting?
Notice how it feels. Continuous. Solid. Standing on its own.
If a self like that were real, you could find it. So search.
Start with sound. Is the bird song you? The hum of the fridge? Then the body: pressure, warmth, the texture of your clothes, the tightness in the shoulder. Then feeling. Call up a little joy, a little sadness. If you were a feeling, which one would you be? Then thought, and the narrator, and whoever the narrator is talking to.
Is there anywhere else to look?
Take each layer slowly, until you’re certain.
Where the self appeared to be, a spaciousness. Rest there.
The self comes back, like a rainbow. Vividly appearing.
Whatever is not yours, let go of it. Your letting go of it will lead to your welfare and happiness for a long time.
– Alagaddūpama Sutta, MN 22
Not me. Not mine. Uncontrollable.
Take up a lens that sees all experience as not-self.
Start with sound. Sounds are just happening – you don’t get much say in them. Listen to the whole soundscape at once, and touch it with the phrase, lightly, like brushing it with a feather.
Then the breath. If you were the breath, which breath would you be? This one? The next one?
Then feeling, the texture of what is felt. Then thought. You didn’t decide for the next thought to be there. It comes from everywhere.
Then turn toward the one meditating. The thinker, the observer, the one sensing. Where is that? How do you actually experience it?
A sunset. Vividly appearing, and you can’t hold onto it. Unhook, and notice what this way of looking does.
There is still knowing, bright and clear. Open the eyes, and notice what things look like now.
No one lives his life. Disguised since childhood, haphazardly assembled from voices and fears and little pleasures, we come of age as masks. Our true face never speaks.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Before you sit, grab a pen and write down your qualities and roles. Kind, caring, prickly, pedantic. Teacher, parent, neighbour. The ones you have applied to yourself, and the ones that have been applied to you. Then place the list to the side.
Settle. Let the whole body hang off the skeleton, filled with bright awareness. Tune into the gaps, the little space between the sensations, between the thoughts, between the feelings.
What is your sense of self right now? Maybe a thought. Maybe a density, a contraction. Maybe an image of yourself meditating.
Glance at the list. Are you being those things right now? Are you being caring? Are you being a friend?
They vividly appear. Yet there’s no core you can find that really is that.
Unhook. Put it to the side, and notice what happens.
A wooden chair on a bonfire. Flames lap at the frame, a leg falls into the ash, then the whole frame collapses. At what point is it no longer a chair?
Settle first. Let the body be heavy and relaxed, filled with bright awareness. Then bring forward your usual sense of self. Where do you locate it? Behind the eyes, in the heart, somewhere just above the body?
Now, lightly, as an experiment, let your right leg vanish into open space and be replaced by a whole new one. Then the left. The arms. The heart. An eye of a different colour. Half the brain, then all of it. Are you still you?
Look at the screen. Faces, a room, someone talking. Now find one small patch of it and see only colour. Points of light. The mind has to reach in to make those points into a person. Tune into that reaching, and the screen starts to thin. Paper thin.
Settle first. Let the body be heavy and relaxed, filled with bright awareness, until the whole body is held at once. Then notice how things appear now. Whatever you arrived carrying may have a little more room around it. Nothing was removed. It is being built differently.
Try seeing the body as empty. Not as an idea – as a way of perceiving. Notice what happens when the word itself arrives.
Whenever there is belief that things are real, desire and hatred are generated. Without that belief no defilements can occur. And when this is completely understood, all views and afflictions dissolve.
– Nāgārjuna, Yuktiṣaṣṭikā (translated by Rob Burbea)
Something in you may lean towards this. Something else may pull back. Fear, excitement, a voice saying this is too big to begin. Let each of them be here. How do you see yourself, standing in relation to this?
Then take the view, lightly, as an experiment. Everything you are experiencing lacks inherent existence. Vividly appearing, yet insubstantial. Points of sensation, glued by the mind into a self and a world.
In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized.
— Bāhiya Sutta (Udāna 1.10), translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Nothing added, nothing pushed away. When a sound arrives, note it lightly: hear. Not the car or the voice, just the act of hearing, acknowledged and let go as the next sound comes. With eyes open or closed, see. Light, darkness, colour, shape. Then the body — the contact where you are held up, the hands, the breath. Feel.
Then turn inward and find the same three. A felt sense in the chest, an emotion hard to name: feel in. Rest attention where thoughts seem to happen and wait, as if in the cinema of the mind. A picture of dinner arrives. A voice says you have to cook something. See in, hear in. If you get caught up, replay the last moment. Was it an image, a sound, or a feeling that drew you in?
Is there anything you know that did not come through the senses?
Just seeing, hearing, and feeling, with no you in it. Then open your eyes, and keep looking this way.
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.
A motorbike starts up in the street. You hear it, and then it is gone. You were never going to hold onto it — you couldn’t have, even if you’d tried.
Settle, and let the mind fall open. Now listen. Traffic, a bird, the hum of an appliance. Let awareness grow until it is big enough to hold all of it, then listen for the silence — in the gaps between sounds, underneath a sound while it is still going. Sounds arise out of that silence and fall back into it. Impressions in awareness.
We start with sound because sound is the easy case. Widen from there. Visual forms, reflections on the surface of a lake. The body sitting and breathing, every sensation arising inside an awareness bigger than the body. The feeling of this moment, whatever tone it has. Thoughts, each with its location and shape, and a glimmer of stillness behind them that they return to.
Then look for your sense of self. It may be subtle, barely more than a feeling that this is you. It may be coarse — craving, aversion, thoroughly identified. Either way it is sensation, feeling, and thought glued together with a label stuck on it. Me. That is just happening too. You do not need to grab any of it. You do not need to hold it still.
Rest as the awareness it all happens in. Then open your eyes, look around the room, and carry the view off the cushion.
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.
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.
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.
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 : )
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
