There’s a common meditation instruction for working with challenging emotions: “focus on the physical sensations of the emotion without trying to change them.” The idea is to pay close attention to the raw feelings (e.g. sadness, anxiety), rather than the mental stories around them—whether they’re good or bad, why why they arose, or what they say about you. Over time I have shifted my view from thinking (1) this is the best instruction ever, to (2) this is bad because it’s a form ...
