In today’s meditation I was asked to recall and experience of a strong negative emotion. I chose my experience of being afraid earlier this week. I have some general anxiety about driving, and last Sunday I was going to have to drive on the highway about an hour north for a class. Conditions were expected to be icy, dark and foggy. I was too anxious to fall asleep on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning I was testy with my partner when he tried to make conversation in the morning.
While this wasn’t a particularly strong emotion for me, it was the best I could recall.
The meditation has something to do with accepting your emotions–inviting them in and feeling them fully. I think the idea would be that when you are in the moment feeling these emotions, you would connect with them and let them in, allowing them to serve their purpose and dissipate when done. This makes sense to me, and I think I partially did that in this case.
Emotions have purposes, and the purpose of fear, in this case anyway, was to draw attention to the fearful thing, so that I could do what was necessary for the fearful thing not to hurt me. On Saturday night, I was feeling too worried and anxious to sleep, and I noticed that my thoughts were spinning and not going anywhere. I took a moment to acknowledge that I was feeling afraid, and considered how I could use this emotion to improve my chances on the road the next day.
I thought about my drive, identified that the on-ramp near my house would be particularly tricky. It would be icy because it is onto an overpass, it has a sharp curve, and it is uphill, which makes acceleration hard, particularly in icy conditions. I considered another highway entrance, but that wasn’t practical, so I told myself that I would take the turn slowly, and that I had plenty of time to merge in this particular on-ramp, so I should allow myself to slowly come up to speed. This was a constructive set of thoughts and did quiet my mind somewhat. I think if I had systematically thought about my route, and further accepted that the class was important to me so I was going to do the drive, I may have gotten to sleep that much faster.