AudioDharma logo AudioDharma

Freely offered by Insight Meditation Center
Freely offered by IMC

Practice Note: Feeling and Thinking

Gil Fronsdal
By: Gil Fronsdal

There’s a time for thinking, and a time for feeling. And mindfulness meditation has a lot more to do with feeling that it has to do with thinking. An analogy I like is that of a pyramid. A pyramid is stable if it sits on its base. But if you turn it upside down, and have it sit on its pointy top, it’s going to be pretty unstable. If we can be centered and grounded in our body, we have the stability that helps us to feel things more fully. The feelings and emotions we have are like the middle section of the pyramid. And the top section is our thinking. If we are present in our body, we are not interfering so much; we have room to feel, to let things unfold, to unwind, to grow and evolve. But if we spend too much time thinking, it’s like not allowing some deeper work, which is more stable, more enduring and transformative. The more we think, the more disconnected we are from what is intimate and grounded. If your energy is more in your thinking mind, see if you can switch that over to be in the feeling body. If you have to think, think about how to be present in your body.

Recorded: Wednesday, June 28, 2017 at Insight Meditation Center
Duration: 05:35

These talks are freely available.
Please help support this service with a tax-deductible donation.

% buffered 00:00
Download

00:00

00:00