A Mindfulness Practice for Sitting in Our Emotions with New Awareness

Teacher wisdom from Sharzon Salzberg:

Mindfulness is a great tool of meditation.

It helps us create more awareness. One such way to increase your awareness is to look for the add-on's. Start to ask yourself: Whatever is happening in the moment, what am I adding on to it?

Projection into an unchanging future is going to be dire. It's bad enough that we are dealing with whatever challenge is in front of us, but on top of that we have all this kind of future speculation, or we've added it. We're trying to deal with it all at once, and we feel defeated. We feel overcome from the beginning.

What are we adding to the painful experience? Can we let go? Can we relinquish the add-on, the projection, even the interpretation, and come back to what we are actually experiencing in this moment? If we can do that, say with a painful emotion, we can often see into the heart of it, and this is the birth of insight or wisdom.

Learn more daily practices and wisdom for lasting inner peace in Sharon's Commune course, Compassionate Resilience, and reconnect to the wellspring of love and strength that lies deep within you. Her 7-day course brings together ALL of her experience teaching about topics like real love, happiness, and the power of meditation in one 7-day course to teach you how to have greater self-awareness, stronger relationships, and lasting inner peace and well-being in your life.

Try Sharon's Compassionate Resilience course today for free!

Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times Best selling author and teacher of Buddhist meditation practices in the West. In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. Her emphasis is on vipassanā (insight) and mettā (loving-kindness) methods, and has been leading meditation retreats around the world for over three decades. Her books include Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (1995), A Heart as Wide as the World (1999), Real Happiness - The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program (2010), which reached The New York Times Best Seller list, and the follow-up Real Happiness at Work (2013). In 1999, Sharon was honored by the New York Open Center for her "Outstanding Contribution to the Mindfulness of the West."