An Emotion Doesn't Have to Fill the Whole Room

There are moments when an emotion seems to become everything.

Anxiety arrives and suddenly the entire internal world feels anxious. Frustration appears and every thought seems to organize around it.

Something happens, the body responds, thought begins running…and before long, there doesn’t seem to be much distance between:

I am experiencing this

and

this is what I am right now.

I still have moments like that.

But years of meditation gradually showed me another possibility.

Something could be deeply present without necessarily becoming everything that was present.

“I am anxious”

Anxiety became one of the clearest places where I noticed this distinction.

For a long time, the natural language was:

I am anxious.

And sometimes that’s still exactly how it feels.

But as my awareness developed, I began recognizing more of what was happening around the anxiety.

There was the feeling itself. There were physical sensations. Breathing changed. Thought began interpreting what was happening.

Sometimes it started predicting what might happen next. The body responded to those thoughts. Then more thoughts arrived.

What initially felt like one solid experience was actually made up of several things participating together.

Eventually another description began feeling more accurate:

An anxious atmosphere is present.

The language didn’t make it disappear

This wasn’t a trick I used to talk myself out of feeling something.

Changing the sentence didn’t remove the anxiety. Sometimes it remained extremely uncomfortable.

The difference was relational.

If anxiety was something present within my internal environment, then I could remain interested in what it was actually doing.

Where could I feel it?

What was happening in my breathing?

What thoughts were joining it?

Was my body tightening?

Was the original feeling changing?

And perhaps most importantly…

was anxiety really the only thing there?

What else is here?

That question became surprisingly useful.

Not:

How do I get rid of this?

Just:

What else is here?

Maybe my chest was tight, but my hands were relaxed. Maybe thought was racing, but breathing could still be felt.

Maybe an uncomfortable emotional atmosphere was present while something quieter remained underneath it.

Sometimes I could even recognize stillness.

That initially seemed contradictory.

How could I be emotionally unsettled and still at the same time?

But I had already learned this lesson through energy.

The internal environment could contain more than one condition.

One thing being loud didn’t require everything else to disappear.

Thought was sometimes adding fuel

Meditation also helped me recognize something else.

The emotion and everything I thought about the emotion weren’t necessarily the same thing.

A feeling could arise. Then thought would arrive.

Why am I feeling this?

This shouldn’t be happening.

What if this gets worse?

Remember the last time this happened?

What does this mean?

Before long, I wasn’t only experiencing the original condition anymore.

I was experiencing the original condition plus everything my mind had constructed around it.

Sometimes recognizing that sequence changed things.

The feeling is here…and thought is now doing something with it.

I didn’t necessarily need to stop the thought.

Recognizing its participation was often enough to give me a little more room.

The body sometimes knew first

As my relationship with the body developed, I also began recognizing emotional changes physically.

Breathing shifted. The stomach tightened. The chest changed. Shoulders moved. A region became uncomfortable.

Sometimes my body seemed to register that the internal atmosphere was changing before I had consciously named what I was feeling.

That became useful.

If I could recognize a condition earlier, I didn’t always have to first encounter it once it had become overwhelming.

Not every time, of course.

Sometimes I still realize what’s happening well after I’m already in it.

But recognition has gradually moved closer to the beginning.

Give it the floor

More recently, I’ve developed another relationship with difficult internal atmospheres.

Instead of immediately trying to change them, sometimes I let them become completely recognizable.

I think of this as:

Give it the floor.

Fine… you’re here.

What are you?

What are you doing?

Where are you?

What happens if I don’t immediately resist you or follow you?

Sometimes something changes. Sometimes an atmosphere seems to move or release.

Sometimes I discover another condition underneath it.

And sometimes absolutely nothing dramatic happens.

It simply remains.

But even then, I usually know considerably more about what I’m experiencing than I did when I started.

This mattered much more outside meditation

It is relatively easy to explore an emotion while sitting quietly with your eyes closed.

Life is different.

Someone says something unexpected. A disagreement happens. Plans change. Something stressful occurs.

There isn’t always time to sit down and carefully examine the internal environment.

This is where years of repetition began becoming useful.

Sometimes I could recognize the shift while the situation was still happening.

Something has changed in me.

That didn’t guarantee I would respond perfectly. It still doesn’t.

But occasionally it created a small space between the emotional condition and what I did next.

And that space mattered.

I didn’t become less emotional

I think this distinction is important.

Meditation didn’t make me emotionally neutral. Internal awareness didn’t remove difficult feelings.

There are still moments when an emotion becomes so prominent that I completely lose the wider view.

The whole room becomes the emotion again.

But now I know something I didn’t always know.

There is a room.

Eventually the atmosphere changes enough for me to recognize it again.

That knowledge alone changed my relationship with difficult states.

Looking back at Arrival Field

This is one of the experiences underneath Arrival Field’s language of an internal environment.

The phrase wasn’t created because it sounded useful.

It described something I had gradually learned to experience.

Thought could be present. Emotion could be present. The body could respond. Energy could move. Stillness could remain.

And none of those necessarily needed to become the complete definition of the person experiencing them.

Arrival Field later gave architecture to that relationship.

But again…the relationship came first.

I wasn’t learning how to stop feeling.

I was learning how to remain present while feeling.

Sometimes successfully. Sometimes not.

And perhaps that’s why the distinction between these two sentences still means so much to me:

I am anxious.

An anxious atmosphere is present.

There are days when they feel exactly the same.

But increasingly, there are days when the second leaves just enough room to notice…

something else is here too.

— Jason