The challenge with difficult emotions is that we don’t want to feel them. During this week’s Sangha, Payton guided the discussion around how we experience and relate to strong emotions like grief, deep sadness, anger, and fear. Buddhism is often characterized as a way to become healed from difficult emotional states, yet perhaps some difficult emotional states are the direct result of having an open heart. How are we to make sense of this?
Payton played a talk by Shaila Catherine on using the body to work with difficult mental states. It is available here:
https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/163/talk/48118/
He also played excerpts from a talk on working with grief, by Matthew Brensilver, available here:
Burlington Buddhist Sangha 