What do I do when a strong emotion comes up while sitting?
Don't do anything. That's the whole practice, and it is harder than it sounds. When anger or grief or fear comes up, you will want to fix it, push it away, or follow it into a story about why it came. Drop the story. Keep the feeling. Find where it lives in the body: heat in the face, a fist in the stomach, pressure behind the eyes. Stay there, the way you would sit beside someone crying without needing them to stop. You will notice it is not one solid thing. It moves, swells, changes texture, and sooner or later it passes on its own, because everything does. Next time it rises, let your attention rest where you feel it most, breathe with it three times, and add no words at all.
This was one stranger’s question. In the app, you sit, say what is actually going on, and the teacher answers you, in a voice, privately. The first dokusan is free.
Download on the App Store