We often resist, suppress, judge or ignore our physical sensations of difficult emotions. And we can talk about emotional intelligence, or acceptance, or processing emotions—but I want to give you a guided embodiment meditation exercise to help you actually work with the embodiment of emotions. We’ll bring up a disturbing emotion–like anxiety, sadness, fear, grief, or anger–and we’re going to sit with it, allow it to be there, notice how it shows up in our body, and take calm committed action. Through this exercise we can learn to lean in, create space and coexist with our feelings.
I’ve invited mindfulness expert Thomas McConkie to join me as he shares this Exercise for Disturbances. It’s not just psychology, it’s also a somatic approach to working through feelings.
You can learn more about the work that Thomas McConkie is doing through meditation courses and retreats on his website at https://LowerLightsWisdom.org/.
The Embodiment Mindfulness Meditation
This meditation exercise is, in my opinion, life-changing. It will fundamentally transform how you interact with painful thoughts and emotions and relationships. You’ll practice creating space for anxiety and other painful emotions so that you can be less reactive and more intentional in your actions. It’s a powerful, transformative exercise.
At the same time, it’s not difficult to practice. It’s a simple skill, and I’ve invited mindfulness expert, Thomas McConkie, to join us to teach it. Thomas designed this exercise to work with disturbances or uncomfortable emotions. As such, it will be a little uncomfortable. If you find yourself getting overwhelmed, feel free to take a break. Do something comforting, and then come back to this exercise when you feel more resourced or safe.
I posted the recording of this 12-minute exercise on my YouTube channel, and you may want to jump over there to practice mindfulness for emotions along with me and Thomas. Or, you could have someone read the practice portion of the transcript below to guide you.
I’ve also made a longer version of this video for my podcast channel where I debrief and explore my experience with Thomas. Each time I do this exercise, something inside me changes, but the first couple times were especially mind-blowing for me. So if you struggle or feel confused during the exercise, definitely check out the longer version of the video to explore the why. The transcript follows that full-length practice and discussion.
How Mindfulness Helps You Sit with Difficult Emotions
Thomas: So we’re about to get into an exercise that is designed to take you into intensity in the body. And, of course, that comes with a risk. We all carry, we could say, unprocessed experience in the body. And as we go deeper and deeper into sensation, we might find that we’re fine, we’re fine, then all at once, we feel flooded, we feel overwhelmed.
If anything like that happens along the way, first, congratulate yourself that you tried this and you came into a pocket of intensity that doesn’t feel like it’s the right time to work with it right now. And let it go. And come back to this exercise anytime you want. It’s not a failure to do that. It’s a success that you’ve actually uncovered another layer of resistance and found a new area to explore when the time is right, when you feel grounded and resourced to do it.
Emma: One of the things I’ve noticed is that for a lot of people, they have a hard time feeling their feelings. Like they don’t know what it means to feel their feelings, and that could include their emotions. Like they don’t quite know what it means to feel what their emotions are saying, but they also don’t know how to sit with their body’s sensations and what’s going on there.
And I think a lot of people have a tendency to distract themselves or avoid having these feelings, whether they’re emotional or physical or they maybe suppress them. They try not to feel them. They’re maybe afraid of them or they intellectualize or distract themselves mentally so that they don’t have to sit with them and that’s what I’m hoping you can talk with us about today. Thomas.
Thomas: I’m excited to talk about this today. I’m happy to, I love the introduction. It needs no embellishment, but if I were to add anything, I would just say from a Buddhist perspective that yes, we all do that as human beings. We avoid ourselves.
We are in conflict with reality, meaning like what is true right now? What’s the truth of our embodied experience? We’re often in conflict with that, and that causes profound suffering. So this exercise is in service of everyday suffering for people like me and you in a way to commit more fully to our embodied experience.
The running and the evasion can all stop right here.
Emma: I love that. And a friend introduced me to this exercise. And when I did it, I was reminded that we can talk about feeling our feelings all day, but this exercise, we’re actually just doing it. We’re just simply practicing it and I found it really valuable, really helpful for me.
So I was so grateful you were willing to share it with my audience.
Thomas: Amazing. Yeah. I’m happy to do it. Do you want me to jump in?
Emma: Yeah, let’s go. Let’s jump right in.
Start the Practice: Mindfulness for Emotions and Anxiety
Thomas: Amazing. I’ll ring some bells because they sound beautiful, and it also helps us settle in and really come to presence for this time.
And we’ll just go, we’ll see, [maybe] five or 10 minutes.
Emma: Great. Sounds great.
Thomas: So take these first few moments to settle into a posture that will allow you to be relaxed, comfortable, but also very present and alert.
Might feel natural to take a couple of big breaths. I really like to take an audible sigh and audible out breath to just help me relax and let go. Yeah, whatever works for you.
And this is also a really good moment and important moment to ask yourself if it feels safe to really move deeply into sensation. For many of us, at least some of the time, it’s not the best moment to go deep into the body. So we shouldn’t assume that an experience like this, a practice like this is always the right thing to do at any given time.
You want to check in with the body and get permission from yourself. Yeah, I feel resourced enough. I feel grounded enough to go deep into my embodied experience.
And if you do feel resourced, and if you do feel a little bit adventurous, I’ll invite you to really just join your awareness right now with physical sensation. Notice what’s present.
We are working in this exercise with everyday disturbance, hundreds of times a day, maybe thousands of times a day. Things are happening at a pre-conscious and unconscious level where we just feel a little ruffled, a little disturbed, a little stirred up, and those moments go undetected and we don’t realize that we choreograph our lives around avoiding our embodied experience.
So when you come into the body right now, oh, happy day, you might notice that there’s already disturbance there, in which case you don’t need to go looking for it. You don’t need to produce it. But if you’re feeling quite tranquil and calm, I’m going to ask you to stir that up a little bit just for the purposes of this exercise to call to your attention a moment today or a moment this week where you had a kind of troubling encounter. Could be with life itself, could just be inclement weather, but the deepest disturbances are often related to other human beings, relationship. So the basic possibilities is when you bring your attention to the body, you already feel disturbance here.
But if you don’t feel any disturbance, you can actually use this exercise to call up some disturbance. Maybe the image of a person that you’re struggling with in relationship right now. Maybe an interaction that didn’t go very well, and it’s stuck in your system. It just doesn’t feel very good.
And this is normally the exact kind of experience sensation that we avoid. We try to shove it down, we repress it, we distract ourselves, and we’re doing something counter-instinctual here by going right into it, going right into the heart of the sensation.
So you call up a disturbing encounter. Something someone said to you, something they did, something that happened in life that left you feeling unsteady, unmoored, anxious disturbed.
And as you continue to breathe, you can notice where this shows up in the body. Where’s the disturbance? Where’s the intense sensation that you would prefer not to be feeling? But nevertheless, it’s present in your system. And rather than running, evading, distracting, repressing, can you just relax into it? Letting awareness soak into the sensation like water, soaking through a sponge, and really feeling what’s here to be felt. A key to doing this is to let go of any interpretations ’cause oftentimes with disturbance, we get a story going, how dare that person? That should have never happened had that person been doing what they were supposed to be doing; I wouldn’t be feeling like this, but in fact, we are feeling like this right now.
So it’s an opportunity to actually really commit to our embodied experience, letting go of the story. Even something as simple as an emotional interpretation, letting go of even emotion and going right to the raw sensation.
And if it helps, you can use a word or two to describe whatever physical sensation you’re aware of in the body. For me, with my disturbance in this moment, I’m aware of a clenching, a contraction in the throat, a pressure. I feel some ache in my heart. So see if you can do that. Just physical sensation. No emotion, no story.
And it’s important when we do this exercise to ask ourselves, is the signal I’m getting from my body indicating real danger? In this moment, there might actually be something unsafe, and you want to ask yourself that. Is this signal from the body, this intensity, this disturbance, is it signaling that something about the environment is unsafe?
And if it is, we want to take care of ourselves and change our circumstances as best we can.
But if it’s a disturbance that’s not indicative of any immediate danger, if we actually feel safe that is on an objective level, we can use this opportunity to go even deeper.
Really finding our awareness on the inside of this intense sensation. Not trying to understand it, not trying to heal it, not trying to liberate it. We’re not performing any operation on it at all. We’re just training ourselves to stay embodied, to commit to the truth of our embodied experience right now.
Stay with it and when you feel like you’re really resting in this disturbance in a way that we do not normally do day to day, unless we bring some intention to a practice like this, you have the option of saying to yourself, saying out loud, I commit to feeling this way on and off for the rest of my life,
I commit to feeling this way on and off for the rest of my life.
Sometimes when we make this declaration, we feel despair. Oh! No! I thought one day I would finally be free of sensations like this. I would finally be delivered from the suffering of my life. And if you feel despair, let that be a signal that you can let go of any fantasy that one day as a feeling human being, you’ll stop feeling and accept this embodied reality that sometimes life hurts. Sometimes it brings us joy and that these are passing ephemeral energies.
On the other hand, sometimes we make this declaration that I commit to feeling this way on and off the rest of our lives, and a light bulb goes on, we realize that a deeper part of us is completely resourced to feel these sensations, all sensations as they come and go, no matter what. We get an insight into the part of our identity that is bigger than all experience, all feelings.
And we realize that no matter what life throws at us, we can remain radically embodied, committed to the truth of this experience.
And so if that’s your response to this practice, just notice that the freedom that comes with committing to this experience, either way, it’s good, the despair is good, the freedom is good. Whatever we feel it’s information for us.
Let this sensation run its course however long it takes, and at some point, as all sensations ebb and flow, you’ll find yourself on the other side of intensity and you’ll realize that you didn’t abandon yourself. You committed to staying embodied. And now you’re free to act from a place where you’re not avoiding yourself, not avoiding your embodied experience.
You can be choiceful. You have agency to decide, do I do something? Do I do nothing? What’s the next thing I can do? The most wise, compassionate, and skillful thing I can do in response to life?
Debriefing the Discomfort: A Key Part of Healing
Emma: Thank you. That’s such an interesting experience. Every time I do it, it’s an interesting experience.
Thomas McConkie: It’s different. It’s so different every time. But I tried to get the basics of what goes into that practice and as people get more familiar with it, they can adapt it and do it on their own. Do it on the fly. I do this exercise in my own way. Maybe dozens of times a day.
Emma: Interesting. Do you debrief when you do group meditations? Do you debrief people’s experiences?
Thomas McConkie: Fully. Absolutely. That’s a really important part of the learning, to just see how different people’s experiences are, but how similar they are in fundamental ways. So that’s a really rich part of the experience.
Emma: Okay. So I’d like to bring up some things that came up for me and then perhaps you could express some things that you commonly see come up for other people.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, absolutely.
When the Body Speaks: Feel the Energy and Let It Move
Emma: Initially for me, first, it was hard for me to calm down a little bit because I am recording an interview, so I had to check the mic, which got funny for a second. And my flighty mind was constantly like, let’s think about and plan and do all these things, instead of sitting with my sensations. But then, after a moment, I was able to turn my attention inside and go there. And one of my first things is I was surprised that I did have this sharp, jaggedy sensation about—when you mentioned a specific person, I hadn’t thought today, “Oh, I don’t have any problems with anyone.” And then I sat and I realized, “Oh, there’s perhaps a political figure who’s inciting some intense feelings.” And then as I explored those feelings and observed them, I felt very much from about here to here [indicating from above her mouth to below her heart] is where I felt these sensations. In my throat.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah.
Emma: In my shoulders.
Thomas McConkie: Yep.
Emma: It felt sharp.
Thomas McConkie: Yep.
Emma: This is how I describe my process going through. It felt sharp.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah.
Emma: My arms felt like I almost wanted to flap and wave, like just like I wanted to be like jerking about almost. This is my embodied experience of this.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, which, let me add really quickly, when you get that sensation, like something wants to move, that’s a whole other protocol where it can be really helpful to let that energy move. Absolutely.
Emma: Would you sometimes be like, let’s go, just flap for a minute.
Thomas McConkie: For sure. Yeah, absolutely. If there’s pent up energy in the body to let that energy move and complete can be a really important part of this process.
Emma: Yeah, I’d love to hear more about that sometime. I don’t know if we have time to go there, but I know in trauma work, sometimes we do that too.
Oh, you wish you could have pushed away, and so now you feel that in your body. Let’s push away, let’s push, let’s let your arms do what they wanted to do.
Thomas McConkie: That’s a really important skillset to develop, I believe. This particular exercise we just did focuses on a different skill, which is to, how would I say it? It is to build strength in the nervous system. It’s to train ourselves to stay consciously present to more and more intensity in the nervous system. So whether we need to move energy after or act that out, that’s an important question, but it’s another question right now. The same way we would like, train at the gym and lift weights by calling up intensity in the body and training ourselves to remain present. We’re strengthening the nervous system.
Emma: Oh, I love that. I love that.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah.
Embodiment Meditation: How Presence Shifts Emotion
Emma: That’s great. Okay. So then as I moved through the exercise, then I felt as my attention soaked into it, I almost felt like it was dripping down into it. And it very quickly softened for me.
Thomas McConkie: Yes. That’s a really important moment to notice when we bring conscious intention to the disturbance. We don’t always find, but we sometimes, maybe even often, find that extra degree of presence starts to metabolize the intensity. It starts to thaw it, melt it and get it moving so that we complete it more quickly. So it can pass through us.
Emma: Yeah, it did. So I started out being completely unaware that I was feeling jittery and then I brought awareness to it and I was like, oh, ha. And then i t melted quite quickly. Like initially, like it was just like, oh, as I brought more awareness, it was like, oh I’ve checked in, I’ve acknowledged, I’ve noticed. I’ve sat with, I’ve explored, and it just melted. I didn’t do anything to it. It just melted.
Thomas McConkie: Yes. Wonderful. And when you have an experience like that, you start to develop a confidence that even when life is very disturbing in a moment where we would usually freak out and numb ourselves and distract ourselves.
And then a week later say, man, I’m having such an awful week. We learned to catch it like right at the head as it’s coming up, and instead of a whole week of suffering
Emma: Carrying it around.
Thomas McConkie: Five seconds later, six, seven minutes later, we feel like, “Oh wow. I feel so much peace and openness and freedom in the body that I didn’t feel before.” So we start to learn in that way and realize, “Wow, I can really, I can stay present to life experiences that I thought were impossible to really encounter with an open heart.”
Emma: Yeah. And I do believe in that. Like I’ve experienced that personally even though I’m a very much a beginner meditator, that as I’ve developed more willingness to feel my feelings through other practices that I feel very confident that I can have a lot of emotions and be okay.
Thomas McConkie: And that’s absolutely where I want to see people get who I get to teach. Just that—to tap into what you just shared so beautifully—it’s this capacity we have as human beings and a little bit of intention, a little bit of sincere intention goes such a long way.
This is, what we just did, is like a quote [shows finger quotes], beginner practice. Anyone can do it off the street with no training. And yet I find it to be among the most advanced meditation practices I’ve ever done because being a human being is hard. And being in relationship with other human beings is hard. And I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re disturbed all the time by what other people are doing. And if we can learn to metabolize that and work with it in the body, it’s a game changer.
Meditation for Anxiety: Change the Response, Not the Emotion
Emma: So then I want to bring up something that came up for me as we continued, so like my attention left and came back and did its thing. I kept paying attention through the exercise, but then as you talked about this idea of you have to accept—or you don’t have to—you choose to accept that you might feel this way off and on throughout your whole life, I felt an initial surge of, “No, I don’t want to!”
Thomas McConkie: Yeah.
Emma: No. Can’t I just wait till this certain politician goes away and then I won’t feel this anymore? Can’t I just—can’t something happen? Can’t I fix it? Can’t I learn some skill so I’m never bothered again? I felt resistance when you brought that up. And I felt a little bit like, “I don’t like this.What if my audience turns off this video now ’cause they’re like, they’re resisting this?”
Thomas McConkie: In my experience, that is the most common experience to this practice. Everything you just said. And that whatever, politician, you’re speaking of, one day they will step down. And a new politician will take their place and there will be a new person who disturbs you and hits you in your own vulnerability in a new, different person, different everything. Same Emma. Same vulnerability, same disturbance. So , that declaration, I commit to feeling this way on and off. It is a glorious, glorious mantra. I love this more than just about any practice because it totally cuts through our fantasy: one day, I don’t have to be disturbed anymore as a human being.
Emma: That’s what I realized as I sat with it. I thought, “I have a fantasy that if so-and-so went away, I wouldn’t have feelings.”
Thomas McConkie: That’s right. But we know there will always be the next person who disturbs us. They’re just a, it’s a different cue to the same trigger we have. So this is a way of taking our freedom back and saying I’m not trying to control the world. I’m not trying to control other people. I’m taking responsibility for my embodied experience, and I’m going to act from a place of greater and greater freedom.
Emma: Yeah.
Thomas McConkie: So that’s a tough one. Like I make no bones about that. When we workshop this live in a room full of a hundred people, there’s always a bunch of voices who freak out about this. And you’re already I see you’re on the other side of the insight. You’re where I want people to get to, which is realizing, “Oh, I think there’s always going to be something that disturbs me next.”
Emma: But, okay, so let me play contrarian, like CBT would be like if you just change how you think about it, you won’t have feelings about it anymore. If you think more rationally, if you think more logically, if you don’t catastrophize, then you won’t be so panicked about whatever, X, Y, Z.
Thomas McConkie: CBT is a vital skillset. Your listeners probably know cognitive behavioral therapy working primarily with a skillfulness of thought. Are our thoughts reflective of reality? Are they generative? Are they supportive for us to be the kind of people we want to be in the world? The limitation, as I see it with CBT, is that if we talk about this practice we’re doing in terms of depth thoughts by the time we’re having a thought, we’ve already had so much elaboration at the level of emotions.
Emma: Yeah.
Thomas McConkie: And the even deeper level of the body. We’ve had so much sensation going on that we have actually not all that much leverage over our thoughts. We want to develop skill at working with our thoughts for sure. And CBT is amazing at that.
Emma: Yeah.
Thomas McConkie: But I find if we want maximum leverage over what kinds of thoughts actually take shape in our consciousness, our best bet is to really learn how to commit to the intensity of our embodied experience. And that actually changes the way we think five layers down way before we even have a conscious thought.
Because often our conscious thought is like, this shouldn’t be happening. I hate that person. They’re completely wrong. This is what I would scream in their face if I saw ’em right now. But when we get closer to the body, we realize, actually, I just feel intensity in the body. I feel disturbed and there’s some part of me that’s not willing to feel that. And once I’m fully willing to feel that, all of a sudden, like the thoughts that come up are like, okay, now that I’m willing to feel this way on and off the rest of my life, is there something skillful I could say to this person?
Emma: That’s where like toward the end of the exercise, I was like, oh, now that I feel a little bit more centered or more like, allowing, making space for that.
Thomas McConkie: Yes.
Emma: Then I actually feel like I’m not just going to sit here and meditate about a certain politician. I’m going to be like, oh, the next time I go to say something or I want to speak up, yes, I’m going to do it from a more reasonable place. Like a more, like less reactive, less emotionally reactive place.
Thomas McConkie: Exactly.
Emma: A more helpful place.
Thomas McConkie: Exactly. And we’ve all had that experience when we’re in the room with a bunch of other people and someone’s speaking from a place of a lot of reactivity. And they’re trying to whip us up into that same frenzy and saying aren’t you outraged like I am.
Emma: Yeah.
Thomas McConkie: And it’s not that there isn’t a place for that.
Emma: Sure.
Thomas McConkie: But I’m speaking to like the experience I’ve had of people in a room, and they’re often like the elders, they’re often like the old souls and they speak from this place that’s like deeper than deep, and they’re channeling something that feels like they’re showing us a new possibility that’s wiser. It’s more loving, it’s more intelligent. That’s where I want to go. And this exercise is training us to not come from a place of reactivity where we need to get people on our side to have the same enemy.
Emma: Yeah.
Thomas McConkie: But to come from a place of given how difficult this situation really is in real life, wisdom tells me that we could do this next.
Mindfulness for Anxiety: Noticing the Absence of Sensation
Emma: Yeah. Fascinating. I wonder, other people might say, “What if I don’t know what I’m feeling? What if I can’t even tell? I have no idea what you’re talking about when you say, get embodied.”
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. That’s a great question and I come across that situation all the time. Not just with myself, but with lots of students.
There’s some basic possibilities. What I love about this exercise, it does not ask us to understand anything.
Emma: We’re not trying to inside or figure it out.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. In fact, what we find after internalizing this practice is that the insight comes later when we’ve really gone to the depths of sensation. The insights percolate up from the depth, so we don’t have to force anything that can just come later.
But in the meantime, there are two basic possibilities that I found. Either we find some sensation because we’re sensitive, embodied human beings. We’re going to be disturbed on and off for the rest of our lives. As long as we have these bodies, we do an exercise like this, it’s, “Oh, boom. I felt something.” Like you said when we started this conversation, “I didn’t know it was there, but bam, the moment we started, bam, it’s there.”
Another possibility is this kind of feeling like, “What’s going on? I don’t know where I am. I don’t really feel anything.” To learn to attune to that kind of a numbness, a nothingness, like, “I don’t feel anything.” Not feeling anything is another kind of feeling. And if we learn to stay with “I don’t really feel anything,” we’re surprised that, wow, there are like 20 layers to that ‘I don’t really feel anything’. We get deeper and deeper into our actual experience, and it yields amazing insight. It is what I found doing this for a long time with students.
Emma: So if someone said, “I can’t tell what I’m feeling. I can’t tell what my body sensations are.” You would say, “Okay, what’s that like?”
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, exactly. What’s that like? Where is it in your body that you can’t tell what’s going on? Is it the entire body? If you zoom out and feel your entire physical field of sensation, is it like a confusion and a numbness and a ‘what’s going on?’
Or is it in the chest, like what is this going on? Like just get specific about the ‘I don’t know’. And that’s a little bit… people are like, “Are you serious? That’s what you do?” It’s powerful. Because it’s, again, it’s letting go of abstraction. It’s letting go of trying to figure out in the mind what’s happening in the body. It’s training ourselves to be fully embodied in life, moment to moment.
What Distraction Tells You During Embodiment Meditation
Emma: Okay. Okay. I appreciate that. What would you say to someone who says, “My mind just keeps wandering. I just keep getting distracted.” Or maybe they’re upset that they keep getting distracted.
Thomas McConkie: Totally. And that is a very convenient drama for the ego. Oh, I keep getting distracted, I guess I can’t go into my body. I guess I’m just not cut out for this experience. Other people can do that practice. So to actually notice that is a productive experience. Like, this practice is revealing a new layer of resistance.
Every time I notice my mind wandering, [I ask], “Am I avoiding? Is there something I’m avoiding?” And training yourself to redirect like it is, I don’t like to use superlatives, but I would say it is almost always the case when we do this exercise and notice like a lot of mind wandering and stories going on that we’re avoiding a deeper vulnerability in the body.
So the mind wandering is indicative of a layer of resistance. It’s giving us insight into, “Oh, this is what happens in my mind when there’s something I don’t want to feel in the body.”
When Sitting with Difficult Emotions Feels Like Too Much
Emma: What if the opposite happens and they’re like, okay. Okay. They’ve been mind wandering, they’ve been ruminating, they’ve been worrying, they’ve been thinking, they’ve been planning, whatever. And you’re like, “Okay, let’s see what’s under that. Let’s see what’s under that.” And they get to this place where they’re like, yes, holy cow. This is overwhelming my whole body. Like they go full on this is completely scary, terrifying, maybe a panic.
Thomas McConkie: Thank you. That is such an important question. I started the exercise with this instruction, which is in the mode of trauma-sensitive practice: we should never assume that going deeper into the body, deeper into sensation, is the best thing to do in this moment. If we feel grounded, if we feel resourced, if we feel curious, yeah I want to see what’s beneath those layers of resistance. Great. There’s a lot here for you.
And if for any reason, like you just said, I actually go a few layers down and I feel flooded, I feel overwhelmed, that is a great moment to just drop the exercise. If your eyes are closed, open them. If you’re sitting down, maybe stand up, maybe move around a bit. If you’re the type who processes intensity alone, take some time alone. Go for a walk. If you’re the type who processes intensity better with another person, find somebody to process with. But take that overwhelm and that flooding very seriously and just be very clear: “I can do this another time when I’m feeling more resourced. What I found today was that I got plenty of insight. I went through a layer of resistance and found this huge pool of—who knows what that cesspool is. And I don’t have to go back to that until I feel ready. If I feel ready.” That’s really important.
Emma: And I think it’s, from a trauma therapy perspective, we do this in a way that tries to keep us within our growth zone and not so much into the flooded zone or the panic zone. And so some of the ways we do this are by doing it in shorter periods of time or in smaller doses. So it’s okay. That’s not necessarily, you should not consider it a failure if you’re like, “Oh, I did this for a few minutes and it was very big for me, and then I took a break.” That’s probably a lot healthier than saying, “I have to just stick with this and make myself suffer.”
Thomas McConkie: I couldn’t say it any better. I love that. I very much agree with that approach to practice.
When Meditation Feels Boring — And Why That Matters
Emma: Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me go back to my biggest barrier with meditation, which is it’s hard for me to get motivated to do it because I find it very boring.
Thomas McConkie: Yes.
Emma: And I’m uncomfortable with boredom.
Thomas McConkie: Boredom is an important layer of resistance that defends against the deeper vulnerability. So if you feel called to, if any of us feel called to, you can actually notice boredom as clearly and precisely as you’ve ever noticed it next time you sit still. And then potentially get curious. Is there something even deeper on the other side of this boredom that’s even more vulnerable, more open, more unknowable that I actually am anxious about experiencing. So boredom is a very helpful defense we all have against these very big open states that a lot of our culture is designed to shield us from. And it so happens that the Buddhist tradition is designed nope, nope, nope. We’re going to, we’re going to move through that. We’re going to let that go. Buddhist practice is designed to take us into greater and greater openness, and that can be really scary.
Emma: Yeah.
Thomas McConkie: It’s not just all nice and loving and I feel so enlightened that it’s terrifying as well.
Emma: Fear is a lot more comfortable for me than boredom, so maybe I should practice that.
Thomas McConkie: Boredom’s a good start. Boredom. You’re lucky. You have good karma to feel boredom in your life. It’s taking you somewhere deeper.
Deepen Your Mindfulness Practice: Resources from Thomas McConkie
Emma: Okay I’ll spend some time with it, thank you so much. Can you tell my audience where they can find more about your work or access more of what you do?
Thomas McConkie: Yeah I have a podcast. I do workshops, retreats, all that stuff. So lowerlightswisdom.org is a great place to, check out what we’re doing.
Emma: I love the podcast.
Thomas McConkie: Oh, thank you. You’ve heard it. Oh, wonderful.
Emma: Yeah. I love your podcast.
Thomas McConkie: Cool. Thank you. The new one. I just started one maybe a couple months ago.
Emma: Oh, I don’t know. One Heart, One Mind is the one.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah, that’s new. I started, that is a couple months ago. Yeah.
Emma: Okay, cool. Yeah, I love it.
Thomas McConkie: Yeah. Amazing. So there’s that. I’ve been living in Boston for the last three years and I’m coming back west pretty soon. So I’ll be teaching more full-time starting in the summer. So I’d love to. I’d love to see you out there, Emma. I’d love to see any of your community out for one of our events.
Emma: That’d be awesome. I’d love it. That’d be great.
Thomas McConkie: Cool.
Emma: Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Check Out My FREE Grounding Skills for Anxiety Course
Thomas recommends practicing his mindfulness exercise frequently to get better at staying open to disturbance and other difficult emotions. To that end, I hope you’ll revisit the meditation portion of this episode on my YouTube channel.
For other grounding techniques, you can go through my course:
Grounding Skills for Stress Anxiety and PTSD
It’s free on my website, and you’ll learn more than 20 techniques to turn on the calming part of your nervous system (the parasympathetic response). This course teaches a body-based approach to reducing anxiety. You’ll be guided in making peace with your emotions, reducing anxiety, and fostering your internal sense of calm.
