Ashok Gupta (speaker) explains mindful awareness as noticing emotions without judgment—observing and 'enveloping' them with awareness and love so they can transform. He frames emotions as conditioned, habitual responses that have been repeatedly re-triggered by current societal conditions, contributing to widespread anxiety, depression, grief and isolation. He cites a recent survey claiming nearly half of Western populations report sadness or anxiety in a given week and calls this a "pandemic of anxiety and sadness."
Chapters
Now, what does mindful awareness mean? Well, instead of repressing the emotion, or instead of indulging the emotion, we observe how we're feeling without judgment. So the first step is even to become aware of what we're feeling rather than distracting ourselves away from it. But then secondly, we're not judging our emotions, we're simply aware of them and witnessing them. In doing so, something magical happens. We envelop that emotion with a blanket of love, a blanket of awareness, and that emotion has the opportunity to then transform and transmutate. You can't shift an emotion straight away, but what you can do is give it a loving embrace. And really what is an emotion? If we go even deeper? An emotion is an unconscious response to a situation or an event based on our past conditioning. So we respond to our outer environment, to people and situations, based on how we responded before and the day before, and the week before, and the year before. These are habits of responding. And those emotions are designed to come up, stay with us, and then dissolve away. But now, as a result of the ongoing situation that humanity finds itself in, those emotions are being re triggered again and again and again for society. And that's why we find that there are so many people, so many more people suffering from anxiety, depression, grief, isolation, all of these types of emotions. And a recent survey found that nearly half the population of Western countries are experiencing some kind of sadness or anxiety, especially during any given week, which is far higher than any pandemic of the virus. There's a pandemic of anxiety and sadness. So let's go deeper into that and understand how we can become aware of that, what's causing it, and how we can have a more mindful stress, frequentness.
