A guided meditation on responding to anxiety and anger with kindness instead of judgment. The speaker shares practical ways to develop supportive thoughts that help you handle difficult emotions with awareness and compassion.
Beginning friendly mind having any kind of challenging feeling. We're going to explore how to find wise thoughts that care for how you feel and how to respond in whatever life situation you're in. If you're anxious, it will say something like it's okay that you feel this way. And also ask how can you best respond to the situation that you're in? If you're angry, it might say, let's try to do our best to be harmless. Friendly mind carries the thoughts that invite whatever challenging feelings you have that are most difficult for you to tolerate and gives the simplest guidance possible. Recognize that we normally don't like the difficult feelings because they're unpleasant. Also recognize you can't make them go away with just your will. You may be able to suppress them, but definitely not transform them. We need to find a different level of support. This is very similar to what Einstein said. You can't solve a problem at the same level that it exists. We need to find a way to shift from trying to change our emotions with emotions and instead shift to a level of wisdom or simple friendly thoughts that will guide us. Developing a friendly mind is is the most help. And I am speaking from years of experience of suffering and needing to find a way that wasn't magic or unrealistic suppression. Judgments and defenses don't help. I am suggesting that you find a place in your awareness when you're most suffering where you can follow guidance that you learn to listen to and to respond to. Shifting our focus to finding supportive, simple, guiding thoughts when we face these difficult feelings is gold. It could be thoughts like I'm sorry you have to go through this. How can I help you? Let's take a rest. A walk. Recognize we're not feeling this on purpose and we are innocent. This friendly mind that we are cultivating can only be helpful if we're honest with ourselves. We need to ask what can I realistically do and how can I realistically be to really follow these guiding thoughts? This was staying aware of our feelings is a real partnership. Switching the level of focus to empathic thinking toward our feeling with no pressure to feel these friendly mind thoughts as it's impossible for our mind to be able to compete on a feeling level when we're really suffering. We are learning to be able to trust our thoughts more than our feelings when they're guiding us. We need to recognize that every time we give this trust to this friendly mind and the way it thinks, it's a mini miracle. What else could we ever ask for?
