Spiritual teachers often talk about the importance of being with emotions. This is hard because we usually repress and avoid difficult emotions. Sometimes for years. Also, the physical discomfort of strong negative emotion can be unbearable. Also, we don’t really see the value in feeling it. But awareness and feeling is the way to move past these difficult emotions.
One way to cultivate more emotional awareness is to ask: What’s the texture of this emotion?
Being with the emotion and letting it come to a point of resolution is probably comparable to leaning a really difficult skill such as painting or playing music. It’s a daily practice. And it takes time. It took me more than a year to get myself not to “go into story”, meaning to stick with the emotion and not formulate some fable around why I feel the way I do, and whose fault it is, and what I should to do avoid it.
One way I can get myself out of story and into the emotion is to ask: What’s the texture of this emotion? This question might sound strange at first because we don’t think of emotion as having texture. But texture is associated with feeling. So, consequently what happens when you ask a question about texture (for me at least) is an immediate departure from the thinking mind into the body. When I focus on texture, I don’t go into story.