Dear friends: Under Donald suggestion I would like to bring as a theme for practice and dharma discussion the theme about negative emotions. I like to talk about negative emotions because they harm me and they also harm life around me. It worries me very much to have negative emotions because when these negative emotions arise in me I become a rather destructive person and that scares me a lot. We all people are like flowers. Different countries have different flowers and paesage. I am very much a Mediterranean flower which means full of passion and warm. Mediterranean people we seem to feel life to its very extremes. This is not very buddhist but this is the sort of flower I am. The practice I have been trying to do for years is the practice of stopping. The practice of stopping means that first I acknowledge the negative emotion. Then I sit down, close my eyes and breathe with the awareness of the in and out breath. When I do this in full awarenes of the emotion, feeling it and embracing it, then and depending upon the power or strenght of the negative emotion in me; The five or ten inhalations and exhalations can be of excruciating mental pain. The emotion becames really bitter and the awarenes os the breath becames like the desifectant of the wound. But I hold and embrace its bitternes. I don't run away, I stay with it for as long as it needs. Then at certain point I know through the way the air circulates alone my spine and the up and down of my abdomen whether the knot of suffering has been disolved or not. But don't get me wrong I do fail very often of stopping because the habit energy is so strong in me that I can not make it alone!. Perhaps this is an important reason searching like mad practicioners in the net so that I can have the support of a sangha. Do you have yourselves negative emotions?. How do you deal with them?. Please share with the group your all experiences.
Thank you Donald for your suggestions. A white flower to you all from: Mayka Current Book Discussion: any Zen book that you recently have read or are reading! Talk about it today! Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Zen_Forum/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Zen_Forum/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/