Working with Painful Emotions: Despair

Audio-only version is here.
Meditation practice begins at 24:53

Dear Open Heart Project,

Thank you so much for your interest in this series, “Working with Painful Emotions.” delighted to practice meditation with you. Before we sit, I want to continue our exploration of working with painful emotions and how our meditation practice can help.

Nine weeks ago, we started with anger, moved on to attachment (or grasping), then shame, followed by jealousy, anxiety, distrust. Last week, we spoke about hate.

This week, we move on to perhaps the most insidious and all-pervasive painful emotion: despair.

In this talk, I offer some insights from classical Buddhism about the collapse that can come with despair. Please have a listen to this short talk and let me know what you think. It’s always so great to hear from you.

At the end of the talk, I make two suggestions for continuing this exploration of painful emotions. One of them is community. And the other is the enneagram.

The enneagram was the inspiration behind the series. The enneagram posits nine ways of being in the world. I just finished writing my next book (out September 13), The Buddhist Enneagram.

Each way is subject to one particular painful emotion more than the others: Ones, with anger, Twos with attachment and so on. If you want to take a deeper look at how to work with painful emotions (or support others to do so), I hope this book will help. It goes into vastly more detail on each emotion and offers Buddhist teachings meant to support release from this particular kind of suffering. May it be of benefit!

The book is available for pre-order. (I’m not scared! You are!) If you preorder the it, click here to let us know and to reserve your spot in a free, live, webinar on Oct 1 from 12p ET-2p ET.

With love, Susan

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