Usually when we experience our thoughts, we strongly believe them, and when we encounter emotions—such as anger, sadness, or fear—we feel as if there’s something very heavy inside us, that we have to do something about. We want to escape from these things, so we either express or repress them, throw them out or push them down, or we wish someone else would come along and take them all away for us. The approach in meditation is to understand that the experience is not actually solid and so we don’t need to do anything about it; we just need to step back and observe.
