Feeling Wisdom Quotes

“When we look more deeply into emotional life, we will see that it does, indeed, color our view of reality. It does sometimes lead to delusions that project onto and distort our experience of reality. It also stimulates a huge amount of discursive conceptual chatter that can be extremely disturbing. However, as we become more familiar with the different ingredients of our emotional life, what will become very obvious is the complexity of our emotional patterning and its influence over us. It is this complexity that leads many of us either to go into therapy or to embark upon some kind of meditation practice, or both.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology

“Jung defined the complexes of the unconscious as “psychic entities that have escaped from the control of consciousness and split off from it, to lead a separate existence in the dark space of the psyche, whence they may at any time hinder or help conscious performance.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology

“If we are able to witness them without losing ourselves in them and becoming taken over by them, we then begin to disidentify and separate from them, to use a common psychological term. When we are able to look into the nature of our emotional life with awareness, we can also more readily separate out what is beneficial from what is potentially unhealthy or even destructive. Disidentification is helped by the process of psychotherapy; it can also be helped by an increased capacity for mindfulness developed in meditation. Unless we can begin to disidentify, however, we cannot move forward and transform the emotions. I will go into this in more depth in later chapters.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology

“Our emotions, as the Latin origins of the word imply, move us into action; they become problematic only when we are dominated by their strength and allow them to rule us in unhealthy ways.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology

“Sitting in meditation with a mind that is not caught in discursive chatter enables a clearer sense of the process that makes up who we are. We start to see with bare awareness that we are actually just a process unfolding. This process is the basis of the sense of me. Upon this process we put the label that is our name. I am just a process with the label Rob on it. The point of this is that as we sit quietly and directly experience the fluidity of our inner life, we can use a very subtle and unintrusive investigation simply to look and see if there is anything that is the basis of an enduring, solid sense of me. This investigation is like shining a flashlight around in a cave to see if there is anything living there.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology

“we can see how the deepening experience of present awareness will help us relate to the spectrum of feelings. With this awareness we can for the first time potentially disidentify from the strength of emotions as they arise. This means we are able to witness stronger emotions and retain a clear sense of self rather than becoming submerged in the emotion. This is the basis of mindfulness, a practice now being used within the therapeutic world that is increasingly valuable in helping people to gain this witnessing of emotions rather than being lost in them. This has become especially valuable for people suffering painful feelings of despair and depression.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology

“Resting in body sensation with bare awareness free of discursive mental conceptions enables us to stop interfering mentally with our experience: giving things labels and in some subtle way evaluating our feelings. We gradually develop the facility to witness the arising and passing of feelings and emotions without contracting into them or pushing them away. Gaining this equanimity in relation to the arising of feelings means we do not get sticky around them and can let them unravel in the space of awareness, accepting whatever feelings arise.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology

“I began to discover that when I have the capacity to remain with an open and spacious awareness, emotions and feelings can arise and simply move through as a flow of energy, going where it needs to go. This requires a kind of “nonstick” awareness that doesn’t react to a feeling by contracting into it or pushing it away. It is also a quality of mind that does not go into the torrent of thoughts that are often stirred by strong feelings, where one often judges them in some way or gets caught in their story.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology

“There were many of us who believed relationships, in particular, were something to be avoided because this kind of contact would lead to all manner of feelings that were disturbing and would be a distraction to our practice of the dharma. It was a great source of amusement that while we tried to live relatively celibate lives, we had in the building one room with a double bed where couples could go to have “contact with the object.” I cannot imagine what we were thinking.”
― Rob Preece, Feeling Wisdom: Working with Emotions Using Buddhist Teachings and Western Psychology