FEELiNGS – a Buddhist wisdom approach to letting go instead of acting out

 

By Trevor Slocum, MA, NCC, LMHC  Copyright 2024

 

{ In memory of my first and beloved Buddhist teacher, Saramati, who has now passed.  I will forever be grateful to him for stamping my mind with the Dharma. }

 

A couple of patients of mine, who are interested in Buddhist meditation, have encouraged me to write out this mnemonic FEELiNGS I developed.  It facilitates remembering the mind-body process that helps release bodily and emotionally stressful experiences. This practice benefits from learning the basic mindfulness practices, such as samatha/vipassana and the brahmavihara practices, as well as the basics of visualization practice, as a basis for this practice.  A Buddhist meditation instructor can help one develop these skills.  The FEELiNGS practice is based on the teachings of Buddhist psychology, the Five Buddha Family mandala, and stupa practice.  I have been told by non-Buddhists that they have found the basic ideas in FEELiNGS beneficial to them as well. It can also be helpful to talk with a psychotherapist when struggling with overwhelming feelings and reactions.

 

FEELiNGS is a six-part practice.  It is my distillation, the essential drop, of several practices taught in Contemplative Psychology, inspired by the Buddhist lineage that stretches back over 2500 years.  It seems especially helpful and naturally intuitive to people who are traumatized or have a history of being dissociated from their bodies or feelings.  It descends to us via Trungpa Rinpoche in his work establishing a Contemplative Psychology program at Naropa University, Boulder, CO, and beyond.  The practice is based on a simple mandala that seeks to express the five elemental wisdoms of Shakyamuni Buddha.

 

Many of the people who come to see me suffer from emotions that are painful, too strong to manage, and cause additional suffering in their lives by being acted upon without reflection.  This is a way of talking about dissociation. Dissociated mental/emotional processes are subject to being unconsciously acted out in the world, which tends to bind people more tightly to patterns of suffering.  Waking up to this truth and learning to process the feelings experienced inside is a way of regaining the ability to remain centered and stable, uncaught up, in the face of strong emotions.  The FEELiNGS practice creates a container for waking up - a container of wisdom-mind to hold the realities of a turbulent inner world.

 

The basic premise of the practice is that our minds, in their unclouded state, are brilliantly awake - the state of liberation from suffering.  According to Buddhist tradition, a Buddha, a fully awake and liberated person, has freed their mind from the ego’s two types of tricks, or obscurations: emotional clouding and cognitive reification.  The Buddha taught so that we, too, could become liberated from suffering with the support of ethics, meditation, and wisdom.  

 

Emotional obscurations are robust, reactive, primitive emotional habits, such as greed and clinging, hatred, envy/jealousy, arrogance, or numbness.  The ego’s strong feeling-based reactions to life’s blunt realities of loss, sickness, old age, and death often catch us off guard.  The more we fail to feel these reactive feelings, the more they unconsciously drive us. Cognitive obscurations are beliefs the ego-mind holds that get in the way of perceiving reality as it is.   Generally, these beliefs "think" they can hold on, trying to make a human’s state of living in flux - both inner and outer - into a solid thing, something to identify with and to have.  Together, the two types of obscurations keep our minds caught in a clouded emotional reactive state to whatever our minds perceive as a solid, fixed "enemy," etc.

 

FEELiNGS is a mnemonic used to help remind us of a process for mentalizing experience.  The FEELiNGS process can help clear away the emotional obscurations, the strong emotions that are hard to handle in the mind and tend to be enacted in the world to detrimental effect.  It also helps with cognitive obscurations, the mind’s habit of making things solid and unchanging and then identifying with that as self.  This practice can be housed in a meditative practice, but it can also be helpful to people as they walk through their daily lives.    

 

The acronym FEELiNGS is helpful to anyone who wants to process a strong emotion that is gripping you and your mind. Let's examine the acronym first. 

 

Steps of the FEELiNGS practice:

 

• F is for             Find it in the body – locate the sensations. Where is its form?  

• EE is for          Embrace with Equanimity – allow it to exist. What are its qualities?

• L is for             Loving-kindness – offer the experience care from the heart. What is at the heart of it?

• i is for               introspection / insight  – small “i” don’t ruminate, be introspective. Why do I care?

• N is for            Not-self – you are not the experience/feelings. It is a passing state. Is it all of you?

• GS is for         Giving it back to Space – to give, you must let go. Are you letting go?

 

 

Aspects of the Buddhist tradition, such as the circumambulation of the stupa, the Buddha’s burial mounds, and the Five Buddha Family Mandala, can add meaning and complexity to this simple practice.  

 

Stupa practice: remembering death and loss

 

While traveling as a young man with my teacher Saramait, studying Buddhism in India, I was taught the importance of the devotional practice of circumambulating the stupa - a traditional ritual of reverence in Buddhism.  It can be likened to being in the gravitational well of the Buddha.  One mindfully walks clockwise around the object of veneration, often a stupa, the monumental burial mounds of the Buddha, which traditionally stood as a symbol of the Buddha.  The FEELiNGS practice incorporates the circumambulation around a stupa as a symbol of death and loss in our personal lives.  In addition to being a sacred reminder of the Buddha Shakyamuni, the stupa is a reminder of our existential situation, about the realities of time passing, and the coming from and returning to the life-giving earth. So much of our sufferings and our most destructive and reactive habits come from living in a state of agitated denial of loss.  By calling to mind our losses and reactions to loss, we return to a more sober and grounded state of mind, a mind more responsive to its environment and to others. In the Buddhist tradition, the stupa and the Five Buddha Families are brought together in one image, called the Pancha Buddha Stupa. Using the image of the Pancha Buddha Stupa, the FEELiNGS practice moves clockwise around the stupa, spending some time in each zone of wisdom. 

 

Wisdoms of the Mandala:

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As the early Sangha grappled with trying to understand the nature of the Buddha's wisdom, over time, this mandala arose in Buddhist culture.  It highlights different but interrelated wisdoms of Shakyamuni Buddha, which, as a whole, can lead to liberating insight.  The various wisdoms are personified in the Buddhas of the Mandala.  These wisdoms act as an antidote to the Five Poisons.  

            

• East – Akshobhya – Mirror-like wisdom – Water – flowing water emotion, hard ice emotion

• South – Ratnasambhava – Wisdom of Equanimity – Earth – the richness of decay and new life

• West – Amitabha – Discerning Wisdom – Fire – the light that sees and warms

• North – Amoghasiddhi – The All-Accomplishing Wisdom – Air – wind moves freely

• Center – Vairocana – The Wisdom of the Absolute Truth/Reality Realm – Space – space accommodates everything

 

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Preliminary stage: Stupa as a reminder to set up the container

 

After the Buddha’s death, the Sangha divided his remains into relics and placed them in eight Stupas. As a container of relics, the stupa reminds us of the importance of creating a container. To make time and space for the practice, please attend to the following containers.

 

• Time container – Find about an hour to dedicate to the practice.  It takes time to think and feel.

• Space container  – Find a space where you feel safe and undistracted.  Someplace simple and protected.  If it feels sacred, all the better.  

• Body/Mind container – Don’t dull your mind or body. Bring your whole self to the practice.  

• Wisdom Mind container – Asking/Allowing the Wisdom mind to help with the inner processing.

• Motivation container – Set the intention that doing this inner work may also free others of suffering. 

 

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The FEELiNGS practice:

 

For the circumambulation, it can be very beneficial actually to circumambulate around a sacred spot.  We can also visualize circumambulating the stupa.  So, ironically, we can begin the circumambulation by taking our seats in meditation.  In our minds, we start by imagining a clear, blue sky. Then, picture a dome-like white stupa made of earth, with four gates in the cardinal directions and a spire on the top.  (You could let the images of the Boudanath Stupa enrich your imagination.) While visualizing the stupa, bring to mind the context of loss.  It could be the loss of a beloved teacher, or a family member, or a childhood, or a fidelity, or a romance, or a position, etc.  How is the emotional experience you are processing connected to a loss?

 

We turn our awareness to the East.  And visualize being before the Eastern gate.  Through the Eastern gate, we see a lapis temple where the blue Buddha Akshobhya, “The Imperturbable,” radiates the white light of the mirror-like wisdom of “in the seen, only the seen.” The East is associated with the energies of pacification. Mindfulness of the body helps the body calm; it is inherently down-regulating to the nervous system.  The first step of the FEELiNGS practice, the F step, is to Find it in the body.  The feeling experience has a physical correlate, and you're encouraged to locate its form within you.  Locating it within empowers us to take responsibility for it.  "Where is its form?" Where is it inside? What is its shape and size? 

           

Once you have a sense of where the emotional experience is manifesting in the body, Embrace what you find with Equanimity.  With this EE step, we move to the Southern gate.  Through this gate is a golden temple where yellow Buddha Ratnasambhava, “The Jewel Born One,” sits in meditation, radiating the golden light of the wisdom of equanimity.  This wisdom arises from the awareness of emptiness - shunyata - the profound quality that everything is interrelated, that nothing is without value to the whole.  Give the experience the acceptance it needs to exist within you. Hold it with your awareness.  Value it for what it is trying to communicate to you. Enrich it with your curiosity about the experience. What is it made up of?  "What are its qualities?" Is it tense? Painful? Numb? Hot? Cold? Angry? Sad?

 

While holding the emotional experience in mind, we can move to the next step, the L step, offering it Loving-kindness from the heart center/chakra. "What is at the heart of it?" With this step, we move to the Western gate of the stupa, through which we see a ruby temple, where meditating red Buddha Amitabha, “Infinite Light,” radiates the red light of discerning wisdom.  This wisdom arises from caring enough to really see to the core of the matter. It is only through loving eyes that we can perceive what is essential, to know intimately, and to be attuned to what is needed. This takes us to the “i” step.  i is a small i, so it doesn’t become another “I” for you to manage.  i stands for introspection/insight.  Again, the small i is to help remind us to be humble about our interpretations and insights. The question What is it? and "Why do I care?" may be revealing. One insight might be that you are not the only person suffering from this feeling.  So, at least you are not alone. Another insight might be that feelings are not known to be especially lethal; chances are you will survive.  Another might be that the experience changes slightly from moment to moment.  Often, it is best to contemplate the experience only long enough to give the experience a name. What is its essence?

 

The next step is the N step, for Not-self.  "Is it all of you?" Whatever you feel, no matter how strongly you feel, it is not the whole of you.  This, too, shall pass.  We are now standing before the gate in the North, through which we see an emerald temple, where green Buddha Amoghasiddhi, “Unfailing Accomplishment,” sits, radiating the green light of “all-accomplishing” wisdom.  This is the wisdom of selfless action that knows things are perfect as they are, and self-attachment, or clinging to outcomes, tends to make things worse.  Perhaps the ultimate action is letting go.

 

A powerful way to cut through clinging and attachment is giving.  To give, one has to let go.  This can be remarkably hard for us all, hence the question, "Are you letting go?" This moves us to the last step, the GS step, for Give it back to Space. Now, we pass through the Eastern gate into the center of the stupa; there is a pearl-white temple where white Buddha Vairocana, "The Illuminator," sits in meditation and radiates the blue light of the wisdom of the “realm of space.”  This is the truth of emptiness made experiential.  The mind is like space - it accommodates what is there but remains unmarked. To allow the feeling to return to space, one must let go of the resistance to feeling it fully, and one must allow the feeling to pass through the body back into space. Know that this process of radiating it back out into space takes time. Also, you discover you cannot hold on to anything; everything belongs to the space that contains you. By giving the experience back to space, you make a sacred offering—an offering of selflessness. 

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The experience will ultimately, in the fullness of time, dissolve back into space, so the added intention of it being a gift for the benefit of all beings, brings good karma and a sense of connection. Speaking the name of what you are giving to space, can help seal the experience.  It also puts the experience inside of you, outside of you, through your voice.  Say it in a sacred way.

 

One can end the practice by imagining letting everything in the meditation dissolve back into space of the clear blue sky - the feeling experience, the stupa, yourself included - like clouds dispersing into the radiant blue sky. It can help to end the practice with long out-breaths, like you are the wind that stirs the clouds.  As a last step, dedicate any goodness from the practice to the benefit of all beings.

 

If you have the time and want to make the practice more intimate, you might imagine talking to each Buddha, having them ask you questions such as “Where is its form?” etc., and then answering them.

 

When the wisdoms in this practice are engaged often, people notice relief from pent-up stress, rumination, and acting out of harming feelings.  On-the-cushion practice can help make the process more immediate, so it can become a walking-around practice you can take into daily life.  

 

Working with the Five Poisons:

 

For serious practitioners, this practice can also help uproot the intensely reactive negative mental states called the Five Poisons. In Buddhism, the Poisons are labeled hatred, greed, pride, envy/jealousy, and ignorance/prejudice. The FEELiNGS practice, based on ancient wisdom, can contain and transform the worst aspects of us. 

 

Learning more:

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If this practice interests you and you want to learn more, there are a few routes for deeper study of Contemplative Psychology in the United States.  If you are interested in becoming a counselor, consider the MA in clinical counseling program at Naropa University.

 

If you are already licensed, consider post-graduate training in Contemplative Psychology from Karuna Training.  

 

References:

 

​Loizzo, J. J., Neale, M., & Wolf, E. J. (2017). Advances in contemplative psychotherapy: Accelerating healing and transformation. Routledge.

Sangharakshita. (1990). A Guide to the Buddhist Path. Windhorse Publications, Ltd.

Trungpa, C. (1973). Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Shambhala Publications, Inc.

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