Gil Fronsdal offers Buddhist wisdom on relating skillfully to our emotions and seeing them as messengers of our inner worlds.
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/insighthour and get on your way to being your best self.
In this talk, Gil Fronsdal lectures about:
- Identifying emotions without getting lost in the story
- The necessity and benefits of feeling pain
- Knowing what’s happening as it’s happening
- How most of us are driven by our desires and aversions
- Simply knowing and how free our knowing can be
- Making room for our experiences
- How our emotions let us know what we should pay attention to
- Learning how our emotions live in the intelligent system of our body
- How reactivity blocks us from processing emotions
- Being in our body and allowing processes to unfold
“One of the primary functions of emotions is to let us know something is important. They’re knocking on the door of our capacity to know. They are not accidents, they’re not incidental, they’re not annoyances, they’re not unfortunate. They’re actually a very important form of which your inner life is presenting itself to you.” – Gil Fronsdal
This talk was originally published on Dharmaseed
About Gil Fronsdal:
Gil Fronsdal is the co-teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California; he has been teaching since 1990. He has practiced Zen and Vipassana in the U.S. and Asia since 1975. He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, and in 1989 began training with Jack Kornfield to be a Vipassana teacher. Gil teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center where he is part of its Teachers Council. Gil was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He currently serves on the SF Zen Center Elders’ Council. In 2011 he founded IMC’s Insight Retreat Center. Gil has an undergraduate degree in agriculture from U.C. Davis where he was active in promoting the field of sustainable farming. In 1998 he received a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University studying the earliest developments of the bodhisattva ideal. He is the author of The Issue at Hand, essays on mindfulness practice; A Monastery Within; a book on the five hindrances called Unhindered; and the translator of The Dhammapada, published by Shambhala Publications. You may listen to Gil’s talks on Audio Dharma.