Karina Papalezova

But once in jhana, you may discover that the more valuable prize was the life skill of learning to relate to all of experience, no matter what it is, with openness and a loving embrace.

Our negative relationship with some emotions (e.g., sadness or anger) comes not from the emotion itself, but our resistance to feeling it.

A powerful way to check in with our emotions is by asking ourselves, “How much am I bracing vs how much am I embracing?” When we brace, we are resisting our experience. This resistance creates internal conflict ... See more

discovering the beauty in our so-called “negative” emotions

Given that emotions play such an essential part in our experience, even if some emotions might feel better than others, it is critical that we listen to all of them. At the most basic level, resisting emotions is resisting our own information processing: we just can’t be as effective or as smart as we could be without processing (read: embracing) o... See more

we might oversimplify by saying all approaches to therapy boil down to two things: get the brain into a more malleable state, and then update a maladaptive mental habit to be more useful in the future.