During a time of intense emotions across the country, with so many people angry, many sorrowful, and many fearful, our innate capacity to regulate feeling states is put to the test. Again, emotions are contagious. The practice of meditation over time strengthens that natural regulation of the body and its ability to adjust its responses to shifting tones and changing environments. The physical relaxation that is part of meditation, lowers our physical tension and the lowered tension signals the brain that the body is not in immediate danger or threat, so our thinking and feeling states calm down. The meditation focus also allows a distancing from both thoughts and emotions; we find we can observe them with a different quality of awareness, an equanimity and poise, from a calm center. That calm center may fade into the background as we continue our day, but it is increasingly available as we remember it and return.
We enter a phase where we will "see-saw" between this calm spiritual awareness and our reactive and shared emotions. There are times when the calm within us is the rock around which all the waves of emotions crash--we can be a strength and a solace for others. At other times--and perhaps in those moments it really is in our best interests to so be--we are wholly human, giving way to the depth of emotion of humanity, and we must look to a Higher Power to bring us to peace. This is its own form of "giving way". And we find ourselves lifted and stronger.
(Susan Nettleton)