Check out Wired’s post on UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman’s recent study of labeling emotions. At first blush it may seem like this supports the idea that any of us using the vipassana technique of “noting” or “witnessing” where we name whatever emotion arises in our experience as it is happening, are now practicing with science on our side. This may be true, and for the record, I don’t know many long term meditators who wouldn’t look at this as obvious. However, as we read a little more carefully we see that Wired’s writer, Alexis Madrigal misses something huge here when he starts off his article with:

Perhaps all those blog posts you wrote about your breakup really did have a purpose.

I’ve never read a blog about a breakup that wasn’t in some capacity a chorus of egoic clinging. Describing one’s pain, and then backfilling the description with its associative story lines isn’t the same thing as simply witnessing the pain of heartbreak. To be fair, there is a sentence late in the article that touches on this:

The researchers postulate that … the bare fact of labeling your emotions that counts, not whatever conclusions you draw in the course of verbal expression (or poetry writing).

But this is the whole point of using a witnessing technique in ones practice. It’s not about controlling our feelings. It’s about letting the light of our awareness dissolve our identification with positively everything. This offers us, and everyone else, a spacious openness in which we can meet the world.

As meditators, our job is to watch our thoughts and emotions as well as the baggage brought on by experiencing them fully. The moment we either indulge or avoid either our thoughts or feelings along with their baggage, awakening is veiled from our sight.

Bows, Wired.com and Wildmind

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