A Simple Practice for Meeting and Metabolizing Difficult Emotions

How to turn toward disturbance with kindness, attend to sensations, stay present with aliveness, and give feelings space without demanding resolution.

This article emerged from my work at The Field, where we are exploring the intersection of core vulnerability and deity yoga, and is informed by my ongoing study with Bruce Tift and Khyentse Norbu. A recent conversation with Michael Taft on the Deconstructing Yourself podcast clarified a key insight: disturbance, when fully felt, can help dissolve the apparent solidity of identity architecture.

Below you'll find pith, concise, and elaborate versions of the practice instructions, roughly following a traditional Buddhist format. Feel free to leap ahead.

The practitioners I work with often carry the same paradox: they desperately want freedom from difficult emotions, yet their efforts to escape intensify the sense of contraction. They've tried therapy, meditation, positive thinking, and still find themselves besieged by patterns of panic, shame, and reactivity.

I am currently teaching a generation stage yoga course and I noticed how students could inhabit deity forms with remarkable stabi…