Practicing with emotional experience & personal narrative
Four sessions from September 13th – October 4th, 2026
Main Meeting Time: Sundays from 9am-10:30am California time* / 5pm-6:30pm UK time
Optional Guided Meditation: Wednesdays 10am California time / 6pm UK time (meditation is 45 min. long)
Teacher: Susy Keely
Registration: Using this form: https://forms.gle/nf4jScAyv6kp2NWZ8
This course meets on zoom and is offered on a Dana basis.
This short meditation course will offer tools for meeting and cultivating ease within our inner experience. We’ll be working with approaches to attend to our emotional experience in ways that work against the habitual tendencies to build up and emphasize the negative, while encouraging a possibility that the neutral and positive aspects of our experience are intentionally included. This course will emphasize developing sensitivity to the felt sense of emotions in the body, exploring the connections between our thoughts and ideas about ourselves, and exploring skillful ways to re-balance the attention towards our inner experience.
In a way, this is a straight-up insight course – we’ll be working with habits of attention that are deeply ingrained for most people, with an intention to free and release what constrains us and builds suffering. That being said, my primary intention for this course is to provide basic tools to engender well being, and to offer a chance to work in a supportive environment to develop our own ease and confidence as practitioners and people. It’s likely that this course will be interesting or helpful whether you are coming from an insight perspective (exploring the ways habitual tendencies of mind build suffering) or are looking to set aside some time just to tend to your inner life in nourishing ways. I think it’s so important to take this time, and as meditators we are offered a particular and powerful means to care for our inner life.
I will be offering meditation tools in this course, and I am not a mental health professional. If you are navigating challenging emotional times for whatever reason you are welcome, but please ensure you have adequate personal/professional support outside of this class. Feel free to ask me if you have questions about the suitability of this course for you (there is a field on the course application form for comments/questions and I will respond to those). Together we’ll be sharing and exploring what it means to open to emotional experience through meditation, and discussions will focus on the meditative approaches themselves vs. sharing the details of our lives. It can be very nourishing to be practicing with a group of folks who are willing to put in the time to actively seek more inner harmony.
This course is suitable for all levels of experience, though it will not include basic meditation instructions. It will be taught from the perspective of Insight Meditation, and many of the approaches are in line with how Rob Burbea presented the domain of working with emotional experience.
There will be an optional live guided meditation on Wednesdays to provide a bit of support for practice mid-week. This session will be recorded and posted for those who cannot attend.
Key aspects of this course
- Becoming more aware of the felt experience of emotions in the body.
- Developing skillfulness in attending to emotional experience in ways that brings more balance and ease.
- Questioning and opening our sense of self-narrative in ways that bring more freedom.
- Exploring the connections between felt emotion and mental activity.
- Developing confidence with our emotional experience (a deeper sense we can feel at home within our inner life).