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Magazine In Brief, TeachingsTeachings

Getting Friendly With Emotion

By Kamilah Majied, PhD

Summer 2024

It is important to develop friendly relationships with our painful emotions so that we don’t become anxious about feeling anxious or depressed about feeling depressed. If we can welcome feelings as natural states that pass eventually, we can know great peace. It can also be useful to not identify with a painful feeling, because at the same time you are experiencing it, you are also experiencing other feelings. So instead of saying “I am depressed,” you might say, “I notice some depression moving through me.” What other feelings are moving through you? Are there any pleasant feelings in there? These kinds of reflective practices can help you balance your awareness and be more connected to the possibilities for peace and joy in each moment.

♦

Excerpted from Joyfully Just: Black Wisdom and Buddhist Insights for Liberated Living by Kamilah Majied (April 2024). Reprinted with permission from Sounds True.

Listen to our podcast with Kamila Majied.

Kamilah Majied, PhD is a Buddhist mental health therapist, clinical educator, researcher, and internationally engaged consultant on building inclusivity and equity using meditative practices. As Professor of Social Work at California State University, Monterey Bay, she teaches clinical practice to graduate students employing psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, mindfulness-based, and artistic approaches to well-being. She has engaged her Buddhist practice for over forty years, leading colloquia, workshops, retreats, and meditation sessions globally on Buddhism as it relates to experiencing wonder, humor, and insight through transforming oppressive patterns and deepening relationships. She is the author of numerous scholarly and secular articles and a contributing author to Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation & Freedom. Her forthcoming book with Sounds True is entitled Joyfully Just: Black Wisdom and Buddhist Insights for Liberated Living.