Shinzen Young, a mindfulness teacher specializing in Unified Mindfulness, joins James Gross, a Stanford psychology professor, to discuss the art of emotional regulation. They explore the dual nature of emotions, emphasizing that both positive and negative feelings are vital for personal growth. The conversation highlights practical strategies for managing emotions, weaving ancient wisdom with modern science. They delve into mindfulness techniques that can help listeners transform their emotional experiences and cultivate resilience in everyday life.
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insights INSIGHT
Understanding Emotions
Emotions are responses to important situations, involving changes in our feelings, behavior, and bodily responses.
Emotions can be helpful or unhelpful, regardless of whether they feel pleasant or unpleasant in the moment.
insights INSIGHT
The Modal Model of Emotion
The modal model of emotion describes how emotions typically unfold: situation, attention, appraisal, then response.
This model helps us understand how to regulate emotions by identifying points of intervention.
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Two Sides of Emotion
Emotions have two sides: experience (internal sensations) and expression (external behaviors).
Mindfulness helps make pleasant emotions more fulfilling and reduces suffering from unpleasant ones.
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In western culture, there's been a long held view that our ability to reason should be placed above our emotions. But the hard truth is that our emotions are there and they're non-negotiable— and If you don't know how to work with them, they can own you.
The good news is that you can work with them and that there are many systems for doing so. To boot, you can learn a ton by listening to your emotions in the right ways.
Today’s guests, Shinzen Young and James Gross will help us understand how to work with our emotions and offer both techniques in modern science and ancient wisdom in order to do so.
Gross is the Ernest R. Hilgard Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant. He teaches something called Unified Mindfulness, which you will hear him describe in this conversation.
This is part one in a series we’re calling The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together. In each episode we bring together a meditative adept or Buddhist scholar and a respected scientist. The idea is to give you the best of both worlds to arm you with both modern and ancient tools for regulating your emotions.
In this episode we talk about:
James’s “modal model” for understanding what emotions are and how they work
James’s five different types of strategies you can use for regulating your emotions
Shinzen’s contention that emotions have two sides to them
How we can experience emotions with more fulfillment and less suffering via a mindfulness training he calls “focus factors”
James’s “process model of emotion regulation”
What James believes are the elements that unite science and Buddhism
Shinzen’s contention that anyone can experience massive benefits of mindfulness training if their meditation practice has four key components
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