Releasing Emotional Reactions
In this retreat, Ken McLeod teaches how emotional reactions release when we stop resisting and start experiencing them fully. Through three distinct methods—breath-based attention, taking and sending, and direct awareness—participants learn to meet discomfort, uncover natural knowing, and stay directly in what arises, without separation. “The illusion is that we are separate from what we experience,” Ken says, pointing to a way of living in which emotion, emptiness, and awareness are not different—and reactivity releases through knowing experience directly.
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1. Why We React: Losing Touch with What We’re Experiencing
Ken opens the retreat by inviting participants into a direct, embodied relationship with their emotional lives. “We react because we fall out of knowing our experience,” he says, pointing to how emotional reactivity arises when we lose touch with what’s actually happening.
Topics covered include how emotional reactions form, why knowing experience completely leads to release, and how resting in the body and breath sets the stage for the retreat’s practical methods. -
2. The Quality of Knowing: Being in Experience
Ken begins by reframing practice not as a way to get something, but as a way to be in experience without separation. “The illusion is that we are separate from what we experience,” he says, pointing to the natural knowing that arises when attention and experience are not divided.Topics covered include different types of knowing, how separation leads to emotional imbalance, and a detailed introduction to Thich Nhat Hanh’s five-phase breath-based practice for being with difficult emotions.
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3. Going to the Edge: Deepening Practice
Ken shifts from instruction to refinement, helping students work with emotional intensity by finding the point where they can stay present without shutting down. “You go to the edge, and you rest your attention right there, with whatever is arising,” he says, emphasizing the power of attention to transform experience when we don’t avoid or get lost in it.
Topics covered include how to recognize avoidance strategies, the role of metaphor in illuminating practice, and the courage needed to meet what emotional reactions reveal about ourselves. -
4. Taking and Sending: A Practice for Releasing Reactivity
Ken introduces a second method for releasing emotional reactions, drawn from the Mahayana practice of taking and sending. The five phases—taking in pain, opening to reactions, sending out well-being, feeling joy, and resting in no separation—offer a way to experience emotional discomfort without retreat or resistance. “You open to another person’s pain and actually take it in... and something begins to change,” he says, emphasizing how this practice dissolves self-protective patterns and opens a path to connection. Topics covered include the four immeasurables, how emotional pain relates to identity, and how transformation arises by working at the edge of our capacity.
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5. The Mystery of Experience
Ken guides students into a deeper understanding of experience by showing how we move away from life itself when we treat stories, roles, and identities as what is real. “We take these descriptions to be the thing itself,” he says, pointing to the illusion of a self that stands apart from experience. Topics covered include how descriptions obscure direct knowing, how reactivity dissolves when we stay with what actually arises, and how the sense of self begins to fall away when we stop living at the story level.
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6. No Fixation: A Direct Awareness Practice for Emotional Reactions
Ken introduces a third method for releasing emotional reactions: a direct awareness practice that reveals the emptiness of reactivity. “When you look at what experiences the feeling and the world it projects, everything goes empty,” he says, describing how emotional reactions dissolve when we stop trying to change them and rest in what’s arising.
Topics covered include tracing reactions back to core feelings, evoking emotion without resistance, and recognizing fixation as the root of distortion in both practice and life. -
7. Work Out Your Own Freedom
Ken closes the retreat by refining the five-step process for releasing emotional reactions and pointing to the unity of emotion, emptiness, and knowing. “Emotion, emptiness, and what experiences are not different,” he says, describing a shift in practice from working with emotion to resting in direct experience. Topics covered include the fluid nature of emotional experience, the natural unfolding of transformation, and the invitation to take full responsibility for your own freedom.