Q. My question concerns labelling experience in and out of meditation. For example we can note our feelings, emotions and thoughts. Whether our experience is painful, pleasurable or neutral. We can also break our emotions down into the five hindrances or longer lists of mental states that exist within the Buddhist tradition. Doing this sometimes seems to help me objectify my experience and helps me notice when I am going down a certain path. At the same time I can’t always define my mental states that easily, or differentiate feeling from emotion. I also experience some confusion as to what kind of breakdown is most helpful or necessary to practice. I would be grateful for any comments you may in this area.

A. This type of practice is something I’m not at all experienced with, and is definitely not in the spirit of the DharmaMind group or this website. My background is in Zen, whose spirit is not one of labelling or dissecting experience. While I do not consider myself to be a Zen practitioner these days, I have never left that spirit behind. The danger with wanting to label and compartmentalise what we are experiencing at this moment is that we can distance ourselves from the impact of the experience, and that can subtly lead us to disowning our relationship with that experience. We can take it into the realm of theory and labels rather than dealing with the emotional impact of whatever it may be. We discover through practice that in fact we spend so much of our time putting a space between ourselves and life’s experiences anyway, seeing it to be a sort of safety device that allows us to avoid the emotional reaction that can be both fearful and challenging. This can create a sense of dissatisfaction and lack of fulfilment in life because we are only living a part of it. Noting that danger, Buddhism does offers us many fine practices that do use systems of labelling and box-filling in pursuit of wisdom.