Mindfulness of Current Emotions Worksheet
When current feelings should be kept mindful and not just classified conceptually.
Treat holding current feelings as a concrete exercise instead of just knowing the skill title.
When does this fit?
If Mindfulness of Current Emotions is to be practiced in writing or in a guided manner.
Priority in the path
This node fits early in the path when inner restlessness or strong emotional activation are in the foreground.
What this is about
The essential discipline in this worksheet is staying with the description of the emotion as an event — what is arising, its physical sensations, its action urge — without shifting into analysis of why it arose or what it means. Mindfulness of emotions fails when it becomes rumination in disguise. The worksheet's purpose is to build the capacity to observe an emotion fully without either suppressing it or acting on its urge — and to notice, over time, that emotions observed this way tend to decrease in intensity rather than intensify.
Step by step
Work through the steps at your own pace. For written exercises, you can use paper or a notebook.
- Name the emotion, prompting situation and intensity from 0 to 100. At extreme distress, begin with crisis-survival skills.
- Observe where you feel the emotion in your body and how it changes.
- Notice urges without automatically acting on them. Let judgments about the emotion pass.
- Afterwards record intensity and experience: what did you observe and what helped?
Explore and apply
These nodes are the next meaningful continuation when you want to move on from the current concept.
Sources and references
Show where this node comes from and how source-near or practice-near it is.