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are we resisting? We have to be honest about this. Often we don’t want to stay in the present moment for more than a few seconds.
    On the most superficial level, perhaps it’s difficult to reside in the experiential world because it’s unfamiliar. We’re not educated to experience, to be present, to inhabit the sensory world. Most of our formal education involves cultivating the thinking process. As well, our culture is oriented toward fostering security and comfort. So just to counteract our years of conditioning, learning how to be present requires repeated practice.
    Furthermore, when we do allow ourselves to reside in the present moment, we often don’t like it one bit. We’re apt tocome into contact with the underlying jangle that I call the anxious quiver of being. We might feel vague sensations of groundlessness or the hole of discomfort at the core of our unhealed pain. We will almost always resist experiencing these places because they don’t feel good at all. We move away from the shakiness, back into the false comfort of our thoughts.
    This is especially true during powerful emotional reactions. For example, if strong anxiety arises, the intensity of dread can feel like death. Even when we remember to practice—regarding the anxiety as our path, not as something we have to escape—we may have trouble residing in the feeling of anxiety. Labeling the thoughts will help, because we are no longer fueling the emotion with beliefs such as “I can’t do this” or “This is too much.” But even when we are able to label our thoughts and thereby loosen our attachment to them, we may still resist the physical discomfort of anxiety. We resist because we don’t like the discomfort.
    But with practice we may eventually discover that these powerful emotions, which can feel like death, are not death. In fact, they are nothing more than a combination of believed thoughts and strong or unpleasant physical sensations. As we cultivate the willingness to just be with the physical experience of the emotion, this fact can gradually become clear to us. With perseverance and effort, we discover that it is possible, through experiencing, to transform our solid emotional reactions into something much more porous. It’s not that they disappear (although they might) but that we hold them much more lightly.
    For example, there was one period when I was particularly discouraged about my practice life. It felt as if my practice was stagnant, yet I knew that I was unwilling to make the necessary efforts. It reached a point at which I began to seriously question myself, and the discouragement and self-doubt spiraled down into a state of anxiety and hopelessness. I wondered why I should even bother with practice, because nothing seemed to be going right.
    I went to see Joko to describe what was going on, and she first asked me what my most believed thoughts were. I realized that I didn’t know. In fact, I had forgotten to even attempt to label my thoughts. She also asked me whether I could reside in the physical experience of my emotional state.
    For the next few days, whenever the discouragement or anxiety arose, I’d first ask myself what my most believed thoughts were. And as they became clear, I would label them: “Having a believed thought: nothing matters,” “Having a believed thought: I’ll never be good at this,” “Having a believed thought: what’s the use?” Often I would have to label the same thought over and over. But once the story line was obvious, it became easier to approach the physical experience of the emotion itself. There was still resistance to the unpleasant quality of the physical experience, especially the physical sensations of doom and anxiety in my midsection. But as I continued to bring awareness to my bodily experience, the density of the emotion began to change. Instead of something solid, the emotion began to break up into smaller aggregates of labeled thoughts and individual, constantly