How to Feel: An Ancient Guide to Minding Our Emotions

A new translation of the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness--and how it can help us to be less controlled by our emotions

To feel is to suffer. But do we have to suffer as much as we do? Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha discovered that practices of mindfully observing our feelings and emotions can help us gain some distance from them. In How to Feel, Maria Heim provides new translations of essential early Buddhist teachings on mindfulness meditation and connects them to recent findings in psychology and neuroscience. A superb meditation manual and insightful exploration of psychology, the book also provides a brief introduction to Buddhism and features the original Pali-language texts on facing pages.

Drawing from the Samyutta Nikaya, an early canonical collection, How to Feel introduces Buddhist practices of mindfulness. Using them, we can watch feelings come and go like winds passing through the sky. We can observe what causes our negative emotions and learn to shift our attention to other things. We can see where emotions lead us and learn to redirect them. We will still feel, but, with practice, emotions will have less control over us.

Just as they did in ancient India, the teachings in How to Feel offer today’s readers radically new and more enlightened ways to experience emotions.

The Buddha (the ＂Awakened One＂) is the title achieved by Siddhattha Gotama, who lived and taught in north India 2,500 years ago. As a young man he renounced his privileged life to seek an end to suffering and achieved a breakthrough by closely examining his experience. He taught his methods to others, founding the tradition we now call Buddhism. Maria Heim is the George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion at Amherst College. She is the author of Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India and one of the translators of How to Lose Yourself: An Ancient Guide to Letting Go (both Princeton).