I would be gratefuland interested in any and all thoughts the readers might have in response to the article below (pinkcottage51@gmail.com)

Meditation and Affect

PP  1- 2 My initial ambition was to write a book with chapters that would expand in more detail some of the ideas contained in this article. This article was to also include an attempt to provide a religious and philosophical context for the view of meditation practice, presented. This portion of the article was to draw heavily on the writings of Scottish philosopher John McMurray but that enterprise proved a little too ambitious; and in the end I waited for the proverbial 2nd wind that never came. As a result I have decided to complete the article as is and see what discussion, if any, it might provoke.

      Also since writing this article,I became a Reiki practitioner and I have discovered that Reiki, besides being a powerful, albeit at times unpredictable, means for spiritual, emotional and physical healing, also provides access through the Reiki symbols to distinct aspects of the meditative state of consciousness. Only in recent years have practitioners and writers on meditation practice begun to emphasize the importance of feeling as an object of meditation practice. (Dr. Mark Epstein) Traditional Eastern practices have no word for emotion but do have a word for feeling but feeling describes a tone of the objects of meditation; objects in the world possess.Some American Zen writers like Charlotte Joko Beck and her students Barry Magrid (Also a psychoanalyst) and Ezra Bayda have emphasized the role of affect in the actual meditation experience in the sitting itself.

   Joko Beck and Bayda have also emphasized affect/feeling’s overall importance in meditation practice and its significant role when meditation practice is extended to everyday life. Joko Beck’s writings were the original inspiration for this article because of her willingness to address the importance of affect or feeling in her practice.

      Meditation traditions of all stripes have emphasized freeing ourselves from the cognitions that bedevil us and cause unneeded suffering but do not usually address what gives these cognitions their power. The emphasis or pathway into meditation has varied in traditional practices. However if one were to distill these traditions into two overall approaches these approaches would be concentration or mindfulness, the one or the zero. Some traditions incorporate both approaches.

      These traditions also vary in what they chose to be the primary object of the mediation: cognition, bodily sensations or perceptions, but rarely, if at all, affect/feeling/emotion.I believe that a shift in emphasis toward affect will not only change one’s understanding as to what actually happens in meditation but will influence what he or she considers to be the overall goal of meditation. I believe most traditional forms of meditation develop a consciousness that is less determined by affect either by shutting it out or wearing it out. Daniel Brown concludes that those who practice some traditional forms of meditation increase their ability to process affect. He describes the experienced meditator as being less reactive to affect-laden content in his or her consciousness and describes the most highly developed meditator,who has reached the final stage of enlightenment, as not experiencing any negative affect. This article contains the results of projective testing conducted by Dr.Brown to assess the changes in the emotional content present in consciousness at each stage of development in the meditator.

   I believe that if one views meditation as a means to develop the individual’s capacity to have his or her actions not be determined or, more correctly, be less determined by his or her affect, it provides a way of viewing meditation that strips it of the trappings of traditional beliefs about what the meditation process is and what its goals should be and could make this practice more accessible to the rest of us in the modern world. The Dali Lama has been engaged in such an enterprise,but has focused on the connection between meditation and science and meditation and health.

   This emphasis on affect also provides a bridge between meditation and modern psychological treatment  This writer has attended a number of conferences in which speakers have debated whether or not such a bridge can be built and if so how it can be constructed.I believe that the success of any psychological treatment, whatever the school or tradition, can be judged by how well it helps the individual develop that part of his consciousness that allows him or her to tolerate and experience and not react to negative affect and at times positive affect like Interest / Excitement. I believe meditation provides a powerful means that allows an individual to continue to develop this ability or skill.

    Therein lies its appeal and the relevance of meditation practice has for us all. whatever the school or tradition, can be judged by how well it helps the individual develop that part of his consciousness that allows him or her to tolerate and experience and not react to negative affect and at times positive affect like Interest / Excitement.I believe meditation provides a powerful means that allows an individual to continue to develop this ability or skill.

 Page 3-4 It also addresses what I see has been a problem with the traditional schools of meditation; what I call “the pedal meets the metal effect” (there are a host of other clichés that capture this same thought); that is how does meditation help the meditator become a better and more compassionate person, more able to cope with the vicissitudes of a daily rough and tumble existence (not a protected cloistered environment); in particular those vicissitudes endemic to all personal relationships..

  As noted above Joko Beck emphasizes experiencing “feeling” as the crucial element in making meditation, a practice that is relevant to our daily lives. One of the themes of this article is to present an alternative way to view “suffering” (the goal of a number of traditions of meditation is to end suffering) as the negative affect a person experiences as well as the negative affect he or she experiences about having this negative affect. If one is more able and willing to experience this negative affect this suffering should lessen.

   It should be noted at this point that underlying this article is this writer’s take on a long neglected theory of affect posited by Silvan Tomkins in six volumes of writings on the nature of Affect, beginning in the early 60s and extending to the early 90s; as well as the writings of Carol Izzard and Donald Nathanson, both of whom have made Tomkins’ Theory of Affect more palatable and easier to digest. A simplification of Tomkins’ view regarding affect is that there are basic innate affects present in humans and less so in other animals. Tomkins would have you observe a human infant for any length of time to accept this claim. Secondly, Tomkins posited that affect is ubiquitous that it attaches to anything even to itself, which is one reason why we tend to ignore it and not give it its due while at the same time providing its power in motivating our actions.

  Donald Nathanson created a shorthand for the other terms we use to describe affect, stating affect refers to the bio-physiological, feeling to the psychological that is perception of affect and emotion to the biographical; the meaning we each assign affect combined with our thoughts and memories etc. over time. I am employing this shorthand for affect, emotion and feeling because these terms are often used interchangeably in day to day life and in academic circles, leading to much confusion.

  Tomkins did not use this shorthand himself and preferred to stick with the term affect and describe how affect combines with other affects, cognitions, percepts, physiological reactions etc.

   Tomkins and later Nathanson identified two basic positive affects present in humans from birth: interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy. They both described these basic affects in this way with the moderate form followed by the more intense manifestation of that particular affect. They both identified one neutral affect: surprise-startle and three basic negative affects: fear-terror, distress-anguish and anger-rage.

  Tomkins identified one negative affect that he felt originally developed as an auxiliary to the drive hunger that being disgust/contempt. Nathanson identified these as two distinct affects which he identified as being dissmell and disgust. Nathanson identified contempt as a combination of anger and disgust and dissmell.

   Both identified shame–humiliation as an innate affect that did not motivate one to totally reject the object of attention like when we experience disgust and dissmell toward the object, but that shame is experienced when positive affect toward an object is incompletely reduced and does not result in a total rejection of that object, conversely there remains a wish to maintain a relationship with that object of attention. Shame, according to Tomkins, is the affect distinguished by its ambivalence toward the once desired object.

  Tomkins and Nathanson maintain that all these affects can be observed in infants by age nine months with shame being the most difficult to observe in infancy but very much in evidence when an infant realizes the familiar face he expected is that of a stranger and he/she temporarily becomes disoriented and confused. 

   Also both Tomkins and Nathanson delineate the nature or qualities of all affect. I will draw upon Nathanson’s description of those qualities. He identifies those qualities as: Urgency, Abstractness, Analogic, Interactive with its Receptors, Matches Profile to Stimulus, Correlates Stimulus and Response and Generality.

  Nathanson / Tomkins state whenever human experience has a sense of urgency that urgency has been provided by affect. They stated, secondly, that affect is abstract; that it bears no intrinsic relationship, has no inherent meaning or association to the triggering source of that affect; that the particular affect we experience is never a clue to its source. This quality would account for the wide range of objects, activities etc., we each fear, enjoy or despise etc.

  Thirdly, that the particular affect we experience resembles, feels more like or is analogous to the stimulus which triggered it. One example would be that a sudden startle resembles that sudden and short-lived stimulus, like a gunshot, that triggered it. a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. I'm a great place for you to tell your story and let your visitors know a little more about you.

PP. 5-6 Fourthly, that those receptors on the body; hair on the back of the neck standing up in fear, face turning red with embarrassment (shame) provide the feedback that allows us to become conscious of that affect; that we are afraid or ashamed. This same quality likely contributes to the broadcast of affect to others, external contagion vs. the internal contagion within the individual described above. Fifth, that each affect has a particular temporal profile, startle/ brief event, distress evidenced in sobbing, a steady-state or ongoing pain vs. the cry of fear triggered by a sudden stab of pain. Sixth, affect with increased intensity expands from the original receptor site,often times the face,to other parts of the body (affect recruits these additional sites) and this expansion or recruitment in turn helps strengthen the link the original stimulus will have with whatever followed it. The stimulus would not only be associated with a frown, but possibly, muscular tension in the shoulders, a clenched jaw or a clenched fist etc. Seventh, that affect has no built in links to any other system of the body or mind and conversely it has the freedom to combine with any of these systems as opposed to drives, which are paired with a particular physiological state  However, the socialization of affect and/or the tendency toward increased affective control do progressively limit this freedom.

     When I have meditated using a simple system of labeling thinking, feeling, seeing, touching, smelling, hearing,sensing (internal bodily sensations), reacting,intending and doing, the most subtle object of meditation was feeling, likely because of the nature of affect described above, especially, when one considers its capacity to attach itself to everything and its similarity to that which stimulates it. (The exception would be when I am experiencing a particular mood states such as sadness, worry anger etc. or experiencing strong feelings in reaction to specific circumstances) This is one likely reason affect has not been the focus of meditation and why “feeling” has traditionally been viewed as a tone possessed by objects in the world that causes us to become attached to or to avoid that object.

     As noted above Nathanson stated affect was abstract and general.Tomkins posited that particular innate affects were activated by the density of neural firings in our brain caused by the particular stimulus.He produced a theory in which what activates affect is quantitative in nature, not qualitative. He defined density as the intensity of the neural firings times the number of neural firings per unit of time. He drew a graph with the affects with startle showing the most neural firings over a shorter period of time followed by fear, a lesser increase over a longer period of time and interest as the a stimulus which produced a slower steady increase in neural firings. He posited that positive affect of joy-satisfaction is produced by the decrease in the density of stimulation. Laughter would be like the mirror image of fear or startle and satisfaction-joy that of affect interest-excitement.Anger and distress are produced by the steady or constant density of stimulation over time,with anger having a higher level of density than distress.If one were tovisualize a graph  it might have better shown the range of each affect by bands with the surprise being on the lower part of the startle band and terror being on the upper portion of the fear band etc rathe than by straight lines. 

.p. 6-8. Also it is important to note that Tomkins identifies the face as the primary site or organ of affect, much like the hand and its fingers is the primary organ of exploration and manipulation. Of note, traditional meditation instructions to the meditator do not usually focus on attention to the meditation student’s face. This is just another indication as to how traditional meditation practices have ignored affect. I would recommend that meditation practice that includes affect as an object of meditation also include discursive discussion as to which facial muscles are involved in the range of affects/feelings and emotions we experience. In Vol. I (pp.227-242) of his series of six volumes on Affect etc. Tomkins drew upon a study by G.B. Ducheme in 1862. Ducheme identified the facial muscles involved in particular emotion/affect, including the distinction between muscles utilized in false emotional and true emotional expression. Paul Ekman has focused on this portion of Tomkins’ work, but primarily as an observer of affect in others vs. experiencing affect internally.

   One of the most significant statements Tomkins (Nathanson) made regarding affect is that we have a wide array of emotional experiences resulting from a basic affect being combined with thought, with itself and with another affect. What we might call an emotional experience could result from a particular affect experienced at different intensity levels (anger: irritation vs. rage) or could result from past efforts to attenuate the expression of particular affect in order to make it feel less toxic or for one to be perceived as more socially acceptable.

   Tomkins maintained that while we have an array of emotions (He would not use the term “emotion”, but Nathanson would) the affect we actually experience remains one of the nine affects: fear, anger, distress, joy, interest, disgust, dissmell and shame. For instance we might communicate to others that we feel guilty about violating this or that moral standard, but the actual affect, the feeling, that we would experience would be shame. (Guilt itself could be viewed as a socio-cultural attempt to manage the affect of shame)

  This view on affect, emotion and feeling actually makes it easier to incorporate affect as an object of meditation as we can more easily provide a framework of understanding as to what we are actually experiencing during the meditation. Meditation also can then be understood as a means of deconstructing emotional experiences separating affect from thought, from memory, from itself, from other affects, and from past efforts to control it etc.

  The following is a list of “feelings” from a workbook I used in group treatment with sexual offenders called Pathways in the distant past; the authors encouraged the reader to “feel” his or her emotions and then list some of these “feelings”. Tomkins would likely state that all these “feelings” are one of the nine basic affects combined with other elements that were noted above.

   For instance excitement would be considered just an intense form of the basic affect of interest; in fact as I mentioned earlier Tomkins and Nathanson listed each basic affect and its most intense manifestation interest–excitement, anger–rage etc.; feeling friendly: a combination of happiness and interest toward another person etc.; humiliated: an intense manifestation of shame (shame-humiliation); playful: feeling joy and excitement while interacting with another person etc.; perplexed: distress felt in not understanding a particular situation; threatened: fear of harm by another person or a circumstance; paranoid: fear combined with a strong and rigid set of beliefs as to the source of the fear; detached: an attempt to attenuate or disavow all affect; smug: a mild form of disgust combined with satisfaction-joy; hysterical: fear combined with a flight of dramatic and exaggerated thoughts; energetic; interest combined with physiological state; judged: shame and accompanying distress felt about another’s opinion of one’s self and so on

  Excited, hopeful, relieved, pleased, cheerful, amused, courageous, content, good, proud, friendly, loving, grieving, flattered, exhausted, sad, lonely, stupid, pained, discontent, regretful, aggravated, weary, ugly ridiculous, hopeless, afraid, angry, beautiful,  cautious,  cowardly,  satisfied, humble, modest, hateful  resentful,  threatened, revengeful  jealous, envying, selfish, guilty, sensual, bad, mad, wary, up-tight, putdown, nervous, shaky, strange, detached, hostile, dreary, faithful, unique, happy, sick, judged ,childish, humiliated, impatient, responsible, sorry, hungry, nauseated, thankful, obedient, wicked, smothered, joyful, smug, frustrated, paranoid, optimistic, surprised, ashamed, curious, anxious, determined, embarrassed, shy, pessimistic, bashful, miserable, indifferent , small, put-out,  inadequate,  insecure,  perplexed,  pensive,  sympathetic, disgusted, hysterical, playful, ecstatic, open, fearful, energetic, depressed..

    One could distill the affect(s) experienced { feeling(s)} from each of the  emotions listed above; albeit some more easily than others.

PP 8-10 One conclusion that can be drawn from Tomkins theory of affect is that, while we all experience the same basic affects, our emotions are unique to our own idiosyncratic histories which are result from our cultural, social, familial and individual experiences. What I call guilt may be something entirely different than what you mean by guilt, but if we grew up in similar cultural, social and familial circumstances it may mean something more similar to us than if we grew up in an entirely different culture etc. However, when we all feel or experience guilt we both experience the affect of shame.Traditional schools of meditation in effect teach us not to react to our thoughts or our emotions so we begin to no longer identify with them and are able to disentangle/deconstruct our affect from its other components which make up our emotional experiences. The result is that these thoughts etc. also then lose their steam their motivation, their value, their affect, their urgency.

     That being said, no matter how similar our socialization might be, we both might experience guilt differently with you only experiencing shame, while I experience a combination of shame and fear and the guy down the street might experience a combination of shame and distress etc. when he is “feeling” guilty.An even more complexad abstract emotional state like being “depressed” may cast even a wider net of different meaning for each individual as well as a different experience of affect. The terms stress and anxiety first used by those engaged in psychological research/treatment and now used in everyday parlance have served to both obscure what affect we are actually experiencing and have at the same time reduced the richness of our emotional experiences. When we say we are “stressed” what is the feeling we are experiencing? Are we referring to some other emotional state with this catch-all term?

    All of the above circumstances, including the nature of affect itself and our inability to develop clear understanding of that nature have contributed to the exclusion of affect as an object of traditional meditation practice.

      The following are two descriptions of meditation provided by two writers Donald Nathanson and Carol Izzard who draw heavily on Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affect:

"Meditation is asystem through which we agree to allow affective amp[lig fication of thoughts m normally lefy out of our awarenes;:

And:

“My position is that a special state of consciousness is altering the structures and processes that are the contents of ordinary states of consciousness. Without drugs or cerebral accidents, this cannot be done easily or summarily. It has to begin with efforts to re-channel emotion and perceptual-cognitive processes. The ubiquitous emotion of interest has to be narrowly channeled into sharply focused attention on some simple object or process. As one maintains focal attention toward simpler and simpler phenomena,the seemingly automatic affective-perceptual-cognitive processing of sensory input is slowed and interrupted and things are sensed differently. The emotion (affect) of interest begins to operate in a different way, with less of its usual focusing, structuring, and organizing functions, and sense data from images or external objects can be processed in extraordinary fashions. If percepts result from sense data they may lack structure but be unusually rich in color, texture, or tone. If an affect other than interest emerges in the altered state, it will be experienced in an extraordinary way. A rare moment of receptive joy or joy combined with tranquility may be the closest we usually come to a special state of consciousness characterized by emotion. Perhaps excitement simply over being alive is another example.Giving up or restricting affective-perceptual-cognitive operations of consciousness frees our senses for dramatically new experiences.”

   Before I continue I should just mention that the term meditation has different meanings in different spiritual practices. For instance, 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous drew upon on an organization called the Oxford Group for many of its practices The Oxford Group viewed meditation as a quiet time in which one waited for specific instructions from God or their higher power. r story and let your visitors know a little more about you.12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous drew upon on an organization called the Oxford Group for many of its practices The Oxford Group viewed meditation as a quiet time in which one waited for specific instructions from God or their higher power story and let your visitors know a little more about you.12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous drew upon on an organization called the Oxford Group for many of its practices The Oxford Group viewed meditation as a quiet time in which one waited for specific instructions from God or their higher power.

   PP. 10-13 To Christianize these three approaches for a moment, I would say that there are those who turn inward utilizing their witness or observing self to attempt to merge directly with God; those who wait for inspiration or for the more literal minded, instructions, from God; and those, who utilize their observing self to translate God into human action, much like Jesus Christ did, with the goal of knowing others as they are “loving thy neighbor as thy self”. Accessing God to act in a way that gives one knowledge of God in “the other” versus viewing “the other” as alien.

     In writing this article I read and spoke to my aunt who is a Franciscan sister about different accounts of St. Francis of Assisi and his encounter with a leper. St.Francis initially was said to throw coins to the leper and ride off before his religious conversion and after his conversion to cover the leper in one version and in another version, which I prefer, St. Francis kissed the leper. I prefer the latter version because, unlike covering the leper out of empathy for the leper; because he identified with the shame St Francis believed the leper felt and then doing for the leper what he would have wanted to do for himself, if he had this disease; by kissing the leper St Francis provided the one thing that the leper likely missed the most because of his disease; that being human touch and affection. By kissing the leper St. Francis showed compassion toward the leper. He was not motivated by the shame he was experiencing for the leper but rather was able to discover what the leper actually needed.It is my contention that increasing one’s capacity to experience one’s own feelings/affect through meditating on one’s own affect reduces the likelihood that one will react to situations motivated by what one feels at the moment and will increase the likelihood that one will actually see the other person for who he or she is and will increase the likelihood that one will show spontaneous compassion for that other person.

    In the practice of mindfulness or Theravadan meditation, one of the beginning instructions is to “gently” bring back your attention back to your breathing and away from distracting thoughts and/or sensations. The first set of instructions is to concentrate on one’s breathing. These distracting thoughts are always coupled with affect, most times negative affect/emotion; for instance,irritation at a repetitious sound coming from outside the room; upset with the temperature of the room, aggravation or panic concerning the aching in one’s back. The instruction directs the meditator to return to a calmer or more pleasant state or lower intensity of affect, which indirectly addresses the negative affect that one was experiencing when distracted. There is a pitfall here,that one will find him or herself in a willful struggle with him or herself to bring back his attention back to the breath, not so “gently” away from the distraction, thus increasing the negative affect present. On the other hand, this instruction can increase one’s ability to focus or concentrate and move one’s attention away from angering, distressing, fear-inducing or shaming circumstances.

   When I participated in meditation with the group or Sangha,I found it much easier to move back to the breath by allowing myself to fully experience the negative affect I was feeling that was coupled with the distraction and the thoughts I had about it and then move my attention back to the breath. Of note, the basic traditional instruction described above ignores the fact that affect is almost always present and as a result they do not address affect or emotion explicitly in the instruction.

     Also it is noteworthy that traditional meditation instructions that are directed at relaxing the body, indirectly gets the meditator to reduce the tension in the body and by extension the face, thus decreasing the intensity of negative affect that might be present and increasing positive affect, that is the affect of joy or satisfaction.It is interesting that many meditation practices focus on having the meditator attend to ,concentrate, on their breathing, sometimes as an initial stage of meditation and sometimes as a direct pathway to an ecstatic or mystical state. This choice of object is interesting because ordinarily we only become aware of or attend to our breathing when we are experiencing an event that is laden with fear or distress or both or some other negative affect, like trying to catch one’s breath, choking or facing an “anxiety-provoking” situation etc. From the start of meditation one is asked to concentrate on an object, his or her breathing; that is normally associated with negative affect in our experience/consciousness. Learning to experience that negative affect over and over again as we attend to our breathing.

   Meditation also provides the meditator with the capacity to place the affect of interest under increased intentional control. Most theorists “interested” in emotion/affect don’t’ even identify interest as an affect, a motivation that makes us attend to one thing rather than another, not out of fear, distress but because interest makes us want more contact with that object. These theorists frequently collapse interest into attention In a more that a few books on meditation one’s consciousness prior to any meditation practice is described as a bunch of wild monkeys moving from one thought, perception, sensation etc to another. This describes a person experiencing interest without any intentional control. Boredom, an absence of interest, is identified as a hindrance in many schools of meditation.Remaining interested in the face of nothing interesting is identified as an important stage in many meditation practices. Ridding oneself of attachment is often identified as something that a meditator can aspire to. Put another way the mediator strives to maintain attention toward the object but without an emotional attachment to that object.

PP 13-14    Earlier in this article I referred to how meditation develops a particular form of consciousness sometimes referred to as the observing self. I believe meditation more than any other spiritual or psychological practice helps one develop and access that part of our consciousness that allows us to act in more intentional manner, not driven by our affect, or by our attempts to escape that very same affect. When I was first exposed to psychological theory it was frequently mentioned in the articles I read that individuals with characterological problems who acted impulsively and were driven to act the way they did, did so because they had little in the way of an observing ego. To simplify this theory,the stronger the observing ego the more psychologically healthy an individual is and the more able he or she is to tolerate difficult emotions or affect and not be driven by them.

    Of note one practice popular in treating characterological problems, in particular, the borderline personality disorder is Dialectical Behavioral Treatment (DBT). That treatment approach utilizes mindfulness techniques, like radical acceptance. However, this treatment approach, either intentionally or more likely because it draws on meditation practice that gives short shrift to affect, makes the object of meditation or mindfulness anything but affect;This has proven to be effective because the focus of attention on affect itself would likely be too overwhelming for this clinical population whose primary treatment goal is to begin to build a rudimentary observing self and to begin to build a rudimentary tolerance of negative affect.

   The observing self goes by many different names in different meditation practices; the Witness and Atman to name two. In Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Meditation in the chapters the Razor’s Edge and Building a Bigger Container she described what I believe is one of the most important functions of the witness or observer; that being allowing oneself to experience thoughts and their painful affect that we would not normally allow into our consciousness as they would be rejected out if hand, denied or disavowed because they would be experienced as toxic.(See earlier definition of meditation by Nathanson)

    Often times, the particular meditation practice is defined by what the observing self seeks. Does it wait for instruction, intuition and inspiration from God? Do we seek to have the witness merge into nothingness, a Cloud of Unknowing, achieving this goal? Do we seek to have the observing self become our spiritual backbone that allows us to experience life and its joys and its vicissitudes with interest, equanimity and grace with an overarching aspiration to end all suffering? My preference as can be seen by the focus on affect as an object of meditation is the latter type of practice. All three of these approaches serve to increase the individual’s access to both calmness and interest in the face of negative affect.

   I do believe that some schools of mediation consider the fully realized observing self to be a state of consciousness without affect; a self without content a nothing. I feel this state of consciousness, when developed through meditation, would be better described as being grounded in a gentle undulation; an alternation between calmness (low intensity joy) and interest (not excitement).I guess one could envision a state of consciousness where these undulations are almost imperceptible, likely in a quiet cloistered environment, but if challenged by the negative affect endemic to daily life I suggest that these undulations would quickly make a reappearance and help one stay the course when one encounters affect-laden circumstances.

    In summary, I have attempted to show why affect, feeling and emotion,have largely been ignored my traditional meditation practices. In doing so I introduced a theory of affect that has also largely been ignored, with the hope of clarifying what I mean when I posit that meditation practice that focuses on affect, feeling and emotion can be an alternative way of viewing meditation practice; as well as clarifying the meaning of those words.

     I also posit that this alternative view also provides a way of demonstrating that meditation practice can have as its primary goal the strengthening of that same part of our consciousness that most, if not all mental health treatment practices, also seek to strengthen. As a result, after establishing this continuum of mental health treatment and meditation practice, meditation would no longer be just viewed as an adjunct to mental health treatment,but as a practice that provides a means toward achieving the overall goal of the psychological health and/or the spiritual awakening of a particular individual.

Written by: Michael Irish