Ken’s description of the three components of a reaction—physical sensation, emotional tone, and the stories that arise—feels spot on. For me, the body and emotional sensations usually arrive together, almost as one movement: for example, a pounding or trembling with fear, a hollowness in the belly with shame, an ache around the heart with grief. Those cues show up before any story rushes in to explain what’s happening.
When I first heard Ken talk about these, I suddenly understood how strongly I was influenced by stories and how utterly convincing they were. My fabricated narratives felt immediate and unquestionable: "She thinks this," "He wants that," "I must have done something wrong." But with practice the stories have become less elaborate, and have much less authority. Body sensations and emotions are now far more accessible than they were before.
Ken emphasises that the story is the least reliable part of a reaction. In one talk he recommended using Byron Katie's four questions to pull the rug out from under stories:
Is this true?How do I know it is true?
How do I feel when I hold this view?
What would life be like if I let this go?
The practice of pausing to ask these four questions has helped me see that my stories are attempts to manage discomfort, rather than a window into truth. And when I can stay with body sensations and feelings without rushing into interpretation, the reaction becomes easier to meet, and the sense that it is “caused” by someone or something else loses its grip. There's more space around the whole experience, and more choice about how to respond.
From Five Elements, Five Dakinis 3
Ken: All reactions have three components. How they manifest physically in the body: typically there’s a kind of tensing or contraction. There can be actual physical sensations in different parts of the body. Your stomach feels churned, or like it does butterflies. There can be a constriction in the throat. There all kinds of possibilities—your heart can beat faster. There are always some—and sometimes some quite strong—physical components to the reaction. And most of the time we aren’t aware of them, which means we aren’t really aware of the reactive process taking place.
So in this set of practices that we’re doing, stay very much connected with your body—what is actually happening in the body. Again you don’t have to analyze it or explain it, but be aware of it and actually experience it.
The same is true at the emotional level. Maybe looking into someone’s eyes triggers fear, maybe it makes you anxious. Maybe you feel squirmy. The sense that someone is seeing you without any judgment may make you acutely aware of your own judgment.
I think one of the things came up earlier is the feeling of being special. And I have one student in L.A. who’s working with that particular issue at this point. She’s very chagrined about it. Because she sees how much of the way that she relates to the world is coming from holding a feeling that she is in some way special. So it allows her to negotiate a lot of situations very easily. But at the same time there’s a certain pride and feeling of superiority. So that’s something you may watch for. Maybe a feeling of being naked, revealed, exposed. And there could be a whole other set of reactions connected with that.
And there are the stories that come up, which is the third component of reaction. This is the component of reaction that we most often notice and believe immediately. We don’t question it at all. And again someone looking at us, really seeing us and seeing us without judgment, we may say to ourselves, “What do they know?” Or, “What does she want?” These are what I mean by stories. And again those thoughts come up. We don’t even question them—we just take them as fact.
But if we’re in touch with the physical and the emotional we may appreciate the fact that these are simply thoughts and ideas and may not have that much grounding in reality. And so now we can experience things very, very differently and experience all of that as, “Oh, this is how I’m reacting to this possibility.” All the discomfort, all the stuff is in me, even though there's a tendency to project it out there.