Not "Identifying"

  Some people might characterize meditative practice as a kind of immersion in the everyday present. I have sometimes heard people use the expression "Go with the flow" to characterize the attitude of accepting everything which they gain from meditative practices, including sitting meditation, and yoga. I tend to feel that this approach works for a little while, until a person reaches a stumbling block. The particular stumbling block that I tend to have in meditative practice is a kind of dullness of mind that feels like emptiness or despair. In those moments when I feel the despair setting in, I tend to either zone out or complain inwardly about the situation, hoping that I can somehow get back to some idealize state in meditation.
    The way of this practice is not trying to get to a special relaxed state. In fact, there are definitely situations I have encountered in practice where I totally 'poop out' and find myself incapable of trying to sustain a particular desired way of being or state of mind. It is as though the practice literally takes me to a corner and forces me to somehow confront that sense of heaviness. In those times, I really need to generate the question who is having this emotion. The reason is that it isn't the emotion itself that is creating the distress, but rather the sense of creating a self out of those emotions.
    The method here is quite simply to ask "who is having this emotion?" And when I am serious to gently explore this area, I realize that there is no need to even exalt or degrade one emotional state over the other. In fact, the whole struggle to 'transcend' emotions seems to be rooted in this misunderstanding of taking an emotional state to be my true mind and awareness in much the same way one typically relates to the body as oneself. It is also rooted in trying to idealize or make permanent certain specific emotions which seem pleasant.
   An example I recently read about regarding exalting the emotions is that of the 'fins d'amour' troubadours. Troubadours were the originators of romantic poetry, and they have been described as people who have tried to make the feeling of love into a kind of spiritual goal. If I exalt a particular person and praise all his or her qualities, however, is this a good thing? I would have to say that it seems okay in the beginning. But like most patterns of thought, it soon bumps up against the reality that these emotions are always coming and going. To try to hold onto an idealized state of anyone is bound to lead to conflict, as one begins to understand that the thought of the person isn't the same as the actual person. For this reason, I think that the troubadours might have been setting themselves up for disappointment by exalting their beloved.
  There is also a danger that over-idealizing people or emotions creates an untenable fantasy about how a person should behave or act. Sometimes, when a person finds herself doing this kind of thing, she can just choose the actual moment as it is rather than hanging onto the ideal. The practice is to go back to the origin of all the emotions and continue to question the source.