Sunday Meditation 12th March 2026

Working with Moods

David Oromith

Hello, good morning, everyone. Wonderful to see you all. Thank you for joining me. I hope you’ve been well since I last saw you. So I think let’s follow our usual format: we’ll begin with our 20-minute meditation, then our talk and then our discussion.

Meditation

So I’d invite you all to please find a comfortable posture for practice, and we can begin straight away.

So, as we’re getting comfortable, just arousing the most meaningful motivation for practice this morning.

Then dropping our attention down into the body: first of all, those raw, tactile sensations where your body meets the ground, whether that is the ground itself or through a chair, a cushion, or wherever you are.

Those sensations of firmness and solidity where your body meets the earth.

What do you notice in the rest of the body right now? What sensations are most obvious to you?

Are there any residual sensations of a recent emotion or perhaps a mood that you’ve been experiencing?

Whatever you find now, just inviting the body to soften and relax, particularly with your out breath.

Let the face be completely soft. No tightening around the brow or the jaws.

No tightening in the shoulders, the arms, and the hands. No tightening in the abdomen. Just loosen up as much as you can right now.

Perhaps coupled with a few slow, deep breaths. Really breathing deeply into the belly, into the chest, and releasing with the out breath.

Seeing if we can relax not only in body but also in mind. Can you give yourself permission to let go of the noise and the busyness? Just for now. just for the duration of this meditation. To not need to go on with the planning and the thinking and the remembering and even the way that we talk to ourselves, telling ourselves what we think about this or that. Can we allow ourselves the freedom, just for now, to set that aside?

And turn our attention to the experience of the breath. The experience of breathing in and breathing out.

And just knowing that, moment to moment, knowing that you’re breathing in, knowing that you’re breathing out.

Though thoughts may come and go, just as sounds arise and pass, just as other sensations in the body come into your attention and leave, let everything else sit in the background. While you focus primarily, you are mindful of the experience of the breath.

The breath will sometimes be long, sometimes it’ll be short. Simply note that: just know that it is long or short. Without intervening, without trying to change or regularise in any way, just really getting out of the way, passively observing how the body breathes.

From time to time, we’ll get distracted and that’s okay, the mind is a distractible thing. We don’t need to worry or become upset. We just try to notice that, notice that we’ve got lost thinking about something. And when we notice, we relax, release and just come back to this breath here and now.

So you might tell yourself, ‘Relax, release, return’.

Over time, breath by breath, see if you can become more and more at ease, more relaxed, your body nice and still, but not losing the alertness, the clarity of your attention, the wakefulness.

Knowing the in breath, knowing the out breath.

This is the practice and it’s okay if your mind is very busy, very active today. It’s okay if your attention is a little lax, a little bit more dull. We respond as we need to: either by loosening up and relaxing a bit more if the mind is very active, agitated, busy or by arousing our focus, applying a bit more effort if our mind is more dull.

You might like to count the breaths if you find that helpful. At the end of every in breath, just a mental succinct count: you might count one to seven, one to seven. Using the counting as just regular little reminders of what you are doing- there’s another breath coming, time to focus.

Whatever distracts you, whether it is from within your own sensations, your own thoughts, or whether it’s from outside – other people, sounds- and respond in the same way: let go, release – let go the need to control, to change.

If you find that you’re getting lost with the one to seven, try something shorter – one to three. Can you focus for just three breaths without distraction?

If that’s a challenge, how about two? How about just one?

I invite you to a brief contemplation: to ask yourself what it is that you would like to bring into the day, perhaps the week. What would you like to offer to yourself today and this week?

What is it you feel you need greater of that you can offer to yourself? Is there a need for greater kindness? Is there a need to prioritise slowing down, our own well-being? What is it you’d like to offer to yourself today and this week?

What would you like to offer others, those around you? How would you like to show up in the world? What qualities would you like to embody and express in the ways you interact with the world and those around you?

Every day and each moment is an opportunity to begin again. So whatever happened before now, yesterday, last week… It’s okay. We begin anew now with our intentions of what we would like to offer to ourselves, to those around us, we’ll do our best.

Teachings

Okay? So… I hope I don’t speak only for myself, but for all of us perhaps, when I say we’ve all got ourselves in a mood before… That’s what we call it, right? When it’s not necessarily one episode of an emotion, something that feels quick and sharp up and down but then it’s gone. But when there’s something that lingers, something that underlies everything, so say, ‘I’m in a bad mood today’- I’ll say something like that.

In emotional psychology, they distinguish between moods and emotions. So where, typically, an emotion would last seconds or minutes, it’s usually very short and there’s usually a clear trigger that you can identify. Something’s happened, and that’s why this triggered this emotion. Whereas moods can last for hours, sometimes days and tends to lower the threshold that is needed to trigger another emotion, right? So it makes you more predisposed to a certain emotion; it makes it more likely to happen.

So say, for example, that you’re in an irritable mood, you’ll start finding yourself feeling angry much more readily than usual, right? That emotion is much quicker for you: you’re on the edge of anger all the time. You’re not fully angry all the time, but you’re not far off it. And so the threshold is kind of lowered, isn’t it? You start to construe the world around you in a way that calls for an angry response. Dr Paul Eckman said it’s as if you’re seeking opportunities to indulge the emotion that’s relevant to your mood. You’re kind of looking for it, you know? So the anger – if you’re in an irritable mood – the anger’s almost attractive and you’re looking for things to be annoyed about, things that are going to justify your irritated mood.

And the psychology also suggests that there’s both an increased difficulty in regulating those emotions. So when you’re in a mood and say, if you’re just feeling ‘normal you’, ‘average you’ and something comes along and gets you angry, that’s going to be easier to navigate and manage than the angry episodes when you’re in an irritable mood because everything’s heightened.

And so there’s an increased difficulty in regulating or managing those emotions when you’re in a mood, but they’re also going to continue as well: they take longer to dissipate. So if you’re in an irritable mood, then you’ll probably find it more difficult to control those angry episodes and they might be more intense and they might take longer to dissipate, basically.

And these kind of moods, so they’re different to emotions, but what causes them? They can be caused by all sorts of things: hormonal changes (changes in our chemistry), sleep, diet, exhaustion, sickness, stress, or the the science of it suggests just lots of a particular emotion in a short period of time. So if you’ve had lots of things that have triggered anger, for example, and they’ve been very intense and very repeated, that could then trigger a mood of irritation, something tips you over and then it lingers around for a while.

So we see that they’re different to emotion. They’re different from that one-off experience of emotion, and they’re going to make that emotion more common for us. So what can we do about them, given that they are more complex?

I think a useful move, first of all, is to just know it is there, to be honest with yourself and aware of it – that it is there, and treat it as a kind of… ‘It’s the background condition of my mind today and it’s going to bias my perception, It’s going to bias the way that I’m going to think about things and interpret things, and it’s going to change how reactive I am for a little while as long as I feel this way.

So we prepare for that and assume that our reading of events might be a bit more harsh: it’s going to be maybe a bit more alarming or it’s going to be a bit more hopeless than usual. You just expect that your perception is going to be a little bit skewed today. So maybe don’t take them as seriously. The stories in our mind, the way we perceive things, or we think this and that…maybe just don’t quite take them as seriously. Hear them, of course – so we’re not ignoring our perceptions – but just knowing that they are almost certainly being flavoured by our mood, and they’re not going to be as accurate as if we weren’t in this mood right now. So that’s one thing: to know that it’s there, to assume that our perceptions are going to be a little bit off. So maybe we can take them with a pinch of salt, right? Maybe don’t take them quite as seriously as we normally would. Expect that we’re going to have lower control over our emotions. So perhaps you decide to reduce your exposure to triggers where you can. You might avoid engaging in a difficult conversation or any big decision, things that you know are going to be more difficult right now because you’re in this mood. Where you can you might try to navigate and maybe avoid some of those. Lama Alan suggests ‘quarantining’ yourself. All right, so just like when you’re sick, if you’re physically sick, if you have some kind of infection, right, that you could pass on to others, you stay home, right? You don’t go and hug your grandma. You don’t go over to the hospital and start walking around. You keep yourself away if you know that you’re going to be able to pass things on, right? You don’t share the same physical space with others – ideally, where we can. So likewise, Lama Alan says that if you’re sick with an irritable mood or a mental affliction, you’re sick with attachment or hostility or jealousy, any of these kinds of things, he says it’s good to quarantine ourselves; which simply means rather than sharing your hostility with everyone by means of your words and actions and just letting it spread – because then it does spread, right? It spreads very easily – maybe we don’t need to share it, and we don’t need to say those words that are coming out of irritation. Maybe we don’t need to act out of it. So can we not share it? Can we pause? Perhaps pause before reacting; before saying something.

The Buddha, of course, offered us the tool of noble silence. I have certainly found this helpful at times when I maybe have felt exhausted or unwell. I know that my capacity is lowered and I may be a bit more irritable. It’s helped to just engage less, to more silence, maybe to be a bit quieter within myself. Quieter outwardly- still be present, still respond as and when needed, but just not get as involved overall because I know my background condition is not good right now, right? I know that something’s not quite right.

And so I know that my perceptions might be kind of tilted a bit to one side, that my capacity for thinking clearly and acting wisely is going to be diminished. And so it’s more likely that I’m then going to act in ways that I’m going to later regret; it’s more likely that I’m going to say something stupid, do something stupid, you know, be a bit snappy or rude, something like that.

So then a kind of quarantine, you know, just maybe not engaging quite as much until it’s passed. And in that time, just cultivating awareness, right? Cultivating awareness, a sense of kindness, being aware of it. Maybe letting others know can be quite helpful. Just to let others know, ‘You know, I’m not feeling a hundred percent today, which is why I’m a bit more quiet, but I’ll be okay tomorrow. It’s nothing, no big deal, just woke up on the wrong side of the bed’. Something like that. Or just, ‘Not at my best, but I’ll be fine’. Trying to pause before reacting and just creating some distance there. So these kinds of things.

And just knowing it’s temporary, it will pass; moods pass, they come and they go, and then what to do? We do our best, you know, to sleep well, eat well, do what we can. Things like we just did: a breathing meditation to introduce some calm and well being. Maybe there are practices that you do that uplift you: loving kindness practice; harvesting joy – these kind of practices we’ve been talking about recently, maybe help uplift you, maybe switch up the mood a little bit, so anything like that can all be good, can’t it?

But, I think this is a helpful teaching, helpful contemplation to think about this and not just let our bad moods run the show, you know? Like, ‘Yesterday I was a Buddhist, yesterday I was a meditator, but today I’m in a bad mood, so let’s forget all that and you’re all just going to get it!’

But maybe… ‘Okay, I know the bad mood is there. So, rather than have no attempt to be aware of it and no attempt to introduce mindfulness to it, I’ll do a little bit of something’.

We may not always be able to make moods go away, right? But sometimes we can just switch up a mood, there’s something we can do, many practices we can do that might help.

Other times, the mood is just there; it’s just going to stick around. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless, doesn’t mean it has to speak for us, doesn’t mean we have to act poorly. We do our best, right? Sometimes a good nap, sometimes a good sleep can be the best thing, I think.