by Kalika Yap

What if the emotions you most want to avoid are actually trying to help you?

That was the quiet question underneath our last Mindfulness Club session with therapist and meditation teacher Brian Shiers, LMFT. Brian introduced us to a practice rooted in Tibetan Buddhist teachings by master Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and it may be one of the most practical and honest approaches to working with difficult emotions I have come across.

He calls them “beautiful monsters.” Intense emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, shame, and despair. They feel monstrous because we avoid them, deny them, or feel embarrassed when they show up uninvited. But Brian made a compelling case that they are also beautiful, because every single one of them comes from our deep, foundational wish to be well, to belong, to matter, and to feel safe.

The Gap Between Story and Feeling

Brian opened with something that stopped me in my tracks: the difference between emotions and feelings.

Emotions, he explained, live in the thinking world. They are story-based. They are shaped by culture, education, and the narratives we build about ourselves and what is happening around us.

Feelings, on the other hand, are everything nonverbal: the body sensations, the mood, the physical sense of threat or safety. They run 24 hours a day, underneath the stories we tell ourselves.

The problem? Most of us live in our heads. We stay with the story. We analyze it, argue with it, try to fix it. And we never quite get to the felt sense underneath, where the real information is waiting.

“Students were getting it up in their heads, but they seemed stuck in the same emotional and energetic habits and emotional patterns, year after year. This led me to change how I teach. Now I focus first and foremost on healing and opening the channel between the mind and the feeling world.” — Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Where the Stories Begin

Brian walked us through something that rang true for almost everyone in the room: the early emotion stories we form as children.

These are not the thoughts we consciously have. They are the background logic sets that quietly shape everything. Examples he shared:

• “I am only lovable if I am well-behaved.”
• “If I make someone mad, I will be alone.”
• “Being too big and too loud makes people dislike me.”
• “If I do not think about bad things, bad things can happen.”

These stories are not formed out of deficiency. They form because something in us deeply wants to be good, to be loved, to belong. That wish is the beautiful part. The distortion is the monster.

Brian shared a story about a high-achieving attorney he works with whose teenage son had been in and out of therapeutic boarding schools. The dad had completely shut down his felt sense around his son. He was so solution-focused that for two years, he had not actually felt love for his child. Not because it was gone, but because he had learned to block access to it.

“He was shocked. He was really shocked by it. He did not realize how long it had been since he had had this experience.”
— Brian Shiers

The Handshake: A 5-Step Practice

The centerpiece of Brian’s session was a practice called the Handshake Process, based on Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s teaching. The idea is that we extend a hand toward the emotions we usually push away, and we do it with a real attitude of welcome. Not to fix them. Not to make them leave faster. To genuinely meet them.

Here are the five steps:

1. Drop In Take a big breath in, then a loud exhale, something like “HA!” The sound engages a different part of the brain. The goal is to cut through the thinking loop and land in the body.
2. Meet It Invite whatever is present. Anxiety? Welcome it. Anger? Welcome it. Feel nothing at all? Welcome that, too. This is a universal yes, with no hidden agenda to make anything go away.
3. Be, Not Do Shift from observer to awareness itself. You are not watching the emotion from a distance. You are the open, awake space in which it is happening. Every sensation, every thought, every mood confirms that you are awake and present.
4. Wait This one is harder than it sounds. We are trained to rush. Brian put it simply: instead of “I will be patient until you leave me alone,” the attitude is “You can stay as long as you want. We are friends now.” That is a very different posture.
5. Communicate When you have really been with the emotion, it may begin to reveal itself. The feeling is real. The body sensation is real. The pain is real. But the story? It is almost never true. It is either incomplete or distorted. And when you stop fighting it, you can finally start to update it.

“The path to freedom from pain is in the pain.”— Rumi

A Note on Wisdom and Pattern

Brian closed with a quote from Ken McLeod, a translator of Tibetan wisdom, that I keep returning to:

“The purpose of spiritual practice is to reclaim our lives from the distortions of conditioning and wake up to what we really are.

A pattern dissolves when you can hold attention to the feeling reactions in the core of the pattern without collapsing into fusion with it.

When you deprive the pattern of your belief, it can feel like you are dying. But you are not dying. The pattern is dying.”
— Ken McLeod

That is the work. And it is good work.

Try This After the Session

Brian recommends journaling after practicing the handshake. Not to analyze what happened, but to ask inquiry questions:

What sensations showed up in my body?
What emotional story was underneath them?
Why does this bother me? And why does that bother me? (Keep asking.)
What is the assumption I am making here?

The goal is not to come up with the perfect answer. It is to build familiarity with your own inner map, so the monsters start to feel less foreign.

When Brian shared his own story about double-booking his wife and tracing it back to an old belief that he had to do everything alone, I felt that. So many of us who run businesses or lead communities carry a version of that same pattern. We overload, we under-ask, and then we wonder why things feel harder than they should.

The handshake is not a quick fix. But it is a real one. And what I love about Brian’s approach is that it does not ask you to get rid of the difficult parts. It asks you to get curious about them. To sit down with your monsters and find out what they actually want.

As Brian said: they come from your goodness. That is worth remembering.