This session explores the two fundamental challenges of spiritual practice: the complexity of thoughts and the intensity of emotional sensations. The teacher guides students to directly encounter the core sensations they habitually avoid, revealing how contraction and avoidance mechanisms originate from a belief in a separate self. Through personal accounts and dialogue, the session examines how what we spend decades running from turns out to be far less threatening than imagined, and how intimate contact with avoided experience is itself the doorway to liberation.