"What does aversion feel like?"

Last week I posted four behaviors that may kill a relationship:  criticism, contempt, denial, and stonewalling.  Since then, I’ve been reading Practicing Peace by Pema Chödrön.  She discusses dealing with aversion which seems to me the emotion behind the four behaviors listed above.  She asks, “What does aversion feel like?”  Then she offers this practice to help explore the feeling.

For the purpose of doing this practice, try to connect with a feeling of aversion to something. Whether this is a smell, a sound, or a memory of a person, an event, dark places, snakes-whatever it is, use your discursive mind to help you contact the feeling of aversion. And then, as much as possible, apply the technique of letting the thoughts go so that you can abide in the experience of aversion as a felt quality....

Once you've contacted that, if you can contact it, then breathe in; instead of pushing the feeling of aversion away, invite it in, but without believing in the judgments and opinions about it, just contacting the feeling free of your interpretation. You can do this for yourself as a way of approaching what you find repulsive, and you can also do it with the wish that all people, who just like you are hooked by the power of aversion, could not act it out, could not become its slave. In this way your own discomfort can connect you with the aversion and pain of other people and awaken your compassion.

So this exercise of compassionate abiding, and in this case specifically, abiding with the experience of aversion, consists of breathing in the negative feeling and then relaxing outward. Then you breathe the feeling in and relax outward again and again. You could do this for five minutes or for hours or anytime, on the spot, when aggressive feelings arise. We do this for ourselves and all other people who feel prejudice and disgust and have no way of working with it so it escalates into self-denigration, into jealousy, and violence, and creates endless suffering all over the world.

I often try to stop the story-telling when I’m upset or feel aversion.  Here I’m intrigued by separating the feelings from the stimulus.  It sounds like a small revolution.  And it sounds difficult.