There is an image I often come back to, where I am sitting at home, minding my own business, quite content, [when suddenly] I hear a knock at the door, only to get up and discover that it’s greed, fear, jealousy, or hatred at the threshold. How do I act? What do I do in that moment? In the past, I have flung open the door and said, “Welcome home, it’s all yours,” only to forget that I live here. My consciousness, my awareness lives here. My capacity to love lives here. This is just a visitor. 

When I think back on the Buddha’s reminder that the mind is naturally radiant and pure—the mind is shining—I can chill for a moment because the visitors are just dropping by. They’re not permanent. They aren’t indicative of my deepest, innermost self. The Buddha said that it is because of visiting forces that we suffer. So it’s in that spirit that I work to reconfigure my relationship to all of these difficult and challenging states that may come, that will come. 

Naming the Experience

To establish the beginnings of a more authentic relationship [with this unexpected guest], see if you can recognize what’s going on by naming it. Every time my mind says, “this is a bad thing to feel, it shouldn’t be here,” I try to retranslate that identification from “bad” to “painful,” “difficult,” “full of suffering,” or “devastating,” and watch to see what happens.

Watching the Mind

I talk about sitting and looking at my own fear. One of the things we say in mindfulness practice is that we pivot. Usually, with a strong emotion, our interest is going toward the object. If you really want a new car, for example, you likely spend your time thinking, “Should I get that kind of upholstery or that kind of upholstery?” It’s not that common to turn our attention around to the desire itself and say, “What does it feel like to want something so much?” 

What is this feeling? What’s it like in my body? What’s the mood of it? 

And that’s how we come to understand feelings as compounds. It’s not just anger. Within the anger, you might also see fear, sadness, and helplessness. When observing my own fear, I notice that despite the world’s pronouncement that we’re afraid of the unknown—which, of course, is true—I’m actually most afraid of all the stories that I tell myself. 

When I first went back to New York after many months away, ahead of that trip, in my mind, I was just watching [my mind create narratives/stories], “I haven’t been back to my apartment in New York for four or five months. I heard people can get Legionnaires’ disease when they turn on the faucet after it’s been off for a long time. My faucet hasn’t been turned on for a long time. I wonder what the water’s going to look like. Will I be able to tell? Does it smell a certain way? What are the symptoms? What am I going to do if the first night in New York I come down with Legionnaires’ disease? There it is!”

Whereas, even in the midst of that, if I remind myself, “You know what? You don’t know. This is just a story. You’re not even in New York yet.” Then I relax. I feel space. I feel openness. So the goal in some way is that space. It’s not an icy distance, it’s space. It’s important that you’re not all caught up in it, [that] you’re not defined by the emotion and driven into action. That’s a state of freedom.

Mindfulness is the place in the middle, which is not sucked in and overcome by something; nor is it pushing it away or recoiling from it in fear.

Not Compounding Suffering

Some things in life just hurt. Losing somebody hurts. People can be so unjust toward themselves in the light of that, insisting “This should not hurt. If I were a better person, if I’d been meditating longer each day, it would not hurt.” Which is quite unfair. There’s a layer of extra suffering [in our making] assumptions and interpretations that we do not [actually] have to endure. [When this takes place], we pile [it] on and we’re not holding that original hurt in a compassionate light or with any spaciousness. 

One of the extra layers of suffering we add on to our feelings or stories is what I call our inner critic. I’ll suggest to people that they give it a name, give it a wardrobe, give it a persona, because the transformation is going to be in how you relate to your inner critic, so we establish a relationship that way. I say [this] with apologies to any Lucys who may be [reading, but] I named my own inner critic Lucy, after the character in the Peanuts comic strip. I named my inner critic Lucy, because a friend had rented a house for many of us to do a retreat, and [when] I went into the bedroom set aside for me, there was a cartoon on the desk. And in the first frame of the cartoon, Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown and says, “You know, Charlie Brown, what your problem is? The problem with you is that you’re you.” Poor Charlie Brown replies, “Well, what in the world can I do about that?” And then Lucy responds, “I don’t pretend to be able to give advice. I merely point out the problem.” 

Somehow, whenever I was walking by the desk, my eye would fall right on that line. “The problem with you is that you’re you.” Because that Lucy-dominant voice had been so strong in my childhood, in my earlier life. Soon after seeing that cartoon, my very first thought was, “It’s never going to happen again.” And I greeted that thought with, “Hi Lucy.” Over time, my favorite response to Lucy became, “Chill out Lucy. Just chill.” That’s different from, “You’re right, Lucy. You’re always right. I’m completely worthless.” It’s also different from, “Oh my God, I’ve been meditating for forty years. Why is Lucy still here? I spent all that money on therapy. Why is Lucy still here? She shouldn’t be. I’m a failure.”

Mindfulness is the place in the middle, which is not sucked in and overcome by something; nor is it pushing it away or recoiling from it in fear. In a vast oversimplification of a certain Tibetan Buddhist practice, they would say:

Invite Lucy in for a meal. Keep an eye on her. Don’t let her have the run of the house, because you might end up with no silverware, but you don’t have to be so afraid. You don’t have to be so ashamed. You don’t have to be so freaked out. Your awareness, your capacity for kindness, for compassion, is actually much stronger than Lucy. Lucy may come. Lucy may come a lot. But you’re OK because of the environment that’s being created.

I used this as an example for the group I was teaching, and some of them didn’t like it. So I said how about inviting Lucy in for a cup of tea? They didn’t like that either. So I said, “OK, what’s acceptable?” And one said, “How about a cup of tea to go?” 

If We Can Be with Something, We Can Learn From It

Interestingly enough, something we often mistakenly do is insist that Lucy never show up again, but that is not going to work. Instead, we can consider what’s skillful and unskillful, realize that we’re not going to prevent things from arising, and refocus our attention toward how they are met. 

The states that lead us toward contraction and suffering are translated as defilements. Whatever we call them, they only function as actual hindrances when we relate to them in a certain way. Otherwise, they’re more like clouds moving in the sky. 

If a certain emotion comes, for example, and you try to dismantle it or evade it immediately, there’s not going to be a lot of learning. But if you can hang in there with it, take some interest in it, pay attention in this different way, there can be a lot of learning, just as I learned in that very personal insight about my own fear. It could be a personal insight, or it could be a more universal insight like, everything that arises—everything—is impermanent. If you look at anger and you see moments of rage and moments of fear, moments of sadness, moments of helplessness … that’s an alive system. That emotion that arose seems so solid, maybe so unchanging, but really look at it: it’s constantly changing. Physical pain arises in a superficial glance, it feels like some entity has just taken over our knee, our back, or our head. But if we really pay careful attention, we see, “Oh, it’s moments of burning, moments of twisting, moments of piercing, moments of iciness. None of that sounds good. None of that feels good. But that’s an alive system. And within that, there’s movement and flow.”

I have a friend, for example, with a very severe chronic pain condition, who said to me, after working in this way, “I found the space within the pain.” We like to think when we look at pain, that it’ll just go away. But it may not be that way. And yet something can happen that brings a whole other kind of relief, if we can find the space within it. We’re investigating when we’re not running away, when we’re not drowning in something that is arising and yet temporary. 

♦

If you would like to learn more about this offering, visit this link here. 

The post A Guide to Changing How We Relate to Difficult Emotions appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What is the one thing in life we can rely on? We might say, “I rely on my mate.” We may love our husbands and wives; but we can’t ever completely rely on them, because another person (like ourselves) is always to some extent unreliable. There is no person on earth whom we can completely rely on, though we can certainly love others and enjoy them. What then can we rely on? If it’s not a person, what is it? What can we rely on in life? I asked somebody once and she said, “Myself.” Can you rely on yourself? Self-reliance is nice, but is inevitably limited.

There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is. Let’s talk more concretely. Suppose there is something I want very much: perhaps I want to marry a certain person, or get an advanced degree, or have my child be healthy and happy. But life as it is might be exactly the opposite of what I want. We don’t know that we’ll marry that certain person. If we do, he might die tomorrow. We may or may not get our advanced degree. Probably we will, but we can’t count on that. We can’t count on anything. Life is always going to be the way it is. So why can’t we rely on that fact? What is so hard about that? Why are we always uneasy? Suppose your living space has just been demolished by an earthquake, and you are about to lose an arm and all your life’s savings. Can you then rely on life just as it is? Can you be that?

Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life. But we don’t want to hear that. I can absolutely trust that in the next year my life is going to be changed, different, yet always just the way it is. If tomorrow I have a heart attack, I can rely on that, because if I have it, I have it. I can rest in life as it is.

Trust in things being as they are is the secret of life.

When we make a personal investment in our thoughts we create the “I” (as Krishnamurti would say), and then our life begins not to work. That’s why we label thoughts, to take the investment out again. When we’ve been sitting long enough we can see our thoughts as just pure sensory input. And we can see ourselves moving through the stages preliminary to that: at first we feel our thoughts are real, and out of that we create the self-centered emotions, and out of that we create the barrier to seeing life as it is; because if we are caught in self-centered emotions we can’t see people or situations clearly. A thought in itself is just pure sensory input, an energy fragment. But we fear to see thoughts as they are.

When we label a thought we step back from it, we remove our identification. There’s a world of difference between saying, “She’s impossible” and “Having a thought that she’s impossible.” If we persistently label any thought the emotional overlay begins to drop out and we are left with an impersonal energy fragment to which we need not attach. But if we think our thoughts are real we act out of them. And if we act from such thoughts our life is muddled. Again, practice is to work with this until we know it in our bones. Practice is not about achieving a realization in our heads. It has to be our flesh, our bones, ourself. Of course, we have to have life-centered thoughts: how to follow a recipe, how to put on a roof, how to plan our vacation. But we don’t need the emotionally self-centered activity that we call thinking. It really isn’t thinking, it’s an aberration of thinking.

Zen is about an active life, an involved life. When we know our minds well and the emotions that our thinking creates, we tend to see better what our lives are about and what needs to be done, which is generally just the next task under our nose. Zen is about a life of action, not a life of passively doing nothing. But our actions must be based on reality. When our actions are based on our false thought systems (which are based on our conditioning), they are poorly based. When we have seen through the thought systems we can see what needs to be done.

What we are doing is not reprogramming ourselves, but freeing ourselves from all programs, by seeing that they are empty of reality. Reprogramming is just jumping from one pot into another. We may have what we think of as a better programming; but the point of sitting is not to be run by any program. Suppose we have a program called “I lack self-confidence.” Suppose we decide to reprogram that to “I have self-confidence.” Neither of them will stand up very well under the pressures of life, because they involve an “I.” And this “I” is a very fragile creation—unreal, actually—and is easily befuddled. In fact there never was an “I.” The point is to see that it is empty, an illusion, which is different from dissolving it. When I say that it’s empty, I mean that it has no basic reality; it’s just a creation of the self-centered thoughts.

Doing Zen practice is never as simple as talking about it. Even students who have a fair understanding of what they’re doing at times tend to desert basic practice. Still, when we sit well, everything else takes care of itself. So whether we have been sitting five years or twenty years or are just beginning, it is important to sit with great, meticulous care.

⧫

Excerpted from Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2007 (trade paperback edition)

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If consciousness is an ocean, thoughts are waves that can be churned into vast storms.

Have you ever awakened in the wee small hours, adrift on your tiny raft of awareness, to find yourself confronted by such a storm?

Perhaps an icy wind is whipping up the memory of something you read about COVID and slapping you in the face with it:

So now I have to tell the daughter that both her parents are dead in a matter of three days. Her dad’s not even buried yet.

You blink up at the ceiling and take a deep breath, before being struck by another blast:

“It is very concerning, extremely worrisome,” Peter Tans, senior climate scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, told the Financial Times. “This last decade, the rate of increase [of carbon emissions] has never been higher, and we are still on the same path. We’re going in the wrong direction at maximum speed.”

In the distance, you can’t quite make out how far, the big black wave of your own personal death looms. In front, around, and behind it, other great waves—the loss of family, loved ones, friends—rise and fall as they approach, like steel-grey pistons driving some inexorable engine of death. Is it any wonder you’re trembling?

Beyond even these, like a range of mountains on the horizon, the mile-high tsunami of climate collapse glints faintly in the light of your night-time awareness. You can see from the sheer size of it that it’s threatening the annihilation of all humans and most complex life on earth. And here, truly, there be sea serpents: fully one-fifth of Australian forests—one-fifth!—were wiped out in a single period of fire. What will happen to the other four-fifths in the future with temperatures and carbon emissions rising all the time, with next to nothing being done?

From your raft of awareness, you gaze up at this advancing tidal wave of death in awe and fear. It’s too terrible, you think. It can’t happen, somebody will find an answer. Amazingly, you find that thinking such nonsense helps somewhat—cheap but priceless denial. Perhaps denial would be enough to let you sleep, except…

Except that, closer to hand, treacherous whirlpools swirl with personal memories: “I’ll always be your friend, but I’ll never love you.” Or: “If you can’t even perform this simple task, you shouldn’t be sitting there!” Thoughts and emotional wounds, ancient and modern, spin round and round, sucking you in. 

You try to think-swim away from these treacherous vortices, to keep your head above the waves of anxiety, grief, guilt, and regret, but thinking just makes it worse—thinking is precisely the problem! This mental chatter is so exhausting, so useless as a response to the overwhelming forces of the world. But what, then?

Traditionally, people have had to be beaten, battered, and half-drowned by these internal storms of mind before they finally turn to meditation. The classic modern example is supplied by Eckhart Tolle in his book, The Power of Now:

I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train—everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing for the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence.

The understandable conclusion: “I can’t live with myself anymore.”

But Tolle noticed a strange contradiction—who exactly was this “I” who couldn’t live with “myself” anymore? Was he, in fact, two people, then? He realized that he was sick of the exhausting, obsessive, thought-churning mind. In other words, sheer suffering caused him to realize that he wasn’t, after all, “the little voice in the head”. Rather, he was an inner witness, an awareness, that perceives those thoughts. After all, computers also have all kinds of information and messages rattling around their mechanical skulls but, unlike us, they have no awareness, no witnessing presence that sees those messages.

Our identification with “the little voice in the head”—our feeling that this mental noise is “me”—is so deep-rooted that it can take deep suffering of the kind Tolle endured to break free from it. 

Two Feeling Practices

There are two main ways to dive beneath the oceanic tumult of thought, and they both involve feeling.

First, we can direct our attention to physical sensations in the body. For example, if you are suffering on your raft of awareness at night—if you’ve at last had enough of anguished thinking—turn on your back and focus your attention on your hands. Feel any tension in your fingers. Feel any tingling, warmth, or aching in your palms. You’ll find that simply redirecting your attention in this way makes a difference—any aches in your hands will intensify and then soften and heat will increase. There will be a feeling that the hands are like thirsty plants being watered with attention. What you will also notice is that focusing on the hands causes the previously unstoppable thought torture machine to dramatically slow down and lose intensity. Of course, noticing this can cause the machine to start up again: “Great, I’m no longer compulsively worrying about climate change… which is threatening my parents, me, everyone I know, thanks to the complete failure of political…” And off we go again.

The remedy is simple: we direct attention to our hands again, feel the tingling, the aches, the heat. Guided meditations are an easy way to experiment with this kind of body scan practice, and apps like Calm and Headspace offer a variety of practices to choose from. For example, this ten-minute Calm meditation includes a body scan, which is an extension of feeling your hands and feet. Or try this somatic mindfulness practice from Willa Blythe Baker on coming down from the thinking mind into the feeling body.

Sometimes, the emotional waves and whirlpools are so intense that it’s difficult to do any kind of body scan meditation. In this case, rather than diving below the surface of the thinking turmoil into physical feelings, we can dive into our emotional feelings. The mystic Osho discussed the art of diving into whirlpools in The Wild Geese and the Water:

In my childhood I used to love swimming, and my village river becomes very dangerous in rainy season, it becomes flooded. It is a hilly river; so much water comes to it, it becomes almost oceanic. And it has a few dangerous spots where many people have died. Those few dangerous spots are whirlpools, and if you are caught in a whirlpool it sucks you. It goes on sucking you deeper and deeper. And, of course, you try to get out of it, and the whirlpool is powerful. You fight, but your energy is not enough. And by fighting you become very much exhausted, and the whirlpool kills you. 

I found a small strategy, and that strategy was that—everybody was surprised—that I will jump in the whirlpool and come out of it without any trouble. The strategy was not to fight with the whirlpool, go with it. In fact, go faster than it sucks you so you are not tired, you are simply diving in it. And you are going so fast that there is no struggle between you and the whirlpool. … I learned my art of let-go through those whirlpools. I am indebted to my river.

What has any of this got to do with the waves and whirlpools of the night?

And then I tried that let-go in every situation of my life. If there was sadness I simply dived in it, and I was surprised to know that it works. If you dive deep into it, soon you are out of it and refreshed, not tired, because you were not fighting with it, because you were not pretending, so there was no question of fighting. You accepted it totally, full-heartedly. And when you totally accept something, in that very acceptance you have transformed its character.

In the same vein, Lao Tzu said:

Give evil nothing to oppose and it will disappear by itself.

When we try to oppose and resist whirlpools of thought-fueled sadness, to swim away from them through thought, we become exhausted from the effort, while our misery only increases. But when we dive into the whirlpools, astonishing things happen.

When we stop resisting sadness—trying to sweeten it with phone calls, distractions, or pleasures—and just let ourselves feel it in all its heaviness, darkness, and pain, it disappears by itself, and even transforms into delight.

Likewise, trying to escape fear through distraction, alcohol, and avoidance can have short-term benefits, but fear is dogged, and, like a dog, loves to chase someone running away. If instead we place attention on the feelings of anxiety, on the burning fear, the racing heart, and the deep-breathing lungs, the fear will “disappear by itself.”

And this is true of all painful emotions and behaviors—we just have to pay close, meticulous attention for a long time. As long as it takes.

In an age of cataclysms that we may be unable to avert or avoid, we can still alchemize fear and sadness into peace and bliss. The mystic Kabir said:

Don’t go outside your house to see flowers, my friend, don’t bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals.

This flower is the “kingdom of heaven” that “lies within.” We don’t need to leave the house to find it. We need only turn within and feel whatever we find in our heart area, chest, and stomach. This is no idle promise—everyone who has seriously looked, without exception, has found it.

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For a good majority of my life, I was a thrill-seeker. I wasn’t a drug addict or alcoholic, but I was definitely addicted to vanity and excitement. I traveled often. I switched jobs and relationships even more often, and I took on new skills and activities just to have something to be excited about. For me, this was simply the norm. I never questioned it. I just unconsciously and habitually lived it. Little did I know that this way of living was driven by a deep desire to escape the pain in my life. It was my inability to be with the intense loneliness, unworthiness, and emptiness I felt inside. It was a way to try and fill this immense gaping hole in my heart that, for so long, I didn’t even realize was there. My life was all thrills and no joy.

At some point in my college years, I began my spiritual journey with meditation and fell to the other extreme. Instead of trying to fill the void, I neurotically and desperately tried to annihilate it. I moved from thrill seeker to self-help junkie. I went to therapy, attended dozens of retreats, read hundreds of books, and sought out teachers that I hoped would somehow “shaktipat” the pain right out of me, leaving me in some blissful, enlightened state. Of course, the practices themselves were pure, but my intentions were not. In fact, they were infused with self-hatred, fear, and aversion. I was like the meditation master Milarepa, who came back to his cave one day after gathering firewood only to find out it was infested with demons. Although he didn’t use thrills to keep them at bay, he did try to chase them away, angrily running around to try and scare them. Just like me, the demons never went away, but actually grew bigger and scarier. When this didn’t work, he sat down and taught them the dharma. This made most of them go away, but the largest and scariest remained. It wasn’t until Milarepa allowed them to be there and offered them his body that they finally left.

While I don’t believe in demons, I do believe Milarepa’s story is true and reveals a truth about our human experience. Perhaps we wake up one day and we feel extremely anxious, or maybe we hear some news that triggers grief or rage to arise within us. Much like Milarepa’s cave, our own inner demons seem to arrive whenever they feel like it. Sometimes we know they’re coming. Other times they simply show up full force without notice. But our practice is not about annihilating them, nor is it about learning some cool mental gymnastics trick or mantra to make them disappear. Rather, it’s about learning how to open fully to our demons, like Milarepa. For our “demons” are actually guides pointing us to our pain and the places within ourselves we have suppressed, denied, or pushed away. They fiercely guide us to the wounds that need to be healed. 

Consciously or not, most of us first come to meditation because of some form of suffering, dissatisfaction, or inner demon we are wrestling with. Perhaps we feel something is wrong or missing, or maybe we struggle daily with stress, painful emotions, habitual states of mind, or other addictive behaviors. Whatever it may be, we often naively believe that meditation will somehow offer us a quick and easy way out. We may even convince ourselves (like I did early on in my practice) that there is some sort of enlightened retirement; that after enough hours of meditation, retreats, and reading spiritual books we will end up in some blissful state where all our troubles evaporate away like morning dew. These hopes, fears, and expectations—along with the belief that life ought to feel good all the time—actually block us from developing a mature spiritual practice.

Freedom from our suffering doesn’t mean discomfort and pain come to end, nor does it mean a lifetime (or many lifetimes) of conditioned patterns and habitual karmic momentum magically disappear. Instead, a mature practice offers us a wiser, more spacious way of being with every single thing our life offers—all the 10,000 joys and sorrows—with clarity, wisdom, compassion, balance, and a deep sense of ease. It’s an unshakeable and profound okayness with things as they are. 

I once heard a teacher explain that a mature meditation practice is one where we learn to be with the very things we came to practice to get rid of. I believe the first step in this maturity process begins when we finally give up the struggle, quit trying to fight our suffering, and instead begin to consciously allow and explore it with an open and curious beginner’s mind. We aren’t trying to transcend our humanity; rather, we’re learning how to drop into it completely and understand the laws that govern it so we may navigate through it more wisely. 

For me, much like Milarepa, it wasn’t until I started to allow my painful feelings to be there that things finally started to transform. I was able to shift from “How do I get rid of this?” to “How can I learn to be with this?” And rather than treating my difficult feelings like an enemy, I practiced greeting them like an old friend. I’d invite them to sit in meditation with me, go for walks, and even join me at work. This unconditional friendliness allowed me to listen, in a felt way, to the intense longings and sadness I’ve avoided for so long. It was as if I had an open mic night to my heart and soul, allowing anything to come up and express itself, no matter how bad it sounded! And I will say there were some highly unpleasant performers. 

Practicing ARK: Awareness, Relaxation, and Kindness

One practice that helped me tremendously during this time was an acronym I created called ARK, which stands for awareness, relaxation, and kindness. The practice of ARK is quite simple. Let’s say you wake up tomorrow morning with a sad, heavy feeling in your body. The first step is awareness. Consciously bring attention to the feeling without any judgements, expectations, or storylines. Drop everything and come into your body exactly as it’s feeling. Try and ground yourself in an embodied awareness. In other words, don’t observe the experience of heaviness as if it were far away from you but rather feel it and hold it closely with a deep sense of warmth and compassion. Imagine this feeling as a crying child and pick it up gently with love and care (oftentimes our suffering is our own inner crying child, so give it the nourishment and nurturing it is yearning for). 

From here, begin to become curious about this feeling with a willingness to be right here with things as they are. You can ask questions like: What is this? Where does this feeling live in my body? What color is it? What would its shape be if I could see it? Is it hot or cold? How long does it last? Does it get bigger or smaller? Do any other emotions arise? Curiosity breeds courage, and if you are willing to look at the emotions that normally scare you, an inner courage and fearlessness will start to arise. It’s like being afraid of a monster in your closet as a child. The more you’re willing to open the door and look, the less scared you’ll be. No monster, just shoes and clothing. No demon, just impermanent sensations in your body. 

Once you’ve become aware in this way, then you can move to the relaxation phase of ARK. Consciously relax what you can. If possible, deepen your breathing and allow yourself to soften into the “ouch” of the emotion. Some parts—physically or emotionally—may not be able to relax. This is totally fine. Relax what you can and soften around what you can’t. Slowly, expand your window of tolerance for what you’re able to be with. It’s as if your sense of self is getting more and more spacious every time you practice, including more and more of the parts of yourself you’ve pushed away. Try and find out what it’s like to feel this heaviness with a receptive and relaxed body. You may even find a sense of ease that is present underneath the depressed feeling. 

Once you have fully relaxed into the difficult emotion, you can then move into the final phase, kindness. This is when you take something that normally would cause neuroses, harm, or unskillful reactions and turn it into fertilizer for compassion. You do this by reminding yourself that there are millions of others waking up feeling this heaviness in their body, just like you. You shift your perception from “I’m suffering” to the simple fact that “There is suffering.” You realize this is nothing personal and you’re not alone, and you allow that truth to open your heart. From that space of tenderness, send out wishes of lovingkindness for yourself and everyone else feeling this way. Instead of carrying around the crap life dumps on you and smelling all day, you can actually use it to grow a beautiful garden. What you once feared can now become a way to strengthen wholesome qualities of mind.  

Once you finish sending out your wishes of lovingkindness you can let go of the practice and move on with your day. The difficult emotion may still be there, but you slowly learn how to let it join you. If you continue this practice every time a difficulty arises, you will find that you are able to be with the very things you came to practice to get away from, and you will slowly become more and more free.

I wish you all well on your journey!

The post Sitting with the Things I Came to Practice to Get Away From appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Another driver cuts you off, and you feel a surge of rage. A coworker gets the promotion you think you deserve, and waves of jealousy wash over you. The pastry display in the grocery store beckons, and you sense your willpower dissolving. Anger. Impatience. Shock. Desire. Frustration. You spend your days bombarded by emotions.

These emotions are often negative—and if you act on them, they can derail you. You know: That email you shouldn’t have sent. The snappy retort you shouldn’t have verbalized. The black funk that permeates every experience and keeps you from feeling joy. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. You can learn to recognize harmful emotions in the moment—and let them go.

Choosing the karma you create

Past karma shapes your experience of the world. It exists; there is not much you can do about it. Yet you are also constantly creating new karma, and that gives you a golden opportunity. With your reaction to each experience, you create the karma that will color your future. It is up to you whether this new karma is positive or negative. You simply have to pay attention at the right moment. Think of how karma operates as if it were a key ring. It seems solid; you can move your key seamlessly around the circle. Yet there is actually a start and an end to the key ring—and a gap. If you know the gap is there, and you have the skill, you can extricate your key from the ring. Similarly, earlier karma creates your experience of events. Your reaction, based on your experience, triggers new karma and a new cycle of creation and experience. You can allow that cycle to continue in an endless sequence. Or you can find the gap, gain the skill, and extricate yourself from the cycle, simultaneously building your compassion and enhancing your sense of inner ease.

The Buddhist tradition is rife with teachings: on compassion, on why we should avoid hatred and jealousy, and on the power of a positive outlook. These teachings are extraordinarily valuable. They clarify and deepen our understanding—and they inspire us. But teachings and their explanations require logic to parse. In the heat of an emotional exchange, you may not have the luxury of logic, because logic requires time and an unbiased mind. Pressure creates a crisis. You don’t have time to think, only to react. So you need a well-honed, quickly deployed skill, something that is short, easy to use, and effective. This is the Third Moment Method, a practical tool that in many ways embodies the core of Buddhist practice.

Understanding the three moments

Life is composed of a series of experiences, and each of these experiences can be broken into three moments.

The First Moment
SENSING
In the first moment, your sensory organs—your eyes, ears, nose—perceive some sort of input. This moment between, for instance, a sound reaching your ear and your ear perceiving it, is instantaneous. It is also effortless, because it is hardwired into your system. In this moment, if someone says “lemon,” you have heard the sound, but you haven’t yet recognized what that sound means.

The Second Moment
ARISING
In the second moment, you recognize the sound—or other sensation—and you have an instant, subconscious reaction, classifying it as good, bad, or neutral. This, too, is automatic, based on prior experience: memories and understanding stemming from your ingrained cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, and linguistic perceptions. It happens so quickly that you may even think it is part of the first moment. You have a physical manifestation of your thought as your body responds to positive, negative, or neutral input—although a “neutral” reaction usually leans slightly toward positive or negative.

Maybe someone is describing a juicy lemon they’ve just sliced. You connect the sound “lemon” to an idea stored in your memory. It evokes a shape, a color, a scent, a taste. Your memory invites an emotional reaction. You love lemons and your mouth salivates; you find lemons sour and you cringe.

The Third Moment
REACTING
In the third moment, you have the choice of accepting your memory’s emotion-tinged invitation or not.

Your reaction may be mental, verbal, or physical. If you have classified something as good, you are drawn to it, even though it may not be beneficial. If you have classified something as bad, you push it away, sometimes with more force than is appropriate or necessary. In either case, you may do a lot of damage that you will later need to try to undo.

Let’s think of “lemon” in a different context. What if your mechanic says that your brand-new car is a lemon? How would you feel? Furious? Foolish? Frustrated? What might you say to the person who advised you to buy it? The third moment provides you with the space to determine your response.

You have a choice about the kind of life you lead. You can let your environment dictate your experience, in which case, unless you solve all the problems of every person with whom you interact, you will always face some unhappiness. Or you can take control over your own experience of life. To me, this seems like a better path.

Practicing the Third Moment Method

The Third Moment Method helps you take this path. In it, you use the Third Moment not to react but to watch—in a very specific way.

At the very instant an emotion arises, pause. Notice the emotion you are experiencing. The timing is very important. You need to be focused and aware before your emotion connects with a thought and becomes solidified. You want to simply see the emotion for what it is.

By widening the gap between action and reaction, you can gain some distance from your automatic responses and also gain an opportunity to know your emotions.

You may be tempted to trace the source of your emotion; that is logical, but in this instance it is not helpful. Instead of focusing on who did what to whom, simply look into your emotion. Don’t do this as an observer, with duality between yourself and the emotion, as though it were external to you. Instead, watch your actual experience; try to feel it directly. Feel your emotion as if it were an inflated balloon, filling your insides. Don’t pay attention to the balloon itself; pay attention to what’s inside it. What does it feel like? No rationalizing. No reasoning. What is at the very core of the balloon? Just space. This is not relabeling your emotion as space. It is simply awareness that the emotion itself does not exist in the way we believe it does, as something fixed and solid. Over time, as that awareness grows, you will begin to feel ease, and maybe even joy.

By widening the gap between action and reaction, you can gain some distance from your automatic responses and also gain an opportunity to know your emotions. You can stop being ruled by these emotions and instead begin to rule your experience of life.

To really enjoy this freedom, though, you need to practice. If you can practice the Third Moment Method frequently and deeply enough, you can experience the unconditional joy that breeds lovingkindness and compassion.

Of course, in the heat of the moment, it can be difficult to remember a practice that is not yet ingrained. You can try practice drills—mentally creating scenarios that evoke strong emotions, then using the Third Moment Method to diffuse them. This will begin to create a mental muscle memory. However, in your mind you still know the experience isn’t real, so in many ways the effect is not real either. The best practice is real life.

Benefiting from the results

Remember: The Third Moment passes very quickly, and it is easy to miss. You find it in the instant between seeing a nasty email and ringing off a reply, hearing a criticism and retorting, seeing a gooey dessert and reaching for it. This is the time to stop and practice the Third Moment Method.

If you truly experience this once—if you really catch the moment—you will find that the Third Moment Method is not only easy but also something you will want to do often. So try to be conscious of your emotions, and seize every opportunity to practice.

If you do this, you will find that your mind is cooler, clearer, and less biased. You are more connected to the present moment. You are aware that your emotions are not reality. That, in turn, affects how you interpret your experiences. You may also find not only that you interact with the world more easily but also that your relationships are better—starting with your relationship with yourself.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Tricycle magazine. 

The post The Power of the Third Moment appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I belong to a practice group called, sensibly enough, Women in Practice. We’re a gathering of women practitioners—mostly Buddhist—who sit zazen together every month, then take turns facilitating discussions about our experience of practice within a religious tradition historically crafted by and for men. After we had met a few times, it became clear that at the core of much of our experience is anger. A good bit of it.

Anyone who reads the news—or who simply is a woman or has women in their lives—knows that we have good reason to be angry. The storm of violence, misogyny, harassment, gaslighting, shaming, victim-blaming, and just plain discrimination and disregard has been raging for a long time, and it shows no sign of abating. The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively opening the door for states to restrict, ban, and even criminalize abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. The world is on fire, yet we still choose to spend valuable time, energy, and resources on the control of women’s bodies. So the fact that women are angry should come as no surprise. But our group was talking about anger because it’s an emotion we’re so rarely allowed to express freely, particularly in the context of spiritual practice.

From a young age, women are taught to be likeable, understanding, nurturing. We’re expected to set aside our feelings in order to care for others, and if we’re unable or unwilling to do so, we risk being labeled selfish, uncaring, or cold. The general reaction to women’s anger is consistently negative and even punitive—particularly in professional settings—though the same response is not applied equally to our male counterparts. Angry men gain power, but angry women lose it in spades. Angry men exude authority, but angry women are “too emotional” (meaning irrational and therefore untrustworthy). We can be called bitchy, histrionic, hormonal, irrational, aggressive, ugly, and most tellingly, too masculine—because, after all, anger is the right and purview of men. By the time we’re adults, we’ve learned the price of expressing our anger, so we learn to refrain, doing our best to steer away from behavior that violates established gender norms. We learn to not make waves, in other words, because waves can drown us, and often they do.

In one 2014 study at Georgia Southern University, 170 undergraduate students watched a video of court lawyers offering closing statements and were asked to rate their competence. Angry male lawyers received the highest scores, while angry female lawyers got the lowest (male lawyers who showed no emotion were second, and their female counterparts were third). In addition, the students attributed the women’s anger to their emotional state but ascribed the men’s anger to the situation in which they found themselves. These results are not unique. Time after time studies show that women who show strong emotions are punished, and often severely.

And yet we get angry. We still get angry. So what happens to all that unvoiced rage? Well, it doesn’t go away. “There is no away,” says that 1970s dictum about pollution. The same is true of our emotions. We may succeed in keeping our psychic dump out of sight or out of mind for a time, but its footprint can’t be erased, and it definitely can’t be ignored for long. The women in our group knew this, so we asked ourselves, what is the most skillful way to work with our anger? Can anger itself be skillful—to resist oppression, for example, and to incite change? What do the Buddhist teachings have to say about this?

In the bhavacakra (wheel of life) paintings, anger, one of the three poisons, is portrayed as a long, sinuous snake, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. It holds on tight to the tail of a rooster, representing greed or passion, which in turn bites down on the tail of a pig—ignorance or delusion. Together, the three poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance are responsible for the creation of karma, which keeps us spinning around and around on the wheel of samsara. In this and other Buddhist teachings, anger is identified as an unskillful klesha, or affliction. Anger is hot, reactive, and potentially decimating. The 8th-century Indian master Shantideva wrote in The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life that thousands of eons of skillful deeds are destroyed in a single moment of anger. The thing to do with anger, then, is to abandon, avoid, or extinguish it, preferably long before it has a chance to do its harm.

Can anger itself be skillful—to resist oppression, for example, and to incite change?

While I agree that anger is a potentially destructive, even devastating force, I also think there’s real danger in dismissing it too quickly, or in overlooking, repressing, or trying to stuff it into a more “acceptable” container. This is a risk all of us face, but Buddhist practitioners—particularly women—are especially susceptible to it. We Buddhists are an earnest bunch, after all. If we take our aspiration and our vows seriously, we’ll work hard to not perpetuate suffering in ourselves and in the world. But if we move too quickly to be forgiving or kind, we risk leapfrogging over real feelings of anger which, left unacknowledged, have the potential to do vastly more harm. Making this deflection more probable is the fact that it’s backed up by teachings we know and trust—teachings on selflessness, compassion, and altruistic joy. In the best of circumstances, these are tools for liberation, but when used to bypass our own feelings, they become the bars of a gilded cage.

That said, I’m not suggesting that women run around in a rage, giving full rein to their feelings of hatred, aversion, or hostility. But I believe there’s a way to make space for our anger. There’s a way to experience it fully and safely, so that we can work with it without judgment or the impulse to cancel it out. The answer is not to extinguish anger but to realize it, which in Buddhism means to clearly understand its nature; and part of this process is seeing how intimately it’s tied to a deep sense of care and love.

Elie wiesel once said that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference—a view not unlike that of the Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte (who, incidentally, has practiced Zen):

Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect, and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.

—Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Whyte undoubtedly knows that it’s a thin line that separates the three poisons from the three virtues. On the flip side of a slender coin, greed becomes generosity, anger turns into compassion, and ignorance transforms into wisdom. Determining what side the coin falls on is self. Liberate self by seeing it for the illusion that it is, and poison naturally becomes medicine, ailment becomes antidote. If anger is self-defense, then it follows that when the self is let go of, the need to protect becomes a moot point. This is true of anger, and it’s true of greed or sorrow or jealousy, of pleasure and pain.

Buddhism teaches that like any other conditioned thing in the universe, emotions are empty of any independent existence. They have no substance. They’re like wisps of fog, fragile bubbles, fleeting thoughts. (It’s not actually anger that’s destructive, but the actions that follow that initial emotional burst.) Therefore, from an absolute perspective, the only way to truly uproot anger is to realize that it’s inherently empty, to see that it has no power other than the one I give it with my actions and thoughts. However, in the relative world, before anger is self-liberated, it simply is, and its existence is as valid as that of equanimity or joy.

Emotions are our weather vane, letting us know which way the wind blows in our internal landscape. They’re also our response to the external world. As Whyte points out, anger shows us that we care, first and foremost, and what we care about and why. In its barest form, anger shows us that there’s something that needs tending—something deep and close.

In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks tells the story of a man who once asked a Masai elder, “What makes a good warrior?” The elder answered, “When the moment calls for fierceness, a good morani [warrior] is very ferocious. And when the moment calls for kindness, a good morani is utterly tender.” But what makes a great warrior, he added, “is knowing which moment is which.”

It’s this commingling of fierceness and tenderness that I find most helpful when thinking about anger and, in the context of practice, the ways in which I can work with it with skill and care. Imagine being able to ask ourselves and each other not “Why are you so angry?” but “Where does it hurt?” If the dark side of anger is its destructive power, its potency lies in its ability to wake us up, to lift us out of a sense of hopelessness or defeat, to let us know there’s something we’re overlooking, something that urgently demands our care.

That’s why, as a woman and as a practitioner, I’m most interested not in liberation from anger, but in liberation within it. I believe we’re all better served if we use our energy not to deflect or subvert or preemptively transform anger but to ask why it’s arising in the first place. A necessary aspect of our work is to investigate how we can collectively bring about the social, economic, political, and spiritual conditions in which anger will be the exception rather than the norm. For if we can harness the energy of anger, this powerful emotion can lead us down the quickest path to love.

In a telling anecdote in her memoir Wintering about the power of anger, the British author Katherine May speaks of the fury she felt when her husband was in the hospital with a burst appendix. The staff, seemingly in no hurry to help him, went nonchalantly about their business while May struggled with her fear. Finally realizing that she could indeed lose him, the normally shy woman focused her anger and used it to advocate for his care. Years earlier, I’d done the same when my brother tried to kill himself.

Two years younger than me, Derek was like my other half. So when I got the call that he was in the hospital, I took the first flight out of Mexico and arrived just as he was being transferred to the psychiatric ward of what was then Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York City.

A few days went by, and each day the psychiatrist in charge refused to see Derek. The reason he gave was that my brother was “stirring up trouble”: he’d given his money to a visitor and asked him to buy takeout from McDonald’s for all the unit’s residents. When I asked Derek about it, he said the place was so depressing, they all needed cheering up. He also refused to tell the staff what they wanted to hear. Looking at the ward’s vomit-green walls, the withered plants on the floor, I couldn’t blame him. I knew no healing would happen in the hospital, so I asked to see the psychiatrist about Derek’s discharge. After waiting for more than three hours, I was finally ushered into the doctor’s office. I sat across from him, a cheap metal desk between us, and stared at his Clark Kent face.

“We’re leaving,” I said, and watched as something in him coiled tightly, ready to fight. Normally I’m calm in stressful situations, and in most cases, I’d rather die than make a scene. But this time, my own body was thrumming. I’ve never been in a fistfight, but I imagine this is what it feels like, the moment before the first punch.

“Not possible,” the psychiatrist said, waving his hand dismissively.

I stood up slowly. “We’re leaving,” I repeated as I stared down at him. My voice was low and steady, but inside I was shaking.

I still wonder what I would’ve done if he’d refused to sign Derek’s discharge. When I think of that moment, I still have fantasies of tearing up the place. I’m not sure if I would’ve followed through, but I do know I was not about to back down. At that instant, No was the furthest thing from my mind.

I saw the doctor hesitate, then make up his mind. He nodded curtly and said, “OK.” An hour later Derek and I stood on the sidewalk, staring at each other and shivering.

Perhaps anger is the thing that tips the scales from inaction to action. Perhaps that’s why anger is not just skillful in certain moments but necessary. Stripped of its self-centering quality, anger can enlarge our boundaries, allowing us to encompass more of the other, or of the world. Mothers know instinctually this kind of expansion. Lovers touch it now and then; so do artists and activists of every stripe. Also those of us who love someone or something deeply, however briefly. When what you love is vulnerable and possibly about to be hurt, has been hurt, is hurt, then your willingness to hazard yourself becomes very clear.

Ultimately, this is what I wish for all of us: that we live and act and love with a fierce and tender clarity. That we allow anger to be neither a weapon nor a shield but the purest form of care.

Practicing Anger

If you’re a woman struggling with anger, the first step of working with it is to acknowledge its presence and to give yourself permission to feel exactly how you feel. Because our conditioning established a narrow band of acceptable behavior for a woman, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that it’s perfectly fine to be exactly who we are, and how we are. That’s the purpose of this simple affirmation practice that borrows loosely from the format of the metta, or lovingkindness, affirmations. (I acknowledge that men also feel anger and experience their own forms of repression. Here I’m speaking directly to that specific designation “angry woman” that so many need to heal from.)

Take a comfortable and stable seated posture, resting your hands gently on the tops of your thighs. If you’d like, you can place one or both hands over your heart. Close your eyes.

Begin by following your breath, allowing your mind to quiet down as you let your breath settle. When you’re ready, repeat to yourself either silently or aloud, “I am safe. I am loved. I am right.” I like to pair each phrase with an exhalation, letting the words trail off in my mind in time with my breath. Continue repeating these affirmations to yourself for the length of your meditation, or let the words fade away when you feel ready to engage the other two steps of the practice, to begin another practice altogether, or to simply rest in silence.

Just a note that the “right” of the third affirmation is not a value judgment or a measurement of any kind. It doesn’t stand in opposition to “wrong.” This rightness is the rightness of wholeness, of inherent perfection. It’s meant to convey the exactly-right-as-I-am of our being. It’s unconditional, just as our love—which is self-love—is unconditional and immutable. We don’t have to do anything to earn it. We don’t have to prove to ourselves we’re worthy. We are loved because we are. That’s all.

The second step in working with anger is to feel it completely. The practice here is to give it as much room as it needs, letting our bodies move through the physiological sequence of anger: the hammering heart, the burning stomach, the shaking hands. If the feelings get too strong, remind yourself that you don’t need to do anything with this emotion. You’re not suppressing it, but neither are you acting it out. As you sit with it, all you’re doing is creating a container in which your anger can just be. Ask yourself: Where do I feel this anger? In my chest, my stomach, my face? Is it cool and simmering, or hot like a blaze? How does anger feel on my skin, in my muscles? How deep is it? How old? If you find yourself drifting into thought or following a story about your anger, gently bring yourself back to the physical sensations in your body. Allow yourself to feel what you feel, and if you need to, stop and repeat the affirmations until you are grounded again.

The third step is to harness the energy of anger so you can use it for good. There are different ways of doing this, but my preferred strategy is to visualize anger as light. Begin by imagining a solid sphere of light in the center of your chest, where the heart is. Gradually and deliberately let this light spread through your body, suffusing it with its energy. Remind yourself that anger is just another form of energy; that you can use it to sustain the hard work of caring for whom or what you love.

As you continue your meditation, allow the light to keep spreading beyond your body, imagining it radiating in all directions. Do this until the light is strong and stable, and after a while deliberately imagine it condensing back into the sphere at the center of your chest—a kind of battery to fuel your next steps.

This is one practice out of many with which to turn poison into virtue. Except “turn” isn’t even the right word. Poison is virtue, and vice versa. Understanding the unity between anger and compassion, we no longer have to struggle with this strong emotion. We can feel it, honor it, and at the same time safeguard our actions so that, like this bright, warm light, they are both tender and fierce. 

The post A Fierce and Tender Clarity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Seven in the morning. Forty-seven degrees. October 2. I’m up to my knees in sage and rabbitbrush by the wide expanse of the Summer Lake playa in Oregon. Perfectly flat for forty square miles, the playa is the chalky white bed of an ancient, land-locked lake. Beside the empty expanse, I stand at the center of the four directions.

To the east, through the haze of the alkali flat, I can make out the low line of the Diablo Mountains. Behind me to the west rise Winter Ridge and Deer Head Mountain, barren and gray after last week’s wildfires. Black spars stud the slopes, all that remain of juniper groves and lodgepole pines. A few lines of smoke rise from stumps still smoldering after the burn. From the south come the complaints of cattle; from the north, the rolling rattle of sandhill cranes. 

The full moon is setting at my back. As it touches the ridgeline, its broad yellow face silhouettes burned spars, as black and limbless as telephone poles. With perfect synchrony, the sun is rising across the playa, sliced through with pink cirrus stripes and a thin layer of smoke held by cold air over the flat. A quarter circle of sun emerges, a half circle, three-quarters—can the earth be turning this quickly?—and the sun escapes the mountains and stands alone. I have seen this color before: the blush at the stem end of an apricot. No breeze stirs. No bird calls out.

In places only a hundred miles away, in times only a few days past, microwaves, radio waves, and electromagnetic pulses shot through my body day and night. My car passed other cars at a combined 140 miles per hour. The hammer of the news cycle struck incessantly, faster and faster, impossible to sustain. Deadlines grew shorter, to-do lists grew longer. In the absence of human contact, electronic messages doubled, tripled, doubled back on themselves. FYI, BTW, LOL. As the earth hurtled through space, I felt I was leaning into a stiff wind, my hair blown back, my arms wheeling, staggering to stay in place. 

But for this moment, in this place, I am held in perfect stillness by what I cannot see. 

I am held in the arms of gravity. The moon would pull me west, the sun would pull me east, but the earth holds me to its fiery heart. 

I am held by the atmosphere that clings tight to the earth. The spinning planet moves the air, bringing the smallest wind and the sound of trucks on the ranch road. But I will not be blown off the face of creation, because I am held by the sky I cannot see.

I am held in the pause of this moment between being and becoming—the time of a forty-mile, cow-stirred flat between two lake-times. Fourteen thousand years ago, there was the old lake flush with freshwater lapping against mountain benches, its marshes stirred by elephantine legs of mammoths and a juniper-wood paddle pushing a tule-reed canoe. Fourteen thousand years to come, there may be a new lake, steaming maybe, bubbling with red anaerobic algae that stain the beach. The playa boils to a skin of salt and fills again under lightning-split skies, part of endless cycles of cosmic creation and destruction. 

A north wind is lifting the dust now, and the sun has diffused into a vague glare. I am a confluence of the wind and the dust, the cloud-shadows and the glare. They hold me in a swirl of interdependencies that I cannot see, but feel instead—not isolation, but a sense of peace, and maybe comfort, to be part of this place, created by it, enlivened by the breath of sage and smoke. All being is interconnected: “From the arising of this,” the Buddha said, “comes the arising of that.” 

So now I will return through the sage to my desk, because I need to say this to you. Each morning invites you to be open and aware, as spacious as the sky that passes through you, recognizing “the precious nature of each day,” in the words of the Dalai Lama. No matter how frenzied you feel, no matter how shoved and strangled by the rush of events, you are standing in a single exquisite moment. No matter where you are, no matter how lost, you are standing at the perfect center of four directions. No matter how off-kilter you feel, you are standing in a place of perfectly balanced forces. Even if you feel abandoned by all that might comfort you, you are held in the embrace of what you cannot see. 

♦

Adapted from Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers ©2022 by Kathleen Dean Moore. Reprinted by permission of Oregon State University Press.

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As a person who is often caught up in difficult emotions, much of my practice focuses on processing them. Before I started to practice meditation, I could talk (for hours) about my feelings, but rarely did I actually feel my feelings. Mindfulness practice gradually taught me how to feel. It also taught me some coping methods that weren’t about fixing myself or figuring myself out but were about a direct knowing, a present–moment touching of my emotions. With my teachers’ guidance, I intuitively felt my way into a process that I now see is essentially based on the Buddha’s Satipatthana Sutta (the four foundations of mindfulness). Here he detailed the practice of mindfulness under four headings: mindfulness of body (sense realm), mindfulness of feeling tone or vedana (reactive impressions of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral), mindfulness of mental states, and mindfulness of dhammas (impersonal phenomena). I found that mindfulness of the body is the fundamental tool for this practice, while the other three realms give perspective on what I discover in the physical sense-sphere.

When a difficult emotion is arising, the sensations give a clear, direct path to connecting with what’s happening in the present moment. My tendency is to go into thoughts like judging (I shouldn’t feel like this) or analyzing (Why do I feel like this?) or solving (How can I feel better?) I wind up stuck in my head and missing the actual experience. What usually happens when I think about my feelings is that the thoughts themselves trigger more feelings because I’m in conflict with myself, and I go deeper into a painful mood. Often when I’m struggling with sadness, the interaction of negative thoughts with low physical energy and dullness blossoms into depression as the blend of thoughts and sensations creates a kind of all-encompassing state, a mental and physical cloud that seems impermeable. By focusing on the body, I take myself out of the thought realm—there are no words in my body—and break this negative cycle.

Focusing on sadness in the body is challenging. The reason that I start thinking about my emotions in the first place is that I don’t want to feel them. The practice of mindful breathing eases this process. Instead of trying to dive right into the middle of the feelings, I start by feeling the breath, then gently moving my attention toward the emotion. This can be called “breathing into” as I follow the breath to the tender spots in the body where the sadness rests.

In this delicate process, mindfulness of the breath needs several companion practices. First is faith. I have to trust that I’ll be okay, that I can be with the feelings without being overwhelmed; my faith in the dharma and in practice supports this step. If I trust in the power of mindfulness, then I don’t have to “solve” the emotion. I also need acceptance and forgiveness of myself so that I’m not judging my own feelings.

The reason that I start thinking about my emotions in the first place is that I don’t want to feel them.

When I first started doing this work several decades ago, I was only aware of emotions in the most obvious places, the chest and belly; I still use those areas of the body as my first focus in this practice. As I’ve become more attentive and trusting, I’ve discovered that I can notice emotions in virtually any part of the body. When grief is arising, my throat constricts and my eyes swell as I hold back tears; fear can appear as tightness in the shoulders or streams of energy down the arms; excitement and joy might be surges of tingling through the back.

Another difficulty in being mindful of emotions is that, although the sensations are associated with the body, at times (especially with the eyes closed) they seem to exist in some slightly different realm—as if they are not quite inside the body, but around it. I’ve read or heard of something called the “emotional body,” and maybe this is what that term means. I don’t know if such a thing is “real,” but the concept helps me to understand what I am feeling, since the experience of emotions in the body can be so subtle and difficult to locate in space.

In any case, wherever emotions arise—whether “in” or “around” the body— one thing is clear: the sensations are always moving.

What I’ve seen is that one of the strongest factors sustaining difficult emotions, especially depression and anxiety, is the subconscious fear that they will last forever. There is something in our makeup that creates this impression, and it is one of the fundamental delusions the Buddha was trying to help us break. When I practice with emotions, I have to consciously remind myself that they are impermanent. This is stepping out of the realm of strict mindfulness, the direct knowing of an experience, and rather, reflecting on the nature of the experience. And this is the advice that the Buddha gives over and over in the Satipatthana—to contemplate the arising and passing away of all phenomena.

Once I’ve come to some balance around the emotions in my body, I can bring in the other realms of mindfulness to support, deepen, and sustain the healing. 

The second foundation, mindfulness of feeling tone (vedana), helps me to see my experience less as a personal drama and more as an almost biologically triggered impulse. Again, going beneath the realm of concepts, vedana points to the raw effect of the emotion—its pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral quality. In other words, it’s not about me, it’s just stuff happening. We’re way down in the lower centers of the brain here, where it’s all about the basics of survival. There’s no rationalizing happening on this level, and we can’t help our reactions. So the only way to understand the feeling tone of my experience is as something I can’t control which must be accepted. On one long retreat when I was becoming attuned, moment-by-moment, to the arising of vedana, my teacher told me that I was experiencing equanimity. At this level of awareness, I wasn’t moving into wanting or not-wanting, which is the natural reaction to experiencing pleasant or unpleasant feelings. Instead, by just seeing the feeling tone, I allowed pleasant and unpleasant to simply move through me with acceptance and mindfulness. This point of view has obvious benefits when dealing with painful emotions.

It’s not about me, it’s just stuff happening.

The third foundation, identifying mental states, is the way that I usually talk about my emotions, naming my feelings as anger, sadness, anxiety, frustration or something else. If I just do this kind of naming intellectually without the earlier steps of sensing in the body and recognizing feeling tone, it doesn’t help much. That’s because what I’m trying to do is clarify the karmic process by which feelings appear and disappear. When I follow sensations to the corresponding feeling tone and then name what is happening, I not only know what’s happening intellectually, I know it viscerally. Seeing this karmic process unfold is where insight arises—the process reveals impermanence, suffering and the lack of solid identity.

With the third foundation, if I add the word just to the emotion identified, I remove a lot of the sting—“just fear,” “just sadness.” And because I’ve deconstructed the emotion into its component parts of body, feeling, and mental state, the name isn’t so threatening. It doesn’t imply some hidden monster; it is known clearly. Now that I know what it is, I can consider ways of working with the feeling that aren’t just reactive avoidance. If I see that I’m angry, I can breathe, relax, soften my heart, maybe practice some lovingkindness (metta). If I see that I’m inclining toward sadness or depression, I can try to activate energy either physically, with exercise, or socially, by connecting with a trusted friend; or I might choose to intentionally focus on something positive like gratitude, beauty, or even my own positive qualities (if I can think of any in that mood). These “antidotes” don’t arise out of aversion, which would simply create more struggle and agitation, but out of the insight and intuitive wisdom that comes from watching the entire process play out.

The fourth foundation, mindfulness of dhammas or impersonal phenomena, supports this process by giving me the broadest view of what is happening. Here I can look at my experience through the lens of dharma. I can put my experience in the context of the Four Noble Truths, watching the arising of suffering (dukkha), its cause, its end, and the way to its end; I can view an emotion as simply one of the five hindrances (desire, aversion, sleepiness, restlessness and doubt); I can deconstruct an emotion into the component five aggregates (form, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness). Once again, this view takes me out of the personal and into the universal experience of being a human with emotions.

I like to summarize the four foundations practice as, This is how my body feels; it’s unpleasant; I’m in a bad mood; it’s natural; and it’s not about me.

Once I’ve gone through this process—and it’s a process that might be repeated many times in a day—there has often been a shift, as simply approaching the feeling in this way has the effect of defusing it. I may still have the mood, but it’s often taking up less space in my consciousness as my viewpoint has changed from someone who’s in pain to someone who is observing the unfolding of the dharma.

Finally, I need to move on and do and think about other things. If I spend my whole day trying to be mindful of my emotions, it can turn into a narcissistic and obsessive exercise. At some point I just have to say, “Okay, fine, I’m in this mood,” and turn my attention elsewhere. One of the advantages of a mindfulness practice is that I can actually learn how to do this, to control and direct my attention to some extent so that I don’t have to stay stuck in one experience or one viewpoint.

♦

Related Inquiring Mind articles on resilience: 

• The Worst Zen Student Who Ever Was: Reflections on Depression and Buddhist Practice
• Angry Because I Care
• Tattooed Lotus

The post There Are No Words in My Body appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The newly opened Mandala Lab at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood looks at the power of difficult emotions and their potential to transform while fostering a more informed way of seeing ourselves and the world with greater clarity. 

The exhibit draws from the Buddhist practice of using mandalas as visual tools for working through the emotions of pride, attachment, envy, anger, and ignorance—also known as kleshas. As Tenzin Gelek, the Rubin’s senior Specialist of Himalayan arts and culture, noted in the exhibit handouts, “In Buddhism the five kleshas are the key afflictive emotional responses that are the root cause of our suffering.” Practitioners, with the help of their teachers, find ways to transmute these feelings as a means to navigate the inevitable trials faced in a given lifetime. 

Divided into quadrants—north, south, east, and west—the interactive space, located on the museum’s third floor, takes its inspiration from the Tibetan Buddhist Sarvavid Vairochana Mandala. The Sanskrit word mandala means “extracting a meaningful essence.” Using interactive artworks and experiences, the museum created what Gelek describes as a “mental gym” in order to “understand, unlock, and heal these difficult emotions within ourselves.”

The Rubin’s signature spiral staircase acts as the mandala’s center. Visitors’ first encounter with the installation happens in the south quadrant, where they are greeted with a pointed question: “How does pride show up in your life?” The question is meant to encourage visitors to consider how they view themselves and others as “a first step toward the wisdom of equanimity, which is an abandonment of judgment.” There is an option to choose which statement about pride most resonates by placing a token in the corresponding slot. On this particular day, slots with the most tokens were, “I think I am better than others” and “I think I am worse than others.” 

The “Scent Library” in the west quadrant investigates attachment through the sense of smell. Six kiosks in the library display a scent selected by a contemporary artist and created by master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. The artists produced short videos inspired by these same aromas that explore how memory and emotions are intertwined. Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson talks about the smell of smoke from her Uncle Allen’s cigarettes while writer Amit Dutta reflects on the scent of the earth through a whimsical stop motion animated video.

For filmmaker Tenzin Tsetan Choklay, the son of refugees who fled Tibet in 1959, it was the smell of fresh laundry that reminded him of his childhood in Dharamsala and his mother’s final days before dying of cancer. While Choklay and his family members are spread throughout the globe, he was able to work through his understanding of impermanence, attachment, and his mother’s death while rekindling familial relationships when he was making his short film “1994,” featured in Scent Lab. “I feel like it gave a good closure to one of the stories from our family’s past,” he said in the museum’s audio tour.  

For me the highlight of the lab is the commissioned sculpture by New York-based artist Palden Weinreb found in the north quadrant. The circular, multi-tiered work of resin and LED lights is the focal point for what the museum describes as a “Breathing Alcove” and was specifically designed for the space. Here visitors focus on the concept of envy using breath awareness—synchronizing the breath with a timed, pulsating light. The use of light as a guiding prompt will not be lost on both longtime and beginner meditators. Watching and breathing in tandem with the light as it cycles through the sculpture lulls you onto an unexpected pathway of interconnectedness and tranquility. “Can you breathe out envy and breathe in joy and appreciation?” asks the museum’s placard.  

That inner tranquility is short-lived, however, as the installation takes a surprising and cacophonous turn with the neighboring “gong orchestra” in the east quadrant. As a self-described gong enthusiast, I was thrilled to see eight gongs of different sizes and metals chosen by established artists such as Peter Gabriel, Sheila E., Shivamani, and Sarah Hennies. All are suspended from the ceiling, hanging over a long basin of water. Visitors are prompted to channel their anger by sharply striking the gong and lowering the instrument into the water. As the gong is immersed, ripples form and then dissipate. “Keep the gong in the water until you can see your reflection and the fully calm surface,” says the museum audio tour. “Perhaps you’ve just experienced the wisdom of patience in the face of anger.”

I appreciate the intent behind the use of a gong as a tool to transmute anger—especially given the current state of the world. But I’m wary of taking such an aggressive approach to an instrument of this kind. Besides that, the sound of crashing gongs reverberating throughout the five floors of a museum known for its serene atmosphere is not without its drawbacks. One visitor was observed with tissue in her ears as she made her way through the exhibit. 

Time will tell if the “gong orchestra” remains a permanent feature of the Mandala Lab. The museum views this 2,700-square-foot interactive space as “one of the city’s first cultural healing spaces in the aftermath of 2020,” according to Executive Director Jorrit Britschgi. In the coming months and years it will also function as the home for the Rubin’s School and Family Programs, introducing younger generations to the world of Himalayan art through social, emotional, and ethical learning (SEE Learning)—a program developed in partnership with Emory University. 

As visitors complete their circumambulation around the Mandala Lab, they are asked to reflect on what they have learned and reminded that “we don’t know what we don’t know.” What we do know is emotions like anger, pride, envy, attachment, and ignorance are complicated and in a constant state of flux. The installation is effective in giving us creative tools to unpack them—cultivating the Buddhist principles of self-awareness and awareness of others. It’s through understanding these thorny emotions that we hope to one day overcome our ignorance—bringing ourselves to a place of greater wisdom and equanimity. In doing so, we continue to turn the wheel of dharma. 

The post Turning Emotions Into Wisdom appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Buddha emphasized the need to cultivate an inner peace that is independent from external conditions. This teaching has become particularly relevant during the past year of widespread pain and uncertainty. Bhante Buddharakkhita, who leads an emergent Theravada Buddhist community in his home country of Uganda, will guide us through mindfulness meditations for weathering the emotional storms of a turbulent world.

Bhante Buddharakkhita is the founder and abbot of the Uganda Buddhist Centre in Kampala, Uganda. He is the spiritual director of Flowering Lotus Meditation Center in Magnolia, Mississippi, a Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and the author of Planting Dhamma Seeds: The Emergence of Buddhism in Africa and Sowing Seeds of Peace: Mindfulness Meditation for Finding Peace Within.

You can learn more about Bhante Buddharakkhita and the story of the Uganda Buddhist Centre in “Buddhism Takes Root in Africa,” or “Visiting Teacher: Bhante Buddharakkhita.”

The post Overcoming Difficult Emotions in a Chaotic World appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.