Introducing Loving-Kindness To Difficult Feelings
by Leo Maciel
To have an enlightened mind is to be with any experience, and this does not mean only the ripe, sweet, and pleasant but the raw, bitter, and unpleasant experiences. Pema Chödrön (2013) cites Ponlop Rinpoche who says that “in the process of uncovering the open, unfixed quality of our mind, we have to be willing to get our hands dirty. It’s only by really tasting your experience of emotions that you get a taste of enlightenment.” The only way out, so to speak, is through”, says Pema, adding that “because we perceive dualistically and have this black-or-white thinking where we label things either “good” or “bad,” we shut down when strong energy arises. We associate this strong energy with different thoughts—memories of the past or fantasies about the future—and then this somewhat indescribable thing happens, which we call feeling an emotion. Emotions, in essence, are just pure energy, but because of dualistic perception we identify the emotion as 'me', and it gets very locked in.”
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