Waves Of Emotion -1

Understanding emotions like the waves of the ocean. Emotions are connected to some of the most sublime and wonderful things that humans experience and also some of the most awful things that humans experience. But whether it’s the positive or the negative, emotions are a very important part of human life and it's very important to get a sense of how to bring mindfulness to our emotional life.

When we see our emotions more clearly, we can discover freedom in relation to them.

Transcript

So,

I hope you all had a nice break and celebration of thankfulness.

As we move into the holiday season and the days are getting dark and the energy and the lights are coming up around some of the homes and on the trees,

There's an energy to this season.

I wanted to explore with you our emotional world.

For some people,

This time of year pulls us into reflection and quiet,

And for some it's about celebration and getting out and socializing,

But for many of us,

It's kind of a combination of both of those things.

So,

As part of this mindfulness practice that we're developing,

One function is to help us see more deeply into this life of ours,

And to see more deeply the forces that really drive us and motivate us,

And to some extent,

These forces that push us around,

The forces that we react to.

So,

When we see these forces,

We can begin to make wiser choices in relationship to them.

We can start lightening up a bit around them.

That's the intention anyway.

And emotions.

Emotions are some of these forces.

Emotions are connected to some of the most sublime experiences,

Precious and wonderful things that we have experienced as humans,

And also,

Emotions are associated and can be experienced in the most awful conditions.

But whether our emotional life is positive or negative,

Emotions are a really important part of our life,

And given that,

It's an important object to bring mindfulness to,

To our emotional life,

So that we can actually see the arising more clearly.

And then,

As we do,

We discover freedom in relationship to them.

That's the intention,

To be able to be free,

To let them be,

Without having them run us.

So,

Meditation practice is a helpful place to be with emotions,

Because meditation is like a laboratory,

Really.

It's a place where we can trust everything that occurs.

We're not doing anything with it.

Like,

Rather than thinking that something should be repressed or denied or held onto,

We're just seeing.

We're just sitting here,

Seeing our emotional life.

In a way that emotions are just moving through,

And it's trustable.

They're just moving.

To let it move through us,

And to let it come and be there,

Is an important part of practice.

One of the reasons why practice is so trustable is that most emotions that we have are a form of communication.

Something in the emotional realm is being communicated.

So,

Let's say you're angry.

This is an easy one to work with,

Or it's a more common one to work with,

I should say.

So if you're very angry,

Something is being communicated in the anger,

And if you shut it out and deny it,

Then you're not availing yourself to what's being communicated.

You're pushing it away.

You're not listening to what needs to be learned or seen or heard.

So when we sit with big emotions,

Like anger,

First of all,

We're not acting on it.

We can trust that we can just be with the anger.

We're not actually harming anybody with our anger.

We're not harming ourselves,

Hopefully.

It's like when we're with anger in practice,

I think Thich Nhat Hanh said,

It's like being with a friend.

We're in a process,

Always with emotions.

We're always in process because emotions are always a movement.

And we can trust that it's process,

That whatever is arising in our emotional realm,

It's in process.

So in part,

What we're cultivating here is to be open and present for our emotional life.

That's the way that emotions are transformed.

You know,

The movement of emotions and actually being present for that movement and seeing the movement can be very clarifying in practice.

When we're able to be with the surface of emotions,

We can feel anger and then we respond to anger.

That's the surface level of emotion.

But if we're just sitting and we're just cultivating awareness of emotion,

It allows us to go deeper.

Like,

Oh,

What's under the anger?

Oh,

Oh,

There's a fear here.

Oh,

Okay.

And so we start seeing some depth of our emotional life that isn't often available if we're just operating on the surface level of the emotions and we go about our busy wanderings.

So there's a wide range of kind of very strong attitudes that people have about emotions in our culture and society.

Some people say that we should celebrate and act on every emotion or the opposite.

We should not express any emotions.

Emotions are frightening and scary.

Let's not show them to anyone.

Let's keep them to ourselves.

And most of us as practitioners,

We already kind of understand what emotions are drivers in our life.

We have a relationship to those drivers,

Consciously or unconsciously.

And it's very helpful in this process of mindfulness practice to reflect a little bit on what that relationship is,

What that might be.

You know,

What are the drivers in your life?

What emotions are driving you?

And it could be avoidance.

Just by paying attention to emotions,

The relationship you have to the emotion might,

You know,

It might interfere with the simplicity of just noticing it.

Like you might get entangled.

Like,

Oh,

This is how it is right now.

I'm angry right now.

And then you exhibit anger,

Anger.

This is all going wrong.

Or I'm really happy and it's just everything is so great and I'm just going to share it and just be happy and expressive out in the world of my happiness.

But the idea is to be really simple with the arising of both of those experiences,

All emotions that arise.

The idea is to be like,

Oh,

Anger,

Anger,

And like feel into the anger.

Oh,

It's hot,

It's contracting.

It hurts my head,

I feel it's closed.

There's heat or happiness,

Wow,

Open,

Spacious,

Receptive,

Welcoming,

Different experiences.

And we meet them with the same level of curiosity.

You know,

Part of the practice is learning to bring a wise attention to every aspect of our life,

Including our emotional life.

And it's important to remember that we don't want to give any special value to our emotional world.

You know,

It's no different.

So sometimes we value joy and happiness over anger and frustration.

This is what the mind does,

Right?

We place judgments and differentiation and say,

This is good and this is bad.

But emotions are no different from our physical experience,

From our thinking,

From our breath,

From the point of just awareness practice.

It's all equal,

All of it.

But because people have these very strong ideas and conditioning around the emotional life,

You know,

There's some emotions that we say,

These are okay and these are not okay.

And these views are the relationships that we have with them.

So as we start to look at,

Well,

What is my relationship to my emotional life?

There's a view,

You know.

This is included and this is not included.

There's a value established.

These are good and appropriate,

And these ones must be suppressed and denied and ignored.

And I see this a lot in the meditation scene.

You know,

There can be a really,

A person who is just habitually angry and challenged and bitter.

And yet on the emotional,

Like in the meditation scene,

They're just,

They suppress and deny and ignore these aspects of themselves.

And they become this serene being in an effort to be admired.

It's interesting to see this,

This hierarchy.

So mindfulness practice,

It really doesn't have this hierarchy.

It's just open awareness to see and be willing to see everything as it is.

We can't have judgment about what we see.

A clear window,

You know,

If you look at a clear window,

It doesn't have judgment about what's in the center of the window.

Many things will come across the clear window,

Right?

And it's the same with our emotions.

We don't want to have,

You know,

Excessively focus on emotions as,

You know,

Or insufficiently focus on them.

We want to focus on them in the same way that we focus on our thoughts and our emotions and our body and our patterns of our being.

They're all equal.

There's a famous simile that comes out of the Buddhist teaching.

It's called the simile of the arrows.

And some of you really know this simile.

It's an important one.

It says if a person is struck by an arrow,

Would that person be hurt?

And this is asked in like a kind of a group of monastics.

And the assembly of people said,

Yes,

That would hurt to be struck by an arrow.

And then the Buddha said,

Well,

Say the person is struck by a second arrow.

Is that even more painful?

And the monks surrounding the in the assembly said,

Yeah,

That the one was bad,

But the second one makes it even worse.

And so the Buddha said,

Life sometimes brings you the first arrow.

The second arrow is what you shoot at yourself.

It's a very important teaching.

So if I'm walking down the street and I stumble on uneven pavement and I fall and I scrape my knee,

That's the first arrow.

Things like that happen.

You know,

I scrape my knee.

The second arrow would me be telling myself,

You know,

Lisa,

You're an embarrassment.

Look at you.

You old lady,

You know,

You can't even walk without falling apart,

You know,

Jeez.

So I've added something there.

All these negative judgments about myself and my ability,

You know,

Adding more negativity.

And now I'm suffering because I don't think I should trip on the uneven pavement.

What's wrong with me?

So now there's another,

That's the third arrow.

And then I get angry thinking,

You know,

I should know better.

I'm like a mindfulness facilitator.

I am a teacher.

Like I should know better than to get all hung up on all these,

These arrows.

I'm just keep on point,

Like shooting myself with arrows.

And then now there's the other arrow.

There's the fourth arrow.

And the arrows go on and on and on all the ways in which I've made something like falling and scraping my knee into something about me and my ability.

So it's important to distinguish,

You know,

What belongs to our life?

What just comes along with being a human being?

Things happen.

First arrow.

I tripped.

I skinned my knee.

And what those secondary reactions we have to it,

You know,

We add suffering.

We add suffering.

And so seeing the arrows,

What are we adding?

And our emotional life is really fraught with arrows.

So at its root,

What we're doing here is learning to distinguish the commentary from the experience.

We have an experience and we're learning to distinguish the reaction we have to whatever that primary situation is.

Are we adding second arrows,

Third arrows,

Fourth arrows?

Are we reacting to it that's different than letting it just be there in simplicity?

This is what happened.

How am I with what's happening?

So there is a variety of emotions that belong in this world of the second arrow.

And again,

In mindfulness practice,

We're not judging ourselves negatively for having the second or third arrows.

We're just trying to wake up and pay attention and notice what's going on.

It doesn't really matter if you finally wake up at the hundred and thirtieth arrow.

It just matters that you wake up from it.

Waking up means that you notice that you're aware that you're not adding any more arrows.

Just okay,

This is what I've been doing.

Because if you get to the hundred and thirtieth arrow and you say,

This is crazy,

I shouldn't be doing this,

Then guess what?

You've just added a hundred and thirty one.

Just okay,

Sooner or later,

You either forget what you're doing or you become distracted or you wake up and it's like,

Okay,

This is enough.

And just step back and take in a bigger picture.

So this is the first of two talks on our emotional life.

And I'll stop here today and take questions and comments.

Reviews

Love the arrows story