That was then.
Now, I try to
imagine each emotion as an essential part of me- whether I like it or not—that has
its own sacred place within me. Similar to John Kabat Zinn’s suggestion
in his classic book Wherever You Go, There You Are to consider each and every character in a legend or
fairy tale (the princess and the witch,
the prince and the ogre) to be a
small or large part of the whole that makes us, I try to see each and every emotion in the same vain.
However, I’ve found
lately that just desiring to
embrace each and every emotion, does not help me in fact radically
accept it- totally and completely. When the rubber meets the road,
I often still resist.
Take this morning
for example.
This morning in
meditation I experienced a sensation of intense of sadness wash over me.
It reminded me of the weather patterns that are so frequently talked about in
the meditation literature. One minute you are sitting in your boat on the
flat calm water with clear skies overhead and a feeling of contentment throughout
your whole body, and the next, a dark cloud rolls in from the east leaving you
instinctually holding your hand to your chest to acknowledge the weight of the
wave of emotion that has just knocked the wind right out of you.
I know there is nothing to do or change about this aspect of meditation
practice. I know there is nothing wrong with discomfort in moments such
as these. I know this is all part of my practice. And the meditation literature has helped me
to see this.
However, afterward I was left wondering two things:
1.) Am I as accepting of these types of emotional weather
patterns when I am off the cushion in my day-to-day life? Which
I’d have to honestly answer a firm: no.
And,
2.) Is it more that my emotional hijackers steal me away from joy? Or, do
I actually habitually abandon
joy the moment any kind of distressing emotion presents itself? To which I’d
have to say a qualitative: yes.
In fact, it happened just the other day.
The other day I was at a Yoga Festival with my 6 year-old son, and it was
undeniably a fantastic day. We laughed. We danced. We ate yummy food. We
hugged. We talked about silly and significant things in the same breath. It was
wonderful.
Then came the hour drive home.
My son was asleep in the back, and I decided to make a quick phone call
(hands free of course!). I had thought the phone call was fairly
innocuous; just firming up plans. Before I knew it though, the
conversation took an unexpected turn, and I was knee deep in the sticky mud of
emotional discomfort.
And boy did I get stuck! The phone call itself was all of 10 minutes, but
my own distress level went on for several hours. And I must tell you,
that pissed me off to no end. I went from a state of bliss stemming from
that fabulous yoga fest with my beloved, to grief and sadness on the phone
call, and then, to anger about
the grief and sadness “ruining” my day.
Yes, if you are wondering, I could see I was definitely struggling with
what some Buddhist practitioners might call non-attachment. LOL.
Interestingly though, I was struggling with both nonattachment to the
pleasant emotions and the unpleasant emotions. Yet in retrospect, I now see that I did not recognize
my own role or accountability in the moment. I felt like something had been
done to me.
Some people confuse non-attachment with being unfeeling, apathetic, or
neutral. But I do not view non-attachment that way. To me,
non-attachment is an open-hearted, unconditional friendliness. Therefore,
non-attachment toward emotions, all emotions, would be a warm and
curious loving- kindness.
When I am formally
sitting on the cushion in meditation, I am able to practice non-attachment to
my changing weather patterns of emotions with relative ease. It is
certainly not effortless, but it does not throw me for a loop anymore either.
Off the cushion
however, I am playing in a whole other league, and one that I am not completely
ready for despite my regular practice.
Something that has helped me though, both on and off the cushion, is to
imagine all my emotions as my dear children.
Now, if you have children of your own as I do, it can be quite easy to
move from the concrete image of your children, to your imagined emotional
children. But even if you don’t, you can use the images of nieces,
nephews, god sons and daughters, or any other child you love. Or, you can
always exercise those imagination muscles which work marvelously as well.
This use of imagery is similar to what several patients of mine have been
recently telling me in bits and pieces about the new animated movie Inside
Out. I have not yet had the opportunity to see it myself, but based
on their descriptions about these movie characters who are personified emotions
(Sadness, Joy, Anger, Disgust, Fear), in this one area, Disney and I may be on
the same page. And like John
Kabat- Zinn says, legends and fairy tales as told through modern day Disney
movies carry timeless truths (or mirrors) about ourselves that is applicable to
all ages.
What is interesting
to me though, is out of all of the emotional characters or children that I
wrestle with, joy may in fact be the most challenging.
To me, joy is like
that well-behaved child who just sits quietly and does what she is told.
She is the child who is able to dress herself and get a snack independently. She
is your go-to girl.
Unfortunately
though, because joy will not make a fuss when you are busy taking care of the
other emotional children who are the squeaky wheels--who for me are: grief,
disappointment, envy, resentment-- joy is the emotional child who can be easily
overlooked, inadvertently ignored, or even neglected at times.
But maybe, like
children, it is no one’s fault. Maybe there actually is no one to blame or to be
mad at. Emotions, like children, all have different idiosyncrasies and
needs. So to engage in reactive, willful behavior like yelling,
screaming, or stomping your feet will only be ineffective and make the
situation 10 times worse.
Therefore, this
reality requires more radical acceptance. The reality that the needy and
dependent emotional children will continually make attempts to steal my
attention away from joy requires more accountability on my part to
engage in mindful awareness when my attention has been distracted. In other words, I need to stop referring to
them as hijackers. Additionally, I need to make a concerted effort to
spend more quality time with joy so that she does not get abandoned as often.
How do we do that
though? How do we respond skillfully to these very tricky emotions where, like Alice
in Wonderland, one minute we feel fine and the next we have slid right down
the rabbit hole?
Here are a few ideas
that I have gathered from the wisdom of others:
Compassion: Instead of viewing these intrusive emotions
like emotional hijackers straight out of some overly dramatic 747 airline movie
starring Harrison Ford, consider the image of seeing them as a teenage gang in
the neighborhood.
Now, you may be
thinking, “what is she talking about?! That still seems really scary.”
Well, that’s true, and you know what, painful emotions like grief can be scary
too. But when you boil it down, a teenage gang is made up of a bunch of
traumatized kids who have, what Jesuit Priest and author Greg Boyle calls, “a
lethal absence of hope.”
And if you can
remember that, then you can begin to engage with these challenging and at times
scary emotions as you might a group of traumatized and hopeless kids who are
messing up your day or your neighborhood. It may help you navigate the moment
from a foundation of compassionate skill rather than fear and anger.
Blessings: Consider
blessing these difficult emotions. Minister and author Barbara Brown
Taylor shared in her book A Geography of Faith, the story of a friend
who used this practice to manage the intense emotions associated with a recurrent
bad dream. In the book Ms. Taylor writes:
“I have a friend who did not sleep through the night for years because of
a dreadful dream he had. He did not have it every night, but he feared it every
night, so that even on his nights off he stayed on guard.”
And that is the struggle right? That is how we can begin to have an
aversive or even aggressive reaction to uncomfortable emotions because the
timing can feel so intrusive, inconvenient, and in the extreme, a betrayal.
However, the aversive and aggressive reactions in the case of Ms.
Taylor’s friend only made the situation worse, and was not improving the sleep.
So instead, her friend tried a blessing.
“One night—in the dream—it occurred to him that what the demon wanted
from him was his blessing. That was the only thing that would end the demon’s
agony. That was the only thing that would make it go away. So he opened the
door with his guts on fire and his hands in front of his face. ‘I bless you,’
he said to the demon, ‘and I bid you go where God wants you to go.” But saying
it once was not enough. He had to say it over and over again, as many different
ways as he could think of to say it, for what seemed in the dream like close to
an hour. It was as if the demon could not get enough of the blessing. It was as
if no one had ever blessed him before…’Now go in peace.’ Making a sound like a
kitten, the demon turned around and never came back.”
This is by no means easy. This practice is not for the faint of
heart.
Invitations: Consider
inviting these hard to handle emotions to dinner, or at least to tea. This one, like the blessing, is
counterintuitive because you are essentially embracing the difficult to then be able to return to the experience
of contentment or joy.
Buddhist teacher and author Tara Brach wrote in her blog on June 12th
of this year about a story from Buddhist literature that is over millennia old in
which the Buddha himself interacted with the Demon God Mara through
compassionate mindfulness rather than aversion and aggression. She wrote:
“Instead of ignoring Mara or driving him away, the Buddha would calmly
acknowledge his presence, saying, ‘I see you, Mara.’ He would then invite him
for tea and serve him as an honored guest. Offering Mara a cushion so that he
could sit comfortably, the Buddha would fill two earthen cups with tea, place
them on the low table between them, and only then take his own seat. Mara would
stay for a while and then go, but throughout the Buddha remained free and
undisturbed.”
Though we may not be
able to follow this model all the time when we experience discomfort, Ms. Brach
reminds us we can try to remember:
“When Mara visits us, in the form of troubling emotions or fearsome
stories, we can say, ‘I see you, Mara,’ and clearly recognize the reality of
craving and fear that lives in each human heart. By accepting these experiences
with the warmth of compassion, we can offer Mara tea rather than fearfully
driving him away.”
Love: Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. modeled a loving practice to be used in the face of adversity
and hate.
Of course, like the other more enlightened beings like the Buddha, we
everyday people may struggle to practice this type of advanced Kingian practice
with the types of aggression and oppression of the likes Dr. King faced and was
ultimately assassinated by. But even still, we can engage this
loving practice with challenging emotions like dread, shame and rage.
Emotions that have the potential to drown out the sound of all the pleasant
feelings like calm, affection and pride.
Dr. King believed a loving practice was “the only force capable of
transforming an enemy into a friend.” Could you imagine making dread, shame and
rage into your friends rather than your enemies?
Dr. King also did not buy into the myth that there are people in the
world who are either all good or all bad.
He believed there is always some of one in the other.
He said: “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best
of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” When we
apply this same assertion to our emotions, maybe bliss is not all good and we
should consider taking her off of the pedestal, and in so doing, avoid devaluing
distressing emotions like betrayal to the confines of the unwanted basement.
Mindful Awareness: Going back to our Buddhist teacher and author friend Tara Brach, in her
book, True Refuge, she generously
gives us an acronym of RAIN to help us remember how to allow each moment of discomfort,
which may or may not present itself during a moment of joy, to move through us
like a wave in the ocean.
RAIN stands for:
R Recognize
A Allow
life to be just as it is
I Investigate
inner experience with kindness
N Non-identification.
When applying RAIN
to our lives she writes:
“RAIN directly deconditions the habitual ways in which you resist your
moment-to-moment experience. It doesn’t matter whether you resist what is by
lashing out in anger, by having a cigarette, or by getting immersed in obsessive
thinking. Your attempt to control your life within and around you actually cuts
you off from your own heart and from this living world. RAIN begins to undo
these unconscious patterns as soon as we take the first step.”
Another similar
approach to RAIN that is taught at Kripalu yoga and wellness center in the
Berkshires of Massachusetts that is also about riding the wave of discomfort is
BRFWA which stands for:
B Breathe
R Relax
F Feel
W Watch
A Allow.
Author, yogi, and
resident Kripalu scholar outlines this technique in his book, and one of my
personal favorites, Yoga and the Quest
for the True Self. He says when we use this technique:
“We don’t try to control our energy experience, we’re free to surrender
to the wave of sensation, of feeling, and of energy. In these remarkable moments of freedom, we
can let life as it is touch us, because at our core we know that ‘everything is
already OK.”
Gratitude:
This suggestion comes from social researcher and author Dr. Brene Brown, and
she says it is particularly useful when the emotional hijacker of joy specifically
is fear.
In an interview with
Oprah Winfrey on Super Soul Sunday, Dr.
Brown said, “If you ask me what’s the most terrifying, difficult emotion we
feel as humans, I would say joy.”
Calling joy
“terrifying” may seem strange, but if you are a “waiting for the other shoe to
drop” type of person, then just when you begin to relax into joy, you may
notice your whole body tense up, as if to say: “no! Don’t let your guard down,
something bad could happen.”
In moments like
these, Dr. Brown suggests we intentionally move ourselves into a practice of
gratitude to avoid that slippery slope from joy to fear that can happen in .2
seconds.
So, that’s it. That’s
all I got. But what about you? How do
you stick with joy to avoid getting hooked on the bait of negative emotions? How do you avoid abandoning joy?
