It’s not that some part of you is conditioned. You’re wholly conditioned, from start to finish. Freedom begins when we are able to recognize this.
—Jun Po Roshi
There are many odd things about being human.
One of the stranger things is that we are fully convinced that we’re in charge of our own minds and our own lives, and that we can look at any situation objectively and logically.
Unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the truth.
With more than fifty years of research (and more coming out every year) there are reams of data showing just how incredibly self-deceiving we really are. From things like cognitive bias (where we avoid information that conflicts with what we believe), to how faulty our memories of past events actually are when tested, to the placebo effect, there is no longer any doubt that we live in very subjective worlds largely of our own making.
Part of our human subjectivity comes from physical, psychological, and cultural conditioning that operates below the surface of our conscious egos. As evolved human beings with complicated brains, emotions, and ideas about reality, we consider ourselves above and removed from conditioning such as this. In fact, even in reading this it’s easy to think of how other people we know are so biased around certain things (the friend who keeps getting into destructive relationships, our alcoholic boss, the pundit on TV ranting about some distortion of the news). But it’s almost impossible to see this in ourselves.
And then our partner shows some affection to someone, and we feel our heart pound in jealousy (even if another part of us feels a little embarrassed about how we’re feeling). Someone cuts us off in traffic, and we scream an obscenity out the window, or perhaps just mutter, annoyed, as our blood pressure skyrockets. Maybe we can’t sleep at night, even though we’re exhausted, or we struggle to get out of bed in the morning because life has, somehow, somewhere, lost its edge.
Maybe we wrestle with voices in our own head; ones that judge us, mock us, distract us, or berate us. Perhaps we have goals for ourselves, dreams of a bigger and better and more loved-filled life, but they never seem to be able to get off the ground.
Something is in the way.
If we really look at our life, how much of it has been a direct result of our choices and how much seems slightly out of our control? And if we’re not fully in charge of our own life, who or what is? For those of us on a spiritual path, we often come to see that conditioning is one of the most important foundations of our practice, and the beginning of our liberation. Here’s why.
On this day, we’re speaking on Skype, so all I have is a view of Jun Po’s head and torso, from the study in his house.
KA: We’ve had a lively discussion so far about ego, Awakening, seeking, and how they all come together on a spiritual path. Today we’re going to talk about conditioning.
JP: [Nodding] One of my favorite topics.
KA: I came prepared today with a good quote about conditioning. It’s from Anthony de Millo: “What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.”
JP: He was a real troublemaker, de Millo. Jesuit priest from India, yes?
KA: That’s the one. And here’s another one of my favorites, Lao Tzu:
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
JP: Wonderful. Do you know the Dhammapada?
KA: Of course. Words of the Buddha, from the Pali Canon.
JP: Very good, grasshopper! One of the “teachings for the common people” from the Buddha:
Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are all mind wrought.
If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts
suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts
happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
KA: So the mind, as described here by the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and de Millo, is understood as something that is conditioned. That conditioning can, to a large extent, create the subjective, emotional world in which we live. It binds us to our ignorance, and prevents us from living a liberated life.
JP: I couldn’t agree more. It’s not that some part of you is conditioned. You’re wholly conditioned, from start to finish. Freedom begins when we are able to recognize this.
KA: Let’s start, then, with the most obvious kind of conditioning, physical.
JP: [Nodding] It gets interesting when you talk about our genetic imprint, the necessity to procreate, and hormones driving our habits, a lot of which get us into trouble in this modern world!
KA: That’s right. Men, for instance, have been found to have huge spikes in testosterone—up to 400% increases—when they achieve something and get public praise for it. Like winning a golf game, or an election, or anything they deem proof of a major accomplishment.
JP: [Nodding] And then their sex drive goes through the roof.
KA: Exactly. And a good Buddhist or Christian or devout practitioner of any religion might get very concerned, because these strange and sultry thoughts are arising, seemingly out of thin air. A sensitive and self-aware man might end up rushing off to his therapist, or priest or rabbi, wondering what’s “wrong” with him since he suddenly wants to screw everything in sight.
JP: And it’s merely biology, not pathology.
KA: Correct. Women, of course, have monthly swings of their estrogen levels, which have a big impact on mood and emotionality and can be a struggle for some self-aware women, especially in a culture that expects us to be the same, every day.
JP: My own testosterone levels, as a seventy-something-year-old man, are dropping. This affects every part of my life, from my intensity to my ability to exercise. It’s very interesting to witness.
KA: I bet. So these are light examples, but physical conditioning can be far more ominous. Children who suffer from emotional or physical abuse show the same changes in their brain functioning as soldiers exposed to traumatic combat and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Under extreme stress, the body reacts first, specifically the dorsal vagal nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system. Then, the parts of the brain associated with detecting potential threats, the anterior insula and the amygdala, adapt to become hyper-vigilant, aware at all times and places of danger in their environment. The physical body and brain are now conditioned, biologically, to survive. Great when bullets are flying around, a saber-toothed tiger is jumping out of the trees, or Dad might hit you on any given night if you say the wrong thing. Not so great at home with the kids or at the beach on holiday.
JP: [Nodding] I manifest the signs of hyper-vigilant tension in my occipital band, temples, and my eyes; they used to squint much of the time because my brain was conditioned to be ready for an unexpected blow from my father.
KA: I see those narrowed eyes on you from time to time. So this still affects you?
JP: To a degree, yes. It arises in my body, manifests in my brain, and then comes into my consciousness. At that point, I have freedom to choose my response.
KA: That’s fascinating. How does it happen? What does it look like, to you?
JP: I now recognize and feel the contraction for what it is. The eyes are narrow, and my body and brain are on high alert. When this arises, I choose to look deeper at what’s happening. Usually, something outside of me has really gotten my attention. Someone has raised their voice in a violent way, for instance. But it actually makes me smile now. The contraction still arises, but that old reaction to it, my hysterical-historical, has been transformed.
KA: The hysterical-historical—you mentioned this term before. It seems like it’s most relevant here, around conditioning. For you, this is the story behind your hypervigilance? All the complications that it caused?
JP: It’s the conditioned story that arises around my physical trauma, in this case, yes. So me as victim, or rebel, outlaw, numbed-out guy, or all the other sub-personalities created by that reality, that I lived over my youth and young adulthood. Those were the stories that came alive in reaction to the trauma.
So when the energy of contraction would arise in my body and my brain, it might lead to an argument with my beloved, or me shutting down emotionally because I would get afraid that I was going to blow my top like Dad used to do. Or I might go off to be by myself, or have some other reaction that wasn’t true to what I was really feeling and what I really wanted.
Let me say that again. I would have some reaction to what I was feeling, and to a deeper need, but that reaction always happened so fast that I wouldn’t notice until too late.
KA: Such as?
JP: Well, when you get all pissed off at your beloved, and storm out of the house, or numb out to protect yourself, is that what you really want? To be contracted and upset, and separate from him or her? Of course not. You want closeness and connection; you feel deep caring for this person—which is why you’re so upset to begin with—yet you’re driven to do something that has the opposite effect.
KA: So, hysterical-historical is the way we react to certain life events, certain “triggers,” if you will? That’s the conditioned response to, well, a conditioned reaction?
JP: [Nodding] We all have our hysterical-historicals within us, and an emotional trigger sets the story in motion [snaps fingers] so quickly we don’t see that we actually have a choice in the matter. Sometimes it’s our “intolerable situation.” Virtually everyone has something they just won’t tolerate—that’s a great place where there is a hysterical-historical trigger waiting to go off.
KA: Like what?
JP: It depends on the person. For some, it’s infidelity. Others, it might be dishonesty. Others, integrity. Or loyalty, sexual intimacy, or challenges to authority. It’s a place in our lives where we seem to have no ability to do anything but react, strongly.
KA: And you’ve learned that you—that we—actually have an ability to choose a reaction instead of have a reaction?
JP: Yes—that’s part of the formal Mondo Zen practice. For me, I had all kinds of problems in relationships when I was younger, because I had no real idea how to trust love or how one was supposed to act in a normal relationship. My familial models—my conditioning—were very confused. Hysterical-historical.
KA: Did your spiritual practice help to expose this and help you to have more freedom and choice?
JP: [Pause] Only partially. What an intensive concentration practice and meditation can give you is a tremendous amount of space in your mind. Your reactive patterns can be seen much more easily, because you’ve trained your mind to be nonreactive. Thousands of hours of meditation creates tremendous spaciousness in your mind.
KA: But it’s not enough?
JP: Well, it wasn’t enough for me. It’s not enough for many of the people who come to me to train.
KA: Why is it not enough?
JP: Because the conditioning is still in place. In long-term meditation, you learn to be nonreactive, you see, to witness what arises in your mind, including your personal hysterical-historical. But you haven’t understood and transformed that conditioning; you’re like a sober drunk who has learned to stop drinking by force of will, but never looked at the causes of what led him to begin drinking in the first place.
As I’ve said before, feelings are information. That’s all. Concentration and meditation can slow down our reactive patterns, and give us genuine spiritual insight. But it takes emotional koans to transform our habitual negative patterns into Enlightened action.
KA: And there aren’t emotional koans in traditional Zen?
JP: [Shakes head.]
KA: Let’s focus on an example that everyone has experienced: “fight, flight, or freeze.” This causes almost instant physiological reactions—breathing gets faster and shallower, blood moves from the stomach and brain to the muscles, pupils dilate, awareness becomes laser-sharp, and our ability to perceive pain and have empathy greatly diminishes.
I feel it if someone pulls out in front of me in traffic without warning, or if a friend jumps out of a closet and scares me, or—
JP: Or if someone puts your intolerable situation in your face. The problem is when we have small fight/flight/freeze responses, just enough to put us into a reactive pattern. We don’t always recognize when that pattern gets partially triggered with us, say in a fight with our partner, some “jerk” cuts us off in traffic, or our mother calls and manages to “make us angry” or “shame us” in the way that only she seems to know how to do.
People will say that someone pushed their buttons—well, those buttons usually are tied directly into fight, flight, or freeze responses, and they have nothing to do with physical survival, but a hell of a lot to do with our perceived emotional survival. That’s why they led to an emotional “acting out,” which is fight, flight, or freeze; or denial, leading to passive-aggressive behaviors later, like withholding love or connection with the person who caused the trigger to arise.
KA: So these adaptive and marvelous physical survival strategies—fight and flight, which are great when tigers leap out of the jungle but not so great when my girlfriend raises her voice at me—can create obstacles to emotional awareness when they become “high jacked” by our conditioning. That what you’re saying?
JP: [Nods.]
KA: You maintain that we choose our reactive patterns. I imagine a lot of people argue with you about this.
JP: [Laughing] Yes, until they see if for themselves. There is absolutely a choice point. I didn’t say that it was a conscious choice point, at least in the beginning. The reason is because it’s almost impossible to track fight, flight, or freeze getting triggered within us at first, because the process itself shuts down our thinking brain and our empathy. It’s hard for us to “witness” this happening. This is where concentration meditation training is essential; we need to develop the ability to stay intelligently Awake, present in the face of anything. Usually, we just react without thought, yelling at the driver who cut us off, hanging up on Mom, or by going emotionally “flat” when our kid acts out in public. Only later, if at all, do we see that a reaction occurred; that we were, in fact, moving a ton of emotional energy through our bodies.
KA: This is what the emotional koans address? This is what your spiritual training was unable to touch?
JP: Yes. [Pause] And yes.
KA: So I’m curious: how does traditional Zen handle these sorts of reactions?
JP: It would have you find the stability of mind to simply not react. The sensations arise, and you develop the discipline to not let it move you. Through concentration and meditation, a practitioner can develop enough mindfulness to witness the sensations arise and not react to them. To stay rooted in dhyana, in selfless awareness.
KA: That sounds like it could make a person a little constipated.
JP: [Laughing] Sometimes, it can do exactly that. Zen sometimes has a reputation for being a little rigid, a little autocratic, and a little stiff. Something I call “Zen disease”—you know, denial is not just a river in Egypt.
KA: Meaning?
JP: You can’t meditate yourself out of emotional reactivity. That’s just repression or bypassing.
KA: Kind of like pretending something doesn’t bother you?
JP: Yes. Or that you don’t have physical conditioning that might make you prone to all sorts of so-called problematic feelings. With Zen disease, a person might be mad as hell, but they’re cool as a cucumber on the surface. And that anger might come out in all kinds of passive-aggressive, violent ways.
KA: I’m sensing you could tell me a few stories about this.
JP: [Laughing] How about just one? When I was still in my twenties, and just beginning my serious study of Zen, I was gardening with a female Zen priest who had tremendous insight. And I saw her act with a lot of cruelty toward some hippies trying to get across the grounds. It really stuck with me, because then I couldn’t understand how you could have genuine spiritual insight, and what seemed like genuine cruelty operating at the same time, and in the same situation.
KA: Mondo Zen and emotional koans attempt to resolve this contradiction?
JP: [Nodding] Those hippies triggered her in some way; there was information in the feeling for her. But instead of looking into it, she came from a reactive place and her caring and her fear—clearly arising within her but also clearly unseen by her—manifested as cruelty and judgment.
KA: How would this priest have acted differently if she’d been more in touch with her emotions?
JP: She might have laughed at herself, for one. A couple of dirty hippies in a van wanted to drive across the grounds to get at the hot springs on the other side—in something like 1970. Big surprise.
It was a long drive to go around; they didn’t have the money for the gas, or for the entrance fee to get in. And she just let them stew in that. She was rigid and hard; inflexible, and very emotionally distant, and utterly without a sense of humor. Maybe she perceived a “laziness” in them that she despised, because she couldn’t stand that in herself. Maybe she hated the whole counterculture. I’m not sure, but I know that if she had been in touch with what she was feeling, she would have found a way to keep her heart open. Use humor. If she wanted to teach them a lesson, then to do so in a way that would actually reach them!
KA: What happened?
JP: I offered to pay their entrance fee to defuse the whole situation, and man, that just infuriated her. I was taking away the object of her projection, and offering a win-win scenario. She didn’t want that. The hippies got their hot springs, the zendo got their donation, but she didn’t get to have her emotionally punitive reaction.
KA: Okay. So she had the spiritual insight, but not the emotional maturity. And the paradox struck you. So what did you hope to do around this dilemma?
JP: I wanted to keep the baby—the power and insight that concentration and meditation bring. But throw out some of the cultural bathwater. A well-trained Zen student’s life is an expression of the marriage of wisdom (meditative mind) and compassion (unconditional love). It has to be both, otherwise we’re unbalanced and myopic. Compassion is transforming our emotional conditioning through conscious choice, Enlightening it, and then shining that light on our negative emotional reactivity. We need to recognize, Enlighten, and transform our habitual destructive emotional reactions before we can really be a light for others.
KA: You realized this then, back in the early Seventies?
JP: God, no. I merely saw the problem. I had no idea what a solution might be.
KA: Can you explain the wisdom side of Zen?
JP: Wisdom is the ability to remain present and aware in Clear Deep Mind. Notice I said mind, not heart. That’s the half that traditional Zen has nailed. Zen training, in my experience, is the very best training to enter into pure receptive awareness, the most direct path to that end. You remain Awake and present as rage or lust or intense jealousy arise. The idea is that nasty stuff arises—let’s use jealousy. Such a sticky feeling, all tight and messy in the body. A Zen student will use his or her training to access dhyana, witnessing mind, and allow the jealousy to flow through them, not grabbing hold of it. Once it passes, they’re safe to open their mouth again. Of course, if that jealousy arose, and now they’re pissed off and angry at their partner and not sure how to communicate it, it will now get swept under the rug. Which raises a question: what sort of evolved and Enlightened being is overcome by lowly jealousy, after all? Vicious self-judgment and self-loathing can sweep in after a reaction like this, for even advanced practitioners. That’s what we call Zen disease. Being unwilling to admit that you have feelings that don’t seem very spiritual. The way out is to get the information in that feeling.
JP: Plus fear and grief, yes. So in Mondo Zen, we investigate the deep truth of jealous reactivity, for instance, to get the information in the feeling, choose to change our minds, and enter lovingly into dialogue about it with our beloved.
KA: Walk us through jealousy, will you? Just so we can be clear.
JP: Sure. The first thing is to be honest with yourself. Yes, the dog gets jealous when you pet the cat. That’s cute, right? But it’s not so cute when we feel our own stomach turn and boil. [Laughing.]
I’m a so-called Zen master. I’ve done a ton of emotional work, been on hundreds of retreats, meditated for tens of thousands of hours. A few years ago, I watched my beloved do the most magnificent tango dance with a professor, a PhD geologist she had known. And damn if I didn’t feel jealousy arise in my body. It was thick and heavy. It shocked me, really. Shouldn’t a Zen guy be above such reactions, after all?
KA: What did you do?
JP: I just cracked up.
KA: Seriously?
JP: Absolutely. As you Awaken you will discover that your response to what was insulting is now liberating, your old reaction has died, you now effortlessly reincarnate as a compassionate, free being. Suddenly it’s no longer boo hoo, but ha ha. Sacred laughter is one of our practices that can really help to change our reactive patterns. And when my beloved came over, I told her how much I loved her and how much watching her dance turned me on, and made me jealous. We both laughed about it.
KA: So you didn’t get angry with her, or ask her to not dance again with him or anything like that?
JP: Of course not. There were no boundaries crossed. What is jealousy? Care to take a guess?
KA: Are we back to fear and caring again?
JP: Is it conceivable you could get jealous if you didn’t care and weren’t afraid?
KA: I suppose not.
JP: Self-evidently not. So here we are again. So I care, and I’m a little afraid. How wonderful. I told my beloved I loved her, and how much she meant to me. I was honest about how vulnerable I felt watching her dance, how much I feared losing her to another man. And she just lit up.
KA: What if, in the situation you described, you had told her you were jealous and to never dance with that guy again?
JP: [Laughing] Well, at that point, my fear and caring are moving from jealousy to anger, and from anger to violence. I’m on the brink of either becoming passive-aggressive and threatening to withhold my love and vulnerability unless she does what I want, or getting overtly violent—maybe shouting, becoming emotionally abusive, or God help us going to the guy who danced with her and threatening him.
From an Enlightened perspective, I say that if you experience jealousy, you do not really understand love. You overstand love. Once you wake up, jealousy as possessiveness, control, domination, gene protection, fear of loss, all such reactions become inconceivable. All you feel is the fear and the caring. That’s what made me laugh. I care for my beloved so much, you see. She’s the world to me. Why would I react with violence to that incredible depth of feeling?
KA: What if you sensed she was really drawn to him? Sensed real chemistry?
JP: So what? She was enjoying herself. Remember life is wonderfully erotic, so celebrate! It’s not neurotic, and celibate! Our understanding concerning monogamy is very clear. Her boundaries were utterly clean. I’m not so sure about his, but he wasn’t my concern, any more than I should be concerned about the mailman’s boundaries or the boundaries of her mechanic. It had nothing to do with her and him, but rather with my reaction to the fear that I might lose her to another man. I saw the depth of my caring for her, and how I felt protective of our relationship. But true love takes no prisoners, my dear. If she really wanted to be with him and told me so, I would do more than just get out of the way. I would help her. I’ve done that very thing in the past, and I would do it for her. Love takes no prisoners.
But that night, she didn’t want to go home with him. She was having fun, and enjoying his intensity. The guy was a hell of a dancer. I was able to connect with her over that. It was refreshing to feel the depths of my caring for the relationship! It mattered to me.
KA: Jealousy, then, is a problem when you come from fear, from contraction. If I ask my partner not to dance with someone because I don’t like the way it makes me feel, that’s really about my fear and my need to control the situation so I don’t feel as vulnerable.
JP: You got it. But that doesn’t mean you tolerate an intolerable circumstance.
KA: Meaning?
JP: Let’s say you and the person you’re married to or dating have agreed to monogamy, and more so have agreed to watch flirtatious energy. Then he or she goes way over an agreed-upon boundary—is dancing incredibly provocatively with someone, or nibbling on their ear, or crossing some obvious boundary. It doesn’t mean you get the information in the feeling and do nothing. It does mean that when you speak to your beloved, you’ll express how much you care and how much that kind of behavior brings up fear in you. You may need to redefine your relationship.
You might request that there be a change in behavior, so that a certain level of flirtation is agreed to be over the line. Some couples are comfortable with monogamy with no flirting. Some with lots of flirting. Some couples are polyamorous and have multiple sexual partners. What matters is getting the truth in the feeling and choosing your reaction from the depth of caring, while being honest about the fear and keeping a healthy boundary about what you are willing to tolerate and will not tolerate.
You get to choose. We never roll over and allow ourselves to become doormats. You may have to end a relationship because your beloved cannot honor your needs around monogamy, or polyamory. That will bring up a lot of fear and caring, for both people!
From a Zen perspective, there is nothing that can cause me to look away from any situation. Negative chosen reactivity causes violence expressed as jealousy, anger, shame, or disgust. True meditative awareness is boundless, limitless, imperturbable, and unshakable. The compassion found here knows no boundary, and this heart cannot be broken—only blown further open.
From this place, discriminating wisdom and right action flow as naturally as water down a hillside, you see.
KA: In your experience, how does traditional Zen fall short, then, when it comes to emotional maturity and emotional insight?
JP: They understand that since emotions are impermanent, like thoughts and everything else, it’s a matter of realizing the impermanent nature of your feelings. Drop underneath the feelings, to the pure witnessing mind in which they are arising.
JP: But to embody true compassion, we must change and transform our negative emotional reactions, not just witness them. Otherwise, we’re suppressing or denying and still at the mercy of our strong emotions—we’re still conditioned, you see. Even if we can develop enough discipline to not let our negative emotional reactions control us, we’re still constantly having to manage that process within ourselves when the stimuli arises. We’re not changing the root cause of our emotional reactivity; we’re not getting the information that’s in the feelings and, based on that information, making other, more intelligent choices.
Some kinds of conditioning, like the physical changes to a traumatized brain, can’t be undone. But we can change how we respond to what happens in the brain. Because our mental and emotional conditioning can be undone. We start doing this by turning into the feeling instead of reacting to it.
KA: What does that look like, turning into the feeling?
JP: First we change our mind about our nature. We must realize and accept that no one has ever made us react in a particular way; we have chosen our reactions because of our conditioning.
Then we no longer promiscuously react; we stay with what’s arising. We stay curious about it. If we live in confusion about the true, deeper nature of our so-called negative emotions, we react to them unconsciously, superficially, and usually destructively. Or we dissociate from them—I might not be using that word in the correctly clinical sense, but you get the idea—and we become only half alive, afraid that emotion will rob us of our precious spirituality, or insight, or compassion. And we have it exactly backward.
For instance, I see this sometimes with men who were raised in violent households. They’re terrified of their anger, because they don’t want to be like Dad was. So they’re half a man, cut off from the clarity and intensity that anger offers, before it becomes messy violence.
The noise level of our emotional reactivity from conditioning overrides and overpowers our intelligence. Until we can Enlighten this process, we are trapped inside of our conditioning, captive to it.
KA: There’s a lot of stuff you’ve just introduced. One idea is that no one can make us have an emotional reaction—that while we have that reaction, we can actually have a choice there.
JP: Yes.
KA: This emotional reactivity—why do you hold that is it so destructive, and why must it be addressed through emotional koan work instead of more pure witnessing, the way that traditional Zen holds?
JP: Because reactivity does two things: it blocks our insight into our true, deeper spiritual emotional nature, and it prevents us from experiencing compassion. Both toward ourselves and toward others. That’s why the marriage of wisdom and compassion is so important. Traditional Zen and most traditional spirituality recognize this, but until recently, the solution was to restrict and control problematic emotions and plug directly into turiya, causal emptiness, witnessing. Not to transform those emotions. This was only because there wasn’t the sophisticated understanding that we now have of the human mind.
KA: In your experience, what are the consequences of not getting under emotional reactivity?
JP: Well, spiritual people don’t think they should get angry, or jealous, or be lustful, or feel ashamed. They don’t see that their angst is, in fact, their liberation. In order to transform our habitual reactions, we must first change our understanding of our emotions.
KA: I’d like to get into something a little more complex, like anger. But we’ve covered a lot of ground already today. Any last words before we break?
JP: Sure. Once Awakened nothing can frighten you.
KA: Seriously? Boo!
JP: [Raises his eyebrow and leans in toward me.]
KA: Then who cares about this emotional stuff?
JP: [Laughing] Because our problems are actually caused by philosophical and emotional ignorance. That’s why we have to gain a better understanding of our emotions. To get the truth in them, so that we can fully Awaken.