From the perspective of awakened awareness, emotions are not problems to solve, but experiences to welcome, without indulging them or acting them out.
Perhaps nothing in human experience is more mysterious and confounding than the powerful pull of turbulent emotions like rage, grief, terror, jealousy, or lust. They seem to operate according to their own laws and retain only a tenuous connection with the so-called rational mind, which has long struggled to make sense of them. Indeed, they can appear to exist in a nether realm all their own. They cloud our judgment, incite us to act in strange and self-destructive ways, and appear to prevent us from abiding in the peace and clarity of awakened awareness.
Buddha dubbed craving (originally, tanha, “thirst”) the root cause of suffering and taught a path to free ourselves from it. The hermits, renunciates, yogis, and sadhus of every religious tradition have spent lifetimes trying to find peace from powerful emotions by eliminating or transcending them. More recently, Freud and his successors in the field of Western psychology have endeavored to discover what causes them and how we can release the stranglehold they have on us. And pharmaceutical companies have developed medications that promise to mute or suppress them. From the perspective of our natural state of unconditional openness and presence, however, emotions are not problems to solve; they’re just experiences to be welcomed as they are, without indulging them or acting them out.
If you’re like most people, you’ve been conditioned to relate to difficult emotions in a number of ways. Perhaps the most common is to identify with them and become immersed in the story that perpetuates them. For example, if your lover rejects you for another, you may indulge in stories about what a horrible person he is while wallowing in feelings of anger, bitterness, and despair. Or if you lose your job, you may blame your boss and run her down to your friends while being staunchly unwilling to face your own unskillful behavior. You’re awash in painful emotions and lost in the endless drama that plays out in your mind.
Another common response is to avoid the feelings by employing one or more of the so-called defense mechanisms like suppression, repression, projection, sublimation, or projective identification. Generally unconscious and therefore difficult to spot, these complex psychological processes prevent you from facing and embracing the challenging emotions by hiding them or attributing them to others. For example, you don’t need to deal with your own pain and vulnerability because the other people in your life appear like helpless victims to you. Or you succeed in maintaining your well-honed persona as the good guy who never gets ruffled by burying your anger deep inside. The problem with this approach is that the misplaced and misunderstood emotions may cause illness, tension, conflict with others, and a feeling of being cut off from your own vitality and authenticity.
Finally, you may attempt to transcend your feelings (a kind of defense mechanism popular in spiritual circles) by hiding out in detachment and disengagement, pretending you’re too evolved to have “negative” emotions. If you’re involved in an intimate relationship, your partner may keep calling you out on your holier-than-thou attitude, which tends to preclude the possibility of genuine intimacy, until the facade crumbles. Or you may spend your life in a kind of isolated limbo as the so-called negative emotions continue to express themselves in unconscious ways. Known as spiritual bypassing, this approach has proved to be common among spiritual teachers in the West, who may profess infallibility while raging at their underlings, having sex with their students, and embezzling ashram funds.
If you practice mindfulness meditation, you may take a very different approach. Instead of defending against your feelings or acting them out, you may learn to make friends with them by offering them your gentle, nonjudgmental attention. Over time you may develop an inner spaciousness that allows you to be aware of thoughts and feelings without necessarily getting caught up in them. When strong emotions do grip you, you can explore them with compassionate awareness and gain insight into their makeup and the circumstances that may be triggering them.
With careful investigation, you may discover that emotions are composed of thoughts, memories, images, and bodily sensations, and you may be able to gain insight into their ephemeral, insubstantial nature, which eventually frees you from their grasp. In Buddhism and other traditions, mindfulness is often accompanied by meditations for cultivating more positive, life-affirming emotions like loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity as antidotes for more destructive emotions like anger, hatred, jealousy, and fear. Ultimately, with more advanced practice, you may be able to penetrate the insubstantiality of the separate self you take yourself to be—and in whom these difficult emotions apparently occur. (For a more detailed discussion of mindfulness of emotions, see my book Meditation for Dummies.)
In practice, however, mindfulness meditation may tend to perpetuate a detached, aloof, witnessing position that subtly pushes away certain feelings as too intense or threatening and encourages the use of awareness to control your mental and emotional state. Rather than allowing your carefully orchestrated calm to be shattered by difficult emotions like anger or grief, you may use mindfulness to bypass or suppress them and enforce a peace of mind that’s dependent on sustaining your mindfulness through constant effort. As soon as you feel your equanimity crumbling, you rush back to your seat for another dose of meditation.
By contrast, awakened awareness spontaneously welcomes and embraces emotions just as they are, without any deliberate effort to investigate, manage, suppress, or change them in any way. The emphasis shifts from the emotions themselves to the unconditional openness in which the emotions arise and pass away. Resting as this openness, this pure and timeless presence, and knowing it to be your fundamental true nature, you have no argument with any experience and allow it to be just as it is. You don’t preference so-called positive emotions as more desirable than so-called negative or destructive ones, yet paradoxically this unconditional welcoming naturally gives rise to a fullness of heart and nourishing feelings of peace, love, gratitude, and joy.
Indeed, without any effort or deliberate cultivation or intention on your part, these nourishing and replenishing emotions gradually penetrate and dissipate the core patterns and stuck places that may continue to give rise to conflictual emotions and to cloud awakened awareness. The more you rest in and as awakened awareness, the more you undermine the obstacles to living it more fully and continuously—and the more you release their energy to empower a more awakened life.
Meditation: Connecting with unconditional openness and purity
Adapted from the Tibetan tradition, this meditation uses visualization as a doorway to resting in your natural state.
Take a few minutes to sit comfortably, with your eyes closed, as you shift your attention from your thinking mind to the coming and going of your breath. Now imagine, perched on the crown of your head, a radiant being of infinite purity, light, and love. Perhaps it takes the form of Jesus, the Buddha, Mother Mary, Kwan Yin, or a particular angel, bodhisattva, deity, saint, or sage. Or you may just imagine a luminous sphere. Whatever form it takes, don’t focus on the details but on the light and love that it radiates. Imagine this being with all your senses.
Imagine that this light and love radiate out in every direction, extending farther and farther until they reach the farthest corners of the universe. Imagine the whole universe filled with the energy of light and love, peace and joy. Spend a few minutes enjoying this imagery.
Now imagine this energy flowing like a river of white light down through your head and neck, filling your body with love and light. Imagine that this pure, expansive energy dissolves all contraction and fixation and leaves you feeling cleansed and purified.
Now imagine this being of light descending through your spine and coming to rest in your heart, where you merge with it and become it. You are a being of infinite purity, light, and love, radiating these qualities out from the heart in every direction. Continue to rest as this infinite radiance for as long you feel inclined.
Finally, let go of all imagery and just rest in your natural state of intrinsic purity, peace, love, and joy. Notice how this meditation continues to affect you as you get up and go about your day.
If you feel moved to explore your emotions, you can remove any labels, concepts, or stories and invite the direct, unmediated experience of the emotion itself. When you stop resisting it, trying to get rid of it, or even making an effort to be mindful of it, but just let it be as it is in open, unconditional awareness, you may discover that it’s merely a movement of energy, one of the many movements in the dance we call living. Only because you perpetuate it with a story or struggle to tame or antidote it does it pose a problem. Left to its own natural unfolding, it eventually releases in a process some traditions call self-liberation. Over time, you learn to recognize that these emotions don’t belong to you—or more precisely, there’s no permanent and abiding you to whom these emotions belong—and they naturally pass through with nowhere to stick.
Although awakened awareness does not harbor a preference for positive or negative emotions, it does, by its very nature, prefer freedom and openness to fixation and contraction. Even the attachment to positive feelings and mind-states can interfere with the full embrace of experience just as it is, which is the mark of nondual awareness. As soon as you get caught in picking and choosing, you’re once again thrust into the realm of duality, of preferring positive over negative, good over bad, right over wrong, light over dark, and you’re resisting the reality that presents itself now.
The difference between mindfulness and the direct approach is subtle but significant: Mindfulness employs a special state of penetrating attention to gain insight into challenging emotions for the purpose of releasing them and replacing them with their more easeful alternatives. The direct approach naturally and spontaneously welcomes emotions without any agenda or plan—and without any identification with them as belonging to me—and trusts that they will self-liberate in the unconditional space of awakened awareness.
Meditation: Welcoming emotions just as they are
Strong emotions may seem like hindrances or distractions that prevent you from resting in awareness. But if you welcome them as they are without getting caught up in the content, they too can point you back to your inherent wakefulness and peace.
Take a few minutes to sit comfortably and shift your attention from your thinking mind to the coming and going of your breath. Now check in with your body to see if you can find a lingering feeling of anger, sadness, or fear. If you can’t sense anything specific, you can bring to mind a difficult recent event and notice the feelings it evokes.
Choose one of the feelings and let your awareness rest there, not with the story but with the sensations in the body. Let go of any images, memories, or thoughts that may arise and just be with the sensations, without trying to change or get rid of them. Even let go of labels like “anger,” “sadness,” or “fear,” which have strong connotations, and just be with the raw feeling itself. Notice any resistance you might have to facing the feeling and allow that to be there as well.
Now pay attention to the stories that keep arising around the feeling, not in order to indulge them but merely to become intimate with them. Are these stories familiar? Have you told these same stories before? How do you react when you lean into the story and believe it? What happens when you step back and see it as just a story? Is this story true? What kind of a price do you pay for believing it?
Now return to the bare feeling without overlay. Has it shifted or changed in any way? Whether it’s changed or not, let it be as it is as you let go of any effort to be present and just rest as the open expanse of awareness itself. Let the feeling unfold (or not) without any further intervention or effort on your part. Let it be just another piece of driftwood afloat on the limitless ocean of who you are.
From time to time, you may be gripped by powerful emotions and feel like you’ve lost your connection with the ground of awakened awareness as you’re swept along by the torrent. Rather than struggling to stay present and mindful, one approach is to just let yourself be taken, as you would if you were being tossed around by waves in the ocean, without deliberately indulging them or acting them out. Let them run their course without resistance. Then, when the torrent subsides, you can lift your head above water and assess the situation. Perhaps you can reflect on where you got hooked in and identified, the core stories or beliefs that seduced you back into separation and conflict.
For example, your boss gives you some critical feedback during your annual review at work, and you immediately drop into feelings of panic and dread, as you imagine that your job is at risk and your survival at stake. No matter how much you try to reason with yourself, the emotions feel like they’re going to overwhelm you. If you practice mindfulness, you may find it helpful to keep returning to your breath as an anchor as you struggle to gain some perspective on these powerful feelings. Or, as before, you can remove any labels, concepts, or stories and invite the direct, unmediated experience of the emotions themselves, allowing them to run their course with the confidence that this unconditional allowing itself is your homeground of awakened awareness. Then, when the emotions subside, you can inquire into the core beliefs that gave rise to them in the first place, such as “I don’t have what it takes to survive,” or “I’m not safe in the world.” As the beliefs lose their hold in light of a deeper knowing, you can spontaneously return to abide in the nondual field of awakened awareness.
The main point here is that you’re not struggling to change the experience in any way, not even by efforting to be mindful. You’re letting the emotions be as they are and move as they do, knowing that they can’t destroy who you really are. In fact, the more you resist, the more you reinforce the sense of separation on which the emotions are based. Paradoxically, the more you embrace them, the more they loosen their grip. One great meditation master reported that when he resisted the demons that inhabited his cave, they just became fiercer. But when he welcomed them to share the cave with him—finally putting his head into the mouth of the fiercest of all—they disappeared and never returned.
No matter how many times you get carried away, resist the temptation to judge certain experiences as bad and to beat yourself up for having them. Judgment just adds more stress and conflict to the mix and ends up intensifying the emotions rather than softening them. Recognize that emotions come and go like the weather and can’t be controlled—but resting in awareness changes your relationship to them. As much as possible, be the warm and welcoming space in which the emotions play themselves out, but don’t get drawn into the fray—and when you do, notice your reactivity and come back home again.
The Buddhist tradition recognizes two different ways of relating to life: the absolute and relative perspectives. From the absolute perspective, everything is perfect and complete just as it is, yet at the same time empty of abiding substance, like a dream that seems meaningful but is ultimately evanescent and insubstantial. From this perspective, you’re a dream character whose task is to wake up from your slumber and realize your true nature as pure, unconditional awareness, apart from the dream. From the relative perspective, you’re an individual person who interacts with other individuals, gets involved in intimate relationships, has personal preferences and a sense of purpose, makes a living, assumes responsibilities, and faces the consequences of your actions. You answer to a particular name, wake up in this body and not another, put food in this mouth, live in this house, have these friends and family. Both perspectives are true simultaneously; indeed, they’re inseparable, like flip sides of the same coin or like a box and its lid, as one teaching puts it. If you get stuck in the relative and forget the absolute, you only identify with your appearance in form and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without a deeper understanding of the ground of being to sustain you. If you get stuck in the absolute and neglect the relative, you end up feeling detached and aloof from life and other people, and you don’t give rise to the love and compassion that mark the expression of awakened awareness in the realm of form.
From an absolute perspective, emotions don’t belong to anyone; they’re just a movement of energy in the dream and don’t have personal meaning because there’s no abiding person to whom they belong. But at a relative level, some emotions do have meaning because they signify stirrings in the heart that have currency in the realm of friendship, family, and intimate relationship. For example, some people naturally evoke certain feelings in you that can’t be denied and that become the basis for how you act in the world. In fact, a sensitive attunement to the play of feelings, felt senses, and intuitions forms the basis for healthy, awakened relationships and gives direction and purpose to life. The key is to discern the difference between reactive emotions and essential human emotions—what one of my teachers called emotionality and true emotion.
Emotionality is based on conditioning, the stories and beliefs that fuel your identification with a limited, me-centered point of view. Someone challenges your carefully crafted self-image, for example, and you lash out with anger or hurt and create conflict and separation. Reactive emotions tend to be intense, painful, disruptive, targeted at others, and defensive, as if you’re trying to protect an inner fortress or vulnerable place that feels like it’s besieged. Though they may fade with time, they tend to accumulate and won’t release and self-liberate unless you gently inquire into the core beliefs that perpetuate the sense of separation on which they’re based.
By contrast, essential emotions and felt senses are subtler, quieter, not as distinct or hard-edged, and not based on stories and beliefs about how the world and other people should be. Rather than being painful and conflictual, they tend to foster relatedness and intimacy, not only with others, but with yourself as well. When you welcome true emotions and experience them fully, you often feel relieved, energized, tender, touched, and more intimate with your own being.
For example, if a friend dies, you may feel a grief and loss that open you to a greater appreciation of the other person and a profound gratitude for life itself. Or, if you have a misunderstanding with a loved one, your hurt may naturally resolve into compassion and understanding for everyone concerned. Because these emotions and felt senses tend to arise directly from the heart, rather than from areas of conflict and tension, they often reveal an inner knowing that informs and enriches your life in form. (For a thorough exploration of attuning to feelings and felt senses, I recommend the book In Touch by John Prendergast.)
As you allow emotions to play out in awareness without interfering with or manipulating them in any way, you may begin to notice that they keep circling back to the same repetitive patterns of thinking and feeling as the mind habitually fixates on certain issues and concerns. Indeed, the tendency for the mind to fixate in some way is the root cause of suffering, out of which the reactive emotions arise. Once you become familiar with these repetitive patterns, the recurrent stories that keep hooking you back into identification and struggle, you can recognize them more quickly when they get activated and more readily let go of the emotions they generate and invite them to pass through.
Let’s say, for example, that your core story is “Nobody loves me”—and even more fundamentally, “I’m unlovable.” You filter your relationships through the lens of this story and find evidence for it everywhere. Your best friend doesn’t call you for a week, and you assume she doesn’t care about you. Your colleagues at work forget to invite you to lunch, and you conclude they can’t stand to be around you. You walk around with a constant feeling of hurt and rejection that colors your relationships at every level—and that may even make you less lovable to others. But once you see through this pattern and recognize it as the distortion you impose upon reality, rather than what other people are actually doing to you, you can catch it when it arises yet again and nip those familiar feelings of rejection and hurt in the bud, before they proliferate.
In fact, one of the most effective ways to return to awakened awareness is to become intimately familiar with your core stories and meet them with compassion and insight as they arise. You don’t have to make an effort to do this deliberately; once recognized, your natural state of unconditional openness spontaneously moves back toward painful stories and emotions in an (effortless) attempt to liberate and reclaim them by infusing them with awareness. Like water, which flows into every available nook and crevice, the light of awakened awareness seems to have an innate tendency to penetrate the dark and unconscious areas of our lives.
Beyond individual core stories, each person has a habitual pattern of fixating on particular recurring themes that runs like a unifying thread through his or her life. Over the centuries, these fixations have been articulated in different ways in different cultures and traditions. For example, Buddhism categorizes these patterns into three primary types: greed, aversion, and delusion, based on the three traditional “poisons” or causes of suffering. Greed types focus on what they want and can’t get enough of—food, sex, attention, pleasure, relationships, material possessions. As a result, their emotions gravitate toward permutations of desire, like lust, hunger, avarice, hurt, or jealousy. Aversion types, as their name implies, focus on fending off perceived threats or attacks from outside, generally through some version of anger or fear, for example, anxiety, dread, criticism, hypervigilance, hatred, or rage. And delusion types generally live in a haze of confusion, ignorance, and disorganization, with emotions that tend to be more muted, mixed, ambivalent, and unclear.
The Sufi tradition developed an even more sophisticated way of understanding the core ways we fixate our attention and interpret life based on our fixation (which was then further elaborated in the West) known as the Enneagram, a nine-faceted system based on three fundamental types: image, fear, and anger. The three image types are concerned with how they’re perceived and received by others; they relate primarily through the heart and are preoccupied with helping others, appearing competent and successful, or establishing themselves as uniquely creative. The three fear types are concerned with figuring things out through the mind, in order to stay safe in a threatening or uncertain world, create an elaborate and protective inner world, or avoid unpleasant feelings by strategizing to keep life interesting. And the anger types are focused on dealing with their own aggressive impulses by suppressing them, acting them out by dominating others, or channeling them into judgment and one-upmanship. (This synopsis is extremely simplistic and merely intended to give a flavor of the system. For extensive elaborations of each type, I recommend The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Riso and Russ Hudson and From Fixation to Freedom by Eli Jaxon-Bear.)
Meditation: Identifying your fixation
Ever wonder about your own core fixation, the habitual way you organize your attention and filter your experience of life? Here’s a meditation for reflecting on the key themes and strategies that lie at the heart of your fixation. Remember, your fixation is not who you are, it’s what prevents you from fully being who you are.
Take a few minutes to sit comfortably and shift your attention from your thinking mind to the coming and going of your breath. Now bring to mind three or four recent events that triggered painful feelings in you. If you don’t tend to feel things strongly, just bring to mind situations where you experienced conflict or stress. Take some time to examine them more closely in retrospect and reflect on the issues that may have triggered your pain.
Do you notice any recurring emotions or themes that run like threads through each situation? What do you tend to believe about life? Are you primarily concerned with getting people to love and approve of you? Or are you trying to protect yourself from attack or criticism in a world you perceive as unsafe? Do you tend to respond to difficulties by trying to figure things out, by reacting from a gut instinctual level, or by connecting with others? What are your core strategies for dealing with life? What are your primary recurring emotions?
Take note of what you discover, and at the same time notice how this recognition affects you. Do you feel more spacious and less reactive now? Or are you still caught up in the story?
Now notice that your answers to these questions, and the questions themselves, are just thoughts and concepts arising in your awareness. Notice any tendency to attach to them or create stories about them. Let them pass through like any other thought that might arise in your awareness. Let yourself rest as awareness itself. Be the space in which these thoughts, emotions, and stories come and go. Remember that you are not the story—the story arises in you.
As helpful as these and other typologies may be for recognizing your own core fixations and explaining the seemingly inexplicable behavior of others, they’re misleading if they seduce you into believing that your fixation is a description of who you really are and then using this knowledge to solidify your identification with a separate self. From the perspective of awakened awareness, the Enneagram and other typologies are useful only in articulating and clarifying what you’re not, so you can see your fixation for what it is and immediately return to your homeground of unconditional openness and presence. When you get trapped in a core story and can’t readily find your way back to openness, you can remind yourself of your fixation and quickly see the current story as an expression of the deeper pattern. Otherwise, it’s just a mind game that has no deeper significance and can devolve into another distraction or preoccupation. In other words, you can end up being fixated on fixation.
Ultimately, any fixation, even on exalted spiritual beliefs, insights, or states, can become an obstacle to the complete and unconditional openness and freedom of awakened awareness. Your true nature can’t be identified or circumscribed in any way, and the mind’s tendency to categorize and conceptualize only obscures it. Any understanding must dissolve in being understanding, that is, you need to let go of your spiritual ideas and concepts and simply abide as the emptiness and freedom you know yourself to be.
Did you ever see the movie The Little Buddha, in which the meditating soon-to-be enlightened teacher is tempted by an onslaught of powerful images and emotions? He remains tranquil and undisturbed, and enlightenment, like the morning star, finally dawns. Once you discover your natural state of inherent wakefulness and peace, it can feel as if all the conditioning of a lifetime is conspiring to seduce you away. The key to continuing to abide as awakened awareness is to resist the temptation to struggle and resist and instead, like the Buddha, welcome the experiences just as they are. In the process, you can become familiar with the particular patterns of preoccupation and fixation that keep hooking you back in and gradually release their hold over you.
You seem to be suggesting that emotions are inevitably caused by underlying beliefs. But I sometimes have powerful negative feelings that arise for no apparent reason I can detect. Is it possible that some feelings just happen?
Yes, it’s certainly possible, especially with emotions that result from early life (or powerful adult-life) trauma. For example, you may find yourself in the most seemingly innocuous situation and suddenly feel terrified and have no idea why. Most likely, you’re being triggered by an association between the current circumstances and past events that were harmful, dangerous, or abusive. For example, certain sexual situations may trigger fear in someone who was abused as a child, or the backfiring of a car may terrify a war veteran whose buddies were shot on his watch. If you investigate more closely, you’ll often find core beliefs like “I’m not safe” or “The world is out to get me,” that were not readily apparent at first. Whether you can identify core beliefs or not, the main point is to welcome the feelings without trying to resist or change them in any way.
I’m rarely disturbed by difficult emotions, and I believe it’s because of all the meditation I’ve done. But my wife just thinks I’m hiding out in detachment and disengagement, as you describe. How can I tell which of us is right?
Here are a few questions you can honestly ask yourself: Am I emotionally available and responsive when the situation calls for it? Or am I withdrawn and unable to feel? For example, my child describes some happy experiences he had at school. Or my wife tells me about some challenging interactions at work. Do I feel myself empathically moved and connected? Or do I watch from a distance, like the Vulcans in Star Trek? Abiding in awakened awareness doesn’t remove you from the ordinary realm of human feeling; rather, it enables even more intimacy and connectedness without the knee-jerk reactivity that comes from defending a position or point of view.
Are you saying that it’s possible to experience awakened awareness and simultaneously have negative, destructive, or angry thoughts and feelings?
Definitely. All thoughts and feelings are welcome in awakened awareness. Remember that awakened awareness is not an experience, but the awake, aware space in which experiences come and go. It doesn’t prefer one experience over another and doesn’t try to edit or suppress what arises. Indeed, through the eyes of awakened awareness all thoughts and feelings, whether positive or negative, are equally empty and insubstantial, like clouds that shift and change across the sky but have no abiding meaning or essence. The more you rest as awakened awareness and allow thoughts and feelings to pass through without grasping or identifying with them, the more they lose their hold over you.
I can’t really see myself in any of the fixations you describe—or more accurately, I see myself in all of them. Is it possible to share a little of every personality type?
Yes, of course, though one type or fixation generally predominates. Needless to say we’re all motivated by fear, anger, ignorance, and self-image at times, and we all want people to love and approve of us, try to figure things out in order to protect ourselves, and suppress our feelings to avoid conflict at times. But if you look closely, you’ll probably find that one particular strategy tends to recur repeatedly and have pride of place. In the end, though, don’t get fixated on fixations—they’re merely descriptions of what you’re not and have ultimate value only as pointers to what you are.