Work with Emotion

I think we are all familiar with unpleasant emotions. There is no one who has not experienced them, including myself. It might be helpful to discover, to reflect and find out which unpleasant emotion really affects you most or bothers you most. So it might be sometimes helpful, useful, to work with that particular emotion or those emotions that bother you in everyday life.

When unpleasant emotions arise learn to be friendly to them. By hating them, by disliking them, we give them more power. And in hating and disliking them we might also be pushing them away, repressing them, which is also not very good because they can come up in the most unexpected situations. So here again is the importance of awareness, just to know them, just to feel them with awareness.

Another very important tool related to this is that we have to learn not to give these unpleasant emotions minuses. So if they arise please give yourself a big plus, because you are learning to work with them, so you deserve a big plus. If you can give them a plus and then make them the object of meditation, this can be a very powerful tool.

Another tool is learning about them, finding out about them, discovering about them as I have been emphasising. If you hate them and if you want to get rid of them, how can you learn about them? And if you are prepared to learn about them and if you are open to them, then you wait until they arise. What do you think will happen when you really wait for them to arise?

When you fear them and you don’t want them to come then they come. And if you are prepared for them, invite them, are open to them, they don’t come. So I hope you will really experience that.

Experience Joy

Let me say something very briefly about meditation of loving-kindness. Here I would say one important aspect of meditation of loving-kindness is that it helps us to experience joy.

In the Buddhist model of meditation, first we work with what are called the hindrances or the obstacles. We can see them as unpleasant emotions. Then the next stage is working with them using loving-kindness or even using focusing on breathing. Then we can sometimes experience jhanas or the absorptions when these hindrances or unpleasant emotions are absent. So these absorptions or jhanas can be seen as positive emotions. And the next stage of meditation is that when there is joy, to remember not to identify with the joy but see that also as changing, as impermanent, and realise that we don’t really own this positive state of mind. So this in simple terms is one way of understanding the Buddhist model of meditation.