Unpleasant Emotions

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.