How to Meditate (10 page)

You have to get dirty with your emotions. Meditation allows us to feel them, live them, and taste them completely. It gives us a lot of insight into why we do the things we do and why other people do the things they do. Out of this insight, compassion is born. This insight also begins to open the doorway to buddha nature and the complete, open spaciousness that’s available when we’re not blocking our feelings. Once I was able to allow myself to have a felt sense of my emotions, it was completely liberating.

As Ponlop Rinpoche said, “Until you begin to really relate with the unfavorable or the unpleasant things as part of your meditation—they’re not the whole thing—but until you start working with them, you don’t really have the quality of being on a path of awakening.”

Listen to more about relating with emotions.

16

HOLD THE EXPERIENCE

A
jahn Amaro, a British dharma teacher, said, “That which is threatening to ego is liberating to the heart.” What he was pointing at here is that we practice meditation because it’s a means of unwinding and dissolving the habits that limit us so that we can open our heart. It is very counterintuitive—but when we feel an emotion that feels totally threatening and awful, it is time to hold the experience of it. As I mentioned, Trungpa Rinpoche said that the definition of emotion is energy mixed with thoughts. If you can let the thoughts go, or interrupt the conversation, then you have just the energy. But you have to watch this closely in your meditation practice: a strong emotion distracts your attention away from the breath; it doesn’t distract your attention into the emotion. You would think a strong emotion would distract you from the breath into the emotion, but in fact what a strong emotion does is distract you away from the experience. That’s what happens. A strong emotion arises, and then whatever we do next with our mind, or with our words, or with our actions, distracts us away from the energy.

In the past few chapters, I’ve been trying to point out the importance of experiencing emotions as part of our path to awakening, to living more wholehearted lives. This is something we do when we train in meditation, but it is also something we must do throughout the day, because emotions definitely tend to come up during what we call “postmeditation.” Perhaps you are one of those people who sits down to meditate and everything feels smooth and nothing comes up. This happens for many of us, especially in the beginning of our practice. But as soon as you have a chore rotation at a retreat and you have to work with someone you don’t like or you have a phone call you don’t want to make, then up comes the raging emotion. Watch how your emotions can take you by the collar and control you in those postmeditation situations.

When a strong emotion arises, it distracts our attention. Let’s just say we’re practicing attention: we’re practicing being present, just being relaxed and open, relaxing into the present moment. We’re practicing, training, in being present. We’re training in gentle, open attention to everything that’s happening—mentally, visually, audibly. Complete openness to what is arising. But when strong emotion arises, the usual pattern is that it distracts us. In meditation, strong emotion distracts your attention away from the breath; you get completely caught in it, and you’re off and running because it’s all mixed up with your thoughts.

When this happens, we most likely move to some kind of strategy: we go to war and we move into aggression by creating a story line about “they” or “me” or “if only.” We might look for ways to destroy, blame, get revenge. We begin plotting it all out. Or the strong emotion arises and we go into a strategy of seeking comfort. We run and hide from the emotion. We distract ourselves through TV or food or other addictive, pleasure-seeking behaviors. We might obsess about how we can get away from facing or feeling this particular thing. We might distract ourselves by turning to pleasant memories, or planning something in the future. Another way we might seek comfort is by building ourselves up by thinking about how good we are and how we’re going to set so-and-so straight and how we’re so right—and on and on and on. In all of these cases, these strategies are moving us away from the rawness, the realness, the immediacy of the actual experience.

Control is another way we respond to the arising of a strong emotion. We have our methods, or strategies, of trying to control the situation to get it to work out OK. Before we know it, we’re feeling a lot of other emotions that are actually distractions from the original feeling that arose. For example, there’s the initial discomfort that we’re actually afraid of, and then maybe we get teary, or we get paranoid, or we get jealous or enraged or fearful. Our strategies to move away get really complicated. The strategies for escape can show up in so many ways—even illness can be one. I’ve had a lot of illness. Illness is not necessarily a strategy, but if you’ve been ill a lot, you might begin to use it as a strategy. A strong emotion comes up, and then you somehow collapse into your weakness. Your illness may be valid, but you can use it, too. Notice what you start saying to yourself when you feel an angry emotion. What happens next in terms of the kind of stories you tell yourself? Does your mind become very critical? And are you being gentle with yourself when the emotion comes up? When I work one on one with students, I often hear so much self-judgment when strong emotion arises for them in their practice. I hear things like “I never get it right” or “I can’t do this” or “This is too hard.” Either you blame yourself or you blame something else: “This technique is stupid” or “This is a waste of my time.” We put ourselves through all kinds of negative thinking.

What I often tell students is this: simply abide with the experience without believing in the stories or opinions about it. Go into your body, and start breathing in and out while trying to simultaneously hold the experience. “Hold the experience” doesn’t mean we’re trying to pin it down. Rather, it is a brave act of becoming vulnerable and allowing our humanity. From this courageous act of holding the experience, a very natural warmth emerges, for ourselves and for all other beings.

I promise you that when you allow yourself to truly experience the rawness of your emotions, a whole new way of seeing the world, of experiencing love and compassion, will be revealed to you.

17

BREATHING WITH THE EMOTION

W
hen a strong feeling comes up, it will often be accompanied by a strong habitual pattern. These are the emotions where you automatically start to go into your justification or defense, or your story or search for pleasure, or whatever it is you do. This is where we really get stopped in our tracks on our path of awakening. This is also the very place where we could make enormous progress on the path if we’re willing to allow our thoughts and emotions to become part of our path. When the emotion arises, go to the body and breathe in and out, and at the same time experience the emotion. If you just go to the breath without experiencing the emotion as well, this can be a way of repressing the emotion.

For example, anger comes up, and then you go to breathing as a way to chill out the anger. But you also want to really experience the underlying energy of anger until it no longer has this power over you. Chilling out helps a little bit—breathing in and out—but the anger will still be there to just pop out the next time the causes and conditions arise. It’s there, just as strong, and you’re just as afraid of it as ever—maybe even more afraid. Because every time you repress it, you’re becoming more afraid of it; it’s becoming more of an opponent. And it’s bigger than you.

So experience the emotion. Breathing is a way of staying present; it anchors you. Because if you just go to the felt experience without the breath, my experience and the experience of other meditators has been that you can drown in it. This leads to overwhelm.

You need to breathe
with
the emotion; you don’t breathe it away. If the emotion does dissipate, fine. That’s what just happened—and it does happen. Let it be like that. But the point is to go to our experience rather than to go to our strategies or our conceptual ways of exiting. You’re breathing the emotion in, and so you’re being with it. You
are
it, actually. You could even imagine that you are breathing the emotion into the heart. Imagine you are breathing it into the heart—the large heart—if that helps you. Breathing the emotion in is the basis for empathy, for being able to stand in someone else’s shoes. You’re feeling anger or fear or jealousy or poverty, and then as you breathe in, there could be the recognition that billions and zillions of people feel this right this moment, and they have felt this in the past, and they will feel this in the future. You’re touching into a universal experience. For you it might have a particular story line, but it’s still a universal experience.

This isn’t easy, but it’s important that you allow yourself to experience whatever feeling or resistance arises in you. For example, I’ve found that often when we start working with emotions, a lot of people get really drowsy because they don’t want to do this work. If you find that’s true for you, you can just experience the drowsiness. You’re moving toward a way to include emotional distress as your path of awakening.

Ken McLeod says that in order to truly experience something in the moment, there are two exits that you are choosing
not
to take. One, you are choosing not to act out by speaking, acting, or doing. Two, you are choosing not to repress anything. This is a standard meditation instruction that you can embody in the entirety of your life: do not act out and do not repress. See what happens if you don’t do either of those things.

When you act out, the energy of your emotion goes into the action. In other words, you deflect the energy from the actual uncomfortable experience. I’ve found that when we do this, the energy comes back again and again and again. When you repress what happens, the energy that you’re trying to move away from gets locked in your body, and it manifests as physical pain and illness.

Mingyur Rinpoche said that when you use emotions as a support and a friend rather than deflecting or repressing them, three things can happen. First, you turn your attention on the emotions, and as a result they disappear. Second, they might intensify. That’s what often happens to me. Third, they remain the same. He says, “They disappear just as they are. They intensify just as they are. They stay the same just as they are.” It’s not like you’re supposed to have a certain result. And we don’t have to label these experiences as “good” or “bad.”

One of the things that I and many other meditators have noticed is that, over time, when we stay with our emotions and breathe with them, the emotions can morph. Here is where we really develop the understanding that emotions are just energy; we see that emotions are simply energy that we attach our thoughts and stories to. Anger morphs into sadness, or it morphs into loneliness, or perhaps it even morphs into happiness. All of this can happen. And what I’d say when you begin to notice this is “Welcome to the lineage of meditators.”

18

DROP THE STORY AND FIND THE FEELING

A
s I’ve mentioned, one of the things that makes us get so lost in our emotions is that we attach our stories to them. I discovered quite a while back (and this was very liberating for me) that the escalation of emotions—where you’re really in the river, swept away, losing all your perspective, totally carried away by loneliness and anger and despair—is fueled by the story line. Our emotions are like the stone thrown into the water, without the rings. An emotion, without the story, is immediate, sharp, and raw. The direct experience of the emotion creates no ripples. But with the story line, the ripples get bigger and bigger and go out farther and farther, and actually turn into waves and hurricane-velocity winds. The story line really churns things up.

You know how you might put on music in order to make yourself cry? You play a particular song and you just milk the sadness. Our story lines are like that, except we don’t need music. We have our mind and our thoughts, and they can rev up the emotions. But if we use our emotions as the object of meditation, as our friend and support, it’s like standing on the bank of the river and observing.

At Gampo Abbey, there are flagpoles out on the cliffs above the ocean. We keep experimenting with putting flags out there, because that’s the point of flagpoles. Sometimes the weather is very calm, and we experience these lovely flags in the stillness of slight wind. Other times there are incredibly high winds, and the flags get shredded in a very short time. The image of the flagpole and the flag is a great one for working with thoughts and emotions, because the flagpole is steady and holds, and then the winds are whipping the flags all over the place, tearing them to shreds—that’s usually our predicament. We
are
the flags, and the wind is just whipping us around. We’re just whipped here and there and all over the place. And our emotions are escalating, our thoughts are all over the place. But using thoughts or emotions themselves as the object of meditation is experiencing life from the perspective of the flagpole. At Gampo Abbey, we never have to get new flagpoles. Even with hurricane-velocity winds, the flagpoles stay up on the cliffs.

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