Writing this posting reminded me of how I viewed spiritual persons years ago, when I began what was called a contemplative life. I viewed holy beings - or spiritual, enlightened - as many do. Serious-minded, grave-looking. Always quiet. Not engaging in secular entertainment. Never expressing anger. Never jealous. Never possessive. Somewhat immune to negative feelings and thoughts. Always thinking about spiritual things. That is, icons of moral perfection - angels without wings. So heavenly as to appear lifeless. Aloof from what most people experience, think, and feel. So, plastic figurines.
I aspired to be a plastic figurine. I tried hard. I wanted to be a monk in the world. I read Wayne Teasdale's Monk in the World as one guidebook. My time and readings revolved around that aspiration. I donned that solemn look and tried to walk like what I saw monks to be. I learned better with time. I came to see being a sacred being means being more alive, not less, and such a one can dive into the world, and think, feel, and experience what is common among others. I learned the spiritual life is not about moral excellence, but about a more radiant, thorough humanness. It is about love and the unending adventure of truth-discovery.
Yes, there was truth in that early aspiration. It was part of a naive enthusiasm, providing energy and nourishment, sustenance and stick-to-it-iveness. It was a phase, an important one - for me, not necessarily for you.
Teasdale's book was a good guide, for to be a monk in the world meant to embody the ideals of the best of monasticism in the ordinary life I was chosen to live. Still, it took time to shed the monkly fantasy.
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we're not here to live as plastic figurines, but with warm blood that can turn hot - and flows.
saintly images on altars, paintings of holy beings on walls and crafted into stained glass windows - never get angry, sad, afraid... - but - cannot breathe, love, or cry... at peace, deathly so.
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Now, I no longer want to be a monk in the world; I want to be as fully myself - best self, not perfect self - as possible. I am an ordinary guy among ordinary people. That feels good. If people could say, when I pass on, "Brian was a good man," that would be enough.
And, with this being-human, I have emotions like others do, some displeasing, some pleasing, some neutral. Emotions course through our bodies, however much self-control we think we have.
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The morning of the first draft of this writing, I had a disquieting emotion - really, a conglomeration of emotions. I had written to a friend about a meeting I had several years ago, one in which I felt betrayed. The time was early in a work relationship, and it created a fissure that was never healed. I had felt treated like an object, much like in my childhood and youth. That is, what I wanted to do was not acceptable, but the person seemed unconcerned about how the denial could hurt. My efforts to explain how I could offer a meditation group, an idea presented to me by another member of the community, in a non-religious way, were of no effect. Later, another person was allowed to offer a mindfulness workshop, which brought back to mind that earlier encounter.
What appears like a scratch to one person can feel like a laceration to another. And does "It's not a big deal," "You need to move on," or "Just get over it" really convey compassion?
I thought that encounter was all in the past. The emotions felt after writing the words spoke of how it was still in the present. All it took were certain conditions to arise, and the experience would come into awareness with its energetic charge, like certain conditions cause accompanying weather. I walked around the house, downcast and overcast.
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Yes, emotions are like weather patterns - caused, conditioned, always in fluctuation. If you examine feelings closely, you cannot find them anywhere, and you see they are not the same moment to moment. You might say, "I'm angry," but anger is not one, stable feeling. Anger is a motion, as all emotions are e-motions (see above etymology).
Yet, when writing above that I "had" disquiet after writing that morning, that is not correct, for we do not have emotions. If anything, they have us. Likewise, "I" is incorrect, for emotions are not personal. Emotions have no "I." Waves on the ocean are not personal, even if they are bouncing you around against your control. The waves are not your waves. So, it helps to create some distance, when we remember we are not what we feel, and the feeling is not personal.
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Early in my meditation training, the term for negative emotion was "afflictive." These sensations cause us suffering; they bedevil us. And they, if strong enough, seize the body-and-mind and hold it prisoner. I was taught to welcome whatever feelings arose - positive, neutral, negative - and release them. One could do this by returning attention to a word or phrase, or the breath. I learned being captive to a positive emotion is the same as being captive to a negative emotion. We lose, for example, happiness when we cling to it, trying to make it last. I was taught, then, to release positive emotions.
We are like watercourses meant for the drifting through of thoughts and feelings. Yet, some emotions are so linked to a story from the past that they keep returning, again and again. The same story can play out for years or a lifetime, with the same sentiments. While meditating, I began to see how this occurs.
The story running through the mind is an addition to the feeling. The narrative supports the emotion, and vice versa. Like, "I'm so angry! How could he say that to me!" And, "Why did I do that, again? When will I ever learn?" Or, "There I go. I can't stop screwing up." And, "My god! How stupid they are." Or, "I just don't get it. Why would anyone dye their hair orange? It's insane!"
I am sure, many in meditation return again and again to, "Gosh! This meditation is going awful today." And, "I'd really just like to get up from here." And, "Is that bell ever going to sound?" And some likely feel and think, from time to time, "Why in the hell am I even doing this anyway?!" Meditation is like a high-tech laboratory for facing inner demons - all kinds of feelings and thoughts we do not prefer. However, silence is an invitation for them to come out of the basement onto the ground floor. Humor is important!
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Then, emotion is often a complex of different shades-of-feeling. When we feel an emotion and explore it closely, we often see it is a collective. What we thought was a single emotion we could name with one word, like "frustration," we can see, upon closer examination, fear, self-recrimination, guilt, resentment, remorse ... . Hence, we learn not to trust our immediate tagging of what we feel with the first word that pops into mind.
When we look at emotions, we can discover stories associated with them. Due to my upbringing, which involved a lot of criticism, judgment, and internalization of a narrative of guilt, I discovered, years later, when I was not to blame in a heated disagreement with anyone, I would back away and look at what happened. I, then, would assume I was - indeed, must be - in the wrong. I would feel guilt and conclude I was morally responsible to apologize.
Part of the narrative in my family, was if I confronted the parent, in any way of defending against his or her blame, meant likely being threatened with punishment or told, "Don't you talk back to me," or both - which meant, "Accept you're wrong, for I said so." Which meant, "I'm always right, regardless of whether you're right." And, in the religion, "god" - the heavenly authoritarian parent - was like that... you never disagree with the tribal deity. I was conditioned to take the blame when there was a disagreement with anyone. "I'm always to blame," when looked at closely, was seen to be only a story, no more real than the watery-looking mirage on a hot pavement, sizzling with summer heat. Nonetheless, these stories and their emotional accompaniments get locked into our body-and-mind. They lurk there, waiting for the right circumstances to appear: though they had never gone anywhere.
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Meditating allows us space to look closely and work with emotions, rather than repress. The oft-referenced "letting go" in mediation has a dark side. We can let go, let go, and let go, yet never look closely, never work with an emotion. Letting go can be another form of escapism, of spiritual bypass.
So, what to do? If we let go, we need to welcome and acknowledge what we feel. With stronger emotions, a more in-depth look, including counseling, might be needed to work through feelings and narratives. Meditation is not the cure-all for either mental or physical health. And practicing some form of silence - call it contemplative prayer, meditation, mindfulness, shikantaza ... - will lead to greater intimacy with one's feelings and the adjoining narratives.
So, meditation is not a getaway, but rather a getting nearer. We may sense and feel things we had long quelled through attachment to busyness, talk, noise, and any number of habitual distractions.
We cannot, for example, be more intimate with only positive emotions; we will encounter their opposites. And we will see our feelings from gross to subtle, like sensing growth through degrees of love from a personal-tribal, where I love myself and those like me, to a transpersonal-pluralistic, where I spontaneously love everyone, even those who express animus toward me.
To add to the complexity of emotions, opposite emotions can exist together. We may, for example, feel both a strong attraction to and a strong aversion toward someone. This complexity points to the insubstantiality of emotion, as well as its often irrationality.
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Rumi's poem "The Guest House" (see above) teaches us a wise lesson. We can welcome anything we feel. Still, welcoming does not mean inviting to take up residence. I certainly do not want anger, for example, to eat dinner with me every night or sleep in my bed with me. Yet, in a literal sense, how many people eat while angry or go to sleep with anger? Befriending feelings does not mean being permissive. We can befriend painful emotions without becoming friends with them.
When does the letting go happen, then? The letting go happens after the welcoming. And the same feeling may come many times to the door. We again welcome it in and welcome it out.
What happens over time is transformation. By not rejecting the emotion and practicing self-compassion, the energy, with its story, becomes available as a moving-motion of blessing-nourishment to the whole self-system. That liveliness had been tied up in the feeling-narrative, leading to a constriction of the self. Now, it is free, and the self-system - itself a motion - has greater expansion to express True Nature.
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While paying attention to feelings is wise, it can become another clinging - sometimes this is called "navel gazing." This inward gazing is a reason we practice letting go, so as not to get fixated on in-looking. Words on the problem of getting stuck on looking inward and exploring feelings, from David Steindl-Rast, in You Are Here ...
The mainspring of every spiritual practice is mindfulness. Today’s mindfulness practices are typically therapeutic techniques that teach us to acknowledge and accept our feelings, thoughts, desires, and bodily sensations. This runs a risk: it can easily turn into an excessive preoccupation with ourselves that neglects the wide network of relationships in which we find ourselves. Grateful living as a mindfulness practice is safe from this trap because it always implies relationship. Gratitude is “interactive mindfulness.”
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After three decades of meditation and contemplative living, I can affirm this: working with - not against - emotions and their narratives is not easy at first, but it gets easier. I wonder how many never keep meditating, for they feel initially worse rather than better. Yet, over time, we welcome in and out with more ease. We get insight into how this process works - its logic. We sense the fruit of this work as we become more expressive of positive stories and feelings. We become physically lighter, mentally brighter. We have more clarity and energy. People sense a difference around us, a glow about us - even physically. What we express becomes contagious. Our spiritual life, with its benefits, serves as an encouragement for others to engage in the same transformation practice.
