Working with positive emotions

Ken: Sunday, March 13th, Against the Stream.

How many of you subscribe to Unfettered Mind’s newsletter? Okay, quite a few. I’ve been working on tomorrow’s newsletter which consisted of me staring at my computer screen for most of yesterday. However, something happened this morning, and this also came up in a conversation I had with a student in Albuquerque. We’re very used to working with negative emotions and painful feelings and difficulties in meditation. Right? Okay, we’re not going to do that today. Do you know how to work with positive ones? Do you know how to use positive emotions? Now, I need to step back a little bit here. In English, the term emotion covers a whole range of experiences: love, anger, grief, sadness, joy, faith, compassion, jealousy, pride, greed, desire, affection, etc.

Okay, all of those and many, many more come under the rubric of emotion. And we sort of try to work it out so that there are good emotions and bad emotions, and it gets into a big mess because you take love, for instance. Well, when love becomes obsessive, then it becomes a bit of a problem. Well, there’s a lot of confusion around emotions. Are they good? Are they bad?

I was listening to a recording many years ago of John Cleese, with his psychiatrist, Robin Skinner, in England. I actually have a copy. I think I have it on CD, so if anybody really wants it … it’s called Families and how to Survive them. It is a set of really lovely talks about what is love. It starts off with “What is love?” and comes back to that, and it’s very basic psychology, but it’s extremely clearly presented. And at one point, John Cleese is saying, “Well, if I understand you, Robin, you’re saying that all emotions are important.”

And Robin said, “Well, yes. Anger: well, it sets a boundary. Anxiety: well, John, have you ever driven with someone who never feels any anxiety? Cruelty?”

And then Robin says, “Well, that’s very interesting, you know. As I increased my capacity to tolerate cruelty in me, I became more effective with my patients.”

I know this very well from teaching. When someone is struggling with something, you want to help them. But sometimes the best way for them is just to let them struggle with it. And you feel cruel when you’re doing that. So that’s how we relate to emotions in Western thought.

Reactive and non-reactive emotions

And in Buddhist thought, the pie is cut very, very differently.And we distinguish between, reactive emotions—at least, what I translate as reactive emotions—and then “something else” which aren’t regarded as emotions in the Buddhist context, but fall into that category in English. And I haven’t got an adequate term for that “something else,” I like to call them the higher emotions or the impersonal emotions even though they’re extremely personal, but they’re things like loving kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity, devotion, faith, etc.

You get into the really nitty gritty of Buddhist categorization, you know, the 75 dharmas of the Sarvastivadins and all that kind of stuff. These would be elements of experience that are conducive to the path or support the path. And the reactive emotions are our old friends, anything that comes out of the basic fundamental emotions, the patterns of attraction, aversion and indifference. So we have pride, jealousy, greed, and stupidity. Stupidity is regarded as an emotion. The term that I’m translating as reactive emotions, in Tibetan it means what clouds and confuses you. Or what confuses you and makes you crazy. That’s what a reactive emotion is, what confuses you and makes you crazy. That’s a pretty good definition, actually. So love can make you crazy. Anger can make you crazy, but it’s actually pretty difficult to be driven crazy by loving kindness and equanimity and compassion and joy. So this is, to me anyway, a more sensible way of thinking about it.

Loving-kindness as a support

Ken: Now one of the things that I’ve seen is that when people practice meditation, they want to be free of emotion. And what we mean, really mean is free of reactive emotion. And these other emotions, they actually are extremely useful to us in practice and in life. So that’s what I want to explore with you a little bit this morning.

So just take a moment and we’re going to work through a number of these. I’m going to start with loving-kindness. Now, this is not a loving-kindness meditation. I want to be very clear about that. And many of you may be more familiar with the term metta, but that’s the Pali for this term, loving-kindness. Now, one of the ways you can think about loving-kindness is it’s a kind of radiant warmth to the world. And traditionally, you begin by developing that radiant warmth with respect to yourself. But, as I say, this is not a loving-kindness meditation. What I want you to do here is to take something in your life that elicits that warmth in you that just you feel warm and open to the world.

You love the world. And I’m not concerned with the object; that may be a person, it may be a memory, it may be a place, it may be a quotation, it may be a teaching you’ve heard. It doesn’t really matter what it is. But I want you to just sit for a few moments and just feel that radiant warmth, that openness. I don’t know how to put it. I’m not being very articulate this morning. Something in your body relaxes and you’re just open to the world. I want you to just sit and feel that for just a few minutes. Often you’ll get this when somebody else has extended love and kindness to you, then you feel a kind of echo of it in yourself. So that may be another way to get to it for you.

[Pause]

Okay, everybody with me with that? Now just keeping that feeling. Rest with the breath or rest in your experience of breathing. Rest in the experience of breathing with that feeling of radiant warmth. You’re not meditating on radiant warmth. You’re resting in the experience of breathing, but it’s being supported or imbued by that feeling of radiant warmth. So just try that for a few moments.

[Pause]

Okay. What’s that like? Anybody warm?

Student: Warm.

Ken: Warm. Anything else?

Student: Expansive?

Ken: Keep going.

Student: Warm and expansive.

Ken: Okay Anybody else? Yes, what’s that?

Student: I don’t have a word for it, but it goes like that …

Ken: Okay. can I quiz you? Was your attention more stable?

Student: Was my attention more stable than …?

Ken: Than when you meditate regularly.

Student: It was calmer.

Ken: Okay. how did your body feel?

Student: Relaxed.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Thank you. Over here.

Student: Thanks. I actually had quite a different experience that seemed to dissipate quickly. As soon as I concentrated on the breath I was immediately … it was fleeting …

Ken: Yes. But what was your experience of resting with the breath coming into it this way?

Student: It was fast. It seemed to be, I don’t know if it was because I just finished meditating for 30 minutes, but I was immediately …

Ken: Your breath was just there and you were settled?

Student: Yes.

Ken: Okay. One more person. Over here.

Student: That’s one thing that always surprised me. I have noticed in my life that I sometimes can make the decision how I feel about things. And it had already been a pretty strong impact in my life. I remember when I got together with my last girlfriend at one point, I decided to love her consciously. It’s weird, but it’s true. And that worked very well. We stayed together for three years and I still love her, unfortunately. But it’s scary sometimes how a little bit of work can change your attitude towards a certain thing 100 percent.

Ken: Very good point. Thank you. Okay.

So we’ve got three different experiences here. Warm and expansive, breath right there. And “Gee I can decide how I feel.” Now all three are very important. This particular genre of emotions provides a very powerful support for meditation practice. One feels calmer, more present, and you just let go of a bunch of negativity. This is why, in the tradition of my own training, at the beginning of every meditation period you’re actually encouraged to cultivate a relationship with these emotions or to feel them to some extent for precisely this reason. And people think the objective here is to exercise or be, you know, have loving-kindness in your life.

Method and result

Ken: What’s helpful here is to distinguish between a method and a result. For the most part meditations on compassion and loving kindness and so forth in Buddhism are actually methods. They’re methods designed or intended for you to develop the internal conditions so that attention is really strong and stable and progressively higher levels of attention, getting up to the level of insight and wisdom and so forth. When that is the case, then these emotions are naturally present. That’s the result. But there’s a little difference between the way that you use emotion, say loving-kindness, to support attention and the loving-kindness that comes out of stable attention or insight.

And the difference is that the first, the former one, is an emotion and is subject to corruption and decay—or in Theravada tradition, the near enemies and the far enemies, and so forth. In the latter case, it’s actually a natural expression of awareness, it is just there. So let’s try the same thing with compassion.

Compassion without trying to fix

Ken: Now, whereas loving-kindness is a kind of radiant warmth, compassion is more the willingness to be there, whatever’s going on, and not have to do anything about it. Not trying to control it, so to speak. And that’s the essence of compassion—the willingness to experience what’s there without trying to control it. And out of that comes the possibility of maybe actually being able to do something that’s helpful. So there’s many ways that we can cultivate a feeling of compassion. And we’ve recently had this devastating earthquake in Japan, which is, you know, significantly more powerful than anything we’ve experienced here and the consequence has been very far reaching. There’s another devastating earthquake in New Zealand and earlier in Haiti. Aeems to be going around the world, but there are lots of other things going on in this country and elsewhere where people’s lives are devastated, where people are struggling to make ends meet, to get health care, medication or what have you, to even put food on the table.

When we think of these things, two things happen. One is there’s a little bit of a cringe in us because we don’t want to deal with it and that’s the contraction. But if we don’t go in that direction, then there’s just this sympathy and wanting others not to suffer. And the reason we don’t want others to suffer is very simple. We know what suffering is like ourselves. So I just want you to sit for a few moments and however works for you, just cultivate the feeling of, “I don’t want others to suffer. I don’t want others to suffer. I want them to be free of suffering, free of struggle, free of pain.” And let that feeling be in your heart, just for a few moments.

[Pause]

And it may feel a little bit like a weight or a pain in your heart. That’s fine. Okay, now let’s do the same thing. I want you to have that feeling in your body, have that feeling with you and now just rest on the breath.

[Pause]

Okay. What’s that like for you? I got three different people. Start with you. Right here.

Student: When I first sat with it, I felt a radiation in my chest, and I felt the sadness. But then with the second step of going with the breath. I felt a certain calmness. And an openness to sitting with it.

Ken: Okay. Good. Anybody else? Over here.

Student: I sort of felt as distracted as ever. But when I came back to the feeling that I had cultivated when we were cultivating the compassionate feeling, I found it focusing.

Ken: Focusing?

Student: Yes.

Ken: Okay, one more person. Yeah. Right here.

Student: So I first touched, that sense of some grief and sadness about the suffering of others. And I’ve had a lot in my family. And then resting in the breath, it seemed to, like, permeate it with a little spaciousness. So it became a little lighter and I could be with it more easily.

Ken: Okay. So Marie?

Marie: I just got in touch with those times when I’ve experienced overwhelming compassion that was coming towards me, and I was able to reconnect with that.

Accepting pain before acting

Student: I have a question.It would seem that those two things are in contrast with each other. The being with something and not wanting it to change and allowing it to just be what it is, and then wishing that someone wasn’t feeling pain for me are two completely different things.

Ken: Yes and no. But it’s good that you ask this. When we come into a situation where somebody is in pain the first thing we want to do is to help them. And often that is because we are not comfortable with the pain. So the first step towards compassion is being able to accept what is happening so that we don’t have to fix it to make ourselves comfortable. When we’re able to do that, then we may be able to do what is actually helpful. This make sense to you? What does this touch?

Student: I think it touches for me aversion to pain. I’m not able to do both at the same time. I can either really focus on not trying to be aversive, or I can focus on, “I really wish you didn’t feel pain right now,” which to me feels like discomfort.

Ken: Okay, so now you know your practice. Do them both together. Very good. Okay. So for you was the flavor of resting with the breath and loving-kindness, and the flavor of the breath resting with compassion—was it a little different? Yeah. Okay. Let’s hear what the difference was. Just a second.

Student: The first was warm and expansive. The second was contractive and cooler.

Ken: Contractive?

Student: Contractive. Yeah.

Ken: Okay.

Student: What Carol said about once going into the breath, however, of the spaciousness coming into the contractiveness, that was very much there.

Ken: Okay, Yes.

Student: In the loving-kindness breath, I was very much aware of my own body and the feelings that were going on for me and the feelings of loving kindness. And then in the compassion breath, I was much more aware of the world around me, much less aware of what was happening with me, kind of in a state of almost feeling really present. Because in being aware of other people and being in a place of empathetic compassion it’s almost like it was laying a groundwork to be ready for action. So I felt more alert and more aware of the world.

Ken: Okay. One more. Peri.

Peri: Loving kindness. Warm. Radiant. Both had a sense of stability I appreciated. But the compassion was far more prickly. Okay. Raw.

Ken: Raw?

Student: Skinless almost …

Ken: Yes. Okay. That’s compassion.

Joy in being alive

Ken: Now we’re going to go to joy. Now. Most of the time joy is discussed in terms of taking joy in the success or the happiness of others. I want to approach it a little differently. You’ve just done something. It’s been hard. And you’ve been successful at it. What do you feel? Joy. Okay. You’ve just done something. It’s been hard and you’ve been successful. And there’s a certain feeling there. So just sit with that feeling Just for a few moments. How do you experience it in your body?

[Pause]

Okay, now we’ll do the same thing that we did before. Letting yourself feel that feeling, but not particularly focusing on it. Rest in the experience of breathing.

[Pause]

Okay. What’s this experience like for you? Yes.

Student: I actually felt the minute I started to breathe, the joy sort of dissipated and I felt a grounding.

Ken: Did you say you feel sad?

Student: No, the joy just dissipated into something that was, for lack of a better word, a much more everyday feeling. And I felt grounded where the joy had felt like it was rising up suddenly.

Ken: And the difference? You felt grounded. Okay. Anybody else? Yes.

Student: For me, it almost created a sense of restlessness because you’re talking about an activity in which you succeeded at.

Ken: It’s done, and now you’re feeling that …

Student: Right. But then that creates that desire to do it again and get the same result, right?

Ken: I see.

Student: So then there’s that whole expectation attached to that activity. Once you’ve succeeded at it, then you almost expect to to get that same result every time. And then there’s the realization of how silly that whole thing is. And then you just kind of let it go.

Ken: You’re all over the place. Understand? What I’m really trying to do here is, just come into the meditation with this feeling. So I’m sorry you got caught up in it. That’s okay. anybody else? Yes.

Student: For me, joy is from a child part. So after I pictured a couple of things that were really hard, even just the last couple of days when I was successful I wanted to dance and, you know, be gay. So breathing was not calm for me. It was, you know, combined with …

Ken: Let’s do this again because this is important. So you have that feeling of being alive, right? The other day I was walking on the beach and the tide was out but there was a young woman, she had an iPod on and she was just dancing in the surf and just being alive. Okay, so just take a few moments. And with that feeling of joy in life, rest in the breath. Just do that. Get away from this accomplishment thing. You just take joy in life, in the activities, in life and whatever life is bringing to you. Just take joy in it and rest in the breath.

[Pause]

Okay. What’s this like? Restless?

Student: The deep breaths. Big breaths.

Ken: Yes. Okay.

Student: Those are the words that come.

Ken: Deep breath. Big breath. Okay, good. Anybody else?

Student: Well, moving from what felt like was this kind of upward moving energy. And as I breathe, it really came way down here to almost a sense of satisfaction or, “Ahhh, yeah.”

Ken: One more.

Joy and connection

Student: I had to bring up images again of joy to get that feeling. And I noticed that I only felt good when I was connected with something or somebody, and when it was all just me then it disappeared right away. I mean, for example, before when I was thinking about accomplishing something, it’s worthless. I mean, if you don’t share it or if you don’t do it for somebody else, I don’t know. It’s just …

Ken: Are you an artist?

Student: Well, I like creating things for other people.

Ken: That’s the the artist’s dilemma. I understand. You work on all of this stuff, and it’s not complete until somebody else sees it. And as soon as they do, it’s no longer yours.

Student: Yeah. You know, if I feel just joy for myself, I feel like an empty, not empty … I feel like a isolated person. I feel isolated, but at the moment I share or I look in somebody’s eyes or create joy for somebody else, then I really feel good.

Ken: So one of the things that joy brings you is into a sense of connection with the world. Yeah. Okay. Anybody else?

Student: The first time I was trying to feel joy, I tried to attach it to a sense of accomplishment. And it was fleeting and it was hard to maintain that. And I kind of I realized I was going for pride. And the second time around, I just, I just tried to envision this person dancing in the surf, and I realized I was smiling when I did it. And this smile made it very much easier to maintain.

Ken: Right, a different flavor from loving kindness and compassion. What’s the difference?

Student: Just much more invigorating and energizing.

Ken: But you all felt there was a difference. Okay.

Equanimity: whatever happens is okay

Ken: You’re going to hate your meditation assignment at the end of this little exercise. Equanimity. Equanimity is a little harder. That’s why I left it to the end. I’m reading this really not very good book about emotions somebody sent me, but there is something interesting I came across. There’s a woman who is working with a tribe of Eskimo called the Utku in northern Canada. And some hunters have flown in and they asked if they could borrow one of their canoes because they wanted to go fishing across the strait or something like that. And the Utku said yes.

So the guys bought it back with a hole in it and asked if they could borrow the other canoe. And this woman was just absolutely infuriated and says, “You bring this back damaged, you want to borrow the other one. This is our livelihood, etc. You can’t take care of it.” And she just let loose.

And the guy said, “Well, let’s see what they say.”

And the head of the family said, “Well. take it.”

And she realized that in this culture the people that she’d been working with sort of looked at her with amusement. What was that all about? In this culture where existence was so close to the bone you never ever got angry. You were culturally attuned to whatever came up. You just accepted it and went with it because your survival depended on never getting angry. I thought that that’s the most interesting thing I’ve found in the book so far.

Recall a time or a situation in your life where—and this may be unimaginable for some of you but we’ll do fantasyland here—where you felt you could just accept anything. It didn’t matter. I mean, things are okay in your life. And whatever happened you’re going to be okay with it. What is it like to feel that? Just take that for a few moments. And I want to make sure that it’s not a detachment. It’s not like aloofness. Like whatever happens, you’re okay with it. Good? Fine. Bad? Okay.

[Pause]

Now it’s a little more difficult because it’s not a vibrant, tangible feeling the way the others are. But with that sense of equanimity, I now just want you to rest in the breath. And, you know, whatever happens, that’s fine. And you just bring that sense to resting in the breath. Whatever happens, I get distracted, I rest calmly. I go crazy? It’s fine.

[Pause]

Okay. What’s that like and how does it compare to the others? Yes.

Student: With the previous three, I felt a temptation to recall the past whereas this time I was able to just allow myself to to feel that in the present.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else? Yes.

Student: One thing I noticed in all four emotions was the level of detachment and stability. In the first one, loving-kindness, I felt detached but very stable. And as I went into the compassion I felt very unstable. And so, so in all four of these they differed mainly in those two things.

Ken: Anybody else?

Student: This one, I had more sense of my body and it felt relaxed and supple and I knew it was just a fleeting moment that I could keep the equanimity. But in that moment, I felt very relaxed.

Ken: I want to emphasize these are entries into it. You don’t have to hold on to the emotion. It’s ways of coming into it. Okay. One more.

Student: I just felt this negotiation going on, like oh, I’ll accept everything, but I need to feel safe here.

Ken: Oh, I see.

Student: I need to feel like a little bit protected and then I’ll accept everything.

Ken: Okay, so a little work to do on equanimity, right?

Student: A little.

Faith and devotion

Ken: Okay. I think we just have time for this. I want to do one more and that is the emotion of devotion or faith. Now I want to distinguish very definitely between faith and belief. Faith for me is the willingness to open to whatever arises in our experience. A belief is trying to interpret what arises in our experience to conform to what’s inside us already. It has to fit our beliefs. So whatever gives rise to faith, and devotion we can regard as a particular expression of faith, usually oriented towards a person or a book or a tradition or a teaching or something like that. Devotion is a little closer to loving-kindness than faith. But either of these, I just want you to cultivate for a few moments if there’s someone who you admire or respect. It could be a person in your life. It could be a teacher. It could be a historical figure. It could even be a mythical figure. That would be a way to develop a sense of devotion, or the something that gives you a deep faith in your life and confidence or something that you have a lot of faith in, in that when you think of it you can just open to whatever. You can just meet whatever arises in your experience. So just cultivate that feeling of faith and devotion. And often it’ll feel like something very, very deep in the heart. But it has a different flavor from the other emotions we’ve been working with. Often connected with devotion and faith there’s a sense of yearning, yearning for a deeper connection with life or a deeper understanding or something along those lines. So just take a few moments and feel faith or devotion as it works for you.

[Pause]

And now come into resting in the breath with that feeling, that you’re just going to open to whatever arises and also that sense of yearning if you’ve been working with devotion. And just rest in the breath with that.

[Pause]

What’s that like for you? Is it different? How is it different?

Student: It felt like a deep, filling up weight just all the way down and through. And very calming somehow.

Ken: Okay. Anybody else. Yes. All of these people who have no experiences that they can’t put into words.

Student: I really, I really like this one. It’s an old friend of mine, devotion. and I just felt so serene, just sweetly serene. And it just felt like a smoothness in the energy in my body, especially across the front.

Ken: Anybody else? Yes.

Student: I went to images of my own death, and so it had a feeling of a roller coaster of opening to not feeling in control, but feeling I can ride it. So whatever will happen, I can go with it.

Ken: And when you rested with the breath, how was that?

Student: And then it felt expansive. I felt an open sky.

Bringing the heart into practice

Ken: Okay. Thank you. So this has been kind of like a very rapid tour of these five emotions. The first four are the brahmaviharas or the four immeasurables. The fifth one is used very, very extensively in the Tibetan tradition. And they are a way, actually, of deepening your practice because when you bring this kind of emotional element into your practice, attention is more stable. It’s deeper, you’re calmer, it’s more open. Exactly the kinds of things we’re trying to cultivate in our meditation anyway. And it comes because, when we bring these emotions into it, we’re bringing the heart into it very, very explicitly. And that’s really, really important in our practice. We use the term “mind” in English to translate a couple of words in Sanskrit or Tibetan or Pali, but it unfortunately biases our practice in the intellectual direction. And it’s really, really important to bring in this emotional element and I hope you’ve got some way of doing that. Your meditation assignment, of course, is to do all five together. So, one last word before we close. Yes, just work at it. I mean, work with each one and get each one so that you have a real sense of it. And then start meditating with that sense of emotional fullness.

One last thing. How many of you have seen the movie Of Gods and Men? Okay. Go and see it if you want to see what a life of faith looks like in the midst of war; it is an astonishing articulation of that. It’s a very slow-paced movie based on an actual historical something that happened in the mid-90s in Algieria. It’s about a group of Cistercian monks in a Muslim community. I think it’s an excellent movie. And it really points out what does what does faith look like in the actual world? Would you agree? I strongly recommend it. You’ll come away with a lot of questions.

Ken: Okay, let’s just sit for a few moments to close.

Goodness comes from this work we have done.
Let me not hold it just in me.
Let it spread to all that is known.
And awaken good throughout the world.