Working with Afflictive Emotions

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Today, we continue a series of talks based on Matthieu Ricard’s book, Happiness:  A Guide to developing Life’s most important skill.    This happiness thing—something we all say we want, but sometimes can’t quite figure out how to get it or keep it. 

First, Matthieu clarifies that the happiness he is talking about is not the passing pleasure that wears off or grows old.  This happiness that we are working on here is a deep sense of well-being, regardless of our external circumstances.  It is a sense of flourishing that is linked to certain mental qualities, states of mind like loving-kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity, qualities that can be learned and mastered by each and every one of us.

So why aren’t we all simply luxuriously happy all the time?  May be some of you are!  Oh happy day!  Please come and teach us!  But for rest of us, we might have moments of a deep sense of well-being, then we lose it.  Then maybe we find it and lose it again.  Let’s look at what’s happening according to our happiness expert.

Mathieu says that it is our muddled approach to happiness and suffering that causes us to not maximize our life experience.  Most of us muddle through life wanting happiness but not being clear about what causes it, and maybe not even sure that we deserve it.   This deep happiness is not reserved for a chosen few, not just for some people with special abilities.  It is something possible for everyone.  It does not take extra-ordinary intelligence or strength.  It merely takes making it our primary purpose.  Then, everything else starts to fall into place.

Do not underestimate the power of your mind to transform your experience of the world!    It helps to recognize that you are capable of great change.  I am encouraging you to consider having a deep sense of happiness, this inner well-being, let that be your primary purpose in life.  Because by doing so, everything else falls in to place.  It doesn’t mean you will never feel sadness again.  It doesn’t mean that your life situation will not continue to have ups and downs.  But it does mean that you will find the deeper joy of living regardless of your external or emotional circumstances. 

So what on earth is getting in the way of our happiness? 

Several years ago, there was a theory in psychology that our stuffing our emotions was standing in the way of our happiness, so we must experience them fully, even act them out to get over them.  Anybody remember the anger management practices of taking baseball bat to an old car, or screaming into a pillow?  These were actual prescribed practices to help people overcome their difficult emotions.  It turns out, oops! That doesn’t work very well.  In fact, acting out our difficult emotions actually strengthens our unskillful response to them.  It may initially enable us to become aware of them, but letting it all hang out on a regular basis turns out to not be very good advice.

AND continually recalling our past unskillfulness or when someone was unskillful towards us, can sometime serve only to reinforce the emotional turmoil.  If I keep thinking myself and telling everyone who will listen about how awful my situation is, that simply reinforces me being hooked into those unskillful emotions of resentment and anger.  Therein lies, our dukkha, or suffering, which is the opposite of sukha, or this deep happiness we are learning to experience.

Our practice for today is finding the balance, the middle way, between wallowing in our thoughts and emotions and denying them.  We are learning to experience the fullness of our emotions, without being dragged around by them. We are practicing this rich experience of life in all its glory without drowning in the ebb and flow of thoughts, emotions, sounds, sensations, forms, feeling.

One of my favorite images for this practice is that we are like the ocean.  At the depth, is this pristine quiet, a stillness, not easily swayed, that is that innate sense of well-being. But on the surface there are various waves and winds that whirl around causing a great deal of churning and turmoil.  Think of the waves as those difficult emotions, in Buddhism, they’re called afflictive emotions, because they afflict us with this unhappiness, if we get caught up in the hurricane of their energy.  The emotions can be both the painful and the pleasurable, and the obstacle is when we get stuck in pushing them away or grabbing on to them for dear life.

 “Into the Demon’s Mouth” in Tricycle Magazine

Dr. Aura Glaser, she wrote a book entitled, Call to Compassion

How do we unskillfully deal with afflictive emotions?

• Avoidance/Distraction:  I’m so angry!  Let’s go have a cocktail
• Denial: Me, Angry? I’m FINE…..
• Wallowing:  Can you believe what they did to me?  Let me tell you again about how horribly I’ve been treated!
• Spiritual bypassing:  I’m Buddhist now, Buddhist aren’t supposed to get angry or jealous or resentful…

More skillful ways of handling afflictive emotions:

• Awareness,  even if we shut down, we can be aware that we shut down
• Acknowledgement –learning to not be afraid of who we are, warts and all
• Willingness  to have curiosity about what they have to teach us
• Letting go, letting be, no longer fueling it with more energy

“We can view all our life situations as inherently workable by using our innate qualities of loving-kindness and compassion,” towards ourselves and others.

“Every time we’re up against a wall, we’re standing at a threshold of new possibilities”

The source of our wisdom lies within the afflictive emotion.

We each have our own favorite top five afflictive emotions that keep coming up.  Pema Chodron describes it like having a radio that can only be tuned to five radio stations—worry, fear, resentment, frustration, whatever your common afflictive emotions might be.  If I asked you to make a list of what makes you unhappy, you could list them right now.  Think of times in this last week or month, when you felt unhappy.  What afflictive emotion or thought was simmering in your brain and your body?

The Buddhist practices are not about removing the afflictive emotions, but rather beginning to have a curiosity about them, taking a more inquisitive look, rather than getting hooked in the old cycle of emotion, thought, unskillful action, or emotion, thought, more emotion, more thought.   So, we can begin to get curious about what is making us unhappy instead of denying, ignoring or wallowing.

Lastly, I want to talk about the importance of Optimism:  it’s important to imagine that you are capable of change.  Even if it hasn’t work the last the last 15 times.  There’s a wonderful documentary called Bob and the Monster, which is about Bob Forrest, who is now a highly respected drug and alcohol counselor.  He himself had to go through rehab over NINE times before he got sober and stayed sober for the last 12 years.  I love the inspiration of someone turning their life around.  Imagine meeting Bob or being Bob somewhere around rehab #5.  Would you give up?  What would you say to Bob or to yourself to make #5 the winning number?  Bob is an example to remind us that this time is the time we can get it right, this time, this moment can be the one when we take our life in a new direction.  This moment, right now, can be that moment.  Every moment is pulsing with that possibility.

In each moment, we might have an afflictive emotion arise.   The practice that Mathieu is teaching is encouraging us to watch more closely, to see more clearly, have more curiosity about what exactly these afflictive emotions are, then building a greater sense of the vast ocean beneath, the pristine stillness, the depth of well-being. 

We can learn to manage our mind.  We can manage our thoughts and perceptions of our selves and the world around us.