Emotional Reactions

Let's face it. Emotional reactions really make a mess of our lives. There are the three basic ones, virtually hard-wired into us: Attraction, aversion and indifference.

Attraction becomes desire and greed. Aversion becomes anger (as well as hatred) and envy. Indifference becomes instinct (as in stupidity) and pride. They are all intimately related. Shock a highly competitive person (envy) and he or she becomes an animal (instinct). Pride breeds stupidity. Unchecked desire becomes greed. The completely impractical challenge we face as practitioners is to change our relationship with these emotional reactions so that they don't completely run our lives.

The common feature is that they are all organized around a felt sense of "I" and their function is to maintain that sense of "I" against all odds. This is important to remember. To step out of an emotional reaction is to step out of an "I". Not so easy.

One of the aspects of the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism that I find quite wonderful is that it gives us several lines of defense or ways of meeting emotional reactions. Defense may be the wrong metaphor because it implies an enemy. Perhaps it's better to talk about doors, doors to freedom. Traditionally, the three doors to freedom are no characteristics, no aspiration, and emptiness, but I'm going to talk about them from a different perspective: Faith, compassion and impermanence.

The first door is faith and it corresponds to the door of emptiness. You can call it confidence or trust, if you wish, but please don't call it belief. I make a distinction between faith and belief. Faith is the willingness to open to what arises in experience. Belief is the disposition to make what arises in experience conform to certain ideas or positions. The one opens. The other closes. For a bit more on this, visit this post: Belief vs. Faith.

When an emotional reaction arises, then, we open to that experience--completely. The caveat is that opening to it means that one experiences it, in all its intensity, without suppressing or expressing it and knows it for what it is. Again, not so easy. For instance, when someone insults me, a whole bunch of reactive mechanisms are triggered. My body immediately tenses up. Anger, pride, astonishment jump up. My mind is only a microsecond behind coming up with defenses, retorts, dismissals, etc. Quite the fireworks show! All of that stuff, all of it, is, however, nothing more than movement in my field of experience. I don't have to do anything with any of it and when I know and experience it as movement, it takes care of itself. If I'm willing to open to the fireworks show, however intense, it releases itself, and that release is made possible by my willingness to just experience what arises.

But I'm not always able to do that. Sometimes the insult is too personal. It hits something in me that I am not yet willing or able to experience. It may hit a part of me that I was not even aware of. That's where the second door comes in. The second door is taking and sending – compassion - and corresponds to no aspiration, that is, I don't want anything. If my training and practice is solid, it clicks in and as soon as I notice the anger or pride, I breathe in that emotional reaction from everyone in the world. Everyone. Not just the person who insulted me. To focus only on that person runs the risk that compassion will degenerate into a pity that is, itself, based in pride. No, I take in the anger of everyone in the world, the seething rage, the icy hatred, the blind fury, all of it from everyone everywhere so that they are free of it. And then I breathe out joy, well-being, peace and good fortune to everyone. That is what I do. The result, that is, what happens, that this exchange changes my relationship with the anger. It loses its compelling force. The compassion behind taking and sending leads me to experience it for just what it is, a movement in mind. Then a different form of compassion arises, less personal but more powerful, a compassion that knows no separation, that knows the suffering and struggle we all experience when we are in the grip of emotional reactions.

The third door is impermanence and it corresponds to no characteristics--everything is defined in relation to other things and has no essential characteristic. Essentially, when faced with enraging, seductive or sleep-inducing emotional reactions, one remembers "This, too, shall pass." And it does. In letting reactions pass without falling into them, even it means gritting one's teeth a bit, we are not polluting the world with our own emotional reactions and we are reminded that those reactions are our responsibility, not anyone else's. "You made me do that" doesn't operate here.

TMMK