Mastering the Waves: Navigating Through Life's Difficult Emotions

Introduction

The above quote, attributed to Viktor E. Frankl, succinctly describes one of the critical skills I had to learn to develop in my life. When I was up for my first management promotion, my boss said I wasn’t ready to be promoted despite having over-achieved consistently in my current role.  She said I was very reactive, which wouldn’t serve me well when working with people. She said she’d promote me when I built the skill to respond instead of react.

Around 15 years ago, I didn’t find many resources to work with my reactivity, except for meditation. Finding Pema Chodron’s teachings and books opened up a new world of integrating meditation practice into my everyday life.

One of the highlights of a Vajrayana Practice is working with difficult and intense emotions and using them as the path to awakening. Pema gives us two ways of working with difficult emotions in this audio track.

In other audios and books, Pema urges us to cut off the storyline that accompanies intense emotions and to stay with the emotion itself. The energy of intense emotion is so powerful that when we learn to stay with it, be curious and examine it, it can help us to be more present and awake in our lives and cultivate inner and outer harmony.

How To Practice

Before we work with really difficult or intense emotions, we have to train to work with emotions of lighter intensity. Right at the beginning, Pema issues a friendly warning, “Do not start with trauma or incapacitating feelings.” Just like how we would start working out with light weights at the gym before loading our body with heavy weights, we practice working with lightweight emotions, which builds strength to work with really difficult emotions. Starting with a difficult emotion can be overwhelming and too much when we begin training.

This practice can be done when we aren’t in the grip of strong emotions. For one, it can be difficult to recall that there is a practice to work with difficult emotions when you are right in the middle of it.

Secondly, trying something new during that time can exacerbate your emotional state. The recommendation is to practice this as a contemplative practice in the beginning. We stir those emotions in us when we recall a particular situation and work with whatever comes up right at that moment. As we train repeatedly in this practice, it becomes easier to recall this during emotional upheaval and to work through it.

Something that I didn’t quite pick up distinctly during the first listen, which I did during my subsequent listening of the audio track, was that Pema guides the listeners to apply it to both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. I was too focused on the difficult part that I didn’t pay much attention to the pleasant emotion part of the practice. (So very typical of how selectively I read or listen to things that fit in with my beliefs or focus!)

Listening to this audiobook was a reminder that no emotion is better or preferable to another. Every emotion is a path to being fully awake in our lives, and discrimination doesn’t help when we are working with accepting ourselves and all our internal states of being.

What’s Next?

In the next edition of this newsletter, which will be available fully to Paid Subscribers, I will cover the practice instructions in detail and explore the components of practice.

Write to Me!

I’d love to know the most difficult emotion you would like to work with. For me, it is fear and shame, the twin flames of my life. ;-)

P.S. Thank you for subscribing and sticking with me. 

As a parting thought, I will finish this edition with a story.

Great Waves

In the early days of the Meiji era, there lived a well-known wrestler called O-nami, Great Waves.

O-nami was immensely strong and knew the art of wrestling. In his private bouts, he defeated even his teacher, but in public, he was so bashful that his own pupils threw him.

O-nami thought he should go to a Zen master for help. Hakuju, a wandering teacher, was stopping in a little temple nearby, so O-nami went to see him and told him of his great trouble.

“Great Waves is your name,” the teacher advised, “so stay in this temple tonight. Imagine that you are those billows. You are no longer a wrestler who is afraid. You are those huge waves sweeping everything before them, swallowing all in their path. Do this, and you will be the greatest wrestler in the land.”

The teacher retired. O-nami sat in meditation, trying to imagine himself as waves. He thought of many different things. Then, gradually, he turned more and more to the feeling of waves. As the night advanced, the waves became larger and larger. They swept away the flowers in their vases. Even the Buddha in the shrine was inundated. Before dawn, the temple was nothing but the ebb and flow of an immense sea.

In the morning, the teacher found O-nami meditating, a faint smile on his face. He patted the wrestler’s shoulder. “Now nothing can disturb you,” he said. “You are those waves. You will sweep everything before you.”

The same day, O-nami entered the wrestling contest and won. After that, no one in Japan was able to defeat him.

Source: Great Waves - Becoming Reason 

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