Making Friends with your Emotion

By teaching us to relate to emotions in a non conceptual way, meditation provides direct access to our raw aliveness. It is not oriented toward the content of feelings, or their meaning, but instead involves opening to feeling directly. When surges of emotional turbulence arise, we practice being still and opening to their energy.


Thus we are allowed to discover a freer, more open awareness, even when we are caught up in emotional reactions. At the same time, it becomes possible to transmute this raw power of our emotions to further the path of realization. we may be able to wonder in the midst of an eruption of anger, "Am I really this angry? Are these people really as wrong as I'm making them?" At this point, we can still be deeply in touch with the power of the emotion, but be free enough from it to choose a more helpful way to use this power, besides just dumping our anger on someone.


The first step in developing this freedom from getting pushed around by our emotions, is to feel and let them be, without judging them as good or bad. when we open to the actual texture and quality of a feeling, instead of trying to control or judge it, the ego -the activity of trying to hold ourselves together- starts to dissolve into the larger aliveness present in the feeling. and consequently, new choices not under the control of what the ego wants, can spontaneously arise and be acted upon.


I think this is partly what Suzuki Roshi meant when he spoke of he weeds of the mind being used to feed the awakening of awareness: "We pull the weeds and bury them near the plant to give it nourishment -you should be grateful for the weeds, because eventually they will enrich your practice. If you have some experience of how the weeds in your mind change into mental nourishment, your practice will make remarkable progress."


This process needs to be practiced over and over again with what for us at any particular moment are workable emotions. A delivering mother, with no epidural to relieve the pain, and in the throes of agony, won't be able to use what's being said here, without first practicing this process exhaustively with less threatening emotions.


After many years of practice, perhaps almost all of our emotions can be perceived in the open space of being at the core of all experience, before the ego can take control. This spaciousness cuts our emotional turmoil down to size, so that it appears as a small drama in the middle of a vast sea of awareness. When we no longer fear our emotions, this promotes greater fearlessness toward life as a whole, know in Buddhism as the "lion's roar".

Roger Shikan Hawkins Sensei

Roger Shikan Hawkins Sensei is teaching in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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