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Along with thoughts and impulses, Buddhist psychology also describes feelings as a natural aspect of heart-mind. Initially we notice that pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant feelings arise with each experience. If we notice them mindfully, without clinging to the pleasant or condemning the unpleasant, we can discover how these basic feelings give rise to a full range of emotions. Some people believe that emotions are dangerous. But the emotions themselves are rarely a problem; it is our lack of awareness of them or the stories that we believe about them that create our suffering. Without awareness, painful feelings can fester into addiction or hatred or degenerate into numbness; eventually we can lose touch not only with what is felt but also with our heart’s essential wisdom. As the twentieth-century Christian mystic Simone Weil noted, "The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."
There are many ways we have been taught to fear our emotions, and many misconceptions that trap us in this fear. The trauma, judgment, fear, and shame we encounter in childhood can be terribly constricting. Sometimes we imagine that spiritual quietude is the best answer -- don’t feel too much, don’t get excited or angry or you’ll rock the boat to enlightenment. Spiritual practice gets mixed up with ideas of passivity and self-effacement, a cessation of passionate aliveness.
Even sincere practitioners can mistake a false outer decorum for the peaceful demeanor of inner freedom. We may secretly believe that if we truly allow ourselves to experience our feelings and desires, our self-indulgence will run rampant, or our aggression and indolence will overwhelm us. In thinking this, we confuse our true nature with the feelings of a deficient and small sense of self. For while emotions are indeed powerful forces, it is not fear and repression that will release us from their grip -- awareness is the answer.
We fear the destructive power of our emotions when we haven’t seen them for what they really are. We confuse allowing ourselves to be aware of them with the necessity to act them out. But to include our full selves in our journey we need to understand how we have been entangled by and identified with our emotions. We need to the see the identity of "the body of fear," to see how the hurt and frustration of childhood, the forces of anger, greed, pride, sexual longing, and need have been conditioned in us. Experiencing the full range of these feelings as they come and go in our consciousness, we can begin to ask of each the question, "Is this who I am?" If we can hold our feelings in a spacious and fearless heart, the lonely, broken, spiteful, confused feelings arise in a new way, transformed by our acceptance.
-- Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, The Laundry
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