This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Meeting Emotions ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Good evening, welcome. It’s nice to see you all.
It’s funny how sometimes I find little pieces of dharma in snippets of daily life. Recently, I came across this quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and just these few lines:
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” It’s so compact, and I feel like there’s a lot there. I want to talk a little bit about feelings, about emotions, and how to be with them, and what our meditation or mindfulness practice can do as a support for them.
I’ll start with a bit of a definition. We can consider that emotions are a form of communication from ourself to ourself. There’s this opportunity to learn something about ourselves when we are in tune with our emotions. Like, “Oh, wow, I’m really angry. I guess this is more important to me than I realized,” or “I feel sad.” And this recognition, “Oh yeah, maybe I was more harmed or hurt or feeling grief or loss more than I realized,” or maybe some anger, like, “Wow, okay, so maybe some borders or some boundaries were crossed and I felt disrespected.”
Emotions can be an important part of having a rich and healthy life, and they can be a support for our lives. But we can only learn from our emotions if we can allow them to be there, if we can allow the emotion to exist and be able to have some contact with it. We need to recognize, as best we can, what it is. Maybe the message it’s telling us is obvious, maybe it’s not, but there’s something about not pushing away your emotions or trying to run away from them. I spent a lot of time doing that. As many of you know, I’m trained as a scientist, and when I reflect back, I think maybe part of the reason I went into science was because I thought, “Oh, they don’t have those messy emotions there.” Little did I realize, until I was a scientist, that scientists turn out to be humans too, with plenty of emotions.
We can also consider that emotions are a composite. Part of it is these physical sensations—the way we feel fear or dread as a lump in the throat, or maybe heat in the face with anger, or a knot in the gut with anxiety. All of these emotions have somatic signatures. They’re not the same for everybody, but it turns out if you have an outline of a human body and you ask people to color in the areas where sadness is, where anger is, where loneliness is, where outrage is, whatever it might be, most people are generally coloring in the same areas of the body. It tends to be the face and the front of the torso, for the most part.
Then there are the physical expressions. Our faces are expressing emotions. Some people get trained in noticing the small flickers of the corners of the mouth or the eyebrows or the eyes and can determine emotions from them. So our emotions are being expressed to others, maybe even if we’re not so much aware of them. I’m sure we’ve all had this experience where somebody is saying one thing, but their expressions are saying something different. It feels a little confusing: do I believe the words or what your eyebrows are saying to me?
And then, of course, there are the thoughts, the stories, the whole narrative that we have going along with the emotion. “I can’t believe they said that, and the next time I see them, I’m going to do this, and this is the third time they’ve done it,” or, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m feeling sad again. I’m always sad. I’ve been depressed for a decade, and I’m never going to feel any better.” There’s this way in which the stories can be perpetuating and fueling the emotions as well.
We can work with these different aspects. From one perspective, we can consider that emotions are, of course, very personal. They’re something that we experience, related to our life story, our history, what we’ve experienced, and how we’ve interpreted it. But for me, I found it helpful to also put it in perspective that yes, all of our emotions are our own, but they are also part of the human experience and this common humanity. We all have emotions, and it’s also culturally and temporally specific.
For example, there are so many books, movies, and TV shows about 19th-century United Kingdom. You see people who are very unflappable and very proper, not showing a lot of emotion, very upright. So there’s a certain era and location with a certain type of emotional expression. Jack Kornfield tells this story of teaching a retreat in Switzerland, probably decades ago. At that time, there weren’t so many meditation retreats, so people from all around Europe came. During retreats, there are individual practice discussions where each retreatant has a private conversation with the teacher. At the end of the retreat, Jack reflected, “Wow, it’s quite something. Everybody from this one country had some anger and self-judgment coming up for them. Members from another country were wildly gesticulating, talking about how painful and beautiful and wonderful everything was. And then from a third country, they had all these existential questions of doubt and the meaning of life.” This is just a recognition that there are cultural influences on our emotions, too. For me, that was very helpful to just realize, “Oh yeah, of course I have these emotions. I’m part of a cultural milieu, in addition to having a particular story and particular experiences.”
There are some that would say that the cultural milieu influencing our emotions today is this culture of outrage. This seems to be the one thing that everybody agrees on: to be outraged. And this is pretty unique, that all the social classes, all the professions, everybody’s outraged. In some ways, we could even say the Western economy is built on this. So much of the media outlets, political discourse, and advertising are really promoting this sense of outrage. Part of this is that we assume that outrage is a reliable source for social change. We can feel like, “Oh yeah, I need to be outraged. This is the only way things are going to be different, and dang it, they need to be different.”
I’m not going to comment on that, except maybe I’ll just share this story that has had a big impact on me. There was a time when I worked for a publicly traded company, and we had missed a major milestone that was going to affect the stock price. So, we had to send out a press release saying we had missed this milestone. Just the nature of my job, I knew all the details, and it was fascinating to see what was happening. People were saying, “I can’t believe this company is doing this. They are only doing this because of X, Y, and Z.” And I’m like, “Wow, it has absolutely nothing to do with what the truth was.” But then there was this whole media kerfuffle that was 100% fabricated. It was actually that we had made a stumble; we had taken a chance on some manufacturing process that turned out not to work very well. But they made up all these stories about something else entirely. It was quite something for me to see the media and all the comments on things being not even close. And not only was it not even close, it was filled with outrage. We were all of a sudden a bad, terrible company, but it just turned out that we took a chance and it didn’t work well on something completely unrelated. So now I have this story in my mind. When I’m seeing the media saying things, I think, “Well, I wonder if that’s the full story.” It might be, but it might not. And chances are, it isn’t.
This idea of emotions—whether it’s outrage or sadness or loneliness or grief or joy or happiness, but in particular the difficult emotions—brings to mind a story, also from Jack Kornfield. I just love this story that talks about one way to work with difficulties.
This is about the poison tree. There’s this tree that has fruit that turns out to be poisonous. Some people, when they discover this tree, their immediate reaction is, “Okay, we got to cut this down. Got to get rid of this tree before somebody’s harmed, before I’m harmed. Let’s get this out of here.” Often, this is our initial response to difficulties that arise. “Get this out of here. I don’t want to feel this. I don’t want to even acknowledge that I have this type of emotion in me, this rage or this despair, whatever it might be.” Sometimes we just want to distract ourselves, and we have these little rectangular things in our pockets that are computers we can tap to entertain ourselves all day long. So that’s one way to respond to a poison tree: to cut it down and get rid of it.
But there are other people, and we might say they’ve journeyed a little bit further on the spiritual path. They recognize the power of the heart, and they want to bring some compassion and care to this tree. So they have this idea: “No, no, let’s not cut it down. Let’s just put a fence around it. We’ll let the tree live and have its fruit, but we’ll just put a fence around it to protect people so they don’t get harmed.” They have this kindness. This is a really different relationship to the emotions, from “get rid of it” to “oh no, it can be there, we’re just going to be with it in a way that is not going to cause harm.”
And then there’s a third group of individuals who meet this poison tree. We could say they have gone even further down the spiritual practice. They come across a tree that has poison fruit, and their response is to say, “Oh, a poison tree! Perfect, just what I was looking for.” And they pick the fruit very carefully, extract some of the elements of it, mix it with some other things, and make medicine out of it for themselves and for others.
I love this story. So often, what we think are our wounds or our difficulties—and I certainly have found this in my life—turn out to be a source of strength, a source of connection to other people, a source of some vulnerability which allows some intimacy and closeness with others. So how can we be with what we might consider to be the fruit from the poison tree? In Buddhist practice, how might it be a support for us to meet what we find difficult in life and be able to transform it into medicine for us and for others?
Some of us might have even come to Buddhist practice because of emotions. Maybe we felt terrible grief from a tragedy in our lives, or maybe we just have some depression or sadness, and it’s not entirely clear why, but we thought we would give meditation a chance. A lot of people come to the dharma with suffering. Maybe you just have this general sense of, “I don’t know what to do with my life. It’s not quite going the way I thought it was going to go.” I had a great job, but somehow, even though I had reached an enviable position, I felt like, “Yeah, something’s not quite right with my life.” Many of us bring some emotional discomfort or uncomfortable emotions with us to the practice.
We might have this belief that, “Okay, if I just practice hard enough, then all emotions will just go away.” I know I secretly had that idea. Yeah, turns out it doesn’t work that way. Just like scientists turn out to be humans, meditation and Buddhist practice turn out to be filled with humans, notably ourselves and others.
But we could say that with Buddhist practice, this idea of freedom, peace, well-being, awakening, liberation—whichever words are meaningful for you—awakening to emotions is to actually feel them and not have them be a problem. To feel them, nothing less and nothing more. Just to feel them and have the “problemness” of them drained out. Maybe our range of emotions can even increase. In my years of practice, I’ve experienced happiness and joy that I didn’t know was possible. I’ve also experienced just terrible despair and darkness, too. But there’s a way in which our practice is designed to hold it, to help us be with it, to increase our capacity to be with it so that we don’t have to organize our life and social situations just to avoid any uncomfortable emotions.
It’s amazing how much energy we put into avoiding things. “Well, I feel a little bit uncomfortable in that situation, so I’m not going to go to that gathering,” or “I’m not going to stretch myself into this new thing that I might learn because I might get embarrassed.” There are so many ways in which we limit ourselves just so that we can avoid some emotions. What would your life be like if you weren’t afraid of emotions? “Yeah, okay, I might be disappointed, I might feel frustrated, but I’m going to do it anyway. I might feel sad if this doesn’t turn out the way I want, but I’m going to meet it anyway.” My partner, my co-worker, the person I see at the coffee shop—all of them might be having strong emotions. Sometimes we want to avoid people like that, like after there’s been a death in the family, and we think, “I don’t know what to say,” so we avoid them. What would it be like to be fearless and be able to comfort others if comforting was what was appropriate and needed? That would be freedom. That would be freedom in our lives.
One way we might think about this is that mindfulness—feeling the feelings, being present for our emotions—is a way that we can allow for an evolving, a resolution, a movement, or what I like to call a metabolism of our emotions. It allows them to move, because that’s their nature. Often emotions can feel stuck, but they’re stuck because the thoughts are ruminating around and around and around. But if we can just meet our emotions—and I’ll talk in a moment about how to do that—there’s a way in which they can evolve, transform, shift, and change. That is their nature. It’s not their nature to always be the same.
Often, if we can meet an emotion, we might see that it’s not just one big terrible thing; maybe it’s a collection of emotions. Grief may have some sorrow, a little bit of fear, maybe some disorientation or a sense of powerlessness. When we make room for them, we can meet and care for these individual ones, allowing them to be seen, known, and pass away. Often with anger, there’s sadness or fear underneath. Or maybe we’re not even sure what the emotions are. Maybe we’re like, “Okay, there’s some fluttering going on deep inside, and it feels uncomfortable, and I don’t want to look at it,” and we just try to ignore it. Or maybe we don’t feel like we have a wide emotional vocabulary. That’s okay. Can we just meet whatever it is?
Maybe this way of meeting emotions is a way we can make friends with them. Some people are comfortable with emotions and have a rich emotional life that supports them and connects them with others. Some people are not so aware of their emotional life and prefer it that way, but they find that their life is kind of flat, stale, and dry. And some people just have a lot of resistance and fear about their emotional life and don’t really want to experience them. In my life, there have been different seasons where I felt very emotional, and times when not so much, but I could feel them. I would say certainly now it’s really been transformed. I used to think, “Okay, certain emotions are okay to feel—happiness, well-being, joy. The sad ones, the confusion ones, the anger ones—not okay.” But I don’t have that feeling anymore, and this is absolutely due to meditation practice.
So, is there a way that we can make friends with our emotional life, however it is right now? This practice is not asking us to be somebody we’re not. We start with whatever might be arising for us now. Maybe we have this idea that we want to be friends with our emotional life, which means can we offer emotions—we might consider them as energies—acceptance and compassion? And if it’s difficult to do that, can we meet the resistance to meeting the emotion? And if it’s difficult to do that, and instead we find ourselves intellectualizing and rationalizing and just thinking about things and not really feeling them in the body… we can just start with that. “Oh yeah, okay, there’s more intellectualization.” Maybe that’s some breadcrumbs to something else that’s richer and deeper.
Being with difficult emotions can be like getting into a cool pool of water. Okay, we’ll put our toes in, and maybe that’s enough to begin with. There is no timetable. We don’t have to push ourselves or force ourselves. We put our toes in, then our feet, then our lower legs. And when we feel comfortable, we can go deeper. Maybe there is a time when we feel like we can go all the way in, and maybe sometime we go into this cool water and put our head under. And there’s this way in which we recognize, like being underwater, that this emotion is just part of the energy of life. It’s not a problem. It’s just what’s being experienced right now.
So how do we do this? This whole idea of putting our toes in the water? I’ll talk about some practical things. This can be on the cushion or off the cushion, in your daily life or during meditation.
I’ll start with some easy, obvious things. Posture. The mind, body, and emotional life are all connected. It’s striking how when I was talking about depression, I was kind of slumping my posture, because this is how it feels. We are often kind of collapsed into ourselves. Don’t underestimate the impact it can have to have an upright posture. It communicates a certain amount of respect for ourselves, for whatever emotion is present. There’s something about being upright that brings a little bit more spaciousness and openness, literally in the chest and the torso. Just having a more upright posture can be a tremendous support. So just notice if you’re feeling like, “Whoa, these emotions,” and sometimes we want to get into a fetal position. If possible, can you be in an upright posture? If your body allows you to, try not to use a backrest but to sit up under your own power, supported by yourself. Sometimes on retreat, I’ve done this—sitting in an upright posture with tears coming down my face, but sitting here. And there’s something like, “Okay, sadness is happening, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s just tears, and it’s just sadness. This is what it means to be a human. All of us have loss, all of us have sadness.”
If posture doesn’t work, feel your feet on the ground. Get grounded, feel connected to the earth. This can be a tremendous support. Feel what your hands are touching, something tangible, because the mind is wanting to spin out in stories. We’re trying to just disrupt the momentum and be here now, because the stories are elsewhere.
Hand placement also can be something. Sometimes it can be helpful to put your hand on your chest. “Oh my gosh, this is hard.” But to sit upright and have your hand on your chest is a way to acknowledge the difficulty, but it’s also a gesture of care and respect for yourself, instead of trying to hide. Or maybe you feel it in the belly.
Next is the breath. With mindfulness, we’re just noticing what the breath is doing. But if we feel like there’s a lot of emotion, whether we’re meditating or just out in daily life, the breath can be a tremendous support. One way is just to, in a subtle way, not a big giant exaggerated way, extend the exhale a little bit. Just a normal inhale, but extend the exhale. This works with the parasympathetic nervous system and just helps our physiology, our nervous system, to calm down so that we feel a little less frantic or fearful. It’s a way of just like, “Okay, I can be here. I can be here with this.”
So, is there a way that then we can maybe explore the physical sensations? As I said, emotions can be experienced in the physical body. The mind is going to protest; it will not want to do this. But can you just be with the physical experience? Sadness, for example: pressure around the eyes, this heaviness in the shoulders, maybe this feeling of wanting to collapse. Just be with the physical sensations as best you can. Most likely, what will happen is you’ll be with a physical sensation, and then the mind is going to want to tell you why you really shouldn’t be doing that, you’ve got to think more about this terrible, awful thing. And then you just come back to the physical sensation. And then the mind is going to pull you away. Just come back to the body. The mind’s going to pull you away. Come back to the body. Exactly like we do with meditation, coming back to the breath. It doesn’t matter how many times. We do the same thing in a kind, gentle way, just coming back to the bodily sensations.
If you feel like, “Whoa, I can’t do that, it’s just too much,” then be with your posture as best you can. If this just feels like too much, do something else. Go outside, be with nature, talk to a friend, call somebody. We don’t want to get into overwhelm. But is there a way that we can just start to put our toes in the water?
There’s a way that we can trust the contact with the emotion and maybe trust that the emotion knows how long to be there. Or maybe there’s this way to recognize that emotions are a natural process. We might say they have their own intelligence. Can there be a way in which we can trust that we don’t have to fix it in that moment? We so often want to just fix it. We turn it into a big giant problem, a nail, and then we come along with our hammer trying to hammer it. But can we allow it to be there and to be felt as best we can, and allow it to transform itself? We are not doing the transforming. We are not the one that is making it change. We’re just making the space, creating the conditions in which it will naturally do what emotions do.
I am not promising any particular timeline. I am not promising any miraculous cure. I am promising this is a way forward if we work with this as best we can, without any particular demand that emotions be done at a particular time or that only certain emotions be expressed. Something happens when we meet them in this way. Our confidence grows, and our capacity to be with them grows, and it gets easier and easier. It will be uncomfortable. Can that be okay? This is a way to have greater freedom in life, not only for ourselves but so that we can support and care for others, not to be afraid of their emotions. This is a way in which our practice can be a benefit to the world, maybe in some tiny way, maybe in a giant way.
No one can tell you how to feel your emotions or what to do with them. But is there a way that we can practice to find freedom with them and learn to make the medicine out of our emotional life for ourselves and for others?
Maybe I’ll end with a simple thing here. I said a lot of words, but really, the physical body is a support for emotions. We so much want to think our way through them. If you could think your way through them, you would have done it already. How much rumination do we do about our emotions? It doesn’t work. We have to actually experience them in the body, it turns out.
With that, I think I’ll end and I’ll open it up to see if there are some questions or comments. Thank you.
Diana Clark: Does anybody have some questions or comments? Nobody is emotional about emotions? This is good. Maybe this felt like old hat, “I knew all this.”
Audience Member (Jim): Well Diane, I’ll say something. Thank you for your talk. I was thinking about outrage. Back in the 1980s, I had sat a retreat with James Hillman, and he talked about how many men, instead of having outrage, were having “enrage.” They saw things that they didn’t like in the world, but it was all going inside and it wasn’t being expressed as action in the world. So sometimes when I hear the word outrage, I always think, “Well, am I more of an outrage or an enrage, or is there some skillful way to work with both of those?”
Diana Clark: Thank you. I never heard this expression “enrage,” and I never thought about this. Outrage, enrage—it has the word “rage” in there. Thank you, Jim, that’s fantastic. So in the 80s, they weren’t expressing their outrage, it was causing the “enrage”?
Audience Member (Jim): Yeah, well James Hillman was talking about how people would have this energy about wanting to respond to the world, but they would bring it with them into the therapist’s office, and it would all get processed in the therapist’s office and nothing would happen out in the world. So he was actually advocating for people to do something constructive with that energy.
Diana Clark: Yeah, and emotions can really be a fuel for energy. We might even say it’s a type of energy that can be a fuel for action in the world. Great, thank you, Jim. Anybody else have a comment or question?
Audience Member: Just a couple of days ago, I was talking to someone about this idea of outrage, and he said, “My thought is we need a new bumper sticker.” And it says, “If you weren’t outraged, you might actually be able to do something about it.”
Diana Clark: Very nice. So I don’t know, it was food for thought. Yeah, people are busy being outraged, and they’re outraged if you’re not outraged. Yeah.
Great. Okay, so thank you all. Thank you for your attention, and I’m wishing you a wonderful rest of the evening and safe travels home. Thank you. If you like, you’re welcome to come up here and talk to me. Otherwise, I’ll see you next week.