06.21.2024 How to Transform Emotions   About twenty years ago, my therapist quietly said to me, “Beth, what’s happening is that you’re anxious about the possibility of being anxious.” Bingo! I was living in a constant state of hypervigilance, and when you’re skilled at scanning for threats, you become convinced that the worst outcome lurks around every corner. It’s called anticipatory anxiousness, and it explained a lot about how my life had unfolded to that point in time. Why wasn’t I invited to that meeting? Will my daughter’s cough get worse? What if the bank doesn’t approve the mortgage? For much of my life, I ruminated on elaborate worst-case scenarios, backed up by “evidence” and played out in detail in my mind, over and over. I’d perfected the art of thinking, planning, and worrying. Fortunately for me, that very day my therapist offered to lend me a trio of books by Pema Chödrön. Pema taught me how to stay with the waves of emotion, watching their rise and fall instead of fighting them. It changed my life. I learned it was okay and safe to hang out in the gap between my arising emotions and future outcomes. At first, it felt uncomfortable, even frightening. Staying put while I noticed my body’s response to fear was new. But as Pema teaches us, it’s the natural flow of life, and thankfully, as she suggested I would, I began to notice that I was big enough to hold the emotion. Slowly I began to trust reality rather than just hope for success in the future. I learned to soften. It was an early instruction in impermanence, completely changing how I related to my day-to-day life and those around me. This Weekend Reader features three teachings on working with — and even befriending — the flux of emotions we experience throughout life. As Pema reminds us below, what Buddhism calls the three poisons — craving, aggression, and ignorance — are at the core of all uncomfortable emotions. If we learn how to unpack the potency of emotion at the feeling or sense level, we can transform its energy in a helpful direction. The point isn’t to stop the waves of energy—it’s learning how to ride them. Mindfulness teachers often use the expression “name it to tame it.” When we notice the energy of emotion arising in our body before we start telling ourselves some big storyline about it, we can soften into new ways of being in the world, with greater ease and joy. May these teachings assist you, as they have me, on your journey of working with the rise and fall of day-to-day life. —Beth Wallace, Associate Publisher, Lion’s Roar Pema Chödrön’s 3 Ways to Transform Your Emotions   At the root of our suffering are the destructive emotions that Buddhism calls the kleshas, or poisons. Pema Chödrön teaches us a three-step practice to transform their energy from a cause of suffering into a path to awakening. You probably have firsthand experience of being unhappy when these poisons arise in your life. But how exactly do they kill your happiness? According to the Buddha’s teachings, it’s not the emotions themselves that make us suffer. In their raw form — before we start to struggle with them and before our thinking process gets involved—they are just sensations or forms of energy. They are not intrinsically bad or good. This is important to remember. The destructive aspect of aggression, for instance, is not the sensation; it’s our rejection of that sensation and what we then do as a response. The culprit isn’t the basic energy but the spin-off, what the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg calls “the add-ons.” ADVERTISEMENT How 3 Buddhist Teachers Work with Difficult Emotions   Working with difficult emotions is a lifelong practice. Three Buddhist teachers open up about their own struggles. Like everyone else I know, in recent years my emotions have been aroused not only by things that happen to me personally, but also by things that have been happening to my friends, and to the world at large. Just keeping up with my friends’ illnesses and deaths — not to mention the disturbing daily news that seems to auger a terrible human future — can be an overwhelming experience. How to cope with this, without going numb or crazy with fear, worry, and grief, is a major practice for me. A Meditation to Befriend Your Feelings   How you relate to your feelings, says Willa Blythe Baker, may be the most important habit of all. When you meet your feelings with grace and mindfulness, you find they’re your best friends on the spiritual path. If you make a habit of this practice, you will gradually notice a shift. The feeling will begin to feel safe with you, and eventually it will begin to relax and open up. At that point, you can notice what it is like when the feeling liberates itself. Let go of the project of befriending and dwell in openness without effort. It is enough to stay here in the present moment, just as you are. This moment of awareness is luminous. This moment of awareness is spacious. This moment is free as it is. LION’S ROAR PROMOTION