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
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