Tricycle | Awake in the World

I remember once, not so many years ago, sitting in my therapist's office, telling him of an argument that I had had with someone close to mc. I can no longer bring back the details, but I had done something to get my friend upset with me, and she had bccome quite angryunjustifiably and disproportionately in my view. I remember fecling upset and frustratcd as I recounted the events.

"All I can do is lovc her more strongly at those times," I insisted somewhat plaintively, drawing on my years of meditation practice and the sincerity of my deeper feelings.

"That will never work," he snapped, and it was like being hit with a Zen master's stick. He looked at me somewhat quizzically, as if amazed at my foolishness. "What's wrong with being angry?" he said.

This interaction has stayed with me for years because, in some way, it crystallizes the difficulties that we face in trying to integrate Buddhist and Western psychological approaches. Buddhism gives us a mixed message about the emotions, on the one hand supporting the notion that we must strive to eliminate them, and on the other hand teaching acceptance of whatever arises. Is there something wrong with being angry? Can we get rid of it? What does it mean to work it through? I have to address questions like this over and over again in my work as a therapist, where it has become clear to me that working through an emotion like anger often means something different than merely eliminating it. For, as the Buddhist view has consistently demonstrated, it is the perspective of the sufferer that determines whether a given experience perpetuates suffering or is a vehicle for awakening. To work something through means to change one's view; if we try instead to change the emotion, we may achieve some short-term success, but we remain bound by forces of attachment and an aversion to the very feelings from which we are struggling to be free.

Of course, my desire to replace my difficult feelings with their opposite was not an original idea. It derived in my case from the Buddhist psychology of the abhidharma, the earliest psychological writings of Buddhism. There exists in most of us the desire to be free from the pressures of our emotions, to cast off the constraints of our emotional lives and replace the problematic feelings with their less conflicted opposites. There is a universal tendency toward debasement in the sphere of the emotions, it seems. We assume that the only way to be free of suffering is to be completely rid of it.

This longing for a realm of emotional quiescence has had an important impact on the way we practice Buddhism. The very teachings themselves often seem to suggest that this is the model that we must strive to achieve. Certain emotions are unwholesome, the abhidharma teaches. We must do whatever we can to diminish their influence in our minds. Consequently, when we read the stories of Buddhist teachers freely expressing sadness or rage, we become confused. These stories contradict the more formal teachings of Buddhism and force us to reevaluate our unconscious assumptions about how loathsome the emotions must be. Our willingness to believe in a model that denies a place for the emotions derives in part from the unconscious desire to split off the emotions from the rest of our experience, to make them the culprits for our predicament. If we could but root out and destroy our emotional natures, we think, we  could be following in the footsteps of the Buddha.

This desire to destroy the offending emotions is also one that is very common in people seeking psychotherapy. Just as many meditators assume that proper med-  itation means diminution of feeling, so many people entering psychotherapy  demonize the unwanted emotions that propel them to seek help. After breaking up his ten-year marriage, for instance, a good friend of mine sought psychotherapy at a  local mental health clinic. His only wish, he told his new therapist, was to be free from what he was feeling. He implored his therapist to take his pain away, to rid him of his unwanted emotions.