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Taming Destructive Emotions

Can meditation change the brain? Daniel Goleman, the best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence, offers Tricycle some surprising answers.

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In your new book, Destructive Emotions, you write that "recognizing and transforming destructive emotions is the heart of spiritual practice." Can you tell us what you mean by "destructive emotions"? There are two perspectives, one from the East and the other from the West. The Western view of destructive emotions—the modern philosophical and scientific view—is that they are emotions that result in harm to oneself or to others. And "harm" here is meant in the most obvious sense: physical harm, affective harm, social harm. The view from the East is subtler.

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