Working with Difficult Emotions
What if, to reach a wish-fulfilling jewel, you had to travel into the depths of your own heart?
Emotional challenges will rise to meet us on the meditation path. As meditation deepens, previously hidden emotional patterns may show up unannounced. Most meditators have experienced the backhanded benefit of making significant progress on their meditation practice only to get walloped by challenging emotions. In one respect, the manifestation of these difficulties is a great sign. Why? Because our skill at paying gentle attention to the meditation object is revealing subtle patterns that were previously below conscious awareness. It’s working!
Generally, psychological defenses keep difficult emotional patterns repressed in the deeper realms of the subconscious. But meditation practice starts to pierce those self-protective mechanisms. That’s good! Let’s describe how these arising emotional patterns can become difficult challenges for meditators. We can then consider some of the tools that have worked for other meditators when facing these challenges. Emotional patterns are a beautiful bend in the road that provides an opening to travel deeper into the heart.
The crisis of deepening meditation
What happens when challenging emotional content arises? For most meditators, a predictable set of reactions occur. These reactions can feel like a crisis on the meditation path. Many meditators experience strong doubt and self-criticism. It may feel like we are failing, doing everything wrong. We may doubt that we ever made progress on the path. Patterns associated with shame and self-hatred suddenly sprout up, seemingly from nowhere. Once these hidden patterns are contacted, self-protective mechanisms kick into gear. We feel lethargic, low, and apathetic, making it hard to continue sitting. The self-protection can also show up as varying levels of irritability; we may find ourselves sitting in agitation rather than calm. Powerful shame reactions can cause our very being to feel wrong.
Our view of meditation can be swallowed up by the feelings of shame and self-hatred. The internal hostility and doubt causes us to deeply question what we are doing. It is quite typical to downgrade our views about where we are on the path. Self-talk in these moments tends to make the experience feel worse (e.g., “I’ve lied to myself for so long; I can’t do this! I’m sitting here fooling myself”; etc.). There may be moments of great self-loathing. We try to practice shamatha but instead get hit with an increasingly hostile inner critic that berates and accuses us, providing mental pictures of prior life failures. Attempting shamatha meditation during these experiences quickly becomes aversive and unpleasant. Being human, we may begin to dread meditating and, understandably, wish to avoid it.
What to do with this storm of emotional content?
How can we open into our own hearts?
A way into the heart: Working with difficult emotional patterns
Meditators have discovered useful guidelines for working with difficult emotional content. They counsel us to understand that upsetting emotions are normal for meditators. We are not bad at meditating, crazy, or a poor excuse for a human. These advanced meditators guide us towards the teachers we’ve worked with and the connections with a sangha that we have formed. And they counsel that the most reliable way into our own dispirited heart is to pivot our practice towards a heart affirming practice, such as metta. We may benefit from replacing our shamatha meditation with metta, at least for a necessary time.
Know these experiences are a normal part of the path. It is crucial to understand that challenging emotions are a normal part of the meditation path. These experiences are like walking through fire. Certainly, there are different levels of intensity when it comes to the unconscious material. Those who experienced trauma and/or psychological disturbances in earlier years may experience more challenges during this phase of the path. Less obvious factors can also contribute to the intensity, such as intergenerational trauma, energy patterns, and karmic traces. Then again, walking through these painful moments may open our hearts, letting us take in the suffering of others and ourselves with new depths of compassion.
Lean on your teacher and your sangha: The Buddhist refuge prayer takes on a more profound meaning at times like these. “Until I awaken, I take refuge in the buddha, dharma, and the supreme assembly.” A good teacher (defined here as one who understands these experiences and can advise you about them) will clarify what is happening and show us that the challenging emotional content is a normal and expected part of meditating. Because shame is so pervasive at this level, it can be a challenge just to bring up the intense emotional content with your teacher. But when you do bring it up, you are likely to experience some relief. Being in a sangha of like-minded meditators can also provide an outlet for these struggles. Sharing what comes up with supportive and understanding friends provides a balm during these challenging times.
Replace shamatha with metta (at least for a while): Shamatha might be the only practice you did up to the point of reaching this fork in the road. It is helpful to hold the shamatha practice loosely at this challenging point. Forcing yourself to ignore the emotional material while berating yourself for concentrating poorly is … usually not helpful! Instead, practice metta.
Practicing metta helps. In short, metta is a means by which we turn towards ourselves in times of difficulty. It can be a lifesaver during these difficult episodes. There are some great books on metta. If the practice is new for you, it is worth taking the time to read a few of them. The actual practice of metta is super simple. You can make a beginning by just saying a set of metta phrases as part of your regular meditation practice. You don’t even have to mean it when you say them! You just need to begin.
There are many metta phrases. Here are the ones that saved me on my last retreat:
“May I be happy;
May I be healthy;
May I be loved;
May I feel safe.“
Well, that sounds fine. But the problem is that metta is actually not so easy, not when you are experiencing powerful emotions. When shame, grief, and self-hatred come calling, you basically just want to hide, from yourself and everyone else. Sitting can heighten these painful internal states; then it can feel like you are circling around the drain. When you get here, meditation can quickly become aversive and painful.
Instead of banging your head against the shamatha wall when painful emotions arise, shift the focus to self-care. Metta is one of the best tools you can pick up in this circumstance. It might be the last thing you want to do, low on the meditation preference totem pole, but it will be the very best thing you can do for yourself (and probably your family and friends!) that you can imagine.
At a retreat last November, I experienced the arising of some powerful emotions. After a few days of pain and confusion, I remembered to try metta. I said the metta phrases until some deep shame began to ease up. After the metta started working, I thought, “I can’t believe that I FORGOT that metta works when nothing else does!” This is a truism. When life seems hopeless and you want to quit meditating altogether, metta might be a good solution.
Interestingly, most of us have a strong resistance to practicing metta when we are in the shitstorm (aka: experiencing painful emotional patterns). Metta is an example of skillful means; we are using the practice to keep going when we reach a painful and confusing part of the path. Metta is not the be all and end all of practice. Rather, it is a skillful means, a tool in the meditation toolbox that can help us learn to open towards difficult emotions.
When a skillful means “works”, you don’t need to make that into a thing. We are simply learning to work skillfully with the mind. You don’t have to make the practice another concept. You already have a million of those. Instead, just do the metta practice and see what happens. How are you before the metta? How are you after? Paraphrasing my teacher, Michael Taft: what’s it like to be you before doing metta? What’s it like to be you after metta? Just be with what you are experiencing. That breaks up the ice crystals in your heart and opens things up. That’s what you want.
Here’s one dude’s experience with emotional patterns and his recognition of the awake space that is always there, even in the midst of heartache.
I was lost, double crossed With my hands behind my back I was long-time hurt and thrown in the dirt Shoved out on the railroad track I've been used, abused, and so confused And I didn't have nowhere to run But I stood and looked And my eyes got hooked On that beautiful morning sun (Brand New Day by Van Morrison)
May you be happy and healthy. May you be loved. And may you feel safe.
Until next time!