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Finding Freedom with Emotions

So tonight I'd like to talk a little bit about practicing mindfulness. Maybe that's not too surprising at a place called the Insight Meditation Center, but why do we practice? For us as individuals, why do we have this mindfulness practice? What are we expecting are the benefits, or the purpose, or why would we do this? Is there a way that we have a sense of how we would measure how our meditation goes, or how our meditation practice over time progresses? What are the values or the qualities that we're expecting to arise, or shift, or change as a consequence of meditation?

For some of us, we're meditating because we want to reduce stress. Why not? Nobody wants to be completely stressed out all the time. We want to reduce physical difficulties, or emotional difficulties, or a combination of them, or just a number of ways in which stress shows up. Or maybe we want to make changes in our behavior. We have this idea that it would be really great if I were more loving and compassionate in the world to other people and to myself, to my annoying coworkers, or to whomever it might be.

Or maybe, for example, we have this idea that we want to lessen procrastination. Or we want to work with some activity that feels like a compulsion or an addiction. Maybe we do have an addiction, and we're hoping that mindfulness can help. So there's a way in which maybe we want to change our behavior in some way.

Or maybe we're practicing mindfulness because we want to understand ourselves better. What makes ourselves tick? What's going on in our life? Maybe get in contact with that. Or what are our habits of mind? Which ones are supporting us, and which ones are not supporting us? These patterns that we've inherited, and patterns that have been created whether we intended to create them or not.

I'll say for me personally, I came to the Dharma^[1] to practice partly because I just didn't know what to do with my life. This kind of angst, like I have all these things that I thought I wanted, and yet my life just doesn't seem right, but I didn't really know what to do. I'd been chasing after so many things and for so long, and I just had this sense there's got to be something different, when I stumbled upon the Dharma by accident during a yoga class. Each of us has our own story of how we came to the Dharma and why we came initially, and chances are it hasn't been constant or the same the whole duration of practicing.

But I would say in general—this is a gross generalization—that people do not want their mindfulness practice to be about everything that's unpleasant. That isn't our intention when we start this practice. "I just want to hang out with everything that's uncomfortable or difficult?" Instead, some people have this idea: "I just want to meditate. I want it to be some kind of chill-out session where I can just be a little bit quiet and settle down and feel good for a little bit, or feel better, or something like this." Sure, why not? We all want this. Nobody wants to be with the difficulty all the time. To be sure, for some people that's exclusively what they expect from meditation—I'm using this word "meditation" in general here—that it's an opportunity to chill out.

But I would say that mindfulness meditation in particular, as opposed to maybe just this kind of global idea of meditation (and recognizing that there's so many different practices other than just mindfulness), can help us with all these things: reducing stress, changing our behavior, having greater understanding. In fact, I would say that those arise whether that's your intention or not. But one thing that's maybe—I don't know if it's unique, but it's something that I would like to emphasize—is that mindfulness meditation is a way to increase the freedom in our lives.

I like this word freedom in a way because it's kind of vague, and we can understand it in lots of different ways, and there's room for all of us to interpret that in a way that makes sense to us. But one way we might understand freedom is not being pushed around by our experiences. Like, "Oh, I have to avoid this situation because it might cause some uncomfortable emotions and I don't want those to arise, so I have to avoid this person, I have to avoid this situation, I have to avoid being alone with myself for too long," or whatever it is.

Or maybe we have this sense that we're spending all of our time engineering, manufacturing, creating, doing whatever we can to control our environment so that we can feel okay, so that nothing unpleasant, untoward, or difficult arises. And that's not freedom either. If we're just always trying to control everything—control other people, control ourselves, wrestle ourselves into being a particular way, behaving in a particular way—if we only feel free or relaxed under certain conditions when we've got them just straight, that's not real freedom.

What the Buddha is pointing to, and what this practice is pointing to, is the freedom of not being pushed around by our experiences. The capacity to be with whatever arises, and the confidence to be with whatever arises. That's where the freedom is.

I want to read a little excerpt from a poem, and I'll tell who the poet is and the name of the poem a little bit later. But I'd like to start by just reading this excerpt. I found this poem really powerful, and I'd just like to share little bits about it and talk about it. So this poem starts like this. It's a well-known poem, maybe some of you know this:

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.

In some ways, I appreciate very much what the poet is pointing to here. He's recognizing so many different things and expressing it in a way that I appreciate. I might say that expressing an emotional experience and using metaphorical language as a way to express it, sometimes it's not clear what an emotional experience is. And if this person's a poet, he's using metaphor in this kind of language. "There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out." Okay, there's something fluttering, and maybe we're not even clear what it is.

So not only is this poet pointing to his emotional experience, but he's also having some awareness of his relationship to that experience. He's saying, "Stay in there. I'm not going to let anybody see you." Maybe this is a sense of shame, or maybe a sense of, "You know, this shouldn't be here, or something's wrong if it's here." But clearly, a sense of this is not something that's welcome.

So the poet knows about this emotional experience and his relationship to this emotional experience. And maybe he also has this view of himself. "I'm too tough for him," the poet says. So this mindfulness, we might say, of this view of himself, or maybe even a wish that he has for himself to be tough so that this little bluebird can't get out. Mindfulness points to all of this: our experience, including our emotional experiences, our relationship to our experiences, and sometimes things that aren't so clear or obvious to see. And that is a view that we have about ourselves and a view about how things should be and how they shouldn't be.

With this, learning to be with the experience begins with just recognizing what's happening. And then with recognition, we can increase our capacity not only to be with experiences, but to even acknowledge them and be able to tease apart, for example, an emotional experience and our relationship to it. Sometimes they get all tangled up and we can't quite tell them apart. It can be really helpful to tease them apart: what's happening, and our relationship to what's happening.

So the poet, he's not expressing freedom though, right? He's having some mindfulness there, but there's a bluebird that wants to get out, and the bluebird isn't free. And he's trying to control his experience. He's not going to let anybody see this bluebird. And we have a sense that his heart is closed, or he has this fear of intimacy; he doesn't want anybody to know that there's this bluebird in his heart. But perhaps he's on his way to more freedom because he is recognizing these different elements. He is being mindful.

And this is the way forward. If we want to have some freedom, it's really helpful to notice what is it that we are tangled up with? What is it that is inhibiting this freedom? So it helps to have some understanding, some awareness, some intimacy with whatever it is that's arising.

I'd like to read a little bit further along in this poem. I'm skipping some parts in the middle. I feel obliged to say—I was thinking to myself, I'm trained as a research scientist and as a Dharma teacher, like I have no business looking at American literature and trying to unpack it and look at it. So I just want to recognize that there's lots of ways we can interpret poems, and I'm just using this in one particular lens. So I kind of want to honor the poet, and I want to honor those people who study English literature who may say, "Diana, I don't know what you're talking about." But that is a disclaimer.

Here's further along in the poem:

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. Then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

I find this poem really touching. There's a number of ways that, as I said, we can interpret it, but his emotions are shifting. In the beginning, he's talking to this bluebird and he's saying, "Stay in there," with this tone of harshness. And then at the end of the poem, he's saying it's nice enough to make a man weep.

First, I could speak for myself, this is often the way it is when we discover uncomfortable experiences, or like we have some emotions. For me, I had a lot of fear, and I wasn't even sure what I was afraid of. I couldn't say, "I'm afraid of this or that," but with some of these long meditation retreats I was doing, there would just be this knot of fear, and I couldn't point to exactly what it was. But first, I just was trying to shove it down, like, "Oh, I don't want to be with that." But then things would shift.

At the end of the poem he's saying it's nice enough to make a man weep. He's pointing to maybe the poignancy and the tenderness of just being with our experiences, being mindful of them as best we can. As best we can. He's not saying that he let this bluebird die, right? He's not getting rid of it. He's not trying to excise a part of himself, but instead, he's starting to engage with the experience.

And I would say that relationship with his emotions is also shifting. It starts with saying, "I'm too tough for him," and saying, "I'm too clever for him. Okay, now I see you, but now I gotta figure this out. I don't have to experience this." And at the end of the poem he's saying, "We sleep together." So in a way, making friends. Often this is kind of how our emotional life is too. I would say with the practice, we learn to make friends with all these parts of ourselves that we were trying to ignore or somehow excise from our experience, or trying to shape our inner life in some way that they weren't there.

And lastly, I would say—this is of course my interpretation—his relationship with others is shifting. In the beginning, there's this sense of isolation: "I'm not going to let anyone see you." And maybe for me, I had the sense he's not even going to let himself see this little bluebird. And then in the middle of that poem is maybe a sense of acceptance. "I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep." So maybe like, "Okay, you're there, but only when the conditions are right I'm going to be with this." And then at the end, maybe the sense of connection and conversation even. He ends with, "It's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?" So all of a sudden there's this connection to somebody else. Before there's this real isolation, and then there's this openness.

So this poem is called Bluebird by Charles Bukowski. It's a powerful poem. I left out a few stanzas there in the middle, but this way in which we meet our emotional life, and as we meet it, things start to shift towards more opening, more acceptance, more being in dialogue with ourselves and with others.

And we do this by—and we find greater freedom by—bringing awareness to all aspects of our experience. It's perfectly natural that, as I was mentioning earlier, there are these parts that we don't really want to be aware of and we're just wishing they would go away. But this practice is about meeting all of it, including some things that we might consider distractions. Sounds. The neighbor's dog that keeps on barking, or whatever the sounds might be, we just fold them in. Like, this too, we can be mindful of that. We can be mindful of a dog barking, and then be mindful of the annoyance, and then be mindful maybe there's even a sense of our self like, "Don't our neighbors know that I'm trying to meditate here? And why do they have a dog? They should let the dog do whatever," or something. In ways that we kind of create this strong sense of self when our preferences aren't getting met. And maybe to just be mindful of that. "Oh yeah, here's the experience of me versus the world, and the uncomfortableness of that."

So this idea of, you know, we can bring mindfulness to everything. And as we do, we start to find more and more freedom. There's things that we don't have to avoid so much; we know that we can practice with them. And in some ways, I kind of like this poem because it doesn't have a neat and tidy, "And they lived happily ever after," and rainbows and unicorns and hearts and all that kind of stuff. Because I kind of wanted to show that this is a person expressing some time in his life, and sometimes our life isn't filled with hearts and unicorns and rainbows and these kinds of things. It has difficulties. Of course it does.

And so we start where we are. This practice isn't asking us to be somebody else. It's not asking us to pretend things are different. We start where we are. And sometimes where we are, there's a lot of difficulties, suffering. Sometimes not too, sometimes we feel like we have a little bit more ease in our life. In particular, I'd like to talk just a little bit about mindfulness of emotions.

This idea that if we're being mindful of our inner life and emotions—here, I don't know what the bluebird in the heart wants out, but we can think of all kinds of things in there. I appreciate this poet pointing to that. But mindfulness of emotions is a way in which, if we're just able to be with them, recognize them, have awareness of them without insisting that they be different, without trying to shove them away, we can allow these emotions to flow through us. To arise and pass away. I think I heard this from Gil Fronsdal^[2], e-motion: this idea that there's a movement, motion, and that if we don't get all tangled up with them, that they will move through. And part of mindfulness practice is discovering how we get tangled up, and how we might disentangle ourselves.

I just want to say a little bit about emotions, and then I'll talk a little bit about how we can be mindful of them. There's a lot to be said here, so I'm just going to touch the surface here. Maybe I'll do some more talks on this. But one way to think about emotions is that they're a form of communication from ourselves to ourselves. Some kind of way like, "Oh, I'm feeling angry," well then there's maybe a way we feel like a boundary has been crossed or we're seeing some injustice, something that feels like this shouldn't be happening. Maybe we feel sad. Maybe there's been some loss, and it's perfectly natural that we have some sadness, or maybe there's a loss of something that we're not even quite clear that we're mourning, something that we don't even have quite clarity about.

But it's a communication from ourselves to ourselves. We can only really kind of learn what this communication is trying to tell us if we allow that emotion to exist, instead of trying to shove it down or extract ourselves, or if you don't try to immediately push it away in whatever way. It's the habit, I think, for most humans. And these days, industries, billions of dollars are getting spent to make it as easy as possible for you to distract yourself and to avoid your inner life.

So they are forms of communication. And I'll say that they are also composites. Composites have both physical sensations as well as mental sensations, because we can kind of divide our experience into those two ways: physical and mental. There's different ways we could talk about emotions, this is one way I'm doing it now. Physical fear in the gut. Anger is hotness. Sadness sometimes feels like really heavy, and maybe like pressure behind the eyes. So there's a bodily experience that goes with emotions. And sometimes we're not so aware of them or connected to them, but they're there. But generally and most often, they're like in the trunk or in the face, or something like this. Not always, but...

And then there's these thoughts, these mental events that go with them. Stories of who did what to whom, and the next time that happens I'm going to make sure they did this. Or maybe we're rehashing a conversation and trying to make it go differently, something that already happened, and we're trying to make it go differently. Or maybe we have a story about how things should be, and how we're going to make it be that way. And maybe in this poem that poet says, "I'm not going to let anyone see you." Right? "I'm going to control it that nobody can see, and these things shouldn't be seen," this type of an idea. And sometimes it's hard to maybe understand exactly what's a thought, what's an emotion. So we don't have to get too tangled up in that. I'd like to simplify and say there's a bodily aspect and a mental aspect to our emotional life.

Maybe I'll start with this little quote which I think is a playful way to think about this. Some time ago there was this article in the New York Times about mindfulness being taught in schools. And the reporter asked this young kid who had been participating in a mindfulness program to describe mindfulness. And here's the kid's response: "Mindfulness is not hitting someone in the mouth."

And I kind of appreciate this recognition, what this kid is pointing to probably is like, "Oh yeah, okay, here's anger here, and I don't have to act out on it," some awareness of this. And I'm imagining this is like a way to be with difficult emotions instead of lashing out.

So how do we work with difficult emotions? There's a few ways, I'll just give some highlights here. One that can be really helpful is notice that there's a mixture of things happening at that moment. Maybe there's this heat of anger, and there's this perfectly neutral sensation of your feet on the ground. And there's a perfectly neutral sensation of the furnace going, or the refrigerator humming, or something like this. And maybe you feel hungry. And you're noticing that the person is wearing a particular type of shirt, or something like this. So just to kind of open up the experience. Sometimes we collapse into the emotion, the anger or whatever it is. It's not always easy to do, but to open up the experience and notice anything else really.

And often the easiest is feeling the pressure on the feet touching the ground. And there's something in particular about that that can kind of help us feel grounded and settled. The awareness might go to the feet, and then go back to the anger, and then we can go to the feet, and then go back to the anger, and then go back to the feet. But there's something about coming back to the feet that interrupts the momentum of the anger getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We have all noticed this. And there's something that we might think about, that the amount of harm we can cause our relationships if we're angry for a full day as opposed to if we're just angry for a couple of hours. We might not send that email, we might not make that phone call. The anger is still there, but just isn't for the same duration. So this one thing we can do: just notice there is a mixture. So we could ask ourselves, what else is here? Anger is here, sadness is here, this terrible sadness, what else is here? And allow the attention to rest on something neutral or pleasant. If there's something pleasant, maybe you're wearing some soft clothing, maybe you're sitting in a comfy chair. So something like that, that's one thing to do with difficult emotions, or strong emotions. Maybe I should use that word, strong emotions.

And then can we transform this emotion from this abstract concept—sadness, anger, love, whatever emotion it might be, anxiety—transform it from this abstract concept into something that's a little bit more tangible? And this is where being aware of the bodily experience of emotions can really help. "Oh, I'm afraid, and I have this knot in my stomach. And this knot feels like it's in this region, and it seems like it's a little bit dynamic, it's moving around, it has maybe a little bit of a throbbing quality." So this way of bringing the awareness to a bodily experience, something tangible that's happening in this moment, is another way we can interrupt the momentum of whatever the emotion is. We're not trying to get rid of the emotion, we're not trying to shame ourselves or anything like this. We're just trying to not dip into overwhelm where we lose all our wisdom. So to notice the bodily experience, the bodily part of the emotion.

And if we are finding that we're just really stuck in this emotion for a long time, and maybe that the power of it or the intensity of it is waxing and waning but we find that it has a recurring feeling to it, or it's going over and over and over again, maybe we can just drop in a question that's a gentle inquiry. Not that we have to find the answer, we don't have to figure it out. The power here is in asking the question, the power is not in getting the answer. And the question is: Is there something underneath this that is fueling this anger, or whatever the emotion is? What is underneath this?

And as I said, we don't have to do this archaeological interior dig to figure it out. It's more just being open to whatever is fueling it. Because there is something that's fueling it, otherwise the emotion would just arise, you'd be mindful of it, and it would pass away. Right? All the neurologists and physiologists and mindfulness teachers say notice this, that things arise and pass away. But if it has this way in which it's just there for a long time, then there's something that's fueling it. And just having this kind of curiosity about what is underneath this. Having that curiosity, bringing this kind of investigation and this openness, that itself is a way that creates the conditions when some new understanding might arise, and that might help with a new relationship to it, or a new understanding, or something like that.

Many of the times we practice mindfulness to have reduced stress or reduced anxiety, or to change some of our habits, or maybe to gain some better understanding. I'd like to maybe offer just this language of some more freedom. And part of the way to have more freedom is to recognize: where do we not have freedom? Where are we—I'm using this expression getting pushed around—but this way in which we're trying to navigate our lives spending so much energy trying to avoid this and only have that. And of course we do, right? Of course humans do this, and we need to do this, it's wise to do this. But there's a way in which it can also feel exhausting and oppressive. So can we have some discernment about what's helpful to avoid, and what maybe we don't need to avoid? What's helpful to support greater freedom, and what is maybe some entanglements or something that are not allowing for greater freedom?

And part of that maybe being with emotions is something that can support this freedom, as well as reducing stress, having greater awareness, and changing our behaviors.

So I think I'll stop there and open it up to see if there's some questions or comments.

Q&A

Speaker: Maybe I'll say, while Jim is walking the mic, it's not uncommon for maybe people later when they hear it to say, "What was the name of that poem again?" I'll just say it's Bluebird by Charles Bukowski.

Questioner 1: Thanks for sharing. How do you, when you're getting curious about what's underneath an emotion that's arising, how do you sort of draw the distinction between unhealthy or ruminating digging into it, versus it's helpful and curious? Because you could just feel the emotion and that would be it, and try not to put a narrative to it, but how do you kind of go through that process?

Diana Clark: Yeah, I think this is a great question, and I think part of the answer is how you described it. If you find that there's a lot of ruminating and going around and around and around, sometimes it can be as simple as to ask ourselves, "Is this helpful?" I've thought this thought 500 bazillion quadrillion times, this isn't so helpful. So sometimes it could be just having that question.

Questioner 1: So definitely the rumination, when you're cycling right, I like that question, "Is it helpful?" But sometimes the asking the question and creating the narrative around it is the unhelpful part of the emotion, right? You're investigating it, you create a story that's not helpful. Around the emotion, how do you know whether you're trying to understand—your mind can spin like, "Well maybe it's this"—but then helpful analyzing versus just the emotion is what it is and not trying to put a narrative or understanding?

Diana Clark: Yeah, so when you're asking the question, you're using the word analyzing, and I'm kind of shying a little bit away from that word of analyzing. I'm just saying a gentle inquiry: "Is there something underneath that's fueling this?" So less about figuring it out and analyzing. And I appreciate what you're pointing to, that sometimes we can create a narrative, a whole story that "I'm having this emotion because I'm a person who acts," or "because of this or that," and then we get all tangled up with that story, and that isn't so helpful.

Maybe if we find ourselves stuck in that, we can do these other things. We can feel our feet on the ground, feeling into the body, these types of things to kind of help interrupt the momentum of those things.

Questioner 2: Good evening Diana, thank you. I have a question regarding the mindfulness aspect. I'm very grateful for this practice because I am gaining more awareness of my emotions and what's overwhelming me. I just feel like sometimes, am I just being passive about it? Like, "Okay, I know the dog is barking and I'm going to ignore it because I don't want to make a big deal out of it." But in doing so, I feel frustrated, or I feel like it's still bothering me. I mean, the dog barking is figurative for life. But I just sometimes feel like, where am I? This practice has been very life-changing for me, just with the presence of where I'm at and how I'm feeling and just sitting with all the things that I think I'm aware of, or maybe they're just so much more illuminated. I just don't know how to be okay with it.

Diana Clark: Yeah, this is a great question. So maybe I'll say a few things. I'll just go with this dog barking. Sure, we can try to create the perfect environment in which we feel comfortable all the time. I kind of feel like that project hasn't worked for me, trying to make everything just be right. So something like the dog barking is a place where we can practice. Like, "Okay, here's annoyance, and this is what annoyance feels like. Frustration, this is what frustration feels like. Anger." Because there will be times in your life where you cannot control it, and it will be really hard. We're all going to get sick, people that we love are going to get sick, and we won't be able to change it. But if we are practicing for other things, in the simpler things like the dog barking—sure, you could pick up the phone and go to the neighbor's house, or I don't know, all these types of things—but it also could be a place to practice. So that because there will be plenty of things in our lives that are really difficult that we can't change. So there's just nothing we can do, there's lots of stuff about that. So that's maybe...

Questioner 2: No, like thank you so much. Thank you.