Being in Emotions

  One of the things I appreciate about Dzogchen Ponlop's book Emotional Rescue is that it characterizes emotions not as bad things to be transcended, but as the material that people can use to be anchored in the present moment. In other words, rather than seeing emotions as 'curses', Ponlop sees the emotional life as a gift. Here he remarks:\

According to the Buddha, our emotions are playing within a great field of energy, an expanse of vividness, beautifully bright and full of sparks. And that energy field is like pure water that has no fixed color or shape of its own. It's clear, transparent, and refreshing. Then thought comes in and colors this clear energy with its labels, judgments, and stories. Each thought is like a drop of pigment that releases its color when mixed into water.  (p.203)

I believe that what Ponlop suggests is that emotions are neither good nor bad. The energy of emotions is like a kind of enormous field within mind. It's only when I start to add  thoughts and words to these emotions that we might start to develop likes, dislikes, preferences and boundaries around the emotions. Sooner or later, these preferences evolve into story lines, such as when a person starts to view emotions as obstacles to achieving an optimal state of being. But if I go back to the original emotional energy itself, no such 'obstacles' really exist. It is as though I have just created a lot of conflict due to avoiding the original energy of the emotion.

To take a simple example, a person might experience an emptiness or disconnection at a certain moment during the day. Rather than accepting this emotion as a naturally arising state, someone might go to the other extreme of making the emotion seem like a deficiency, or the sign of something missing. It often happens that the first question one might have when feeling this emptiness  is 'what am I missing to fill that void'? Rather than seeing it only as a kind of energy, we make a conclusion that the emotion is a sign of something gone wrong. But has anything gone wrong in that moment? It perhaps depends on how we view the emotion itself. Perhaps all the views of that emotion are only relative ways of looking at it, or locating it in terms of a self. While one person might see that emotion as 'the universal condition of humans', others might see it as 'something unfulfilled', while a third party might say, 'be grateful for what you have." Which one is correct? There is no real way to know, since all these are interpretations that are based on relative views.

If I see emotion as a manifestation of the true mind, there is no need to revert to relative views. In that case, I am simply seeing the emotion as a part of the mind that is already luminous and perfect, instead of seeing this emotion as an aberration or an illness. This means that even if I do inquire into the emotion's source, nothing I do with the emotion is making it either better or worse. The emotion already exists perfectly due to causes and conditions, which are also perfectly where they are. Rather than seeing the emotion as something bad that I need to remove, can I gently relax with this emotion and see it as equally part of mind pleasure and fulfillment is? I think this is the challenge that practice poses.

Ponlop, Dzoghen, Emotional Rescue. New York: Tarcher Perigee,