It's OK to Feel

I have been struggling with a certain part of a Buddhism workshop that I have been helping to coordinate in the coming weeks. This part has to do with mindfulness of feelings. We have this exercise where we get people into pairs and have them describing a particularly emotional experience, or something that involves conflict.  The first telling is really focussed on the content of that experience: what “he” said, what “she” said, etc. After relaxing the body and mind, the participants then re-tell the story using more awareness of the sensations and a more compassionate attitude. If I understand the exercise correctly, I think it is supposed to be about learning to experience situations directly rather than through the media of thoughts and judgments. I think the reason for this is that the higher up one goes in the ladder of abstractions, the easier it is to get into dualistic thinking. The true ‘feel’ of an experience becomes blurred by convenient ways to symbolize the whole transaction.  I believe that this is exactly what Alfred Korzybski was getting at when he coined the term ‘ladder of abstraction’, in his work on General Semantics. Korzybski proposed that language needs to be readjusted to allow for multiple factors and situations, rather than resorting to “A/Not A” logic. Korzybski felt that we don’t live in a black and white universe of abstract concepts.

Part of me wonders, however, is there a significant place for feelings and emotions in Buddhist philosophy? Aren’t emotions just attachments? And doesn’t Chan in particular simply treat feelings as one of the five aggregates, not worthy of revealing significant truths about the mind or the universe? I have started to puzzle over the place of emotions in the meditative experience.

I see two potential challenges when I am experiencing emotions in daily life. The first thing is that I become afraid of the feeling itself and immediately go to a level of judging myself or how I can ‘manage’ the feeling. This often takes the form of substituting thoughts for direct understanding and acceptance of the emotions I am actually having. Examples of this happen when I immediately judge that I don’t like a person whenever there is an uncomfortable feeling around someone.  Another potential challenge is that I start to think that certain feelings I have entitle me to certain ways of being treated. An example would be if I feel ‘hurt’, and how that sometimes justifies a kind of defensive position toward those whom we feel have hurt us. Of course, both challenges show how stuck I can become in abstract concepts, and how comfortable it is to go there when there is a tender feeling.

What I have started to realize recently is that thoughts always take place after the feelings themselves. In that sense, it is doubtful that thoughts can shape the feelings themselves or make them into something different than what they are. While thoughts might serve to mask or suppress emotions, it’s hard to say whether this really helps a person or hinders a person’s inner processes. Sometimes a feeling will just happen, and it is hard to tell where it is coming from or why. Trying to reverse that feeling by understanding why it is arising is an almost endless task. But more importantly, it might be helpful to not try to reverse the feeling at all. I have found that accepting the feeling and being fully aware of the feeling as it is can take a great deal of suffering out of the feeling itself.

Why is this? I think one of the reasons is that the true suffering comes from the judgments we make about ourselves when we have specific emotional states. Feelings get tremendous amounts of approval or disapproval in the societies in which we grow up and inhabit. If anger is frowned upon in most societies, feelings of anger might already lead me to think that I am out of control, or simply not kind or patient enough toward others. The less I accept an emotion, the more I will start to judge myself and then feel that I also need to defend myself against others who might see my vulnerability. The same goes with other emotions such as jealousy or lust. If I stop judging myself for having an emotion, I might struggle less to cover up the emotion or justify ‘who I am’ in light of the emotion that arises. In this way, I just allow the emotion to be in its own way without adding that layer of judgment to it.


From my own experience, I have found that this awareness of feelings as they are helps me to create more space to accept my unfolding being as it is. I am not trying to hold myself up to an image of who I expect myself to be, as I begin to make room for those purely felt experiences to happen. In that sense, the invitation to ‘just feel’ or allow feelings to naturally come to mind without judgment, is useful. Carl Rogers, who wasn’t a Buddhist, has even explained how his patients come to realize that they are not static beings, as they see the unfolding of their emotions over time. This realization seems to come close to the realization of impermanence that is described in Buddhism.

As far as the role of emotions goes in Chan and/or spiritual practice, I am still not so sure. I think that it’s important to be honest in how I feel about situations. I have a tendency to look to the spiritual practitioner or teacher as a model for how I should behave, and this can conflict with my true feelings at times. But if I am not honest with myself, I will end up spending more time suppressing feelings than really approaching them with full awareness. Only with full awareness do I see that the feeling doesn’t have this ‘self’, and is one part of a total experience. Being aware of feelings is certainly not the same as ‘identifying myself as an emotional person’ or ‘being that feeling’. These latter are both judgments that are based on attachment to a concept of self. So I think that the direct experience of emotions is an important part of meditative life, but the real gold seems to be in recognizing their nature as impermanent and having no self. It is only in that sense that we can accept the feelings as we would any other phenomena, as flowers in the garden of mind. Indeed, this means that there can be ‘angry’ Buddha, ‘depressed’ Buddha and ‘cranky’ Buddha, as much as there is ‘happy’ Buddha and ‘social’ Buddha. All the expressions of emotion come from the same source. But because I fully accept them as part of that fundamental nature and as impermanent parts, I am not fettered by them. And they don’t need to define that sense of who I am. This seems to be a way to harmonize emotions that doesn’t devolve into self-glorification. It might even give me more energy to serve others, since I am no longer so at war with my feelings.But in another sense, if I am open into inquiring into this anxiety and learning to be fully with it, that in itself can be a transformative relationship to all fears.