Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this eight-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro addresses emotions arising around death—our own or a loved one’s—and teaches practical Buddhist methods for working with them rather than escaping. She names the core emotions: denial, anger, fear, sadness, and guilt. The instruction unfolds in three parts: first, acknowledge and accept emotions without self-judgment, recognizing they’re natural for unenlightened beings; second, avoid being overwhelmed; third, remember impermanence as an antidote. She develops this through the sky-and-clouds analogy—emotions, like clouds, arise, pass through the vast clear sky of mind, and disappear. This way of meeting emotions prepares us for our own death and for supporting others through theirs. Suited to practitioners new to Buddhist approaches to dying.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2.05 Looking at Emotions.mp3
UUID: d00b87a7-ea7a-4b68-ada6-9668b5929463
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 8.0 minutes
Words: ~1,122
Okay, so now we’ll look at emotions. So with regard to death, when we think about death or encounter death in some way, it’s only natural that certain emotions can arise in our mind. And usually these are not very pleasant emotions. And so our way of responding may be to try to escape from them somehow, to push them out of our mind, to busy ourselves with something, some work or entertainment. So we don’t usually like to experience unpleasant emotions.
We try to find ways of escaping from them. But it’s actually not helpful to avoid or escape from these emotions because most likely there will be a time when we can’t run away from them anymore. We’ll be stuck with them. And if we haven’t learned how to deal with them, we may be just overwhelmed by them and not know what to do. So it’s much better to learn to face these emotions and learn how to deal with them.
And this is actually an important part of preparing ourselves for death, both our own death and also the deaths of our loved ones, family and friends. If we can learn how to deal with emotions, we’ll be better prepared for death when it happens. There are things that we can do, methods that we can learn and work on to deal with our emotions. So, I’ll first of all talk about some general ways of working with disturbing emotions. Emotions that can disturb our mind.
And then I’ll talk about specific disturbing emotions that could come up in particularly with regard to death, and ways that we can deal with these. So these can include denial, anger, fear or anxiety, sadness, guilt. So these are some of the emotions that people tend to experience when they themselves are dying or when they’re dealing with the death of a loved one. So, in general, there’s a lot of methods in Buddhism that can help us to work with disturbing emotions. One of these is simply to accept and acknowledge them in a non judgmental way.
To understand that it’s completely normal and natural to have these emotions arise in our mind. We’re human beings. We’re not enlightened beings. And as human beings, we’re not free from disturbing thoughts and emotions. We can be.
We do have the ability, the potential to reach the state of enlightenment where, you know, we no longer have disturbing negative thoughts and emotions arising in our mind, but we’re not at that point yet. It’s important for us to accept where we are and accept the emotions that arise in our mind and not be judgmental about them. So, it’s not at all helpful to think, Oh, I shouldn’t feel this way. It’s wrong to feel this way, or I’m bad to feel this way. So having such critical judgmental attitudes about the emotions that arise in our mind doesn’t help, And in fact it just makes things worse.
It just adds another layer of problems on top of what’s already there. It’s already difficult enough to have this disturbing emotion whether it’s fear or anger or sadness. So that itself is problematic. And then if on top of that we are judgmental, we are self critical, we feel, oh I shouldn’t feel this way. That’s just exacerbating the problem, making things worse.
So look out for that. Look out for judgemental attitudes. And don’t let your mind get into those and instead see if you can just develop an attitude of acceptance. That this is what’s happening in your mind and most probably there is a good reason for feeling that way. If you are facing death yourself or facing the death of a loved one, it’s completely natural and understandable that such emotions would arise.
So this is the first general way of dealing with the emotion is just having an accepting attitude, acknowledge the emotion, and don’t judge yourself for having the emotion. Then on the other hand, it’s not helpful to allow your mind to be completely overwhelmed by the emotion. So for example, you feel angry to let yourself just get completely caught up in the anger and act out the anger. So that is also not helpful. It’s best if we can learn other ways of dealing with these disturbing emotions rather than completely getting caught up with them and going along with them or getting stuck in them.
And to do this, it’s helpful to remember impermanence. Remember that our mind, our thoughts, emotions, as well as everything else within us and around us is impermanent by nature. And what that means is that it’s changing moment by moment. This is actually not so difficult to see if you really look at your mind, you watch your mind, observe your mind. You can easily see that your mind is changing.
At one point in time you feel angry, at another point in time you feel calm and relaxed, at one point in time you feel sad or depressed, at another point you can feel happy and laugh. So our mind is not permanently stuck in any one state or in any one emotion. But rather, the thoughts and emotions that arise in our mind simply come and go. There’s an analogy in the Buddhist teachings that can be very helpful here. That is that our mind is like the sky.
If you think about the natural state of the sky, it’s clear and vast and spacious. And sometimes clouds appear in the sky. But clouds are not a permanent part of the sky. They come and they go. They are transitory.
They appear in the sky, they pass through and they disappear. And it’s similar with our mind. Our mind is like the sky, it is vast and clear and spacious. And thoughts and emotions are like clouds. They appear in our mind, they’re there for a certain period of time, sometimes a few moments or longer, then they disappear.
They don’t stay, they’re not permanent. So, it can be very helpful if you remind yourself of the impermanent nature of your thoughts and emotions. Even though they may be there at this moment in time, they are not going to be there forever. There will come a time, it could be a few moments or a few minutes or a few hours later when this emotion is going to be gone. And you may feel some other emotion.
So thinking of your emotions as impermanent, transitory, passing through your mind like clouds passing through the sky, can be very helpful to not be totally caught up in and overwhelmed by or get stuck in them.