Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 9-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro challenges the assumption that you have no choice when difficult emotions arise. She teaches mindfulness meditation as the foundational practice for observing the transitory nature of your mind and experiences — noticing anger, depression, or sadness arise and pass without acting them out. When emotions are overwhelming, she recommends physical activity: a walk, exercise, or a work project to shift your state while maintaining awareness. Central to her approach is de-identification — instead of “I am angry,” say “there is anger in my mind” — which weakens emotions’ grip. She grounds this in the Buddhist understanding that your mind’s true nature is clear and pure like the sky, while emotions are temporary clouds. Identifying with that clarity and with positive emotions brings freedom.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2.06 Working with Emotions.mp3
UUID: 4d25f0d9-43ed-481e-8233-8eeb37e9bcbc
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 9.0 minutes
Words: ~1,360
So, if you are able to do some kind of meditation practice such as mindfulness meditation, which is a very important, very basic meditation practice in Buddhism. So, doing this on a regular basis is very helpful. Because it enables you to get a really strong firm experience of the transitory and impermanent nature of your mind, of your experiences. And you first generate that experience through formal meditation practice on your own or in a group or in a retreat. And then gradually the more you become familiar with mindfulness, you’re able to bring that into the rest of your life.
So when you’re at work or in other situations dealing with people, dealing with problems, you’ll be able to observe what’s going on in your mind and understand that it’s transitory, it’s temporary, it’s impermanent, it’s coming and going. So you can observe thoughts and feelings and even strong emotions like anger and not be caught up in them, but be able to simply note them and let them go. Another thing that could be helpful is to do something physical. If you’re experiencing some very difficult emotion, it can be helpful to go for a walk or do some work, do some project, do some exercise, physical exercise. So that can help shake you out of this emotional state.
And you might think that that sounds like an escape route, a way of escaping from the difficult emotion, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. You can still maintain this awareness, this acknowledgement, this acceptance of this emotion that’s happening in you. But you realize that you don’t wanna just sit there and dwell in it and get stuck in it. Want to put your energy into something something useful, something constructive. And doing something physical, doing some work or exercise can actually help to bring about a change in your mind, help the process of letting go of the emotion, bringing yourself into a more positive state of mind.
And then another thing that’s helpful with regard to emotions in general is to understand that you have a choice as to what you do with the emotion. How you respond, how you react to the emotion that’s arising in your mind. Now people sometimes don’t think they have a choice. And one reason for this could be because of habit or familiarity. If in your life, for example, you had the habit of getting depressed and you never really learned how to deal with depression, so you would just get caught up in the depression and stuck in the depression, end up being depressed for days or longer at a time.
So, if that has been your experience in life, then you might have this idea that, Oh, I have no choice. When depression arises in your mind, only thing you can do, the only option you have is to become depressed. However, we do have a choice. There is a choice there. Whether to get caught up in the emotion, get stuck in the emotion, act out the emotion, or to do something else.
Because again, the emotion is not a permanent part of our mind. It’s something transitory, something that just passes through our mind like a cloud. And it’s because of not realizing that that people think they don’t have a choice and they keep falling back on the old patterns. But if we can realize, hey, no, I I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to get stuck in this emotion.
I can do something else. I can choose to put myself into a different state of mind or deal with this emotion in a different way. So that’s really important. And that’s really freedom to realise that we have a choice as to how we deal with the emotion. And it’s helpful to consider the different results of, on the one hand, getting caught up in the emotion, getting stuck in the emotion, acting out the emotion.
So what does that lead to? What are the results of that? What are the consequences of that? And on the other hand, doing something different. Changing your mind.
Putting your attention on something else. Bringing some positive thought or positive experience into your mind. So doing something other than this old way of just getting stuck in the emotion. So if you do that, what are the consequences? So if we compare those two courses of action, those two ways of dealing with the emotion, then we might realize that it’s much more desirable, much more helpful to do something else other than just getting stuck in the emotion.
Something else that’s helpful with regard to emotions is to learn to de identify with them. So our normal habit or pattern is to identify with our emotions and our thoughts, whatever arises in our mind. We do this sort of unconsciously. As soon as an emotion arises, there’s this sense of I with regard to that emotion. I am depressed.
I am angry. I am sad. And that’s actually not the case. It’s not true that I am this emotion. But rather the emotion is just some experience in my mind.
Just some transitory phenomena arising and passing through my mind. And it’s not me. So, it’s helpful to say to ourselves something like, There is anger in my mind. Or There is depression in my mind. Or There is sadness in my mind.
As opposed to I am angry, I am sad, I am depressed. So in the beginning, we may need to say something like that to ourselves in order to really get the sense of non identification with our emotion. But after some time that will become more natural. We’ll naturally be able to simply observe the different emotions arising in our mind and not be caught up in them. Not identify with them.
Because it’s it’s when we identify with the emotions that we give them strength, we give them power, we feed them, and then they last longer, they stay longer in our mind, they become much more difficult to let go of. Whereas learning to de identify with them, learning to see them as just mental phenomena passing through my mind, like clouds passing through the sky. Then, the result of that is they won’t last as long. They won’t be as strong. So we’ll be able to let go of them much more quickly and easily.
And if you have some understanding or if you’ve heard something about the Buddhist explanation of the mind, what is the mind? And can remind yourself of that. That can be very helpful as well. According to Buddhism, the real nature of our mind is clear and pure, like the sky. Like a clear, vast, spacious, pure sky.
And the thoughts and emotions are just like clouds that pass through and are not permanent and actually don’t disturb or harm the nature of the sky. In the same way, thoughts and emotions are just transitory passing phenomena in our mind. They come and they go, and they don’t really disturb or harm the pure nature of our mind. The pure nature of our mind is always there. So even in the midst of a storm of emotions, feeling extremely sad or depressed or angry or frightened.
So even in that kind of situation, the pure, clear nature of our mind is there. So, it can be helpful to contemplate that and learn to identify more with the pure, clear, positive nature of your mind as well as the positive emotions in your mind. Because our mind is not only negative, we have more than just negative thoughts and emotions. We have lots of positive ones. We have love, we have compassion, we have patience, we have peacefulness and joy.
So if we can learn to identify more with the positive emotions in the mind, positive thoughts and experiences and the clear and pure nature of the mind, then that can also help us to not be so caught up in the negative, disturbing thoughts and emotions that arise.