Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 9.5-minute talk, Ven Sangye Khadro presents three practical methods for working with disturbing emotions like depression, fear, and anger. The first method—remembering you are not alone in your struggle—counteracts the isolation and self-obsession that make problems balloon out of proportion, while naturally awakening compassion for others facing the same pain. The second is Tonglen, the practice of imagining you take on others’ suffering and give them peace and happiness, which directly weakens the self-cherishing that lies beneath emotional disturbance. Finally, she teaches reality-checking: stepping back from the mind’s story to ask whether your thoughts are actually true, or whether you’re catastrophizing, imagining scenarios that may never happen, or exaggerating your ability to handle difficulty.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2.07 More Methods for Working with Emotions.mp3
UUID: b8831a5c-d112-44c9-b98c-9d1914b3d17a
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 9.5 minutes
Words: ~1,396
And then, another general technique that is very helpful in dealing with problematic, disturbing emotions is to remember that you are not the only person in the world who has such feelings, such experiences. So, what can happen is that when we do feel some painful, disturbing emotion, such as depression or anger or fear, we may feel as though I’m the only one in the world who has this problem. Nobody else feels this way. Everybody else is doing well. Everybody else is fine.
I am the only one who feels this way. And if we have that kind of view or attitude, it has a result of making us feel isolated from others, making us feel alone and lonely. And it also has the effect of making our problem, this problematic emotion that we’re experiencing, seem much bigger, much greater than it really is. It’s like the expression that we have, making a mountain out of a molehill. So our problem may not really be that great.
But by focusing on it, feeling I’m the only one who has this and it’s so huge and it’s so terrible and it seems like a mountain. So then it becomes much more difficult to deal with and we tend to get much more stuck in it. So to counteract that tendency, it’s very helpful if we can remind ourselves that other people also experience this kind of emotion. Even at the very same moment that we’re experiencing it, the very same moment we feel depressed. There’s probably millions of other people who are depressed.
And many of those other people are suffering much more than we are. Their experience of this emotion could be much worse than what we’re experiencing. Thinking of this not to make us feel worse. So we have to be careful to avoid that. Oh, there’s so many people who are suffering, are miserable, and then feel overwhelmed by that.
But rather just to realize that this is a problem that many other people have, not only myself. And some people have it even worse. And if we contemplate this in the right way, it brings about compassion. It brings about a sense of unity or harmony or empathy with other people. We can empathize with other people’s suffering when we’re happy, when we’re feeling wonderful and great and happy.
It’s very difficult to empathize with people who are suffering. Very difficult to call to feel where they’re at. Whereas when we are experiencing some kind of suffering, we’re in a perfect situation to be able to understand what other people are feeling who are suffering. And so that enables us to have real compassion, which is wishing others to be free of suffering. To have compassion we have to understand what suffering is.
Otherwise, you know, we don’t really know what other people are experiencing. So when we have our own first hand experience of sadness or depression or grief or fear, then we can understand how other people feel when they’re experiencing those. And that opens up our heart to having greater and greater compassion. And also wanting to reach out to others and do what will be helpful to others to relieve their suffering. So, using our own experience of some kind of painful emotion is a wonderful opportunity to be able to develop compassion, to increase our feeling of compassion.
And so this is very helpful. Remembering when you’re experiencing some kind of suffering, some kind of painful emotion, remembering that other people experience this as well. So, doing this, reminding yourself that other people have problems as well, will help you to avoid expanding or exaggerating your problem, making a mountain out of a molehill. And instead your problem may seem more like a molehill. Much smaller, more manageable, not so unbearable.
So, remind yourself that others have problems as well. Generate compassion for all those who have such problems. Generate the wish for them to be free from these painful difficult emotions. And another method that’s very helpful is that of Tonglen, which we’ll be talking about in one of the later sessions. Is a practice that involves taking, actually imagining that we take on suffering to relieve others of their suffering and giving them peace and happiness.
Giving whatever they need to be happy and peaceful. The meditation on Tonglen is particularly to help us decrease selfishness or the self-cherishing attitude, which we are all prone to. We all tend to have this feeling of, I am the most important person in the world. I am like the center of the universe. And having that kind of attitude of self importance or self centeredness is actually a major contributor to our disturbing emotions and the kind of problems that we get into because of disturbing emotions.
It’s because we’re so concerned about ourselves that we get unhappy when things don’t go our way. We get sad when we lose someone or something that we value, we want to be there and never disappear. We’re fearful of anything bad happening to me. So, if we watch our mind and analyse what’s going on in our mind, most probably any time we’re experiencing some sort of disturbing emotion. If we look beneath that or behind that, we’ll most probably find this attitude of self concern or self-cherishing.
Sense of I am more important than others, than anyone else. And the practice of Tonglen as well as the development of love and compassion are very very helpful for decreasing self centeredness, self concern and increasing a sense of altruism, caring for others. The more we can have love, compassion, and altruism, the wish to benefit others, the less we will have painful, disturbing emotions invading our mind. So this is another general way in which you can work on disturbing emotions. Finally, another general way of working with disturbing emotions is to do a reality check.
And what this means is that in some if not all cases of having some kind of disturbing emotion invading our mind and getting caught up in it, it could be because we’re seeing things in an unrealistic way or in an exaggerated way. We’re just not seeing things realistically, truthfully. Like for example, when we have fear. When we’re afraid of something, it often happens that our mind is inventing some sort of terrible thing that might happen to us and that we dread happening. And we feel, oh, if that were to happen to me, I wouldn’t be able to handle it.
And our mind can get completely caught up in fear and terror, even panic, even become immobilized by fear. And if we look realistically at this situation, for example, asking ourselves, well, is it definite that this is going to happen? This thing I’m afraid of? You know, is it really going to happen? We’ll probably realise, well yes it might happen but it also might not happen.
So we’re not kind of seeing things realistically there. And also if we ask ourselves, well even if it did happen to me, is it the case that I won’t be able to handle it? That I’ll just be totally smashed by it, totally out of control with it? Again, if we look realistically, we might be able to acknowledge that well, even if it does happen, maybe it won’t be that bad. Maybe I will be able to handle it.
I will be able to go through it and come out the other end okay. So, that’s just an example. But in general, what this method involves is taking a step back from our mind and what’s going on in our mind. And analysing the various thoughts, what our mind is saying, the sort of blah blah blah that’s going on in our mind. And asking ourselves, is this really true?
Is it really true what my mind is saying? Or is there some error there? You know, can we recognize some mistake, some error, some unrealistic way of thinking? And if we are able to recognise that, then we can change it. We can change the tape.
Change the blah blah blah that’s going on in our mind to something that’s more realistic, more correct, more reasonable. So that’s another way that’s helpful in dealing with disturbing emotions.