What Do Emotions Mean?

After reading my September post "Up Close and Impersonal," a good friend of mine sent a very eloquent response with some questions. It was too long to fit in one of the comment boxes, so I'm going to reproduce some parts of it here and respond to them over several posts. His questions touch on issues that often come up in conversations I have with other friends about the ideas in this blog.

My friend comments on the kind of detachment (feeling emotions but not judging them or taking them personally) that I describe, wondering whether this way of approaching emotions would be appropriate in all situations. Aren't there some situations, he asks, where emotions  should be taken personally?

"As a Holocaust historian living in a century of modern crises, I wonder if non-emotional responses to these subjects, even 'should I care to contemplate them in equanimity,' would be fully human or even [as] valuable as full human responses of thought and feeling. Detaching the two from each other seems an enervating separation of the composite components needed for a full-throated response."

I'm pretty sure "non-emotional" here is my friend's summation of what I variously describe in the post (and many previous ones) as letting emotions be, not taking them personally, not getting them caught up in a story, neither grasping nor avoiding them, etc. My own preferred umbrella term for these things is "disidentification." (The problem with "non-emotional" is that it implies that detachment = not having feelings, whereas the opposite is true: feeling my feelings is a prerequisite for learning not to take them personally.) So my friend is asking two questions about disidentification with (or detachment from, if you prefer) emotions, at least in certain situations: Is it "fully human"? And is it as "valuable" as emotional responses with no detachment (where emotions are taken personally)?

In this post I want to address the first question, which seems to me to have to do with ethical judgment. I mean, "human" is obviously metaphorical, since detachment would not make me cease to be a biological human. So the question is: if I am thinking about the Holocaust and I feel pain (or anger, sadness, disgust, guilt, curiosity) but I am also sufficiently detached from that feeling to make a deliberate decision about whether and how to act on it, am I behaving less than ethically?

I don't think so. I make ethical evaluations of my behavior on the basis of three things: my intentions, my actions, and my awareness of consequences. I believe that it is necessary for me to acknowledge (at least to myself) and experience my emotions in order to make the evaluation. It would be impossible for me to fully understand my intentions, for instance, if I were denying my feelings.

But I don't think it's useful to judge the emotions themselves. In fact, in my experience, holding judgments about my feelings is precisely what leads me to start denying or suppressing them. When I was younger, believing that I shouldn't feel angry meant that I suppressed anger when I did feel it, which in turn resulted in stress, depression and occasional inappropriate and hurtful outbursts of rage.

The fact that we can't determine our emotions (influence, yes; determine, no) suggests to me that it is not appropriate to judge someone (including oneself) based solely on what emotion s/he is feeling in a particular situation. Once in my early twenties I had a very odd experience. I was attending a weekly spiritual study group (not Buddhist), and one of the other participants (there were about half a dozen of us) told the group that she was upset and preoccupied because her (adult) son had been threatening to kill himself. Later that week I was talking with her on the telephone (we had previously made plans to do this), so I expressed my concern about her and her son and we talked about the situation for a little while. Then, a couple of weeks later, she confronted the group at our weekly meeting. No one except me had expressed any concern or even asked her about her son after she had shared the story. She pointed out that I was the only one to respond and told the other members how angry she was with them for not following up on this.

Now, here is the odd thing that happened. While she was telling the group how she felt, I had an uncontrollable urge to laugh. It was the most inappropriate emotional response possible. To this day I have no idea what prompted it. It seemed like an almost purely physical reaction, because I did not have any thoughts that her pain and anger or her son's suicide threats were funny or pleasant. I managed not to laugh out loud, but I couldn't completely control my face and I know I was smiling crazily with suppressed laughter. I believe she saw this because she gave me a look of pained puzzlement at one point. But neither she nor anyone else ever asked me about it, and I don't know whether the others noticed at all.

(Since that time I have known one or two people who compulsively smile when they are feeling deep discomfort or displeasure, sometimes fear. So if I had to guess I would say that the laughter was somehow triggered by the intense embarrassment or discomfort of the situation. But that would only be a guess, because I was absolutely unaware of any motivation at the time.)

Certainly I was embarrassed about my urge to laugh. I did my best to control it, and if the woman had asked me about it I would have apologized and given her what explanation there was, which wasn't much. But even then, and certainly now, I don't take the laughter personally in the sense that I don't think it means anything about what kind of person I am. And since I know from that experience that it is possible to have an inappropriate emotional reaction that one can't control, I don't use the presence or absence of specific emotions as the basis for ethical evaluation of behavior.

Night Thoughts

I've written before about awareness practice as a self-treatment for depression. I want to say more about that here, and I'm going to talk about suicidal thoughts as a symptom of depression. If you are reading this and know me personally, please don't be concerned. I'm fine. It's just that one of the concrete ways I can measure the positive effects of the practice is that I used to have thoughts of suicide regularly, every few months or so. Those thoughts don't come to me anymore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I don't go to them. I haven't for several years now.

Except once this fall I did, and I want to tell you about it because it's pretty interesting. I had a kind of episode (perhaps in another entry I'll explain how it came about) which consisted of a feeling of intense anxiety accompanied by insomnia. So I was lying awake just trying to accept the feeling and be compassionate toward myself, which is how I handle these things now. And I think it's because I associate those sensations with past depression that it occurred to me that I used to think about suicide in connection with them. And then I made what was pretty much a conscious decision to go there in my mind. So I just allowed myself to have the thought: "I want to die." It was immediately followed by a flood of sadness, which was actually a relief because it was so much better than the painful anxiety I had been experiencing. It was like I felt the knot in my solar plexus just melt away. But at the same time, the thought of wanting to die did not go away. So I stopped the thought (I have the ability to do this now) and I could feel the sadness morph back into anxiety. Which was very unpleasant. I wanted to access the sadness again, so I tried it one more time - I thought again "I want to die" and again I felt the overwhelming sadness.

At this point, though, I began to be concerned that accessing the sadness via the suicidal thought was not a good idea. I sensed that the thinking would soon turn the feeling into a very intense despair that I know from experience is quite difficult to get out of. So I stopped the thought (and the sadness) again and watched the anxiety come back. I tried to get the anxiety to turn into sadness without the suicidal thinking, but it didn't work. I dozed off once or twice when the anxiety waned, but it kept coming back and I didn't sleep much that night.

The next morning, still feeling the anxiety, I decided to re-read a book about depression that had helped me in the past. This turned out to be the way to prompt the sadness without going through the suicidal thinking. I think it was something about reminding myself of the techniques I had used to change my thinking that helped me find the feeling without the thoughts.

I have always believed that many people use art in this way, to help them get access to feelings they can't otherwise. Some people seem to like to listen to sad music or see a tragic movie when they are depressed. I never choose to do this myself. I do have intense emotional reactions to art (usually books or films) that give me access to feelings I hadn't been aware of. But it is always kind of a surprise - I never consciously seek out a particular piece of fiction in order to feel a certain way. (Occasionally I avoid a specific piece of fiction because I think it will stimulate feelings I don't want to have right then.) The surprise seems to be an important part of the catharsis.

I remember once I was in a very unhappy relationship, one where I often suppressed my own thoughts and feelings. One day I was in some kind of new age bookstore and flipped through a book about dream interpretation. That night I dreamed that my chapstick had turned into a stick of deodorant that I was smearing onto my lips. Get it? Like I was deodorizing everything I said? Anyway, I thought at the time, and have ever since, that just the idea that dreams were symbolic somehow prompted me to access my own feelings that way. I think that can be the value of having an awareness practice, or perhaps any kind of artful system. It doesn't determine the content of your life, but (re) framing that content even a little bit can help you connect with it.

Les Fleurs du mal

This topic goes back to a series of posts on love (I mean, uh, coffee) that I wrote last summer. Part of my practice involves nurturing certain feelings or attitudes: compassion, patience, respect, etc. This means noticing and accepting that while I will always continue to feel emotions spontaneously and in ways I can't control, I also have the capacity to cultivate and perhaps even create feelings intentionally. Sometimes it is easiest to see this with negative emotions. If I am honest with myself I admit that I sometimes choose to fuel my anger (for instance) rather than allowing it to die down on its own.

I can do the same with a positive emotion like gratitude. (There are many reasons to cultivate that particular feeling, by the way. Here is an article on the health benefits of gratitude.) It doesn't exactly mean that I just order myself to have a feeling and then I have it. There is an intervening imaginative step. I think about something that I am grateful for (even if it's small) and then gently focus my attention on the sense of gratitude and allow it to blossom. At the same time I withdraw my attention from all the things that might give rise to the opposite of gratitude, which is complaint. (It's all about directing one's attention - that's the thing you can learn to control.)

That's how it works with negative emotions too. Have you ever had the sense that someone (perhaps you...) is looking for a reason to get angry? It's done by withdrawing attention from whatever is positive or neutral and focusing on anger triggers, however small. And then allowing the anger to blossom, or whatever it is that negative feelings do instead of blossoming. Fester. Metastasize.

It does seem clear to me now that cultivated feelings are qualitatively different from spontaneous emotions. Different in this way: spontaneous emotions, even the positive ones, are usually mixed. When I experience impulsive gratitude for something someone has just said or done, there is often an undertone, however subtle, of other kinds of feelings: a sense of obligation, of guilt, of inferiority (or superiority). Similarly with love. I can cultivate loving, caring feelings toward my friends and even toward strangers, but when I fall in love I fall into other feelings too: longing, jealousy, fear. (Or: a sense of obligation, of guilt, of inferiority or superiority.) That's what makes it eros.

This mix of feelings (however subtle) might be described as having "depth." Does this mean that cultivated feelings are "shallow"? Perhaps, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Depth and shallowness are only metaphors, after all. Shallow does not have to mean false. And even deep does not mean permanent.

Isn't there a similar qualitative difference when it comes to negative emotions? Anger that I've been manufacturing doesn't feel the same as spontaneous anger in response to something someone has really said or done. The spontaneous version is mixed -  often with empathy, love, or even humor. What allows me to sustain shallow, cultivated anger - to bear a grudge, for instance? Isn't it specifically a failure to laugh? To experience the other feelings that go along with spontaneous, in-the-moment anger?

As usual, this post has gone in a direction I didn't foresee when I began it. So I guess the point, or a point, or the point I seem to have reached temporarily, is that there are lots of ways to define and describe emotions, ways that don't have to be judgments. It is more a matter of choosing what you want (not to suffer, for example) and then observing what is helpful (gratitude, for instance).

Good Morning, Moon

It's early morning right now, and I've been watching a full moon set through my west-facing window. I woke up very conscious of, though I would not say deeply pained by, the conflict between my more ego-based fears and desires (and the longstanding habits these have engendered) and my relatively new and sometimes still difficult-to-locate willingness to live and act with disinterested compassion. How I handle the conflict will directly affect how I spend this day. Will I carry out the work I've committed to or will I procrastinate? Will I try to force other people to meet my needs and allow my relationships be lost in all my projections, or will I be quietly present to others as they are and say and do what is most helpful to all?

This decision has to be made anew each day; actually several times a day.

There are things I can do help strengthen the connection between my best aspirations and my behavior. But there is no one thing that is right every time. When I woke up this morning I thought of listening to a dharma talk (analogous to a sermon) for inspiration. I sensed, however, that I was likely to listen in a superficial way, without a real change of heart. Some days just sensing that is the beginning of mindfulness. So I sat in the dark watching the moon for a while, but I was really watching my own intentions. Just watching. Later I know it will be useful to watch what I do.

That's the thing. There is no conflict between intentionalism and behaviorism. What really matters, the true object of my attempts at understanding, is the murky middle ground between my heart and my actions. Sometimes I enter this ground from one side, sometimes from the other. Parts of it are mapped now. More will be some day.

More Thoughts on Happiness

This past week I've been in a low mood: touchy, vulnerable. This takes some management, inter- as well as intra- personally, but it isn't threatening unless I let it be. If you asked me whether I'm happy or not, I don't know what I'd answer because I don't think of feelings in that general way anymore. In any given moment I might be feeling happiness or another emotion (or more than one emotion).

The other morning I was drinking my coffee and writing in my journal about my intentions for the day. I've found that this is very helpful for keeping myself on track in terms of both particular tasks and my spiritual practice more generally (honesty, compassion, awareness, being present, etc.). I was thinking about my plans for the day and was aware of feeling somewhat anxious and sad. And the thought passed through my head: "I don't feel happy right now, so this is going to be a bad day." But I didn't pay much attention to it, because I no longer believe that a good day means feeling happy all the time.

It's more than that. I don't need to delve into my reasons for feeling happy or unhappy in the moment. I wasn't compelled to do something to make myself happy. For one thing, I still trusted that planning my day was a helpful thing to do, and I knew from recent experience that doing so would probably lead to some moments of happiness during the day, however fleeting.

But also, now when I do have feelings of happiness, I tend to enjoy them as though they were sensual pleasures - which they kind of are, really. I mean, the reason we seek out the things that make us happy and avoid those that make us fearful or sad is that the physical sensations of those emotions are either pleasant or unpleasant. So now when I'm happy I try not to grasp onto or strain to reproduce or perpetuate what prompted the feeling. I just enjoy it in the same way I enjoy my morning coffee. When the cup is empty, it's empty.

Later, when I was walking to work, it was a lovely morning. One of those magical fall days that feels warmer than its 44 degrees because the air is soft and damp. A little bit cloudy with a low sun that shone through enough to make the sky beautiful. And I enjoy walking itself as an activity. And so I felt pleasure and happiness, and the thing I had to remember was to be open to whatever pleasure was available in the moment, which just meant paying attention to something besides my own thoughts.

One other thing: even though I've been down lately, I have noticed that when I happen to see my meditation blanket, I feel comforted. Not happy exactly, just comforted, as though someone I trusted had said "it's okay" to me in a way I could believe. Sometimes in the past when I've been unhappy or in (psychic) pain I would say to myself "it's okay" or "this is just what being human is." It helped, but it took a lot of work and repetition. Now, though, it's become a skill that I have faith in, so that all I need is a reminder, like seeing the place where I know I'll meditate again within 24 hours. It's not happiness, not a solution, not an escape. Just something that's real and tested.

On Rules

This is a silly story with a more serious point attached. And it even has to do with coffee. The other day I discovered that the cream in my refrigerator had gone bad, so I drove to the coffee shop on my way to work. This coffee shop has a small parking lot, but I usually just park in the much larger lot of an adjacent shopping center, where there is always room. However, this time I decided to give the coffee shop lot a try. At the same time there was someone else entering the lot from the opposite end. I parked in one of the two spaces and he pulled into the other. While I was still marveling about there being available parking, I noticed a sign positioned between the two spaces: "To go parking only." That explained why they were free. And the sign was definitely new. Obviously a good idea, I thought, since the coffee shop is always busy and has a lot of customers who linger all day, which is why I don't usually bother to try the lot.

Now, I noticed that mind had an automatic reaction to seeing an officially printed rule, which was to check to see that I was obeying it, which I was, since I was indeed there for a cup of coffee "to go." It was pretty amusing to watch myself trying to get some kind of ego satisfaction out of this. I even mentally rehearsed -- this all happened pretty quickly, by the way, and was at least partly image-based rather than in the form of internal dialogue; it's only with the awareness practice that I've become alert to these little mental antics, though I'm sure they have always been there -- I even mentally rehearsed what I would have felt obligated to do had I been there to stay (move my car) and congratulated myself for hypothetically being willing to obey the rule.

In the meantime, the man in the car next to me, who is no doubt in a more advanced state of enlightenment than I am, had already gotten out of his vehicle and headed inside, so when I went in I got in line behind him. (Not a problem for me, by the way: I specialize in patient line-waiting.) When I got up to the counter I ordered a brewed coffee to go, which I received immediately and paid for. Then when I turned around to put the (thankfully fresh) cream in, I noticed the guy from the parking lot sitting at a table reading a newspaper. And, I kid you not, part of my mind registered outrage: "Hey! That guy parked in the "to go" space! He shouldn't be sitting down in here!" (Conditioned me is far too polite to ever say something like that to anyone, though I did have a brief mental image of doing so.) Almost simultaneously, the rational observant me realized that he must have ordered an espresso drink (in fact I faintly recalled overhearing this) and was waiting for it to be prepared. And the calm, centered me almost burst out laughing at my ridiculous internal drama.

This is the kind of thinking that used to rule my unconscious mental life and prompt me to make all kinds of judgments about other people and myself and probably be in a continuous state of stress, or worse. With awareness, these things have been brought into consciousness and gradually let go of, disidentified with, drained of their emotional significance. Now they are like echoes of the old life of constant suffering.

There is something about rules, perhaps prohibitions specifically, that prompts either attraction or aversion. Rules, whether one compulsively obeys or compulsively transgresses, offer so much to the ego. They promise identity. I see both urges in myself: there are many kinds of rules (like the rules of grammar) that I've loved to obey and enforce; there are others (deadlines, curfews, no girls in the boys' dorm) that I have perversely resisted. What is true inside me is true of the world around me. For every rule that I enjoy following, there is someone who needs to flout it. For every rule that I resist and flout, there is someone who takes pleasure in observing it.

And there is pleasure to be had in obeying rules. And in flouting them. These pleasures are a lot like other pleasures: best when enjoyed moderately and in ways that don't hurt other people. Or oneself.

I am trying to live by ethical habits, not rules; habits of honesty, compassion, moderation, without strong reactions one way or the other to the world's regulations. This way of living means that I happen to follow external rules more often than not. Sometimes I need them to keep me aware of other people's specific needs and interests. But at times my habits will surely take me athwart of a rule or two. Transgression is not ruled out.

On Moderation

The idea of moderation is important in Buddhism and is, I now see, probably the proper name for what I've been doing even if I haven't always called it that. I began to focus explicitly on moderation a few weeks ago, after reading Procrastination and Blocking: A Novel, Practical Approach, by Robert Boice (Praeger 1996). The book is very helpful, and a key piece of advice it contains is to work regularly at a moderate pace (rather than procrastinating and thus forcing oneself into bingelike work sessions). I had never thought of moderation like that before and, as is often the case, putting a familiar concept into a new context has really opened it up for me. Now I can see all kinds of ways to make use of it.

The other day I was in a conversation where there was disagreement. I was aware that I was likely to react negatively (judgmentally, defensively) to the things the other person was saying and possibly even to express contempt through my tone and body language. So I made a conscious decision to moderate my reactions. This meant expressing my own opinions in a mild tone, avoiding extreme wording, listening carefully to what the person said, at least trying in good faith to be open to it, responding with concreteness and specificity. This was a completely different experience from hiding or suppressing my opinions. Knowing that I was capable of being moderate made it easier to be honest. It meant focusing on the real, practical goals of the conversation instead of on my feelings and judgments. I did occasionally have judgmental thoughts ("this person is a boob," etc.), but I moderated them internally by reminding myself that such thoughts, and the feelings attached to them, are not helpful to me in the long term.

For a lot of my life I have reflexively hidden my real feelings and opinions from other people, sometimes out of politeness, other times from lack of self-knowledge. (Of course it's more complicated than that, but it's definitely been a pattern in many of my social interactions.) With the awareness practice I have become much more cognizant of the frequent tension or conflict between what I'm saying and what I'm thinking/feeling, but it has not always been clear what to do about that, or even how to do anything.

But now it seems to me that moderation is the answer. Moderating my thoughts, feelings, actions and speech helps mitigate the conflict by softening the boundary between inside and outside. Moderation is something that I partly do internally/emotionally, by avoiding inflating my own thoughts and feelings into extreme or ego-serving versions of themselves. And it's partly something that I do externally/verbally in the choices that I make about how I express myself. Using the same process - doing the same practice - in both realms makes them seem less rigidly divided. If I am honest yet moderate with myself, and honest yet moderate with other people, then it's less likely that I experience the boundary between inner and outer, between private and social, between self and other, as conflictual or divisive.

And yet that doesn't make the boundary disappear. I think it just makes it more like a point of connection than a point of division. It is through the practices of honesty and moderation (for now I see that honesty, like moderation, is a practice rather than a quality) that I actively and positively am myself, rather than passively and negatively allowing myself to congeal through polite concealment, defensiveness, or impulsive aggression. The equanimity that I seek internally is the same balance that I can project and perhaps help create externally through moderation.