Inner Work

For the week of: November 24, 2003

Owing Our Difficult Emotions

The progress of our inner life depends in part on creating a vessel in ourselves to contain energies. The first task in this regard is to discover the ways we waste energy. Then we work to plug those leaks, to conserve energy. The most obvious drain, and the easiest to work on, comes from unnecessary tension in our body.

But another and more potent energy drain lurks within all the difficult emotions that prey on us. These emotional reactions not only waste energy, but also twist our will down unwholesome paths. Psychologists, spiritual teachers, and others develop ways to help us deal with our difficult emotions, usually based on increasing our awareness of these emotional processes in us. As awareness increases, self-acceptance, understanding of root causes, and letting go become possible.

However, the crux of our problem with emotional reactions lies in the way we ascribe their cause to people or other factors outside of us. We shirk responsibility for our reactions, blaming them on others or on our "situation." If instead, we realize that someone else, or even we ourselves on a different day, might respond quite differently to the same event, then we can begin to own our unwholesome emotions, to see that they arise from our own conditioned patterns. If we see that the cause of some difficult emotion lies within ourselves, we then have a greater possibility of choosing to let it go. As long as I think that he or she made me angry, I will nurture that grudge and resentment. But as soon as I see that the anger in me is mine, not his, not due to him, but due to my own habitual emotional pathways, it becomes palatable for me to choose not to perpetuate this uncomfortable and wasteful state in myself.

For this week, work at owning your emotions.

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