Developing Self-Mastery
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
—Leonardo da Vinci
The theme of this chapter can be summarized in these four words:
From Compulsion to Choice
Once upon a time in ancient China, a man on a horse rode past a man standing on the side of the road. The standing man asked, “Rider, where are you going?” The man on the horse answered, “I don’t know. Ask the horse.”
This story provides a metaphor for our emotional lives. The horse represents our emotions. We usually feel compelled by our emotions. We feel we have no control over the horse, and we let it take us wherever it wants to. Fortunately, it turns out that we can tame and guide the horse. It begins with understanding the horse and observing its preferences, tendencies, and behaviors. Once we understand the horse, we learn to communicate and work with it skillfully. Eventually, it takes us wherever we want to go. Hence we create choice for ourselves. We can then choose to ride into the sunset and look cool like John Wayne.
The last chapter, when we explored self-awareness, is about understanding the horse. In this chapter, we will make use of self-awareness to gain mastery over our emotions. In other words, we will learn to ride the horse.
About Self-Regulation
When we think of self-regulation, we usually think only of self-control, like the not-screaming-at-the-CEO type of self-control. If that is all you are thinking, my friends, you are missing all the good, yummy stuff. Self-regulation goes far beyond self-control. Daniel Goleman identifies five emotional competencies under the domain of self-regulation:
1. Self-control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check
2. Trustworthiness: Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity
3. Conscientiousness: Taking responsibility for personal performance
4. Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change
5. Innovation: Being comfortable with novel ideas, approaches, and information
There is one commonality that underlies all these competences: choice. Everybody wants to have all these qualities. We all like to be adaptable and innovative, for example. Who among us does not want to maintain our standards of honesty and integrity? Yet, a lot of us do not succeed at upholding these qualities all the time. Why? Because we often feel compelled by our emotions to move in a different direction. If, however, we have the ability to turn compulsion into choice, then all these qualities may become enabled for us, and we may choose to exercise them if we wish.
The ability to move from compulsion to choice is the common enabler for all these competencies.
Self-Regulation Is Not Avoiding or Suppressing Emotions
After teaching Search Inside Yourself for a while, we realized that while it is important to explain what self-regulation is, it is equally important to explain what self-regulation is not. The simple reason is many people think self-regulation is simply about suppressing distressing emotions. Happily, that is not the case.
Self-regulation is not about avoiding emotions. There are situations in which feeling painful emotions is appropriate. For example, when your best friend shares sad news with you, it is probably best if you also share some of her sadness. Also, if you are a doctor giving very bad news to a patient, you probably don’t want to avoid feeling bad. You definitely do not want a big grin on your face when you tell your patient he only has one month to live—that would be awkward.
Self-regulation is also not about denying or repressing true feelings. Feelings carry valuable information, so if you deny or repress them, you lose that information. One Search Inside Yourself participant at Google, for example, learned to listen closely to his feelings and began to grasp the full extent of his dissatisfaction in his current role. In response, he moved into another role at Google shortly after the course and became much happier and more effective at his work.
Self-regulation is not about never having certain emotions. It is about becoming very skillful with them. For example, I was told that in Buddhist psychology, there is an important difference between anger and indignation: anger arises out of powerlessness, while indignation arises out of power. Because of that difference, when you feel angry, you feel out of control, but when you feel indignant, you can retain full control of your mind and emotion. Hence, you can be emotional and fighting for change without ever losing your cool. Indignation is, therefore, a skillful state and a good example of self-regulation at its best. I think the person who best personified this was Gandhi. Gandhi was not an angry man, but that did not stop him from fighting injustice or leading massive marches. All that time he was fighting, he never lost his calmness or compassion. That’s how I want to be when I grow up.
Like Writing on Water
Still, when there are situations in life where you really need to dampen unwholesome thoughts or emotions, what do you do?
I think the first question to ask is whether it is possible to stop an unwholesome thought or emotion from arising in the first place. Based on my own experience, I think it is impossible. In fact, Paul Ekman, one of the most preeminent psychologists in the world, told me he discussed precisely this topic with the Dalai Lama. They both agree that it is impossible to stop a thought or emotion from arising. That must be the correct answer then, since Paul, the Dalai Lama, and I cannot all be wrong at the same time, right?
However, the Dalai Lama added an important point: while we cannot stop an unwholesome thought or emotion from arising, we have the power to let it go, and the highly trained mind can let it go the moment it arises.
The Buddha has a very beautiful metaphor for this state of mind. He calls it “like writing on water.”1 Whenever an unwholesome thought or emotion arises in an enlightened mind, it is like writing on water; the moment it is written, it disappears.
“My client would like the agreement to be written on water.”
Practice of Letting Go
One of the most important life-changing insights gained in meditation is that pain and suffering are qualitatively distinct, and one does not necessarily follow the other. The origin of this insight is the practice of letting go.
Letting go is an extremely important skill. It is one of the essential foundations of meditation practice. As usual, the Zen tradition has the funniest way of articulating this key insight. In the words of Sengcan, the Third Patriarch of Zen, “The Great Way is without difficulty, just cease having preferences.”2 When the mind becomes so free that it is capable of letting go even of preferences, the Great Way is no longer difficult.
The central importance of letting go leads to a very important question: is it possible to let go and still appreciate and fully experience the ups and downs of life? The way I like to ask the question is: can you have your karma and eat cake too?
I think it is possible. The key is to let go of two things: grasping and aversion. Grasping is when the mind desperately holds on to something and refuses to let it go. Aversion is when the mind desperately keeps something away and refuses to let it come. These two qualities are flip sides of each other. Grasping and aversion together account for a huge percentage of the suffering we experience, perhaps 90 percent, maybe even 100 percent.
When we experience any phenomenon, we begin with contact between sense organ and object, then sensation and perception arise, and immediately after, grasping or aversion arises (some meditative traditions classify the mind itself as a sense, thus elegantly extending this model of experience to mental phenomenon as well as physical phenomenon). The key insight here is that grasping and aversion are separate from sensation and perception. They arise so closely together that we do not normally notice the difference.
However, as your mindfulness practice becomes stronger, you may notice the distinction and maybe even the tiny gap between them. For example, after sitting for a long time, you may feel pain in your back, and almost immediately after that, you may feel aversion. You tell yourself, “I hate this pain. I do not want this sensation. Go away!” With enough mindfulness practice, you may notice that both experiences are distinct. There is the experience of physical pain, and there is the separate experience of aversion. The untrained mind lumps them into one indivisible experience, but the trained mind sees two distinct experiences, one leading to the arising of the other.
Once your mind reaches that level of perceptive resolution, two very important opportunities become available to you.
The first important opportunity is the possibility of experiencing pain without suffering. The theory is that aversion, not the pain itself, is the actual cause of suffering; the pain is just a sensation that creates that aversion. Hence, if the mind recognizes this and then becomes able to let go of aversion, then the experience of pain may lead to greatly reduced suffering—perhaps no suffering at all. Jon Kabat-Zinn has a great example of how this theory works in practice. Here, he tells the story of a man in his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) clinic:
Another man, in his early seventies, came to the clinic with severe pain in his feet. He came to the first class in a wheelchair.... That first day he told the class that the pain was so bad he just wanted to cut off his feet. He didn’t see what meditating could possibly do for him, but things were so bad that he was willing to give anything a try. Everybody felt incredibly sorry for him.... He came to the second class on crutches rather than in the wheelchair. After that he used only a cane. The transition from wheelchair to crutches to cane spoke volumes to us all as we watched him from week to week. He said at the end that the pain hadn’t changed much but that his attitude toward his pain had changed a lot.3
One of the most interesting historical figures to have acquired this insight was Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors. He wrote:
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Funny enough (in our context), this quote originates from the collection of his writings entitled Meditations.
The second important opportunity is the possibility of experiencing pleasure without the aftertaste of unsatisfactoriness. The biggest problem with pleasant experiences is that they all eventually cease. The experience itself causes no suffering, but our clinging on to them and our desperate hoping that they do not go away cause suffering. Thich Nhat Hanh has a very nice way of putting it: wilting flowers do not cause suffering; it is the unrealistic desire that flowers not wilt that causes suffering. Hence, if the mind recognizes this and then becomes able to let go of grasping, the pleasant experiences lead to little or no suffering. We can fully enjoy flowers even though they eventually wilt.
By letting go of grasping and aversion, we can fully adopt the letting-go mind and also fully experience life in its glorious Technicolor detail. In fact, we may be able to experience life more vividly with the letting-go mind because it frees us from the noisy interferences of grasping, aversion, and suffering.
Good karma. Good cake. Yum.
“Okay, you don’t have to let everything go.”
General Principles for Dealing with Distress
Four very helpful general principles for dealing with any distressing emotions are:
1. Know when you are not in pain.
2. Do not feel bad about feeling bad.
3. Do not feed the monsters.
4. Start every thought with kindness and humor.
Know When You Are Not in Pain
When you are not in pain, be aware that you are not in pain. This is a very powerful practice on multiple levels. On one level, it increases happiness. When we are suffering from pain, we always tell ourselves, “I’ll be so happy if I am free from this pain,” but when we are free from that pain, we forget to enjoy freedom from pain. This practice of constantly noticing the lack of distress encourages us to enjoy the sweetness of that freedom, thereby helping us to be happier.
On another level, I find that even when we are experiencing pain, the pain is not constant, especially emotional pain. The pain waxes and wanes, and there are times (perhaps short intervals of minutes or seconds) when a space opens up and we are free from pain. The practice of noticing the lack of distress helps us abide in that small space when it opens up. This space gives us temporary relief and is the basis from which we launch our recovery and find the strength to face our problems.
Do Not Feel Bad About Feeling Bad
We have the tendency to feel bad about feeling bad. I call it “meta-distress,” distress about experiencing distress. This is especially true for sensitive and good-hearted people. We berate ourselves by saying things like, “Hey, if I am such a good person, why am I feeling this much envy?” This is even truer for good people with contemplative practices like meditation. We scold ourselves by saying, “Maybe if I was actually a good meditator, I wouldn’t feel this way. Therefore, I must be a hypocrite and a useless piece of [insert context-appropriate noun].”
It is important to recognize that distress is a naturally arising phenomenon—we all experience it from time to time. Even Thich Nhat Hanh, the very symbol of enlightened peace in the world, once got so angry at someone he almost wanted to stand up and slug him.
Also recognize that feeling bad about feeling bad is an act of ego. It’s a reflection of our ego’s image about itself, and the net result is the creation of new distress for no good reason at all. The antidote is to let the ego go, with good humor whenever possible.
And remember, meta-distress is really bad economics.
Do Not Feed the Monsters
Let’s pretend that monsters cause our distress, occupying the mind and wreaking havoc on our emotions. What can we do to stop them? They seem so overwhelmingly powerful, we cannot stop them from arising in the mind, and we seem powerless to make them leave.
Happily, it turns out that our monsters need us to feed them in order to survive. If we do not feed them, they will get hungry, and maybe they will go away. Therein lies the source of our power—we cannot stop monsters from arising or force them to leave, but we have the power to stop feeding them.
Take anger, for example. If you are really angry at somebody and then examine that anger with mindfulness, you may find that the anger is not constant from moment to moment; it is constantly waxing or waning subtly. You may also find your mind constantly feeding the anger by retelling one or more stories to yourself over and over. If you then stop telling the stories, you may find the anger dissipating for the lack of fuel. Anger Monster needs to feed on your angry stories. With no stories to eat, Anger Monster gets hungry and sometimes goes away. By not feeding Anger Monster, you save mental energy and Anger Monster may leave you alone to play elsewhere. Anger Monster knows people are giving away plenty of anger food elsewhere.
Not feeding monsters is very good economics.
“Okay, how about for starters, I just stop feeding you carbs?”
Start Every Thought with Kindness and Humor
In every situation, distressing or otherwise, it is useful to begin each thought with kindness and compassion for oneself and others.
In my experience, the most important quality of kindness is its healing effect. Imagine taking a rough, spiky brush and repeatedly brushing it hard and fast on an area of your skin. Eventually, your skin will become inflamed and painful to the touch. Kindness is the quality of gently ceasing that harmful brushing action. If you do that, eventually, the skin will heal.
I also find it very useful to see the humor in my own failings. Every time I lose my temper or have a greedy or spiteful thought that does not go away for a while, it is like I have fallen off the wagon again. Of course, I can interpret falling off the wagon as a humiliating and embarrassing experience. However, it is much more fun to think of the experience as a scene in an old black-and-white comedy. Guy falls off wagon in the context of fast, playful music, makes a funny face, dusts himself off, and then climbs back up on the wagon in a quick, awkward, and jerky motion. It is all very funny. So every time I fail, it is a comedy.
And since I fail so often, my life is a great comedy.
Neural Model of Emotion Regulation
In the brain, emotional reactivity and regulation look a lot like this:
(courtesy of Philippe Goldin)
Stanford research scientist Philippe Goldin explains this process well:
In the context of a threat, real or imagined, our emotional state can rapidly shift into fear or anxiety. This shift in emotional reactivity occurs in emotional related brain regions in the limbic system (or the “emotional brain,” represented by the “emotion” bubble). A bottom-up signal is sent to other brain regions to recruit from other brain systems to help regulate (the “regulation” bubble) via top-down signals specific aspects of emotional reactivity. When this system is working, the regulatory systems initiate changes in attention, thinking, and behavior. Using cognitive perspective taking, we can examine what is the source of the threat and determine what strategies will be most effective in modulating the intensity, duration and interpretation of that ongoing emotion experience. I would also add that especially in human beings, this is likely mediated through our view of self, be it positive or negative or otherwise, and our ability to use language and thinking to modulate and understand our experiences.4
This model suggests one way we can think of mindfulness and other practices in this book. Mindfulness helps our thinking brain and our emotional brain communicate more clearly to each other, so they work better together. The engineering types among us can think of mindfulness as increasing the bandwidth of the arrows between the emotion and regulation bubbles so that we get better information flow between them. Mindfulness also gives more power to the thinking brain whenever you need it. You can think of mindfulness as increasing the power output of the regulation systems in the brain so it works even better. In fact, studies suggest it actually does so literally by increasing the neural activity of the executive center of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex. Finally, mindfulness, in conjunction with other practices and insights in this book, helps us make more skillful use of the self and language bubbles.
Dealing with Triggers
One common situation in which self-regulation skills really come in handy is when we get triggered. That is when a seemingly small situation causes a disproportionally large emotional response in us, such as when our spouse makes an almost innocuous comment about something we do and we just blow up. From an objective, third-party perspective, such an event often seems like making a mountain out of a molehill. For example, all Cindy did was playfully twirl the hair of her husband, John, commenting, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” John’s face immediately became red with anger, and he insulted her with an expletive, right in front of his campaign staff.
The first step in learning to deal with triggers is identifying when you have been triggered. Executive coach Marc Lesser provided these helpful suggestions on things to look out for:
• Body: Shallow breathing, rapid heartbeat, and sick to the stomach
• Emotions: Experiencing a flight-or-flight response, either feeling like a “deer in headlights” or having an emotional outburst (what Goleman famously calls an “amygdala hijack”)
• Thoughts: Feeling like a victim, thoughts of blame and judgment, difficulty paying attention
Triggers almost always have long histories behind them. When we get triggered, it is very often because it brings back something from the past, that she’s-doing-that-again feeling. Triggers are also very often connected to a perceived inadequacy about ourselves that is a source of pain to us, sort of like a raw nerve. For example, if I am feeling very insecure about my performance at work, a mere suggestion from my boss that she is slightly concerned about my project’s progress may cause a trigger reaction in me. In contrast, if I am fully confident about my work, my reaction to my boss will be entirely different.
Siberian North Railroad
Here is a practice called the Siberian North Railroad for dealing with triggers. This is a useful practice not only for triggers but also for other situations in which we need to deal with negative or distressing emotions.
The practice has five steps:
1. Stop
2. Breathe
3. Notice
4. Reflect
5. Respond
Jennifer Bevan, one of our class participants, came up with the mnemonic that became the name of the practice. She took the first letter of each step, SBNRR, and created the phrase SiBerian North RailRoad. I like the mental imagery behind the mnemonic. It’s like you need to cool down from all that heat of an emotional trigger, and where better to cool down than one of the coldest and most remote places in the world?
The first and most important step is to stop. Whenever you feel triggered, just stop. Pausing at the onset of a trigger is a very powerful and important skill. Do not react for just one moment. This moment is known as the sacred pause. It enables all the other steps. If you only remember one step in this practice, remember this one. In almost every instance, this one step is enough to make a big difference.
The next step is to breathe. By focusing the mind on the breath, we reinforce the sacred pause. In addition, taking conscious breaths, especially deep ones, calms the body and mind.
After breathing, notice. Experience your emotion by bringing attention to your body. What does this feel like in the body? In the face, neck, shoulder, chest, back? Notice changes in tension and temperature. Apply mindfulness by experiencing it moment-to-moment without judging. What is most important at this point is to try to experience emotional difficulty simply as a physiological phenomenon, not an existential phenomenon. If it is anger you are experiencing, for example, your observation is not “I am angry”; it is “I experience anger in my body.”
Now we reflect. Where is the emotion coming from? Is there a history behind it? Is there a self-perceived inadequacy involved? Without judging it to be right or wrong, let’s just bring this perspective into the situation. If this experience involves another person, put yourself inside the other person looking out at you. Think about these statements:
• Everybody wants to be happy.
• This person thinks acting this way will make him happy, in some way.
Again, bring perspective without judging it to be right or wrong.
Finally, we respond. Bring to mind ways in which you might respond to this situation that would have a positive outcome. You do not actually have to do it—just imagine the kindest, most positive response. What would that look like?
In our Search Inside Yourself class, before doing the Siberian North Railroad exercise, we invite participants to talk about a situation in which they were triggered. This readies them for the exercise. We usually have them sit in groups of three where each person gets to have a two-minute monologue. The topic of the monologue is:
Describe a situation when you were triggered:
1. What was the event?
2. What were the feelings that arose? What was the very first feeling—anger, retreat?
3. Where in your body did you feel it / do you feel it now?
At home I recommend you think about the last time you were emotionally triggered and ask yourself the questions above. This will prepare you for the following meditation.
SIBERIAN NORTH RAILROAD
Settling Attention
Start with 3 deep breaths.
Bring gentle awareness to the breathing. Bring attention to the in and out breaths, and the spaces in between. Negative Emotion
Let’s now shift gears into a negative emotion for 2 minutes.
Bring to mind a memory of an unhappy event, an experience of frustration, anger, or hurt, or an experience in which you were triggered.
See if you can relive the event and the associated emotions in your mind. Managing Negative Emotion
Let us now mentally practice our response strategy for 7 minutes.
The first two steps are to stop and breathe. Stopping at the onset of a trigger is the sacred pause. Let us reinforce the pause by focusing the mind on the breath, and not reacting to the emotion. If you want, you may try taking slow, deep breaths. And let’s stay in this state of pause for another 30 seconds.
(30-second pause)
The next step is to notice. We notice by experiencing the emotion in the body. Bring your attention to your body. What does an afflictive emotion feel like in the body? In the face? Neck, shoulders, chest, back? Notice any difference in level of tension or temperature.
Experience it without judging. What is most important at this point is to try to experience emotional difficulty simply as a physiological phenomenon, not an existential phenomenon. For example, the experience is not “I am angry.” It is “I experience anger in my body.”
Let’s take a minute to experience the physiology of emotion in the body.
(60-second pause)
Now we reflect.
Where is the emotion coming from? Is there a history behind it? If this experience involves another person, put yourself inside the other person looking out at you. Think about this statement: “Everybody wants to be happy. This person thinks acting this way will make him happy, in some way.” Bring perspective without judging it to be right or wrong.
(30-second pause)
Now we respond.
Bring to mind ways in which you might respond to this situation that would have a positive outcome. You do not actually have to do it—just imagine the kindest, most positive response. What would that look like? Let’s spend the next minute or so creating that response.
(60-second pause) Returning to Grounding
Let us now return to the present for 2 minutes. Bring awareness back to your breath.
(Short pause)
Make a tight fist with your hand, holding any of your residual emotion there. Slowly open your fingers and let go of that energy.
And bring your attention back, either to your body, or your breath, whichever your mind finds more stability in.
And just settle your mind there, for the remainder of 1 minute.
In class, right after the above exercise, we always do Mindful Conversation (see Chapter 3) in pairs to give everyone a chance to process the experience. Those who are comfortable doing so may tell their stories and share their experiences. Those who are not comfortable doing so may just talk about how it felt to go through the process itself.
In this artificial setting, the five-step process takes seven minutes. In real life, the whole process may be over in seconds, which may not give you a lot of time to do it right if you do not have sufficient practice. One way to practice this process is to do it retroactively. That means practicing the reflection and response steps after a triggering event is over. The first three steps (stop, breathe, notice) can be strengthened with sitting mindfulness practice. The last two steps (reflect and respond) are best strengthened with real-life cases. Given how quickly each episode moves, it’s hard to train in real time, but it’s just as effective to do it “off-line” retroactively. The more time you spend practicing the reflect-and-respond process offline, the better you will be able to do it in the real-life situation.
The next time you are triggered, remember to take the SBNRR.
“Good news, comrades! To help you deal with negative or distressing emotions, the Politburo has come up with a handy mnemonic…”
How to Not Strangle Your Mother-In-Law
Derek, one Search Inside Yourself participant who had no prior mindfulness training, told me this story:
My mother-in-law forgot to engage the brake on the stroller with my twenty-month-old daughter inside. The stroller went sailing across the driveway, smacking into one of our cars. Thanks to Search Inside Yourself, instead of coming unglued and saying something stupid, I took two deep breaths and simply refrained from comment. Better still, I did it almost without thinking about it, I just brought attention to my breath at my nostrils, and it just worked. I even recognized the racing in my heart and the sinking, gross feeling in my stomach. It was amazing.
If you ever need examples of people with crazy tempers (me), who usually engage mouth before brain, being able to successfully employ Search Inside Yourself training to not strangle their mothers-in-law, you may tell my story.
Derek did not just refrain from doing something stupid at the moment, but he was also able to later reflect on how sorry his mother-in-law must have felt, and he forgave her carelessness with a few kind words. Last I heard, they lived happily ever after. (Derek’s name has been changed to protect him from mothers-in-law.)
Other Ways to Handle Triggers
One way of looking at the Siberian North Railroad approach is as an emotional self-regulation strategy, starting with attentional control and resulting in cognitive change over time. If you understand it that way, it can become a general framework on which we can add other ways of handling triggers. This idea was suggested to me by Philippe Goldin who was, in turn, inspired by a review paper by Kevin Ochsner and James Gross.5
As you see below, the timeline begins with the triggering event and goes from left to right. We begin with attentional control but move increasingly toward cognitive change.
In attentional control, during the moments right after being triggered, we recommend to stop, breathe, and notice, which corresponds to calming the mind and observing the emotional experience in the body. In addition to those, there are other things you can try that may work better for you. One is the standard practice of counting to ten, which is a more deliberate way of invoking the sacred pause. This practice also has the benefit of giving your mind something else to do, thus temporarily distracting it from emotions until it is capable of handling the situation. Another practice is to take slow, deep breaths. Taking deep breaths induces a calming effect, possibly because it stimulates the vagus nerve, which is known to reduce heart rate and blood pressure (I imagine it must be the opposite of the Las Vegas nerve). Lastly, if it gets too overwhelming, you can temporarily distract yourself totally by focusing on something entirely unrelated to the trigger, such as staring at reading materials you have at hand, or perhaps excusing yourself from the room by taking a restroom break (“Break free, go pee”).
Attentional control is good and necessary, but often insufficient. Even if your mind is so highly trained that you can let go of the distress and return to calm very quickly, the issues behind the trigger will remain unresolved and you will still be similarly triggered in the future. Hence, cognitive work is also necessary. Cognitive work here means reframing and reinterpreting the meaning of the situation. It almost always involves seeing things more objectively and with more compassion toward self and others. The cognitive practices we recommend are to reflect and respond, which are reflecting on how this trigger connects with your own past and how it must seem from the other person’s point of view, and deciding what your optimal response would be if you had a choice.
In addition to these, if it works for you, you can also try seeing positives in this trigger. For example, you just blew up in front of your new boyfriend and are surprised at the level of emotion. This is a perfect time to let things calm down and create space so you can both talk about it, using the situation as an opportunity to help him know you more deeply as a person. Or perhaps this is an opportunity for self-discovery. For example, if you already have a mature meditation practice and something your boss says suddenly makes you feel very vulnerable (“like I’m five years old again”), you have just received valuable education on which aspects of your meditation practice you need to focus. Finally, a more advanced but highly effective practice is to apply kindness and compassion in the situation. This is something we will explore in Chapters 7 and 8.
The final piece of the framework is creating a willingness to experience and accept the emotions—in a way, opening up the heart and mind so they become big enough to effortlessly contain any emotion, like the sky effortlessly containing any cloud. We suggest two practices for this. The first is something Marc Lesser calls “meshing,” or visualizing yourself as porous as a mesh screen. As you encounter strong feelings welling up (for example, anger, resentment, fear), let these feelings pass through your body. You can observe these intense feelings moving through you, not sticking to you, and see that they are separate from you. The second, which is my own practice, is to pretend my life is a sitcom and appreciate the humor in every absurd situation. In my life, I have found myself in many unpleasant situations, and most of them can be scenes in a bad comedy, especially bad situations of my own making.
From Self-Regulation to Self-Confidence
Whenever we experience unpleasant emotions, our first instinct is aversion. We do not want these unpleasant feelings; we want them to go away. As a result of this aversion, we shift our thoughts externally toward the other person or environment instead of toward ourselves. For example, when we feel hurt, our thoughts are dominated by how awful the other person is, all because we want to avoid experiencing unpleasant emotions. This process is usually unconscious to most of us.
If, however, through mindfulness and other practices, we bring conscious awareness to this process, then we can see that our externally directed negative thoughts arise mostly from our aversion. Given that insight, if we also develop the capacity to experience our own unpleasant feelings, we may tame aversion, which in turn may tame ruminations and obsessive thoughts. Once we create within ourselves the ability to tame such thoughts, we increase self-confidence.
Earlier in the self-awareness chapter, we talked about how self-confidence can arise from deep understanding of our failure mode and recovery mode. In my engineer’s mind, I think of skillfulness in self-regulation as an upgrade to my recovery mechanism. By knowing exactly how a system recovers after failure, I can be confident in it even when it fails because I know the conditions in which the system can come back quickly enough that failure is inconsequential. If, in addition to that, I can upgrade the recovery mechanisms such that it can recover much faster and more cleanly (that is, causing fewer problems), then I can have even more confidence in it and can subject it to even more interesting and challenging environments. We can think of the practices in this chapter as upgrading our recovery mode.
That is how the practices in this chapter can increase our self-confidence.
Jason, a Search Inside Yourself participant, learned to use the insights of self-regulation to improve his own self-confidence. He considered himself a person who gets triggered extremely easily and, consequently, often found himself in socially difficult situations. During Search Inside Yourself, he learned that being triggered can be a “time-limited” experience once he learned to bring attention to his breathing and to stop feeding his monsters. He discovered that all he had to do was calmly experience the unpleasantness by “riding things out” and “letting my body reset” for fifteen to thirty minutes, and then his “view would open up again” and his mind would be clear enough to think properly once more. He also discovered he could gradually shrink the time it takes to “reset” with mindfulness training. Consequently, he gained confidence in himself.
One unintended happy consequence of this was, in his own words, “If I didn’t learn all this, I would have quit my job and regretted it.” Jason was a skillful engineer, so he was not the only beneficiary of that decision; Google also benefitted by getting to keep him.
Making Friends with Emotions
Ultimately, self-regulation is about making friends with our emotions. All the practices and techniques mentioned in this chapter—the Siberian North Railroad, not feeding monsters, seeing positives in triggers, and so on—point toward befriending our emotions.
Mingyur Rinpoche provides a powerful personal example of befriending emotions. He suffered from full-blown panic disorder until the age of thirteen. When he was thirteen and in the middle of a meditation retreat, Mingyur decided to look deep into his panic. He realized there are two ways to make his panic bigger and stronger: treating it like a boss and obeying its every order, or treating it like an enemy and wishing it to go away. Mingyur decided he would, instead, learn to make friends with panic, neither taking orders from it nor wishing it to go away, but just allowing it to come and go at will and treating it with kindness. In just three days, his panic went away, permanently. “Panic became my best friend, but it was gone in three days, so now I miss my friend,” he half-joked to me. Here he describes the insight he gained from this exercise:
For three days I stayed in my room meditating.... Gradually I began to recognize how feeble and transitory the thoughts and emotions that had troubled me for years actually were, and how fixating on small problems had turned them into big ones. Just by sitting quietly and observing how rapidly, and in many ways illogically, my thoughts and emotions came and went, I began to recognize in a direct way that they weren’t nearly as solid or real as they appeared to be. And once I began to let go of my belief in the story they seemed to tell, I began to see the “author” beyond them—the infinitely vast, infinitely open awareness that is the nature of mind itself.6
The great Persian Sufi poet Rumi beautifully describes the mind of befriending emotions in his famous poem, “Guest House”:
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Inspired by Rumi and Mingyur, and also because I am an engineer pretending to be a poet, I would like to end this chapter with a poem I wrote titled “My Monsters”:
My monsters come in different shapes and sizes.
Over the years, I have learned to deal with them.
I do that by letting go.
First, I let go of my wish to suppress them.
When they arrive, I acknowledge them.
I let them be.
Next, I let go of my instinct to vilify them.
I seek to understand them.
I see them for who they are.
They are merely creations of my body and mind.
I humor them a little.
I joke with them.
I joke about them.
I let them play.
Then, I let go of my desire to feed them.
They may play here all they want.
But they get no food from me.
They are free to stay here hungry, if they want.
I continue to let them be.
Then they get really hungry.
And sometimes they leave.
Finally, I let go of my desire to hold on to them.
They are free to leave as they wish.
I let them go.
I am free.
For now.
I do not overcome them.
They do not overcome me.
And we live together.
In harmony.
“I know they’re now good friends with you and all, but must they hang out here so often?”