Three Ways With a Hard Emotion

In almost every hard emotion there is a moment when the mind offers three doors.

The first is to push it down. Grit the teeth, keep the smile, get through the hour. The feeling goes somewhere — into the jaw, into the stomach, into the sleep of next Tuesday — but not into consciousness.

The second is to let it out. Send the message. Slam the door. Say the thing you were going to regret. The feeling is discharged briefly, at the cost of a relationship or a reputation.

The third door is the one most contemporary advice does not describe.

Watch it, don’t identify with it

Vipassanā is the Pali word — clear seeing. Every Buddhist tradition contains a version of it. The instruction, in its plainest form, is that when a hard feeling arises you neither suppress it nor act on it; you turn attention to it and watch what it does.

You will notice two things at once. There is the story — the person, the reasoning, the sentence you would like to say, the account of who was right. The story is easy to find and it is stable. It repeats itself.

There is also the feeling itself — the heat behind the sternum, the tightening in the shoulders, the small tremor in the hands. The feeling is not stable. If you look at it directly rather than at the story, you will see it move. It rises, plateaus, changes shape, softens. It behaves like weather. It never stays exactly what it was thirty seconds ago.

The tradition’s technical claim — Śāntideva makes it in the sixth chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, where he takes up patience — is that a feeling opposed becomes a feeling fixed. It compresses. It waits to be discharged. A feeling watched — not opposed, not obeyed — is a feeling free to move through and be gone.

This is not calming down. Calming is a specific pleasant feeling, which you would then also lose, and would then chase, and would then be miserable about. The point of the third door is not the feeling that follows. The point is not fighting.

A specific evening

I was chief officer on a charter yacht in the Caribbean, seasons ago. Our principal was a man who loved the coast and had ideas about it — three ideas an hour, most days, and every one of them offered kindly. Late in the evening, once the anchor had been down for hours and the deck team was off watch, he came up and asked whether we could move the boat closer to the point.

The point was worth seeing. He was right about that. But the swell was working around it, and the anchorage where we sat was better than the one he had in mind. The captain went through the technical picture with him and turned to me. It was my evolution to run — bosun and one deckhand on stations, tender to be relaunched, spring on, anchor up, five minutes down the coast, new set, snubber, done.

I noticed the surge of irritation in real time. Not with him — he was a lovely man with a good instinct for a landscape. The irritation was with the shape of the hour: the day already long, the crew turned in, the specific pieces of work that would now be undone and redone in the dark for a preference rather than a need.

I noticed the story assembling — the deck team’s fatigue, the tender that had been washed and covered, the private judgment that this could have waited for daylight. I noticed the story wanted to be shared with the bosun on the way to the tender.

I did not share it. I looked at the irritation itself — the small pocket of heat behind the sternum — and it did not vanish, but it stopped operating me. The move went well. The new anchorage was, in fact, lovelier at that hour than the one we had left, and the principal saw the coast the way he had wanted to see it, and the deck team was in the galley for tea inside forty minutes. The next morning it was not particularly a memory.

This is not enlightenment. It is one specific evening in one specific bay on which the third door was available and I used it. It is available most evenings, in smaller versions. Nothing about the tradition asks for more.

What this is not

It is not a substitute for changing the parts of a life that keep generating the emotion. Chronic burnout is a signal about the life. Chronic anxiety is a signal about the nervous system. Chronic anger is a signal about a boundary that is not being held. The third door does not exempt you from noticing what the life is asking you to change.

It is the move that lets you notice clearly instead of through the fog of a story that never quite resolves.

Read the sixth chapter of the Bodhicaryāvatāra slowly. Try the third door this week on something small, before you need it for something large.

— Оргьен Йентен Дордже