Emotion In Motion

Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye. I was recently asked if Buddhists cry, which, ironically, made me laugh at first, but then I realized "Do Buddhists cry?" is actually a pretty good question. Well, yes, of course I cry. I rarely if ever cry today about something that upset me yesterday.

I cry about things that hurt the moment I feel pain, but never about something that already occurred in the past or hasn't even happened yet. Now, I've been trying to wrap my head around why that is, and I've concluded that it's related to the important distinction I often talk about between feelings and emotions. Here's a refresher: a feeling lasts between 45 seconds and a minute-and-a-half. That's it.

The feeling then moves on to make room for a new feeling; they move like clouds in the sky or traffic on a busy street: one feeling comes, another feeling goes. That's why we can fluctuate from feeling excited to annoyed, jealous, overjoyed, frustrated, elated, all in an hour's time. All of our feelings are perfectly natural and healthy human responses to stimuli. But, emotions? Emotions are a completely different ball of wax.

Emotions start out as a feeling, but as time goes on, they have less and less to do with our original feeling, and more to do with how we feel or think about what we are feeling, if that makes sense. We then either consciously or habitually pick an emotion with which to express the feeling. That's why I say the two are related, but they are not the same. I mean, how often do we FEEL hurt but EMOTE anger, for example, or we FEEL vulnerable but

EMOTE fear? Especially when a feeling is new to us and we don't know what to do with it. Think of emotion as a verb; an action. It's what we DO with a feeling, whereas a feeling is, well... what we feel. We don't FEEL emotions, we feel feelings. We EXPRESS emotions. I think that best illustrates the distinction and why even though a feeling is brief, we can emote anger long after something has upset us. It's why we continue emoting sadness, deflation, and so on, long after the initial

feeling came and went. Instead of moving on from a feeling in a minute or so, we get stuck analyzing it and constructing a narrative around the feeling, a story we tell ourselves about how we "should" or "shouldn't" be feeling something, sometimes even a justification about how rational our emotion must be in order to fit what we think is unfair, for example, often about something someone has done that we strongly believe they shouldn't have, or... you get the picture, instead of just

acknowledging the feeling and moving on from it, we stretch it out, sometimes for decades, as we try to use it to support some part of our preciously held identity or belief. An easy example of how often we do this is when we say things like, "She wronged me "ten years ago so my anger today is totally justified." We get very precious about it because we think that if we move on from our feeling of rage, for example, then the person who wronged us has somehow gotten away with something,

but the opposite is actually true. If we are still upset about it, that means they still have a hold on us, whereas if we let it go, it means we are totally free. So don't get all defensive about your emotions just yet, you might be protecting the very thing that drives you crazy. So while yes, of course, I feel sadness like everyone else and naturally cry, for example.

We don't have to turn that feeling into an emotion, that is: construct a narrative about it or be upset today about something that upset us yesterday.

Perhaps looking at other feelings would serve as a better example: just like everyone else, I feel anger from time to time, and it lasts about a minute or so, but by being aware that I can choose to let the anger go or let it affect what I'm about to do or say, I choose to channel the energy towards something constructive because I already know that if I don't, it will turn and express itself as something destructive, starting with destroying my own inner peace and then spreading outward.

To channel energy, we must first understand it. If we know that pain is usually at the heart of our anger, for example, then we work with the hurt, not with the anger. That's why I think that pause between impulse and response is so important; it gives us a chance to ask ourselves what is really going on below the surface. Now, you may not want to hear this, but forgiveness is actually the only way to neutralize the pain of anger so we can go on living in peace.

And forgiveness has nothing to do with whether the other person who angered us asks us for forgiveness or even deserves it, it's that WE deserve it. I mean, whatever harm was caused by the other person is bad enough, why make it worse on ourselves by adding insult to injury? When you get angry with someone, you're not punishing them, you're actually punishing yourself. And the longer you stay mad, the longer you have to live with that toxicity.

The FEELING of anger is perfectly natural and understandable; the EMOTION of anger? It's a waste of time as far as I'm concerned. When I feel sadness, I don't try to suppress or push it down, I feel it, but I remind myself that anytime I feel something from the past, I leave the present moment to get there and overlook the situation in the present by focusing on the past. Gosh, I really still don't think that I'm making sense of any of this.

Feelings, as you know, are difficult to explain because they aren't facts. And emotions are even worse because they aren't rational, they are what I often call the potholes on an otherwise smooth path toward euphoria.