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. From feeling lucky, to feeling sad, feeling funky, and feeling glad, strong feelings, other people's feelings, from being one of our senses to making no sense at all, how do we explain feelings, and what do we do with all of them?
I am not a visual artist, so bear with me as I try to paint with words a simple picture of how I relate to my feelings. Imagine yourself as a bottle of sparkling water. All the various feelings you can experience in life are the bubbles inside: some stay at the bottom for a very long time before they rise, others are close to the surface, and a few quickly float to the top and disappear. The bubbles certainly make life interesting and exciting, and without them,
our lives would be flat and dull. But fun as they may be, it's best not to get attached to any of the bubbles or to hope that some of them last a long time, nor wish that others never surface; they all tend to show up and disappear without much warning. Our job is to avoid reacting to every single one. But, it's also crucial that we don't keep feelings bottled up, because if we get agitated, we explode. So what do we do with all these feelings?
I've been taught to simply observe feelings as they come up without identifying with them. That is to say, witness the feelings without claiming them as your own. Here's what I mean: you know how there is often a voice inside your head telling you one thing, while the other half of you says another? Well, you are neither one of those two voices, you are the one watching them argue. The same is true with feelings: you are not the bubbles, you are the one watching them come up.
Here's a quick recap from the book about the difference between feelings and emotions: If we get attached to something as temporary as a feeling, it turns into an emotion that can last a lifetime. It's how some people stay angry for decades or still "feel" something long after it happened. Emotions, in other words, are the narrative we create around feelings, and we cling to those emotions with a firm grip, refusing to let the storyline go and move on.
Now, back to feelings: despite there being thousands of them, they all boil down to either painful, pleasurable, or neutral. Do me a favor and imagine a triangle where one point is pain, the other is pleasure, and the third is neutral, or ignorant. When I feel neutral about something, it's because I don't know enough about it - ignorance. The more I learn, the less neutral I feel about it, and the more likely I am to either like it or dislike it.
We also feel neutral about people until we get to know them. The rest of the time, we spend every moment of our lives trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Today, however, I want to talk about the middle of the triangle. It's a space where we are not neutral, but we don't harbor strong feelings for or against anything either. We rarely spend much time in the middle area because we are so busy seeking pleasure
or avoiding pain. I'm not talking about becoming numb or stoic, nor am I saying that any feeling is "bad;" all human ambition is motivated by feelings, after all. I am talking about a serene, middle ground between the three extremes. Serenity may not sound appealing if you actually enjoy drama and chaos. It's possible you even thrive when oscillating between extremely passionate about things or fiercely against them; many people live their lives that way.
In fact, all forms of media intentionally dramatize the information we process, offering us written, audio, and video stimulation around the clock. But just because the emotional rollercoaster runs 24 hours a day, it doesn't mean we have to ride it, does it? Especially when it distracts us from slowing down to look within. As the Dalai Lama said, "If our emotions fluctuate wildly and we easily "give-in to hatred and jealousy, even our friends will avoid us."
An alternative to the emotional rollercoaster is serenity, which the dictionary defines as calm and unruffled. It is synonymous with peaceful, clear, quiet, and tranquil, and its opposite is turmoil and unrest. The serene, middle path is the center of the triangle, where we know that feelings are not facts, so we watch them without reacting to them. It's where we stop claiming ownership of feelings because they aren't "ours," they simply appear and disappear like bubbles in sparkling water.
This is not to be confused with detachment, which implies detaching from something to which we were originally attached; it's the age-old Buddhist practice of non-attachment, where we don't cling or resist in the first place, we observe with curiosity. At the end of the day, we can only see things clearly when we are serene. The rest of the time, our perception is colored by feelings, which distort reality.
The gray area is where we are well-informed (so it's not the neutral tip of the triangle), and, yet, it's immune from the powerful pull to extremes like greed, hatred, lust, and disgust. Imagine a clear glass of sparkling water, and we just watch the bubbles appearing one moment and disappearing the next. Mindfulness is the gap between impulse and informed response, so I'm not talking about denying our feelings or suppressing them.
In fact, Episode 96 is about Non-Violent Communication, and how feelings are often indicators of a met or an unmet need. Our job is to identify and understand the need not to be so quick to express the feeling. Do you think your life would be more peaceful if you spend more time in the middle of the triangle, instead of bouncing between extremes? The choice is ours to make depending on the kind of life we want to lead. So, what do you choose? And why?
Rumi said, "Beyond 'right' and 'wrong' there is a field; I will meet you there." And I think that beyond "Like" and "Dislike" there is field, and that's where we rest in acceptance, awareness, and surrender. Namaste. Timber Hawkeye is the bestselling author of Faithfully Religionless and Buddhist Boot Camp.
For additional information, please visit BuddhistBootCamp.com, where you can order autographed books to support the Prison Library Project, watch Timber's inspiring TED Talk, and join our monthly mailing list. We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and invite you to subscribe for more thought-provoking discussions. Thank you for being a Soldier of Peace in the Army of Love. 🙏🏼