UUC MSC, Week 7: May 20, 2021

“Working with Difficult Emotions”

Video of the session (Part 1)
Video of the session (Part 2)

Practice with the “Week 6” recordings at the Center for MSC

Stages of Acceptance

Difficult emotions are emotions that cause us pain—anger, fear, and grief are three good examples. They inevitably arise from the events and conditions of our personal lives, and from broader social and cultural conditions. We're often afraid of them, and turn away from them in one way or another.

In this session we're going to practice turning towards difficult emotions. And when we do that, even with mindfulness and loving-kindness, our pain may temporarily increase. So meditators often wonder how much emotional distress they should allow into their practice. Meditation teacher Thich Nhat Hanh's response to this question is: “Not much!” That's because, although experiencing some discomfort is necessary for self-compassion to arise, we only need to touch emotional pain in order to build our capacity for self-compassion. What's more, if we let too much suffering in all at once, we'll get overwhelmed, and be more likely to resist, and then we won't be able to practice our mindfulness and self-compassion skills as effectively.

Reflect on this well-know poem by Rumi: 

The 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're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
It 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. 

This poem encourages us to "welcome and entertain" even very difficult emotions, and perhaps seeks to reassure us that, ultimately, we have that capacity. Still, when we have the choice (!), we should titrate the amount of suffering we allow in our lives, to keep ourselves from becoming overwhelmed. That’s the self-compassionate thing to do. Sometimes, after all, we aren't ready to have our home violently swept of its furniture; it wouldn't be safe to let the visitor in. So the art of self-compassion is to incline gradually toward emotional discomfort. The aim isn't to rip off the bandaid so that the wound can heal. Instead, we can accept emotional discomfort in stages.

When we move beyond resistance, there are four stages of acceptance (Germer, 2009), and as MSC teacher Christine Brähler has pointed out, both resistance and the four stages of acceptance can be nicely illustrated by extending Rumi's metaphor, and thinking about different ways we might respond to visitors to our home:

o   Resisting (the stage before acceptance begins) – struggling against what comes; hiding in the house, blocking the door, or telling the visitor to go away

o   Exploring – turning toward discomfort with curiosity; peeking through the peephole in the door to see who has arrived. (A thought experiment due to meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg can be helpful here: imagine you're a Martian who's suddenly inhabiting a human body and experiencing human emotions for the first time. "Oh! This is what anger feels like!")

o   Tolerating – safely enduring, holding steady; inviting the guest in but asking them to remain in the entry hall. Here we might use a focussed attention or "anchoring" practice, like focussing on the breath, or the soles of the feet.

o   Allowing – letting feelings come and go; allowing the guest to go wherever they want to in the house…and ultimately, letting them stay as long as they want, and leave whenever they want. (A tall order!)

o   Befriending – seeing the value in all experience; sitting down with the guest and listening to what the guest has to say.

Each successive stage corresponds to a gradual release of emotional resistance, and so to a lessening of the unnecessary suffering that arises when we resist difficult emotions.

This gradual approach means that you can give yourself permission to close when dealing with difficult emotions. We don't want to use self-compassion as a strategy to eliminate difficult emotions—that's just resistance in disguise—but we also don't have to engage with the most difficult emotions in our lives at any particular moment.

Importantly, by the way, accepting difficult emotions doesn't mean not trying to change situations that may have given rise to them—unjust social institutions, for example. It just means learning to hold the pain itself, pain that can easily become toxic if we refuse to accept it. When we accept the pain, we're likely to be able to see more clearly what needs to be done.