Skillful Means Podcast
Skillful Means Podcast offers practical wisdom for everyday life. Host Jennifer O'Sullivan explores navigating life's challenges through the lenses of Buddhist mindfulness, yoga, Internal Family Systems, and positive psychology.
Each month, episodes feature grounded guidance and accessible practices for meeting whatever arises with greater ease.
Jennifer is a Certified IFS Practitioner with over 20 years of experience teaching yoga and mindfulness.
Skillful Means Podcast
#105 Embracing Difficult Emotions
This month, we're looking at a question that comes up a lot:
All parts are supposed to be welcome, but how do we work with feelings we don't like?
Drawing on Buddhist wisdom and the function of emotions, we're exploring:
- Why equanimity is about including our feelings, not surprising them.
- What the Buddhist teachings on dukkha (suffering) can tell us about why fighting against our emotions creates more suffering.
- How so-called negative emotions serve as important internal motivators.
+ Simple techniques to start reframing your relationship with difficult feelings in order to create a welcoming inner atmosphere for all your parts.
Mentioned In The Episode:
Join me for one of my upcoming Pause and Reset gatherings—hour-long meditative sessions combining desk-friendly yoga, mindfulness practice and parts work meditations. The next one is on June 4th and is pay what you can.
~ ~ ~
SMP welcomes your comments and questions at feedback@skillfulmeanspodcast.com. You can also get in touch with Jen through her website: https://www.sati.yoga
Fill out this survey to help guide the direction of the show: https://airtable.com/appM7JWCQd7Q1Hwa4/pagRTiysNido3BXqF/form
To support the show, consider a donation via Ko-Fi.
Welcome to Skillful Means Podcast. I'm your ever emotional host, jennifer O'Sullivan. Before we get into today's episode, I want to tell you about some virtual events I have coming up. As an experiment, I'm hosting monthly pause and reset gatherings. These are hour-long meditative sessions that combine desk-friendly yoga, mindfulness practice and parts work meditations, and they're designed to help you reconnect to your inner wisdom and ground your awareness in embodied presence. The next one will be on June 4th and is pay what you can, so check the show notes for a link to sign up, and I hope you'll join me for that.
Speaker 1:On today's show, we're doing a bit of an about face. Last month was all about grounding the strategies and practices that we nurture in order to stay calm and centered, especially when we're under pressure. But or I should say, and we don't want to use these practices to suppress our feelings Grounding is about accessing a sense of equilibrium within ourselves that is inclusive of our difficult feelings, not instead of them. Admittedly, this is confusing, because often big emotions are quickly followed by words and behaviors that we may later regret. There have definitely been times when I was kind of out of my body watching myself say something I really didn't mean, wishing that I could just pluck the words out of the air before they reach the other person's ears. Of course we don't want to be mucking things up like that and to make things even more confusing. Many of us pick up the impression that emotional expression is a failing of spiritual growth and personal development. I've encountered many people who believe that to be a real yogi or a real practitioner, one must show up in this stoic, unimpacted kind of way and honestly, I get it. I think many of us turn to yoga and meditation to teach us how to feel better, to suffer less. I know I started practicing yoga because I was having all this anxiety-fueled, unwanted, intrusive thoughts bubbling around in my head and the embodied movement of yoga class those same grounding practices I talked about last month. They were, without exaggeration, life-saving.
Speaker 1:After more than 20 years in the yoga world, I've come to realize that not an insignificant portion of people are performing a kind of equanimity, not because they're bad people or dishonest, but because we're trying to model what we see in our teachers. But what we see in their behavior is not necessarily reflective of what's happening inside them when they encounter hardship and, honestly, oftentimes we just don't see them in those situations. I've been fortunate to be in close proximity to Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh a few times. I felt his equanimity wafting off of him like the scent of lavender on a French breeze. There are people who really are at a point in their practice where things don't shake them up, but people like Thich Nhat Hanh have spent decades investigating directly the roots of their thinking and emotionality. In other words, they don't get to this point through emotional suppression. And in fact, during the QA portion of a retreat I attended with Tay, I saw on his face how a retreatant's question affected him. He was moved by this person's expression of suffering. What he didn't do was jump right in with advice. He sat there quietly for what felt like ages, and meanwhile the audience was weeping all 700 of us. Now I can't say with any certainty what was going on in the privacy of Tae's own heart and mind, but I imagine he was practicing exactly what he had been teaching us throughout that week. We approach our suffering, our difficult feelings, like a mother cares for her crying baby. She doesn't get angry at the baby, she takes it into her arms and cares for it tenderly.
Speaker 1:The question that inspired this month's theme is one I've received from yoga students and IFS clients alike. It goes something like this, jen, I've heard you say that we're supposed to welcome all emotions, but I find that really hard. I don't like feeling anxious or sad, and at this stage in my practice I should feel more contented and compassionate, but I find that I still get really angry about things. So how can I work with emotions? I don't want to be having. This is a fantastic question and I'm going to do my best to point you in a helpful direction, but I also want to say that learning to suffer well, welcoming and embracing all of our emotions is the practice. The Buddha and Patanjali both set this out at the beginning of their teachings and both outline a lifestyle that helps us to suffer less. In other words, there are no simple lessons that we can just learn and then move on to new material. It's something that will develop and refine throughout our lives.
Speaker 1:The first thing is that I would invite you to reframe how you think about difficult emotions. A helpful question to get you started is what is it about these emotions that I don't like? What is it that I really want to happen when they show up? When I ask myself these questions, the answers come really quickly. I don't like them because they make me feel bad. The answers come really quickly. I don't like them because they make me feel bad, not just mentally bad, but my whole body feels bad. When I'm angry, I get headaches. When I'm upset, I feel achy and weighed down, and what I want is for those feelings to go away as quickly as possible, because I don't know how long I can tolerate the pain and I also worry that they'll impact my effectiveness across my life domains. You're going to have your own answers, but I bet that, whatever they are, they make sense In my case. Who wouldn't want the pain to go away?
Speaker 1:The Sanskrit word for suffering is dukkha, and in Buddhism, the first noble truth states that dukkha is inevitable, and the second noble truth is that the ultimate cause of dukkha is our own dissatisfaction with the circumstances of our lives. Here's where I pause to say that nothing in the Four Noble Truths suggests that we should endure dangerous circumstances. We're not talking about that kind of suffering, so anyone who is in harm's way should focus on getting help, not challenge their mindset about it. Instead, we're talking about developing the capacity to live in a world that is, by all objective measures hard to live in. In such a world, if we are to remain resilient, fulfilled even, the only way out is through, which brings me to one of the types of suffering that encapsulates my relationship with pain. It's called dukkha dukkha or the suffering of suffering. It's I don't want to have to deal with this thinking which actually gets in the way of addressing what's causing the suffering in the first place. It's born of a longing for things to be different than they actually are. And because dukkha dukkha is my pattern, I can tell you from experience that this way of thinking changes nothing and it just adds to my frustration. And it's probably why I'm attracted to Buddhism in the first place, because, like the Stoics, the Buddha is like girl, just deal, and I sometimes need someone to say that to me.
Speaker 1:There are other types of suffering related to emotional life, including Viparinama Dukkha, which is the opposite of Dukkha Dukkha and stems from the attachments that we hold for pleasant experiences. More specifically, this kind of suffering arises when we're experiencing joyful emotions, because we sense that they're not going to last. In other words, we can't be fully in the moment because we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. Some people go another step further by really doubling down on positivity. It's kind of encapsulated in the good vibes only culture, which is an attempt to lock in happiness by rejecting what might threaten it.
Speaker 1:Another type of suffering is sankaradukka, which is related to the way we talk to ourselves about painful experiences, and it includes a lot of self-judgment about how we should be feeling. I should be more compassionate, or we catastrophize about what the pain means and where it could lead. You could hear a bit of sankharadukha when I noted that I wasn't sure I could tolerate the pain. The implication is that if it goes on too long, I'd be annihilated by it, at risk of getting perhaps too cerebral. Maybe that's too late about our feelings. It's nevertheless a helpful practice to investigate the nature of your relationship to your feelings. You've probably heard the parable of the second arrow. The first arrow represents the first noble truth Bad things are going to happen to you and everyone you love. No one gets through life without some scars. The second arrow represents our reaction to the first arrow. Instead of facing our challenges directly, we take a second arrow and stab ourselves again as we fret about the unfairness of getting struck in the first place. Pain and painful experiences are also subject to change. Like all things, they're impermanent. The clarity we get when we learn to separate the first and the second arrows goes a long way to alleviating those additional types of suffering I just mentioned.
Speaker 1:We can also turn to psychology. These days, psychologists believe that all emotions serve a function. Positive emotions are believed to broaden our perspective, while also helping us to develop internal and external resources that support our thriving. So-called negative emotions have a purpose too. In some cases, they kick off physiological processes that spur action. So the classic example is fear, ramping up the body to fight a foe or run away from danger. Where positive emotions open our minds, negative emotions help us narrow in on solving particular problems. For instance, anger is a response to injustice or harm to yourself or people you care about, and it motivates us to take action to right wrongs. Sadness engenders compassion and caring, and fortifies our bonds with others. Worry encourages us to plan ahead and seek others' help. Resentment indicates a violation of a boundary which probably should be fortified, and guilt encourages us to own our mistakes, so we develop social sensitivity and learn to repair.
Speaker 1:These are just a few examples, but what I want to impart is that difficult emotions are not evidence of bad character. They're designed to turn our attention towards something that needs it. It's kind of ingenious if you think about it, because bad feelings are hard to ignore. It's kind of ingenious if you think about it because bad feelings are hard to ignore. To sum up, psychology tells us that our negative emotions serve an important function for our survival. Buddhism takes it further by suggesting that when we don't take this on board, we compound our pain. I recognize that adopting this view is one thing, but living it may be another. A lot of cultures around the world are very antagonistic to emotional expression, especially unpleasant emotions, and we may have picked up spoken or unspoken rules from family members, teachers and other people in our lives. But my hope in sharing this with you is that I've planted a very important seed in your mind that may take some time to grow, and that seed is. Nothing is wrong with your feelings now.
Speaker 1:You know I like to make these episodes practical in some way, so I want to wind down this show with some practices to help you establish a welcoming inner atmosphere. First, I suggest developing your emotional vocabulary. The more clarity you have about the precise emotion you're feeling, the less encompassing it will feel. For example, I feel horrible is really different from I feel discouraged because I didn't get the response I was expecting. You can't do much with horrible it's like a storm cloud hovering over everything. But naming discouragement opens up some possibilities for learning and refinement. And if you're looking for more emotion words to draw on, I recommend doing an image search for emotions wheel. There are a ton of great ones out there and I wasn't sure which one to link to, so have a go.
Speaker 1:The second thing is to practice creating a bit of space around your feelings is to practice creating a bit of space around your feelings. We can do this by incorporating parts language into how we talk about emotions. So instead of saying I'm so angry right now, try, a part of me is really angry right now. This helps to bring a bit of perspective into the moment, while also helping you to step back from the full intensity of the feeling. This extra bit of space also opens the door for you to find out what's caused the feeling in the first place, and it's at this point that you might ask the part what is it that you need me to know right now? So you're going from I'm angry to a part is angry to a part is angry about dot, dot dot. It's that last bit that turns a big, unwieldy, difficult, uncomfortable, painful feeling into an important messenger.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, welcoming and working collaboratively with parts is an act of self-compassion. We have a right to feel what we feel, and not only that. Emotions are there for a reason. Suppressing them denies us our authenticity and wholeness. It also deprives us of important information that we may need to act on. This doesn't mean that we get to behave unhinged and run around destroying all of our relationships, but I have found that we are far less reckless when we are more in tune with our inner world than when we aren't. Well, that about does it. That went a little faster than I thought it would.
Speaker 1:As always, I put together the topics for this show based on questions I get from from you guys. So if you're wondering about a yoga, mindfulness, daoist or ifs topic, I'd like to hear about it. Send me your questions to feedback at skillfulmeanspodcastcom, and if you'd like to share your story on this show, check out that link to the form in my show notes. And don't forget to check out one of the upcoming pause and reset gatherings. And, as always, thank you for listening and for sending in your thoughts and encouragements Until next time. May you meet each moment with courage and compassion.
