A couple of weeks ago, I attended my 20 year high school reunion. After the Chinese restaurant where we’d gathered shut down for the night, a throng of us, not wanting the party to end, walked down the street to a local watering hole. And so it was that, somewhere around two o’clock in the morning, I found myself sitting in a crowded, noisy dive bar, talking with a couple of old friends about meditation and mindfulness.
I don’t remember exactly what we were saying—we’d had a couple of beers, and it was so loud in the bar we had to shout to hear each other—but at some point, another friend leaned over our table and raised an objection: “But Buddhism says not to feel your emotions!”
Unfortunately, this friend wandered away from our table before we could really unpack his comment. But over the next couple of days, I found myself thinking about it.
On the one hand, I knew this statement wasn’t literally true: Buddhism doesn’t say not to feel your emotions. On the other hand, Buddhism does have a different stance on emotions than Western psychology, or for that matter, Western culture. In fact, Buddhism’s take on emotions is so different from the typical Western view that I can see why my friend—buzzed or not—might have objected to it.
Western evolutionary psychology sees emotions in terms of their survival value. As small, furry mammals and eventually, hominid hunter-gatherers, our emotions helped us react to the circumstances around us and motivate us toward actions that helped us survive and reproduce.
For example, if you were sitting around the campfire after a hunt and someone took your share of the meat, it made sense to get angry. It may have made sense for your anger to drive you toward an aggressive action, like raising your voice or even punching that guy in the face. After all, you didn’t want to lose your aurochs burger or, more importantly, your status in the tribe.
The problem is, today, that the same emotional reaction comes up when you’re with your family at Disneyland and someone cuts in front of you in the line for Space Mountain. Under 21st century conditions, aggressive behavior like that could swiftly land you in Disneyland jail, or worse.
In other words, our natural, evolved emotional responses aren’t always reliable guides for our behavior. Still, from this perspective, our emotions are seen as basically adaptive—as normal, healthy responses to the vicissitudes of life. Generally speaking, Western psychology and psychotherapy encourage us to feel and express our emotions—at least to the degree that it’s socially appropriate to do so.
This is more true now than ever, as therapy culture increasingly pervades our social milieu, encouraging us to focus—perhaps more than at any other time in history—on our individual feelings, looking to them as sources of truth and following them as compasses for our life decisions.
Buddhism takes a decidedly more sober view of emotions. In Buddhism, certain emotions are referred to as kleshas—a term variously translated as destructive emotions, afflictions, defilements, or even poisons. The three root kleshas—craving, aversion, and ignorance—are seen as the cause of suffering and the source of all the other kleshas.1 In Mahayana Buddhism, these three, plus pride (or arrogance) and envy (or jealousy) are referred to as the five poisons.
From a therapeutically correct Western standpoint, referring to these major emotions or mental states as “poisons” feels extreme. Many therapists (including myself, at times) would even object to calling some emotions “negative” and others “positive.” We might also raise a legitimate concern that classifying emotions in this way could lead to spiritual bypassing, a phenomenon in which practitioners use spiritual teachings to deny or suppress their feelings in a way that is ultimately unhealthy.
But Buddhism does have a reason for making this distinction. Unlike Western psychology, Buddhism sees human nature as inherently good. That is, our true nature—sometimes referred to as buddha nature—is always already awake, compassionate, and free. Also unlike Western psychology, Buddhism aims not at treating mental disorders, but at attaining awakening–a state of psychological freedom and wellbeing that is beyond an ordinary state of mental health.
From this perspective, the kleshas are like clouds that obscure the blue sky of our awake nature. In order to enjoy the freedom of that sky-like mind, we have to clear away the clouds.2
However, that still doesn’t mean we should deny or suppress our emotions. As Paul Ekman and colleagues note in their paper on Buddhism and emotions, “The initial challenge of Buddhist meditative practice is not merely to suppress, let alone repress, destructive mental states, but instead to identify how they arise, how they are experienced, and how they influence oneself and others over the long run.”
In other words, the path is actually one of developing mindful awareness of our emotions. Over time, in watching disruptive emotions arise, and seeing clearly how they affect ourselves and others, we become disenchanted with them, and they naturally arise less often and less intensely. As the kleshas arise less and less, we have greater access to positive emotions like love, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
The challenge, for those of us in the West who practice Buddhist meditation, is to work with the kleshas without denying or suppressing them. After all, isn’t the urge to get rid of them or make them go away just another form of aversion?
Can we be present with emotions like fear, anger, or craving, without trying to stuff them down, bottle them up, or skip past them? Can we bring compassion to our own painful emotions, while also seeing clearly how they affect our lives and relationships? Paradoxically, we need to stay present with disruptive or painful emotions in order to eventually have greater freedom from them.
And that’s what I wish I’d said to my friend at the dive bar at two o’clock in the morning. Yes, Buddhism wants us to ultimately be free from craving, aversion, ignorance, arrogance, and jealousy. But the path to that freedom isn’t to suppress our feelings. It’s to cultivate mindful, compassionate awareness of them until, like dark clouds on a rainy day, they naturally dissolve, leaving us to experience the clear sky of our true nature.
As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What did you think of this week’s essay? Please feel free to leave a comment below. And if you enjoyed reading this, you can also like it, restack it, or share it with a friend.
Thank you,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
Craving has also been translated as desire or greed, while aversion has been translated as anger or hatred.
It’s not just that the kleshas bum us out. Buddhism also analyzes these mental states in terms of how they affect our behavior, and the ethical consequences of that behavior. For example, in some circumstances, giving free reign to anger and aggression can lead us to harm others, damage our relationships, and disrupt social harmony, leading us to feel even more painful emotions in the future.
Well explained Chris. Without explicitly talking about it, but contained within your story, you seem to be demonstrating some of the principle by your way of responding to your friend's remark. Rather than react in the moment, you allowed yourself to sit with it and consider a best response to a dismissive perspective.
Chris, I wish I'd had this piece 20 years ago! Excellent work.