Understanding “emotions”, “negative emotions” and “overcoming negative emotions”

[Talk at Yoga Now studio, Chicago, USA]

Video:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So I’m grateful to be here amongst all of you today. Thank you for coming. I’m Chaitanya Chheran.
I’m a monk and author from India, Mumbai. For the last 20 years I’ve been, 20-25 years I’ve been studying and speaking and writing on the ancient yoga text, the Bhagavad Gita. And today I’ll speak on the topic of overcoming negative emotions.
I’ll talk about this in three parts. First I’ll talk about emotions. Then I’ll talk about negative emotions.
And then I’ll talk about dealing with or overcoming those emotions. Emotions are a fundamental reality that we experience in our life and that we long to experience. We all want to experience love, joy, excitement.
And these emotions are what make our life worth living. And yet emotions, although they are such a defining reality of our life, they are hugely neglected in our current way of looking at the world. Our way of looking at the world presently is largely shaped by science.
And since this dawn in the 16th century onwards, science started focusing on observing the world and focusing on what it called the primary characteristics. When we observe the world, we primarily look at colors, tastes, forms, sensations. But science focused on the measurable parameters.
Measurable parameters means length, breadth, velocity, mass. And these it considered to be objective. Whereas the emotions and the experiences are subjective.
If we have some delicious food after this program. It’s not if, we do have a food after the program. And it is delicious.
But if we have some food, now if we ask 10 different people, how is the food? Not everybody will experience the food in the same way. Somebody says it’s lovely, somebody says okay. People are polite, they’ll just say it’s good.
But it’s a taste is something subjective. And science wanted to focus on those parameters which are objective. Because they could be measured and then they could be expressed through equations.
And then we could gain greater control through experiments and through models. This approach of reducing reality to its measurable parameters was phenomenally successful in terms of the advancement of technology. At the same time, even among the top scientists, there have been those who have sounded cautionary notes about this approach.
So Einstein is attributed to have said that all that counts is not countable. And all that is countable doesn’t count. So for whenever our attention goes to one thing, it often goes off from another thing.
So when our, as science and technology’s attention has focused more and more on the measurable parameters, the non-measurable aspect has been undermined. And how to understand it, how to process it, how to manage it, all that knowledge has become increasingly lost. Now, certainly we have phenomenal technological advancement.
We have airplanes, we have mobiles, we have spacecrafts, we have air conditioning. Today, comforts that were unimaginable even for royalty a few centuries ago are commonplace. Air conditions, airplanes, phones, some simple examples.
And despite it all, despite all these comforts and luxuries, we find that more and more people are suffering from mental health problems. While some mental health problems can have physiological or neurological causes, most relate with emotions and behaviors going haywire. And the less, the more we focus on tangible objects and processing those objects through mathematics and science and technology, the more our attention went away from the inner aspect.
And the inner aspect does matter hugely in our life. When we are eating food, going to the earlier example, we would like to know what its ingredients are. If we are dieting or if we are careful about, we want to avoid particular kind of food because of some medical conditions.
At the same time, the main thing we experience when we eat food is its taste. And with all the best technological advancement that we have, we cannot design anything like a tastometer. We can have a thermometer, barometer, but we can’t have a tastometer.
How does this taste? One of the greatest fears in the 21st century, we consider fears of 19th, 20th, 21st centuries. Two new fears have added to the list of the top ten fears of the 21st century. One is the fear of terrorists.
And the second is the fear of rejection. As the traditional social structures have become more unstable, then people are left on their own to form relationships and relationships may break. So there’s the fear of rejection.
When two people want to form a relationship with each other, they would very much want to know, does this other person really care for me? And if, while people are forming a relationship, if we could have something like a love-o-meter. You put it on the person’s heart. You really love me? And it shows a score.
If we could have something like that, we could have so much more security when we are forming relationships. To quote Einstein again, an attributed quote is that he said that gravity can explain the falling of objects, but gravity can’t explain people’s falling in love. So there is a very real aspect to our life, which is related with our emotions and which is not addressed by our scientific and technological advancement.
Martin Luther King put his finger on this almost half a century ago, when he said that we have guided missiles and misguided men. We have guided missiles. With our technology, we are able to guide external objects with phenomenal levels of accuracy.
But internally, there is something within us which misguides us, which disorients us. So I got a sense of this about 25 years ago when I was a student studying engineering in India. And along with my studies, I always had a desire to make some contribution in society.
So I had great faith in the power of education. So while I was doing my engineering studies, I would go to a nearby slum area where poor kids were living. And I would offer them, as a part of a social welfare organization, I would offer them free tuitions.
And as I befriended these kids, I soon found that they came from dysfunctional families. And the main dysfunctionality was most of the fathers were alcoholics. And there was domestic violence.
And as I started hearing their stories, I started wondering whether my teaching them maths or history or English, how much was it really going to help them when their whole home was like hell. Now, when I met those fathers, they were not bad people. They were actually nice and they were grateful that I was coming and teaching their children.
But these kids would tell me that when their fathers would drink, they would become a different person. So that time our organization decided to diversify into helping people become free from addiction, especially to alcohol. So I used to go to the slums and one of my friends used to go to a nearby village.
And over a period of months and about a year, we managed to get a good number of people to give up, to make free from their alcoholism. So this small village, it became completely free from alcohol by the efforts of our organization. And we considered to be a great success.
But one day I came back from the slums after doing my tuitions there and my friend came back from the village. And he looked shattered. I asked him what happened.
And he said that in that village, there had been the local political elections. And one of the candidates, in order to woo the voters, had brought three truckloads of free alcohol for everyone. And not only the fathers, but even their kids had drunk.
So at that time, it was very disheartening for us, but it was also jolting. At that time, it struck me that we were trying to help people and we were earnest in our own way. But I felt that we were trying to help people and it was like pouring water in a leaking bucket.
Now I don’t want to act as if I was holier than thou. I felt that there is something within people which makes them work against their best interests. And it’s not just in those people out there.
It was there in me also. When I was young, I was infamous for my short temper. I would get angry.
In the Greek tradition they say that anger is temporary madness. So I would speak and do things which I would terribly regret afterwards. So I saw that there is something within us which makes us act against our best interests.
And it is driven by feelings, by emotions. Anger is an emotion. When somebody is an alcoholic, at that time there is an overwhelming emotion of attraction towards alcohol.
So emotions are very real. But when the emotions act negatively, at that time they start hurting us. They start not only hurting us but our negative emotions can hurt us and they can hurt others.
All of us have to survive and succeed in the world. We have to struggle for existence. This is from the evolutionary perspective a fact of life.
But it seems while all living beings struggle for existence against the forces of nature. A deer has to be on the watch out. A tiger or a lion may not pounce on it.
A small fish may have to worry that a big fish may not eat it. But we human beings, our struggle seems to be not just against nature. It seems to be against our own nature.
Sometimes we do have storms and hurricanes, extreme weathers which trouble us. But a far more constant trouble for us is something within us that works against us. Fish are caught by bait.
Mice may be caught by cheese in a mousetrap. But all such animals have excuses that they don’t know in advance that the cheese or the bait is a trap. And whatever is dangled before them, it looks like food.
But most of the times we human beings have neither of these excuses. Almost everyone knows that alcoholism or excessive smoking or drugs is dangerous. And to no one does alcohol look like food.
So what is it that makes us act against ourselves? In fact this is a key question that is raised in this ancient yoga text the Bhagavad Gita where the questioner asks the teacher what impels me to act against my moral sense, my intelligence and my intention. And in response the Bhagavad Gita describes a three level model of the self to help us understand why we do what we do. It explains that our existence is three dimensional, body, mind and soul.
This could be broadly compared to a computer system in which we have the hardware, the software and the user. The hardware is the body, the software is the mind and the soul is the user. So with our technology, with our scientific advancement we have worked to improve the hardware.
But the software of the mind is where emotions are generated and that is where negative emotions are also generated. And these negative emotions are like viruses corrupting the software. Sometimes you may get a new phone or a new computer and with external appearance it looks so good.
But we try to turn it on, nothing works, nothing works at all. Last year I was in central New Jersey, I was invited to speak at a mental health care center. I spoke to the mental health care providers because when they are taking care of mental health patients they themselves get depleted, they need care and support also.
So they were telling me about some of their patients and the people who need mental health care, it’s not that they are insane people. We may have some stereotype or idea of insane people as being disheveled, unclean. But these people were just like us.
But somehow negative emotions choked their potential. So it’s like a new machine, it’s like a very attractive, clean looking machine but with corrupt software nothing works. So when these negative emotions come in, it’s like the software of the mind getting corrupted.
And once the software of the mind is corrupted, no matter how much we work at the level of the hardware, that is not the solution. It’s good to have good hardware but it’s equally important to work at the level of the software to make sure that it is protected. So to understand this three level model of the self, body, mind and soul, let’s do a simple thought experiment.
So wherever you are seated, you can sit comfortably and you can close your eyes. And with me you can take three deep breaths. One.
Two. Now with your eyes closed, look at what you see in front of you. Because your eyes are closed, you can’t see what is physically in front of you.
And yet, it’s as if there is some screen inside you on which you may see various things. You may see this room, you may see your home, you may see your car, you may see your phone, you may see a loud one, you may see a series of images coming and going. You may see a dull haze of various colors.
Whatever it is that you see specifically, you see that on something like an inner screen. Now while you are observing that inner screen, try to take a step back and catch sight of the person who is observing this inner screen. I repeat, this person who is observing the inner screen, we can call that person the inner seer.
Try to catch sight of that inner seer. Take a step back while looking at the screen and see if you can see the seer. No matter how much you step back, the seer seems to step back with you.
What you are looking for is what you are looking with. That inner seer is you, the soul. And the inner screen is your mind.
You can take one deep breath and you can open your eyes. Thank you. So normally when we function, at that time the inner seer, the inner screen and the outer scene, they have to be in one line.
And that’s how perception takes place. A, sometimes we say somebody is absent minded. You are talking with someone and maybe by their expression of the eyes we see they are somewhere else.
Then you may tap them. Earth to you, earth to you. Wherever you are, whichever planet you have gone to, please come back to earth now.
So what happens at that time? Physically they are still there. The outer scene is still the same and obviously whoever is a conscious being inside, that is still there. But in between the inner seer and the outer scene, there is the inner screen.
But the inner screen is showing something else. The inner screen is normally meant to function like a window which shows us the outer world. But the inner screen can become like a TV and can show anything from anywhere in the universe or beyond the universe.
So when the inner screen becomes like a TV, we get distracted. And we are talking here about negative emotions. So normally we think of emotions as a one step experience.
That say if something stings us, something pierces our foot, we will feel pain, we will get angry, we will feel hurt, we will feel alarmed. It might be a thorn piercing our leg. So we think that stimulus in the outer scene causes the emotion of pain.
But suppose a nail had already gone into our leg and there is a danger that we might get tetanus or some other disease like that. And then we go to a doctor and the doctor gives an injection. When the doctor gives a shot, that shot, the sensation is the same as when a nail might have gone inside.
But we will feel relief. Yes, I got the shot now. I am protected from the disease.
So it’s not just the sensation that causes the emotion. The sensation is what comes from the outer scene. But in the inner screen, there are our conceptions.
So the window from which we see the outer world, this window is not just a transparent window for us to see things. This window also processes and gives us a processed input. So our experience of emotions is not just a one-step process.
The stimulus causes the emotion. The stimulus appears on the inner screen and the inner screen processes or interprets the emotion. And based on the interpretation of the emotion, we have the experience.
I’ll give another example, a simpler example to illustrate this. Say we have come for a program and we know there is a feast. And maybe there is some delicious dessert.
Say there is something like, would anyone like to tell what is their favorite dessert? Sorry? Chocolate cake. Chocolate cake, thank you. So there is a chocolate cake.
And it’s delicious and everybody is waiting to have that. So normally if we know there is chocolate cake, there will be anticipation. And then when the feast is served, we find there is no chocolate cake.
This is what happened. Can you guys see? Maybe we come to know that the cook messed up the whole thing and they decided to cancel because it was not cooked well. They cancelled it from the menu.
Now for most people, it would be disappointing. It will be annoying. It will be irritating.
But suppose just before coming for the feast, somebody has been diagnosed with diabetes. And they love chocolate cakes. And thinking, oh, everybody will be eating chocolate cakes.
I alone won’t be able to eat it. It’s so miserable. And when they come to know there is no chocolate cake, for them there will be relief.
Oh, no chocolate cake. So that means that it is not just the absence of the chocolate cake as a stimulus, as an event that produces the emotion. The event is important.
But the event is interpreted by us based on our context. And that is what produces the emotion. So when we are talking right now, we are talking about negative emotions.
I talked about how negative emotions can hurt us and hurt others through us. So where do these negative emotions come from? At one level, going back to the example of, say, people who are alcoholics. Every alcoholic will have some story behind them.
Maybe they face some terrible distress in their life or they had some bad association because of which they became alcoholics. It’s true. But at the same time, it is not just somebody else might have gone through the same situation and they may not have become alcoholics.
So the event is something which is not in our control. So for all of us, we will sooner or later face negative situations in life. And when these negative situations come, we can’t just wish them away.
But negative situations alone don’t have to produce negative emotions. In between the negative situation and the negative emotion experienced by us is our capacity to process, our capacity to interpret. And often certain interpretations may be so habitual for us that we may not even notice that we are doing an act of interpretation.
Say, two people are staying here and two students are there. This is their college or this is their workplace. And both of them are passing by.
Along the way, there is a bar. Now one of them is alcoholic. The other is not interested in alcohol.
When the first person passes by, desire keeps coming. Come on, let’s drink. No, no, no.
I want to drink. I have a lot of work to do. I can’t drink today.
Hey, you have a lot of work to do. If you drink, you’ll relax. Then you can work better.
So all sorts of thoughts will go on in the mind. For the person who has drunk earlier, habitually drunk earlier, for somebody who is not drunk, will just pass by. They may not even notice the bar.
So the stimulus is there. But the effect of that stimulus, the emotion that is produced within us by that stimulus, it is not dependent on stimulus alone. It is dependent on how we process that stimulus.
And how we process it is determined by the impressions that are stored in our mind. The mind is not just a window. The mind can also be a TV.
But whether it is a window or a TV, it functions based on the impressions stored within it. Whatever actions we do in the past, the past actions become impressions within us. And these impressions come up as propositions.
Somebody who has drunk repeatedly, that creates an impression of alcoholism within. And then that comes as a proposition. Drink, let’s drink, let’s drink.
Now if the impressions were not there, the proposition would not come. So going back to the software example I gave earlier of the mind being like the software. Suppose somebody has visited a particular site repeatedly.
Say they have visited sports.com because they love sports. And now they come for a spiritual program and they hear about spirituality. Oh, that’s quite interesting.
I want to read more about it. And they go in their browser and they type SP to go to spirituality. But what comes up? Sports.com. They had no desire to go to sports.com at least then.
But because they have gone to sports.com repeatedly, so sports.com comes as an autocomplete now. But if they consciously keep typing spirituality.com, they can go to spirituality. So this example that in the software may give us certain promptings.
But we don’t have necessarily accept those promptings. We can choose them. Choose whether to accept it or to do something else.
Similarly for us, based on whatever incidents may have happened in our life or whatever actions we may ourselves have done in our life, certain impressions are stored. And those impressions may lead to negative emotions. So negative emotions, if we quarrel with someone.
And in the past, we may have experienced a quarrel leads to a fight and a fight leads to violence. And violence leads to terrible complications or one fight means people just break apart after that. So that fight may create fear.
One small quarrel might create fear, might create loneliness, might trigger fears of abandonment, might take us into depression. So here what has happened, the quarrel is something which is just a fact of life. One of my friends is a marriage counselor.
And he told me that in his experience, there are only two kinds of couples. Those who quarrel with each other and those whom you don’t know very well. So when two people are together, there are always going to be disagreements.
But there is a way to process them and to move on in life. But if somebody has had those negative experiences of small quarrels becoming very big, then that might just cause enormous fear. So all of us, if we look at our lives, we will find that certain negative emotions are prominent within us.
And those, some situation comes up and those negative emotions start overwhelming us. But if we see these negative emotions as something which is a proposition coming from the mind, the situation does not necessarily have to stimulate that emotion. The situation may lead to the proposition from the mind.
Like as soon as we type SP using the keyboard, immediately the keyboard is the hardware. And the hardware, I type SP and immediately the software gives me sports.com. So there is some stimulus from the hardware. But that stimulus, just typing SP doesn’t have to lead to sports.com. It can lead to something else also.
But in that particular machine, typing SP will lead to sports.com. So similarly for us, when a particular stimulus comes, that stimulus may trigger some emotion within us. Now our typing SP and sports.com coming, this is not a one step thing. We type SP and then when sports.com comes, we press enter.
Then it goes to sports.com. Similarly for us, when we experience a certain emotion, it is not just the situation that triggers the emotion. The situation may come in our life. But that situation triggers or activates a particular proposition within us.
And when we accept that proposition, that is when that emotion takes us over. So we, if we understand that the emotion that is coming within us, this is simply a proposition of the mind. It is not something that we necessarily have to accept.
What do we mean? Now I’m moving to, so I talked about emotions, then I talked about negative. Negative emotions come not just by negative situations, but also by the impressions that are stored within us, which cause those negative emotions to come as propositions. Now I’ll talk about the last part, about overcoming.
So for overcoming negative emotions, the first thing we need to do is to recognize that we are different from our emotions. That we are not our emotions, we are the experiencer of our emotions. And not just the experiencer of our emotions, we are actually the chooser of our emotions.
When an emotion comes as a proposition, say somebody does something which upsets us, and then we start feeling angry. When that, at that initial moment the anger comes, that’s an emotion, but that’s a gentle push. This person is so unreasonable, so irresponsible, so annoying.
At that time, when the emotion has come, that is a proposition. When we give it our attention, at that time it starts growing. And then the more attention we give, the more it grows.
Every emotion initially comes as a thought. And when we invest our consciousness into it, it grows into an emotion. Once it grows into an emotion, it may grow into an obsession.
So example for this could be a snowball. At the top of a hill, initially there is no snowball. There is just a snow pebble.
Snow pebble and somebody could just kick it with a toe and it would break apart. But as it keeps moving down, down, down, down, down, it gains mass and it gains momentum. And that same snow pebble which a person could have cracked with just their toe, by the time it comes down, it might become such a giant ball that it can knock over a person.
It can break the bones of a person. Similarly for us, initially what comes as a proposition within us is just a thought. It’s like a snow pebble.
When we give our attention to it, at that time it starts growing. So we could use the word thought in two different senses. I got a thought.
There thought refers to simply just an event that has occurred in our mind. But we can also say, I have given this a lot of thought. That means we have given it our attention and our contemplation.
We have analyzed it deeply. So we could put these two meanings of the word thought together and say that not every thought deserves our thought. Not every thought that pops up within us deserves to be thought about.
Or another way to put it is that our thoughts have no power till we give them our thought. A thought pops up within us. Our thoughts don’t have power till we think about them, till we give them our thought.
So the emotion of anger has popped up within me because of something that has happened. And when that has happened, at that time if I just, instead of identifying with it, I identify it. That means rather than saying I am feeling angry, if I can just preface it with my mind is saying I am feeling angry.
Now what do I mean by the mind is saying? The mind is like the software. So the software is proposing, visit sports.com. It’s not that I have to reject it, but it’s not that I have to accept it. I can evaluate it.
So a very good way to deal with the negative emotions of the mind and in general to deal with the mind is to personify it as another person separate from us. So suppose we have a child or a friend and that person gets upset. Now when they are upset, we are concerned.
But just because they are upset with something and they tell us, oh this boy hit me, so you go and hit this boy. It’s not that the mother is immediately going to go and hit that boy. The mother is going to, what happened exactly? So the mother will hear what the child is saying.
The mother will also be evaluating what the child is saying. And based on that evaluation, mother may tell, you hit him first. That’s why he hit you back or whatever.
The appropriate course of action will come out thereafter. So similarly, if we understand this inner dynamics, that the emotion that comes up within us, it’s like a snow pebble at the top of a mountain. If instead of identifying with it, we identify it.
Instead of saying, I am feeling depressed. I am feeling exasperated. The mind is saying, I am feeling exasperated.
As soon as we just preface that emotion with the mind is saying, it creates a distance. And as soon as it creates a distance, we can evaluate it. So we don’t have to, generally we think of dealing with our emotions in two ways.
Either we express them or we repress them. And both are unhealthy. If we just express our anger, the other person may just feel terribly wounded, terribly hurt.
And we may ourselves speak words which we do not want to speak. But we can’t even repress the emotions. If you are angry and if you keep repressing that anger for a long time, eventually it will come up in an ugly form.
But what we could do, not express, not repress, but process. We can process the emotion. It’s like a mother, when the child is crying, child says, that boy hit me.
You go and hit him. Now the mother will process what the child is saying. Similarly, we can process.
And by processing, we can respond appropriately. And the practice of yoga is ultimately meant to give us a spiritual anchor. A spiritual anchor by which we can process our emotions steadily.
Yoga has various aspects to it. One is the physical aspect of the yoga wherein we do various postures by which we try to heal and strengthen and shape our body. The word yoga originally in Sanskrit means connection.
It refers to the connection of the finite consciousness with the infinite consciousness. Of what we call as a soul with the ultimate, the supreme soul. And this consciousness connection can be established in various ways.
Bhakti yoga is the process of yoga of establishing a connection through the power of devotion. Through devotion, we establish a spiritual connection. And that spiritual connection brings us stability.
How does all this related with processing emotions so that we can respond healthily? I’ll conclude with one metaphor and one story. Suppose we are in an ocean. And in that ocean, many waves are coming.
Now we may decide I don’t want to be swept away by the waves. But our strength is finite. If the waves are very strong, we will get swept away.
But if in that ocean, above is a helicopter. And the helicopter throws a rope down. And we hold on to that rope.
The waves will still hit us. But if we manage to hold on to that rope, then the waves won’t toss us away that forcefully. And holding on to the rope will also require effort.
Because when the waves come, they may hurl us very strongly. And we have to strain our muscles to hold on to that rope. But holding on to the rope requires far lesser effort.
And is far more productive than trying to fight the waves. Even if we use all our strength, when the waves come, we can’t fight the waves. Very difficult.
So the rope is our spiritual connection. Through our meditation, through our prayer, through our spiritual practices, we are all meant to develop our own spiritual connection. We find our rope and we get our grip on the rope.
And once we have gripped that rope firmly, then the waves that will come, they are like the emotions that come within us. They will be stimulated by outer situations. They will be stimulated by inner impressions.
Or they will be stimulated by a combination of both. But when these wave-like emotions come, if we can hold on to this rope, that is our spiritual connection, then we won’t be that affected by negative emotions. And we can, once the emotion comes as a forceful wave, we hold on to it, and then the wave comes, it pushes us, but by that holding on, we are not that swayed by the wave.
And then the wave goes. So emotions will arise within us, the proposition will come, and at that time we’ll be pushed. But instead of trying to push back against the wave, we overcome emotions not by fighting against the emotions, but by rising above the emotions, raising our consciousness to a higher level, focusing on a higher purpose.
So the kirtan that we did before this talk started, that is actually one time-honored process by which we can develop a spiritual connection. So when I first came to America several years ago, I had gone to university, and I spoke there on the topic of regulating our mental diet. I spoke at a vegetarian society.
And after that, one boy came and talked with me, and he said, just before this class, I was contemplating suicide. He said, I had been in a relationship with a girl, and she had broken up with me. I was devastated.
So he said, as I was walking along gloomily in the campus, I saw a poster of the program which I was conducting. And he said, now after hearing the talk, I understand that it is not I who wanted to commit suicide, it was my mind which was proposing, commit suicide, commit suicide, commit suicide. I told him that this spiritual insight is literally life-saving for you.
I encouraged him to connect with the Bhakti Yoga Club which was there. I encouraged him to read the Bhagavad Gita, which is the yoga text which talks about the mind. I also write daily on the Bhagavad Gita at a blog called GitaDaily.com. I write daily a 300-word meditation on the practical application of that spiritual knowledge.
So I encouraged him to read that. And every year once or twice when I come from India to America, I would meet this boy. Last year when I had come, I met him again, and he told me he went through a similar situation.
He seemed to be in a steady long-term relationship, but the girl broke up with him, and she sent him a text that, I’m blocking you, don’t try to contact me. And he was so enticed, he just went straight to his room, and there he closed the door, pulled down the windows, pulled the drapes, turned off the lights, and then he, over the years he had been practicing Bhakti Yoga, and he was like music. So he picked up his violin, and he started doing kirtan.
He started singing the mantra, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Ram, Hare Ram, Ram Ram, Hare Hare. He told me that he sang continuously for six hours, pouring out his heart, calling out in devotion, and as he kept calling out, calling out, everything was dark externally, but he felt as if I was being bathed in a sublime light internally. I felt as if I was being hugged by a divine presence.
I felt comforted, I felt healed. That which could have been a very depressing experience for him turned out to be a very enriching experience. And that happened because he took shelter of that spiritual connection.
So when the news of the breakup came, that proposition came, terrible. And when he went into the room, he could very well, in the darkness of the room, have acted on that proposition. Okay, commit suicide.
But because he had practiced spirituality, so within him, the spiritual practices also created an impression. And that spiritual impression led to the prompting. Meditate, sing, pray, connect spiritually.
And he listened to that proposition. And when he listened to that proposition, that was like he took hold of that spiritual connection, that rope, and that gave him shelter. So for all of us, a similar opportunity is there.
We may all be having different negative emotions that might come within us at different times. But whatever be the specific negative emotion, if we develop our overall spiritual connection, we’ll find that that spiritual connection will give us the strength to resist the outer negativity as well as the inner negativity. Whatever life may get us to, our spirituality will get us through.
Whatever life may get us to, our spirituality will get us through. I’ll summarize what I spoke today. I spoke on the topic of overcoming negative emotions in three parts.
Emotions, negative, and overcoming. Emotions, I talked about how that is what we long to experience, and that’s what we most strongly experience. And yet, in the scientific world view, because of the focus on measurable parameters, emotions are largely left out.
With all our technological advancement, we can’t have a tastometer or a lavometer. And because of having developed technologically, we have guided missiles. But because of having neglected the emotions and the inner aspect of life, we have misguided men.
And that’s why despite having so much technological progress, mental health problems have become enormous. So to understand negative emotions, we discussed how something within people seems to work against them. Like in my experience in social service, I found that even if people were helped to get off alcohol, they relaxed.
So it’s like pouring water in a leaking bucket. And what was it that not just people out there, every one of us seems to have some self-destructive impulse within us. And to understand that, I talked about a three-level model of the self given in the Bhagavad Gita, the body, mind, and the soul, like the hardware, software, and user.
So no matter how good the hardware, if the software is corrupt, the device can’t be used. Similarly, no matter how healthy or strong or whatever a person may be, if the mind is disturbed, they can’t function well. And what corrupts the mind’s software? Talked about how? The three-step process.
Our actions lead to the formation of impressions in the mind. And the impressions lead to propositions. So somebody who has drunk alcohol repeatedly, when they pass by a bar, the proposition, drink alcohol, drink alcohol, comes strongly.
And just like if somebody has visited sports.com repeatedly, as soon as they type SP, even if they want to go to spirituality, sports will come up. So if based on our experiences in life, we may have had some negative experiences, they have created some negative impressions, we might have negative emotions coming up. We have a quarrel, and immediately, a fear of abandonment and loneliness might come up.
So when we understand this three-level model of the self, to understand it, we did a thought experiment of how? There is the inner seer, which we can’t see, but we can intuitively know. There is the inner screen, on which we see the outer world. So the inner screen is the mind, the inner seer is the soul.
And what we can do is, that we can check how this inner screen is working. It can work as a window, it can work as a TV. And the inner screen is where the impressions are present, and that is where our interpretation of the outer event happens.
With the outer event, a piercing sensation on our foot can cause us pain and annoyance and anger, if it’s a nail piercing. But if it’s a shot giving us antigenous medication, it can bring relief. The same food item, say, chocolate cake, not being there can cause annoyance to some, but can cause relief to someone else.
So our experience of emotions is not a one-step process, but a two-step process. And if we can understand this, that the emotion doesn’t just come from the situation, but from the impression in the mind, then we can face negative situations without necessarily going into negative emotions. To do that, instead of identifying with the mind, we identify the mind.
Rather than, I am feeling angry, the mind is saying, I am feeling angry. So treat the mind like we would treat a friend whom we want to counsel or a child whom we want to pacify. And by personifying the mind as someone different from us, we can better process the mind and the emotions coming within it.
And for processing these emotions, another big aid is if we have inner stability. And inner stability can come by our spiritual connection. Our emotions are like waves which will shake and batter us.
But if we are in the ocean and we can hold on to a rope dropped by a helicopter, then the waves won’t batter us that much. Similarly, our emotions will come, situations will come, and they’ll trigger emotions. But if we have developed a strong spiritual connection, then we can say no.
Or we don’t have to, by default say, get carried away by the emotion. We can process that emotion and respond healthily. And I talked about the story of the boy who earlier, because of breakup, was considering suicide.
But by becoming spiritual and by taking shelter of his spiritual side through kirtan, what was a depressing experience became transformed into an enriching experience. So for all of us also, whatever life may get us to, our spirituality can get us through. Thank you very much.
Any questions or comments? If any of you would like to share any point you felt spoke to you, which you would be carrying home with you, feel free to share that. One part that spoke to me was the mind or television. We can choose what things we replay conscious of the choice is often the issue.
So I appreciate you creating that awareness of making sure that we understand that inner screen of processes from the window or from television. Because all the negative experiences don’t apply to what may be happening at this moment. They are just occurring.
And it doesn’t mean you have to address it. That’s true. Beautiful.
Thank you. When the inner screen comes up as something comes up, it is for us to select whether we get carried away by the TV or we see it as a window. If you consider there are two common mental health problems that most people have today.
One is depression and the other is anxiety. And in terms of this inner screen metaphor, basically depression occurs when something goes wrong in our life and then the mind starts acting like a TV which shows all the bad things that have happened in the past. This person did like this to me.
Oh, I made this mess over here. Oh, this thing went wrong over there. And as all those negativities start playing within us, replaying within us, we start thinking my future is going to be more of the same.
And that’s how the mind going into the past and replaying the past negativity causes depression. Conversely, the mind goes into the future. It becomes a future TV.
Oh, this may go wrong, that may go wrong, that may go wrong, that may go wrong. That’s what causes anxiety. So if you could just become aware of this inner screen, we could become more equipped to combat both depression and anxiety.
Thank you. Thank you. Yes? So you gave an analogy of sports.com and spirituality.com. Yeah.
So I think spirituality.com when the situation or the people I don’t care very much about. In my life, the more I care about the people that are close to me, the more it goes to sports.com, and I’m already at sports.com without even having to… It’s instantaneous almost. That’s true.
If you have a rough time, just stop and do something else. Yeah, I understand. Actually, the people around us affect us a lot.
Say that again. No, I said that. Now, for me, when the… He said that when the people around… Do you want me to repeat what he said? Okay, I said it.
The people around us affect us a lot because they are often the source of the propositions for us. So if we have spiritually minded people around us, then they will propose that we do something spiritual. The world we live in today, most people are more materially minded than spiritually minded.
Now, this doesn’t mean that if the people whom we care for, we necessarily have to disconnect from them. But we have to recognize that they are at this level of consciousness. All of us are on a journey of spiritual evolution.
And we all are at different levels. And we need to make sure that from where we are, we progress, we don’t regress. And through our relationships, some of them may be a little more materially minded than us.
We might be a little more spiritually minded. But through our relationships, we can also help them move forward to become more spiritual. So if that is not happening, then we may need to increase our spiritual connections a bit more.
Spiritual growth is not so much about rejecting any connections. It is more about adding some new connections by which we get more spiritual prompts externally. And then that will keep us spiritual.
My question was a bit different. Okay, sorry. Let me try it again.
If the situation is not that important to me, then at least that’s in my life. I agree. No, I agree with you.
Oh, also her. I agree with you, yeah. I also agree with you.
Yes. I just wanted to say, Ram Dass, you know Ram Dass? Yeah. He says if you… That’s clever.
Yeah. I’d say that, yeah, it’s true. If we get angry about something circumstantial, which is of casual importance for us, then that anger is much easier to control.
But if something which is someone whom we care for a lot and something threatens them, the anger becomes much more forceful. That’s why I said that emotions themselves are not bad. And in some situations, anger is also a warranted reaction.
If somebody doesn’t… if some outrageous thing is happening and we don’t feel any emotion, we don’t feel any outrage because of that, that indicates not detachment, it indicates desensitization. Detachment is where we don’t get emotionally entangled. But desensitization is where we have become emotionally disabled.
We’re just not able to express any emotions. Say, if somebody is a very well-built person and somebody punches them, because their body is well-built and they’re used to fighting, they may not feel the pain of the punch so much. But if somebody is, say, paralyzed, you touch them and they don’t turn around.
If you want to talk with them, you touch them, tap them, slap them, still they don’t turn around. That is not detachment. That is desensitization.
So I would say emotions themselves are not the problem. And actually where we are more strongly emotionally invested, the emotions will come much stronger and much faster. So at that time, we need to recognize that often we think that just because the emotion has come, that means I have to act on it.
There’s a difference between acknowledging an emotion and acting on the emotion. So if I’m feeling angry, I cannot wish away and say I’m calm. No, I’m angry.
Denying our emotions or suppressing our emotions is unhealthy. Our emotions are meant to be, we could say, like our ministers, not our masters. If there’s a head of state, many ministers, and the head of state takes counsel from the ministers.
And sometimes the minister might have a very valuable thing to say. So the head of state doesn’t neglect the minister. But the head of state will not act simply based on the input of a minister.
And if sometimes an emotion comes forcefully and we start getting angry and we act on it, that’s okay. But when we realize, okay, this my concern was valid, but the action that I took because of the concern actually did not address the concern, it only worsened it. It only worsened the situation.
Then at that time, as soon as we realize it, we can do course correction. Okay, let me stop right now. I exploded, but let me stop right now.
Actually, even the awareness of our lack of self-awareness is also an awareness. That means, oh, I got angry. I had planned not to get angry.
But as soon as I realized I got angry, that is also a step in self-awareness. So at one level of self-awareness, I could say, as soon as I feel the emotion of anger, I will distance myself from it. But even if that emotion has come, as soon as I realize it, I can check it.
And in general, if we could find for ourselves some kind of pause button. So what will work for whom, that will vary. For some people, it’s deep breathing.
It can be a pause button. For some of us, chanting some mantra can be a pause button. For some of us, maybe reading some wisdom quote about the danger of anger, about the importance of managing our emotions, of responding healthily.
Maybe keep some flash card in the pocket or keep something on the phone. And when that emotion comes up, just read that. Or if we have an issue with a particular kind of negative emotion.
I was in Detroit. I was talking at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. They said that for them, one of the most important things is what they call an accountability partner.
When the urge comes, just call someone. So we have to find out some pause button that works for us. And if we introspect to see what will work for us best, we get that pause button.
Then, even if the emotion is strong, we will acknowledge the strength of the emotion, but that doesn’t mean we will let ourselves be pushed away by that emotion. Thank you. Yes, please.
So, what spoke to emotion? So, talking to your mind as if you are counseling a friend. Can you say a little bit more about that? Okay, yeah. So, how can we talk to our mind as if we are counseling a friend? I will tell one thing that works for me.
That, as I said, I had a lot of anger issues in the past. And now, because I travel a lot, I often correspond with people by writing. So when somebody does something that makes me very angry, I write an email expressing out my whole anger.
But I made a policy that for at least 24 hours, I won’t press the send button. If I don’t express the anger, it will burn within me. But if I express the anger and send it, it will burn somewhere else.
So better find a safe zone in between. Just write it out. And if I decide for 24 hours I won’t send it, quite often it happens that within 24 hours, that person itself writes back and gives some information which just completely changes the picture.
Or that person recognizes the mistake and apologizes and the issue gets rectified. Or even if that doesn’t happen, after 24 hours, when the emotion has calmed down to some extent, then if I reread the email once again, this, I really don’t know enough information over here. I’m making too much of an unwarranted judgment.
This is right, but maybe I’m phrasing it too harshly. Let me make it a little gentle. So I just process that and then change it accordingly.
And I have found many times that the conflict, even if it is not immediately resolved, at least the aggravation is avoided. So the same principle can be generalized through what you could call as journaling. Now journaling different people can do in different situations.
But in this case, what I say is when we are feeling a particular emotion, just get it out. If I’m feeling depressed, I’m feeling lonely, I’m feeling hurt, whatever it is, just get it out and put it down in writing. And then just getting the emotion out, as long as those thoughts are inside us, they congest us and they congest our inner space and they don’t allow us to think clearly.
Just getting it out removes that congestion, not entirely, but significantly. And then because as soon as the thought becomes expressed as a word outside us, that creates certain distance which brings perspective. And then again, if we give some amount of time, maybe 6 hours, 24 hours, whatever, and then revisit it.
At that time, you could say the emotional temperature which had gone up very high, that has relatively come down. And then the intelligence has become more stable. So then what we do is, like earlier I said, if we were counseling someone else, then I am here, this person is here, and I am counseling them.
But in this case, it’s my mind and my intelligence. So my mind, what it has said, it is already there in the journal, and my intelligence is addressing it. So in that way, we counsel our mind.
Basically, this means it requires creating a physical and a chronological distance. We create a physical distance by writing it down and a chronological distance by letting it stay for some time. And then when we evaluate it, when we analyze it, it becomes much easier to process it effectively.
So even if we don’t have the time to journal in certain situations, just verbalizing it, verbalizing the emotion instead of acting on that emotion. Even if I can’t say at that time, the mind is saying, I am feeling angry. Yes, I am feeling very angry right now.
Just that thought, just putting our emotion in words, I am feeling very angry right now. That itself triggers our intelligence. Basically, emotions are not the problem.
But when the emotions paralyze our intelligence, the emotions sidelines the intelligence, and then emotion becomes the sole arbiter of our action. That is when the problem is. But if we just verbalize the emotion, because even to not verbalize what the emotion is telling us to do, the emotion is saying, yell at that person.
Instead of that, I am feeling like yelling at this person. When we verbalize that emotion, that itself activates our intelligence. And once the intelligence is activated, then, oh, I really need to yell at this person.
The intelligence starts evaluating it immediately. So it says that if we could just verbalize, either by writing or by speaking, that can trigger the intelligence and begin the process of counseling the mind. And things like that.
So I realized that actually my emotions were materializing in some way. And in some way, I was getting a message that whatever is piling up is just… That is true. It’s not going to stay like that for a long time.
It’s going to be poured over somehow. So I guess my question is, in your speech you were talking a lot about acting on your emotions. My question was more to the emotions that were suppressed.
I was learning some of the other signs around me. What I noticed was, I don’t really want to verbalize how I feel. Because even if I verbalize or write it down, I will tip down to the other end and I will actually have to say things that I regret.
Okay, yeah. I understand. That is true.
Yeah. So if we have a habit of, say, repressing our emotions for a long time, and that is leading to unhealthy consequences. But now if we verbalize the emotion, that may take us to the other extreme of expressing it and causing damage in the other way.
Not necessarily. For all of us, we have our nature. And some of us can better deal with things inside us.
We say people are introvert. So it’s not that introverts don’t like people. Introverts get strength when they are alone.
Extroverts, they get strength when they are with people. So often extroverts process their emotions by expressing them. Sometimes some people come and talk with us and they say I have this problem, I have this problem, I have this problem.
And they don’t really want a solution. Because sometimes situations don’t have immediate solutions. They just want understanding ear and understanding heart.
And that helps them to process it better. But some people, it may be the opposite. When they have some problem, they say I want to be alone.
And alone they are able to process it better. So for each of us, we have to understand our nature and then find out how best we can process emotions. Now both can go towards extremes.
Sometimes some people, they don’t, they are not processing their emotions. They may say they are extroverts and they may feel that by expressing my emotions I am processing them. But sometimes they are just expressing whatever thought comes in their mind and they basically end up treating other people as dumping ground for their emotional garbage.
On the other hand, some people may say I am alone and when I am alone I process my emotions better. But in that being alone, they might just be feeling more desolate, more forlorn and their mind may be making their life more miserable. So what I am saying here is we all have our nature but even with our nature sometimes we may go towards extremities.
So if for a long time we find that we have been repressing our emotions, that could indicate two things. One is that yes, we don’t like to express our emotions so much. We do have a capacity to process our emotions internally or at least we have an inclination to do that.
But even when we have an inclination to do something, that also has limits. We can’t, just because somebody is an introvert doesn’t mean that they can experience all of life forever alone. We also need to express, we also need to connect.
So if our limit is exceeded, then it will become unbearable. Once you will necessarily verbalizing lead to going to the other extreme? Not necessarily, it can but it could also act as an overall corrective influence. That means that once we, this is suppressed emotion, we either find a trustworthy friend and talk with them or if we can’t find a friend like that, we just write down in our journal which can act like a friend for us, at least recording our thoughts.
And after that, significant thing is processing. If we process, then we will find a healthy expression for it. Or we may find that just expressing it through writing itself helps me to deal with it.
I have one of my mentors, he told me that he has got a cupboard full of journals. And he said in my will I have written that when I die, along with my body, all these journals should be burnt. It will be cremated.
So I asked him why? He said in all those journals, there is a lot of anger. I don’t want anyone to know about it. I just want that anger to burn away with me.
So that means for him, he felt that just by writing the journal, that was enough expression for processing. So how much expression we need for processing our emotions, that is something which you can decide. Sometimes just writing in a private journal might be enough.
Sometimes writing in a journal and then talking with a particular friend. Even if a third person has hurt us, a third person has done something which is problematic, we don’t have to talk with that person. Just talking with somebody else might also help us to process it.
Sometimes we may need to talk with that person. And how to process it is something which we can later on decide. But repressing emotions habitually will choke us.
Because if we keep repressing our emotions, then the result would be that our capacity to experience emotions itself will go down. We don’t want to be emotionally deadened. We don’t want to be emotionally hypersensitive.
But we don’t want to emotionally desensitize also. So what is the appropriate expression, we can find out. But processing is what is required.
So thank you very much for your attention and participation. We have dinner for all of you. Thank you for coming.
So we have some books also here, if you can buy and take a look at the books. So I think, how are we doing dinner?