Finding Freedom Within Emotions: A Buddhist Approach to Joy

I'd like to discuss the root of joy relating to knowing how to be free within our emotions or with our emotions. In particular, I want to offer, obviously, a Buddhist lens on this, coming from Buddhist meditation, but also a little bit of practical advice on how we might go about finding more freedom within our emotions.

Despite some popular ideas out there, the Buddhist path is not a path of trying to get rid of all of our emotions. I don't think that would be very fun. I think that would be probably almost impossible, and it's just not needed in order to be free. From a Buddhist perspective, it's also kind of a false premise in that during a lot of Buddhist practice, we spend time nurturing and/or encouraging prosocial or positive emotions like loving-kindness and compassion. Obviously, compassion is made up of several kinds of emotions, so it's not a singular emotion, but it involves emotions.

I think here the first distinction is: what kinds of emotions do we want to learn to become more fluid or free within? Usually, the list starts with what are called the five main afflictive emotions. The first one is confusion or ignorance. The second one is aggression or aversion. The third one is attachment or clinging. The fourth is pride, and the fifth is jealousy.

For most of us, if you can't see pain or stress in all five of these, we can probably pick out at least two or three where we can see there's pain in these kinds of emotions. Let's take jealousy as an example. When we feel jealous towards another, it's painful. We're wanting something someone else has and we don't have it, and there's a longing, there's usually a dislike of that person, and this is painful. This is a painful thing to hold on to.

It's a little different than aversion, but it's similar in that aversion is another painful afflictive emotion where it burns. I know when I get angry, it burns—it's painful to be angry. Clinging and attachment are a little more difficult to see because they're often pleasurable. We're attaching to something, we're wanting something usually because we like it, because it's pleasurable. So it's a little more difficult to see that that causes pain or stress.

Pride and confusion are probably the deepest ones, or ignorance, because this is really the confusion around self, around how we view our identity and our self in the moment. From a Buddhist perspective, we may be adding on something to that that doesn't actually exist. A lot of people, when they study selflessness in Buddhism, at first think, "Oh, it's saying self doesn't exist." No, it's saying there's something we're adding on—there's an add-on that doesn't exist. It doesn't mean the self doesn't exist completely. There is an interdependent self, something that is in relationship to other things, made of parts, that's interdependent. Sometimes we call that the "mere I." Nonetheless, we need to become clear what we're adding on, and the start of that is usually recognizing our other afflictive emotions, states of mind that aren't serving ourselves or another.

Some may argue that anger or aversion is helpful in some circumstances, and I understand that. I'm sympathetic to that. Sometimes the Dalai Lama even says anger can be useful in sort of getting us to take action, but he said after that, we need to shift into compassion, and that compassion is a much more useful set of emotions for taking action in the world. We tend to center compassion over aggression or aversion. Compassion is very useful at helping others and serving the world. But anyway, that's just a side comment.

More or less, the first step, I think, is through our meditation practice—through mindful awareness—recognizing how certain states, mainly these five afflictive emotions, are creating harm for ourselves, keeping us stuck and stagnant in communication with others. They literally create pain. Emotions are powerful because they're made up of thoughts and ideas, but they're also feelings. For instance, for me, anger burns—I can feel it burning in my body. Attachment is like a ball of excitement or sometimes a stickiness. It's a tough feeling to describe, but I can feel it in my body.

As meditators, we're learning to use our meditation practice, the awareness or the mindfulness we're deepening in meditation, to actually be able to discern these emotional reactions more clearly, to watch them, to bear witness to them in meditation, and then ultimately to learn how to be free within them.

Some people might think, "Well, why learn how to be free within our emotions? Why not just get rid of them?" As I pointed out, I don't believe we need to. Sure, we could say as we travel the path of what's called the bodhisattvas in the Mahayana tradition, eventually to Buddhahood, yes, the emotions do transform and/or resolve. But when we're on the path, when we haven't yet realized Buddhist non-duality or emptiness, we need to work more skillfully, I think, with this.

The reason I say "free within" is that what I've found is we don't necessarily have to get rid of an emotion to feel freedom within it. I'll explain what I mean, and there are many ways to do this. Just to be clear, I still get caught in my emotions, and I still get overwhelmed by them, and still do things unskillfully from time to time. I am also a beginner in this. But the little moments of hope or space I've seen within an emotion have been very encouraging, actually.

This is one of the ways I often encourage people to find joy in their practice, to find joy in the dharma. Because let's be honest, if we're really trying to transform ourselves through meditation and the Buddhist path, it's quite challenging. Most of the time, it's a grind. Most of the time, it's quite hard (at least for me). So taking joy, finding moments to take joy in the practice, is really important.

I think one of the main ways to find joy is when we start to discover that we are not our emotions. I remember early on, through some insight meditation practice—this was 23, 24 years ago—I had a moment in meditation of just bearing witness, watching through mindfulness, just watching an emotion arise, seeing myself hook into it and change. The emotion changed or fell away throughout the course of the meditation period, and this was a big deal for me. This really hooked me—this is really what hooked me into regular meditation and the study of Buddhism. It was like, "Wow, I didn't know that was possible. I just thought my emotions were me."

Of course, we can read that in a book and sort of understand it intellectually, but when you actually taste the experience, which I'm also imagining many of you reading this have, when you taste that, even if it's just for a split second, it's so powerful. When I'm talking about joy, I'm talking about the joy of that—the joy of seeing it's possible that I don't have to believe every single thought and emotion that arises. I would add that it's also possible that we don't need to get rid of it in order to have that freedom.

This is often a first step for us as meditators—just seeing, "Okay, I'm not exactly my thoughts and emotions." Yet of course what I found out next was they continue to arise, and just because I had that little insight, it doesn't mean it lasts, and it doesn't mean my emotions and thoughts stopped. Then came the process of understanding what thoughts and emotions are through studying the dharma over the years. Ultimately, through some help from my teachers, I’ve come to feel confident in practicing with emotions, rather than needing to get rid of them. 

This is technically a little bit more of a Vajrayana perspective, coming from the lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, but I find it so helpful when we stop demonizing our emotions and recognize that they too have an essence that's open and spacious, and we can connect with that through awareness. Not only that, even just within basic shamatha practice or meditative awareness practice, we can host our emotions.

I think that was one of the second insights—when I stopped demonizing emotions (I mean, I still demonize them, but let's say not as much as I used to)—when I stopped demonizing them, that provided quite a lot of freedom. In the sense that, often when we're spending a lot of energy fighting something, and we recognize, "Well, the more I fight this, the stronger it gets," when we stop the fight and approach it from a different angle, this is quite liberating. Not to say we don't get caught in the emotion or experience or challenge or difficulty—it just offers that layer where we don't have to fight it. We can seek to know it. We can seek to host it within awareness.

Of course, through compassion practice, we can apply compassion to our confused experience, understanding that we experience confusion, that we experience pain, dissatisfaction, stress, and suffering, that we experience difficult emotions. This is a moment to recognize our vulnerability—not quite our fragility, but our vulnerability—and it's a moment we can provide compassion towards ourselves. We're not bad for that. We just don't know how to get out of that quagmire.

Of course, Buddhism then teaches how to get out of that, how to get out of that quagmire. But as I said, it's not so much about getting rid of the emotion. It's through watchfulness, hosting it within awareness, not demonizing it, not making it an enemy. Then, through the teachings on Buddhist non-duality or emptiness or selflessness, we can start to see that that emotion exists interdependently, that emotion doesn't always exist in the way it appears.

Meaning, the emotion is usually in relation to an object. We're the subject experiencing the emotion, and it's usually in relation to another person or a situation, something that happened, and we create all kinds of narratives. But when we seek to watch narrative rather than hook into the narrative or bite the narrative, we can start to question its reality.

This doesn't mean we're trying to prove it doesn't exist at all—that would be nihilism. But what we are doing is opening up the space to see: does it exist in the way it appears? That's more the question from Buddhist non-duality. There are many questions, but that's a really core one that I use: does it exist in the way I'm experiencing it, or the way the narrative is playing out in my mind? Does it exist in the way it appears, or I'm assuming it is?

Just that question, just that doubt, is like a bomb onto confusion. It's like throwing a wrench, throwing a stick in wheels turning—everything falls apart, or has the potential to. These are big deals, even these small questions. When we start to question, "Is this the only way to look at it? Is this the way it exists? Can it exist in another way?"—we're never asking, "How do I find its non-existence?" The Buddha didn't teach that. That's not useful.

What we are asking is: where is this narrative? Where am I adding on to this narrative that doesn't need to be there? Where can I be with just the experience of it as it is? Ultimately, this is where we find genuine freedom in our emotions because we also recognize the emotions are energy. They're energy in the body. They're narrative and karma and cause and effect playing out in the mind, and we can just let it be a play of mind. We can let it arise, abide, and fall.

As we strengthen awareness, we can host it. As we strengthen compassion, we can bear witness to it without judgment. Ultimately, we can see that it doesn't exist in the way it appears. Someone might ask, "Well, how does it exist?" I already said, we use terms like "interdependently" or "in relationship." In Mahayana Buddhism, there are many ways to describe that. I'm just trying to keep it simple here. But ultimately, despite the jargon and the words, this needs to be seen directly, and ultimately, it becomes joyful.

As I said, personally, I'm still working on this, but the tiny moments I have had in practice—it's very joyful. Because then we are in control of our experience. We are not the one being pulled along. We become the driver, and we can choose how we want to interact in the world.

We have the ability to choose how our suffering plays out from that. Ultimately, people can cause harm and pain towards us and others, but it's our choice how we want to handle that, how we want to work with that. It's not theirs. We have our mind and body, and that's our choice, how we want to work with that.

I find that incredibly helpful because it helps me to recognize where I do have agency and where I don't. If I give someone else my agency, there's no joy—there's just blame and anger and sadness, all of that. But when I can recognize where I have agency, then there can be joy in freedom and finding space within an emotion and finding compassion.