Quotes About Emotions

The first noble truth says simply that it's part of being human to feel discomfort.

in meditation we can notice how emotions and moods are connected with having lost or gained something, having been praised or blamed, and so forth. We can notice how what begins as a simple thought, a simple quality of energy, quickly blossoms into full-blown pleasure and pain.

Without the words, without the repetitive thoughts, the emotions don't last longer than one and a half minutes.

Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves.

I was reading a transcript of a talk by Ponlop Rinpoche, and he said, "In the process of uncovering buddha nature, in the process of uncovering our open, unfixated quality of our mind, we have to be willing to get our hands dirty." In other words, he was saying that we need to be willing to work with our disturbing emotions, the ones that feel entirely dark.

addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can't stand it.

When I realize I'm triggered, I think of it as a neutral moment, a moment in time, a moment of truth that can go either way. What I'm advocating is that in that precious moment we start to make choices that lead to happiness and freedom rather than choices that lead to unnecessary suffering and the obscuration of our intelligence, our warmth, our capacity to remain open and present with the natural movement of life.

In Jill Bolte Taylor's book My Stroke of Insight, she points to scientific evidence showing that the life span of any particular emotion is only one and a half minutes. After that we have to revive the emotion and get it going again.

If we don't look into hope and fear, seeing a thought arise, seeing the chain reaction that follows—if we don't train in sitting with that energy without getting snared by the drama, then we're always going to be afraid.

This is where tenderness comes in. When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality. There is definitely something tender and throbbing about groundlessness.

Our story lines are different, but when it comes to pain and pleasure and our reaction to them, people everywhere are the same.

Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.

The idea isn't to try to get rid of your anger, but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty, and also to see it with gentleness.

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That's the compassionate thing to do. That's the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape?

So whether it's anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression—whatever it might be—the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you've experienced it fully, to let go.

No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear. I once asked the Zen master Kobun Chino Roshi how he related with fear, and he said, "I agree. I agree." But the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away.

heavy emotion as a way to develop true compassion for ourselves and everyone else.

Here's something that's very helpful to know about now. The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us.

in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts. We stay with our own little plot of earth and trust that it can be cultivated, that cultivation will bring it to its full potential. Even though it's full of rocks and the soil is dry, we begin to plow this plot with patience. We let the process evolve naturally.

Constantly apply cheerfulness, if for no other reason than because you are on this spiritual path. Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up.

We can know the nature of dislike, shame, and embarrassment and not believe there's something wrong with that. We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better "me" who one day will emerge. We can't just jump over ourselves as if we were not there. It's better to take a straight look at all our hopes and fears.

There are four maras. The first mara is called devaputra mara. It has to do with seeking pleasure. The second one, called skandha mara, has to do with how we always try to re-create ourselves, try to get some ground back, try to be who we think we are. The third mara is called klesha mara. It has to do with how we use our emotions to keep ourselves dumb or asleep. The fourth one, yama mara, has to do with the fear of death.

Can we feel the emotion and breathe it into our hearts for ourselves and everyone else? If we can remember to experiment like this even occasionally, we are training as a warrior.

When we multitask and split up our mind into a million directions, we are actually creating our own suffering, because these habits strengthen strong emotional reactivity and discursive thought.