Anger. Impatience. Shock. Desire. Frustration. You spend your life being bombarded by emotions.
These emotions are often negative and if you act on them, they can derail you. Past karma shapes your experience of the World.
You are also constantly creating new karma, and that gives you a golden opportunity. With your reaction to each experience, you create the karma of your future.
It is up to you whether this new karma is positive or negative. You simply have to pay attention to the moment.
Karma operates like a key ring. It seems solid; you can move your key seamlessly around the circle. Yet there is actually a start and an end to the key ring – and a gap.
If you know the gap is there, and you have the skill, you can extricate your key from the ring.
Similarly, earlier karma creates your experience of events. Your reaction, based on your experience, triggers new karma and a new cycle of creation and experience.
You can allow that cycle to continue in an endless sequence. Or you can find the gap, gain the skill, and extricate yourself from the cycle, simultaneously building your compassion and enhancing your sense of inner ease.
The Buddhist tradition is full with teachings on compassion, on why you should avoid hatred and jealousy, on the power of a positive outlook. But teachings and their explanations require logic.
In the heat of an emotional exchange, you may not have the luxury of logic, because logic requires time and an unbiased mind. Pressure creates a crisis. You do not have time to think, only to react.
In the first moment, your sensory organs – your eyes, ears, nose – perceive some sort of input. This moment between a sound reaching your ear and your ear perceiving it, is instantaneous.
It is also effortless, because it is hardwired into your system. In this moment, if someone says ‘lemon’, you have heard the sound, but you have not yet recognized what that sound means.
In the second moment, you recognize the sound and you have an instant, subconscious reaction, classifying it as good, bad, or neutral.
This, too, is automatic, based on prior experience: memories and understanding stemming from your ingrained cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, and linguistic perceptions.
It happens so quickly that you may even think it is part of the first moment.
You have a physical manifestation of your thought as your body responds to positive, negative, or neutral input.
You connect the sound ‘lemon’ to an idea stored in your memory. It evokes a shape, a color, a scent, a taste.
Your memory invites an emotional reaction. You love lemons and your mouth salivates; you find lemons sour and you cringe.
In the third moment, you have the choice of accepting your memory’s emotion tinged invitation or not. Your reaction may be mental, verbal, or physical.
If you have classified some thing as good, you are drawn to it, even though it may not be beneficial.
If you have classified something as bad, you push it away, even though it may not be appropriate or necessary. In either case, you may do a lot of damage that you will later need to try to undo.
The third moment provides you with the space to determine your response. At the very instant an emotion arises, pause. Notice the emotion you are experiencing. The timing is very important.
You need to be focused and aware before your emotion connects with a thought and becomes solidified. You want to simply see the emotion for what it is.
You may be tempted to trace the source of your emotion; that is logical, but in this instance it is not helpful. Instead of focusing on who did what to whom, simply look into your emotion.
Do not do this as an observer, with duality between yourself and the emotion, as though it were external to you.
Watch your actual experience; try to feel it directly. Feel your emotion as if it were an inflated balloon, filling your insides.
Do not pay attention to the balloon itself; pay attention to what is inside. No rationalizing or reasoning.
What is at the very core of the balloon? Just space. This is not relabeling your emotion as space.
It is simply Awareness that the emotion itself does not exist in the way you believe it does, as something fixed and solid.
Over time, as that Awareness grows, you will begin to feel ease, and maybe even joy.
By widening the gap between action and reaction, you can gain some distance from your automatic responses and also gain an opportunity to know your emotions.
You can stop being ruled by these emotions and instead begin to rule your experience of life.
To really enjoy this freedom, though, you need to practice. If you practice, you can experience the unconditional joy that breeds lovingkindness and compassion.