Treat All Emotions As If They Were Your Own Children

How To Develop Self Compassion

"When happiness comes embrace it because suffering is everyday" - Ratu Pandji Pandita

By personifying your emotions, by putting a child's face to your jealousy for example, you will be able to give compassion to yourself ...

Sometimes we are ambushed by our emotions from the moment we wake up, and these feelings of irritability, confusion or listlessness dog us throughout the day. These seem to be the only times when we really pay attention to ourselves, when our emotions are painful and we try to avoid or control them.

As meditation practitioners, when our emotions go awry, it's sometimes difficult to simply let our feelings be, to feel the pain of our emotions and not be mentally affected by them. We search our brains for reasons for our distress because we think that there must be some explanation for these unpleasant feelings we are experiencing.

Sometimes there is. More often than not it's simply the way we feel at that precise moment in time. To search for answers with our intellect is pointless since the dance and interplay of our emotions is without logic - especially when they arise in our loving relationships.

If we are not mindful in our practice and relax to how we feel, we can fool ourselves into believing that there must be something terribly wrong in our lives. We assume it's normal to feel "happy" all the time, and that it's abnormal to feel angry, upset or lonely without good reason. Here lies the seed of our suffering, the root of our ignorance.

Our thinking minds are conditioned to grasp at what it perceives as pleasant and reject states of being it deems unpleasant. This judgement of what is good and bad, right and wrong is at the heart of our dissatisfaction. We go through this process of judgement with our emotions

The tantric path teaches practitioners to view our emotions as simply energy and to use them as part of our practice. 

Have you ever noticed that anger and passion feel exactly the same in your body? In fact physiologically both these emotions affect the body in the same way - our pupils dilate, our hearts start pounding, our muscles fill with blood and ready for action. 

Similarly sadness and sensitivity to beauty are two sides of the coin. The first time I held my niece in my arms and looked at her, my heart felt like breaking at the beauty of her sweet face. It felt exactly like sadness - but I was happy!

All our emotions are exactly the same in that they have a positive and negative aspect depending on our view.

Suffering arises when we judge our emotions. We may even be doing ourselves a great disservice by never fully experiencing the positive aspects of these wonderful energies if we habitually suppress them. If we judge our anger, for example, the danger to ourselves is we may end up suppressing our passion because anger feels exactly the same in our body as passion. If we do it long enough, we begin to believe that we lack a passionate zest for life!

How do we stop judging our emotions? 

The first step is to understand that emotions are neither good nor bad, and it's our mind that judges them so. In New Age parlance, some call this our Inner Critic, who devotes its time trying to maintain an idealised view of who we are. Depending on our perception of ourselves it tends to accept some emotions and reject others to fit in with this view. 

One of the methods to stop judging your emotions and accepting all of them is to see them as your own children. By personifying your emotions by putting a child's face to your fear for example, you will be able to give love and compassion to yourself. 

In each one us is a sad child, an angry child, a lonely child and so on. If we truly begin to see our emotions as our own children we would never reject any of them but treat them all equally with loving kindness. After a while we begin to understand and learn to accept them, no longer trying to avoid nor judge them. We begin to develop a relationship with them  and in so doing, because we understand their pain, are able to develop compassion towards others experiencing the same emotions. It's a very powerful practice.