Emotions Should be as Water off a Duck's Back

The title of this entry is something my sensei would say to us quite often during my time training in his dojo.  I always thought I understood it, I always thought I believed it and agreed with it.  The truth, however, was far from that.  I was merely reciting it as a theory, and then in the next instant allowing emotions to soak into my skin as though I were a sponge.  It is a very simple thing to convince yourself of a delusion.  All that is required is access to one's own psyche (something we all tend to have), a desire to believe something, and the inability to actually practice what we think we should.  In other words, an inability to do rather than say.  An inability to practice what we preach.


Since humanity is so prone to hypocrisy, anyway, it is a very simple thing to take a single step off the slope and plunge into a world of delusion, never realizing one has fallen off the path and into a useless loop.

Hypocrisy is merely a part of the human condition.  Some consider it a plague, but I am more inclined to say that it is an aspect of our imperfection (such a radiant thing is imperfection).  Most people praise flawless diamonds and gem stones.  I would rather study a cracked and unbalanced maze of facets that did not aline with each other at precisely all the same angle.  These are nuances, character, individuality that make these stones unique from the other pieces that are considered "perfect".  I don't perceive perfect duplicates as perfection.  I perceive them as dull, boring, useless when it comes to the studies of the mind.  They are useful for sansara and applications to the physical world of science and engineering.  However, if you wish to talk philosophy or art, give me that which contains an imbalance that allows me to sense the differences of perception when a light is shined from 47 degrees, and from when the light is shone from 193 degrees.

Do you see how the refraction at this angle produces a photo effect resembling the northern lights, but if we hit it over here with the same beam, it is now fireworks?

It is at once sorrowful, joyous and stimulating to make such observations.

It is at once sorrowful, joyous and stimulating to be alive.

But more often than not, in the moment in which we are living, we are not filled with all of these emotions at the same time, to the same extent.  It is to say, they are all present, but it depends on what is stimulating our senses and what we are enticed or affected by in sansara, that determines the extent to which particular emotions are evoked.  This is how I walked the earth for nearly twenty nine years.

I did not experience my emotions, my emotions arose from what was going on around me or what I had held within me from an original reaction -- and all those emotions collected in a vast infinite pool inside.  Fermenting in a stagnant ooze.


In this way, I was not experiencing my emotions, my emotions were experiencing me.  I was reacting not to what was in front of me at all, any more.  I was seeing it through hearsay interpretation, through the eyes of everything I had been through, previously.  I would feel happy, and I would try desperately to hold to that emotion, not wishing to let go of it.  But the event that had caused the happiness would pass, and then I would feel only sorrow for the fact that it was over, even though I was clinging to what had given me happiness.  It was like holding onto a piece of food so long, believing it to be delicious but desiring to savor it -- that I never actually tasted it, and it finally spoiled and rotted into foul decay.

Rather than merely abstracting emotion into analogies (though I will use words to paint vivid and powerful pictures of poetic nature whether I want to or not, in the end) -- I will try to list at least a couple real examples: 

*1.  I used to believe it was an awful thing to forgive people who had harmed me.  I believed I should carry the anger and rage with me, as a weapon upon my belt.  The rage and anger were not swords and knives that I might wield against someone else.

If you've ever studied real martial arts and learned truly how to both utilize yourself as an instrument of self defense, and how to effectively avoid having to do so in most situations -- you will have also learned that emotion will quite literally cause you to fight yourself rather than your external opponent.  Rage will cause you to tense up and when you throw that punch or kick or try to move out of the way of an attack, you will be slowed and weakened because the wrong muscles will be acting.  You will be out of harmony with yourself, if you are not empty of emotion.  Rage will cause you to be less effective and place you in grave danger of losing a fight.

Thus, rage was not an effective weapon to use against other people.  It was more akin to stabbing myself first with the knife, and then attempting to use it to attack someone else.



*2.  I used to believe that holding sorrow within you was the way you prevented it from overwhelming you.  If you could contain the tears and screaming anguish, it would pass and you would avoid embarrassment that might lead to you appearing weak.

If you've ever lost a loved one, or ever experienced loss of the sort that unhinges you in ways that you cannot cope with -- you know that ignoring the pain and thinking it will just go away if you just clench it up inside, doesn't solve the problem  This is like clenching your fist as it bleeds from the outside, and expecting the wound to heal, or allowing a drowning man to grasp a hold of you to keep himself afloat.  You will not escape the poisonous, dark emotion.  You will only be pulled under.  No lives will be saved.


I am not advocating emotionless automaton existence

Emotions are the wine of life, both those of happiness and those of anger and sorrow and rage and all the things tha make us unhappy.  There would be no manner by which we would understand or experience happiness without something to compare it to.  We would simply be like the cars we drive, or the  computers we spend so much time staring at facebook with:  non-living, non-existing objects.  This is why I like flawed objects.  Flawed objects have the characteristic that begins to allow for emotion.  The imperfections, the imbalances that allow for change and challenge and individuality.

Emotions are how we truly experience the world.  Just seeing a sunset, or just tasting food, or just having really great sex, is nothing, if we cannot feel it.  And we cannot feel these wondrous sensations, without having known what it is like to lose them, to not have them, to have something that is the opposite.  Emotions enrich life, they enrich existence.  Emotions are what make life, life.

Food is the sustenance  of the body, but as noted above, it does spoil.  Emotions are the sustenance of the spirit -- but they too are perishable.  Time effects both food and emotion.

So how do we avoid consuming rotten emotion and getting emotional poisoning?

We avoid illness by letting go of emotion.  Truly letting go.  Acknowledging the amazing wonder of the emotion, and then letting it leave us like heat leaves the body on a cool night, or our bodies dispose of waste.  Carbon dioxide is exhaled, and the digestive processes take care of the rest.

Digest your emotions, let them nurture you as they can, and then let them pass out of you and into the world around you.  Revel in the awesome uneven features of the mountain ranges, and the incredible slight imbalance of plants and animal life and the vastness of the ocean and the way the waves flow across the beach irregularly.

Appreciate too the apparent perfection of ripples in a still pool when a stone is dropped into it.

And let go all, as it is appropriate.

If you do not allow your body to urinate and defecate, it will fall ill, poisoned by its own waste products.  In this same fashion, if the soul does not let go of emotions when they have passed -- it too will fall ill.  So, inhale as new opportunities for stimuli arise.  Feel the emotions of the past exchanged for those of the present as you hold your breath for a few seconds.  Exhale slowly to allow the old emotions to flow out of you.  Hold your breath to allow the emptiness of your lungs bring calm to the new emotions that you have allowed to span your body.  Repeat the process.

You are feeling, you are feeling new things as change happens, you are breathing, you breathing new air as your lungs exchange that which you had for that which you now have; there, now you are alive.