Befriend your Strong Emotions | with Sister Dang Nghiem

Dear friends.

I know you are there and I'm very happy.

As I was closing my eyes and

followed my breathing,

I silently told myself.

I love you so.

I love you so.

And I saw myself as a child wandering on the streets of Saigon.

Feeling quite sad.

I saw myself standing by the bridge,

thinking of dark thoughts.

I saw myself coming to this country as a teenager,

with a small handbag on one hand,

and the younger brother...

on the other hand, holding him.

And a thought arose in me,

you have come a long way.

I love you so.

Thank you for all the efforts you've made in life.

So that you can still be here.

Before I came to the practice,

I didn't know how to take care of my strong emotions.

So I remember as a child I already experienced a lot of trauma from the sexual abuse,

from the verbal abuse, from being an immigration child in Vietnam.

So I was quite depressed.

Of course, I didn't call it depression.

And in Vietnamese, I didn't even know that there was such a word called depression.

We should say sad, but I used to wander on the streets a lot.

And I would make up songs about my life.

And those songs were quite sad.

I remember I would sing and then cry.

And I even sang to my brother,

and both of us cry.

Or I would...

We had many bridges in Saigon.

So every time I stood on a bridge or rode a bicycle on a bridge,

The thought of...

suicide would arise in my mind.

And that was...

That was so rehearsed in me since a young age that as I grew into a teenager, it became worsened.

And in college and medical school whenever I had a difficulty in in life, in relationships,

my thought immediately went to...

It was like a default.

It will go to...

"Why do I live?"

"What's the meaning of this life?"

I might as well just checked out.

So there were times...

Most of the time I didn't want to die,

but

suicidal thoughts would come up as the first

choice for me.

So that's how.

As I became a practitioner, I realized that it had become a habit, a personality for me.

So slowly, I learned to breathe with it and to tell myself I am dying every day,

I don't have to wish for death.

The body goes through.

Changes every moment.

My skin cells sloughed off.

Hair falls off.

Everything is changing.

So the question is whether - is NOT
whether to die or to live.

The question is how am I living and how am I dying?

Can I live beautifully?

Can I die beautifully each moment?

So that helped change my attitude in the way I approached my sadness.

And I see that as I practice...

the four kinds of nutriment more diligently, more positively,

slowly, and now I

I don't experience strong emotions that often.

I'm quite steady and stable in my...

In my way of being.

And when sadness arises, of course, things that are unpleasant, still happen, but I don't react so strongly.

So the frequency and the intensity of strong emotion is definitely reduced a lot.

But also how I respond to them so that they don't last for long.

Because instead of

blaming on the on the external circumstance,

I learned to come back to myself and breathe and tell myself I choose peace.

I choose harmony within myself.

I don't want to cause further damage to myself.

So whatever happened already, I don't have to explode.

I can just come back and care for myself first.

And when I'm calm, I can go ask the person what they meant when they said that or when they did that.

Or I may have enough understanding from within that I don't even need the clarification or verification.

I can just let it go.

So that's a choice and it's a wonderful choice.

All of us go through strong emotions,

whether it's sadness,

anger,

insecurity, jealousy,

self-doubt,

regret,

yearning,

etc..

We all have them.

Some emotions are stronger than others,

in a certain time in our life.

It also depends on how personality,

how we express our emotions.

Over the years as a spiritual practitioner,

I've learned to regard emotions.

First of all, as a wave.

Emotions.

They can also be regarded

as a storm,

or

as a food, a nutriment,

as a habit,

as an addiction.

So I'll go over them

in that light, so that we can gain a deeper understanding into our emotions.

Emotions as a wave.

The moment that we experience an emotion, we may not be even aware of it.

Like when you are angry and somebody said you are angry and you may say, I'm not angry.

Somebody said, are you sad?

Is something wrong?

You say, I'm not sad.

There's nothing wrong.

Sometimes an emotion has passed.

And looking back a day later.

Sometimes a week, sometimes a year, sometimes years later that we are realize what we were experiencing.

So we looked at a wave.

It doesn't start at a peak.

And it doesn't end

at this trough.

An emotion starts long ago,

underneath the surface of an ocean.

The undercurrent, so many conditions,

the previous waves have pushed the water so that it builds up into this one wave,

or one tsunami and it manifests.

Then it comes down, but it is also the basis for another wave.

It also helps build up another wave.

So when we see an emotion as a wave,

in that way, we know we're not caught,

when it's full blown, when it has...

quieted down, but we learned to take care of it,

at every point along the waves.

And I like to see that when we practice mindfulness, we learn to embrace our emotion.

We are like a surfer instead of riding on the wave forward,

we actually learn to ride on the wave backward.

To look at it after it has passed.

And to learn which conditions that have helped built this particular wave or tsunami.

How it affected our body.

The tension, the fatigued, the flare of a skin problem.

Some physical health or mental problems.

Some insomnia, for example.

So we look at the effects that that particular emotion just had on our body and our thoughts and our speech.

And we slowly called backward on it and identified.

When it was full blown,

how did it affect me in those moments?

How?

What thoughts did I have.

What speech did I use?

Which kind of speech I used and which kind of bodily actions, movements, tension that I had.

So we learned to go backward on that wave and slowly to identify

the underlying causes and conditions that triggered that particular wave.

Maybe somebody had said something that triggered a feeling of insecurity in us.

Trigger

a memory of our childhood,

of something pleasant or painful.

Maybe it was a sight.

A sound, even a smell, a word, a touch, a touch can also trigger a pleasant or unpleasant painful memory experience.

A thought can definitely trigger an emotion.

And so we learned to be aware where we can be depressed for so many years,

and yet we know very little about that particular emotion and how it affects us

in terms of our body, our mind, in terms of how it affects our habits and behaviors.

In the same spirit, we can also look at an emotion as a store.

Again, a storm will build up.

To have

a cyclone, for example,

in one area.,

let's say in Florida or

in California.

When we have a rainstorm,

we know that it started somewhere, even in the East Coast or further up North of California, or further down South.

And it comes up.

And so

In the storm,

we also learn about the eye of the storm.

When houses and cars are flying in the air, very heavy rain, water is rising.

So many things that happen.

But at the eye of the storm,

there is an area in the middle of the storm.

It may be even 20 miles radius that is actually quiet and calm,

and little to no effect of the storm takes place in the eye of the storm.

So we can also

look deeply into our emotion as a store, how it has built up the conditions, the causes that have brought about a storm.

And we can see how we are swept away by the storm, by our thoughts, by our speech, by our body, the actions.

Also the external environment, the presence of others,

certain people, certain ways help us to be calmer.

Certain people, certain ways trigger us to feel...

to

be lost, to lose our control.

And so we look and we see there are times that we can be in the eye of the storm.

There are ways that we can practice so that we can be safe in the eye of the storm,

instead of being swept away, being injured, and then injure others.

Emotions can also be regarded as a food, as a nutriment.

The Buddha said that nothing can survive without food.

How has the depression come to be?

How has the anger come to be?

How has the insecurity,

the jealousy, the self-doubt, the suspicion,

come to be.

How have we fed,

this emotion, these emotions?

Intentionally,

often is unintentionally.

Unconsciously.

Again.

We learned that a half life

of an emotion hormone;

It's only 69 seconds.

69 seconds.

And that dose of hormone has only half quantity left in our bloodstream.

So it shouldn't have that much of an effect on us after 69 seconds.

And yet, how can we be so depressed for days, for months?

How can we be angry and resentful our whole lives?

Something is feeding

this emotion.

And when we make time to look deeply.

Into ourselves, we will discover.

Yes.

I've been feeding my emotion with my negative thinking.

With my negative views.

With my hurtful

speech,

with my

violent, unkind,

harmful actions.

That's why my emotion has grown over the years, has become

more bitter, more angry, more depressed, more aloof, more withdrawn from life.

It takes a lot of courage to look into ourselves, into our habits, and to see things more clearly.

It's difficult.

It's challenging to do that.

But as we gain an understanding

of our own thoughts, of our emotions.

We will

changed the way we looked at ourselves.

Instead of seeing ourselves as

victims

of

an external situation,

circumstance.

Instead of seeing ourselves as victims of an emotion,

We become more proactive.

We see that we have a choice.

Do I want to feed this emotion?

Because if I don't feed it.

It will not grow.

Do I want to build up this wave?

Do I want to fit in the storm?

Or do I want to choose peace?

Do I want to choose harmony in myself and my body, in my mind, in my relationship with myself and with others?

And so we become much more proactive.

We learn different ways to take better care of our emotions.

Emotions can also be regarded as a habit.

Although most of us, if not all of us, will definitely say we want to be happy.

But if again, if we look deeply, we will see that we often side with our negative emotions and thoughts.

We feed

the negativity with our daily consumption through eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body and thoughts.

And we are addicted

to these strong negative emotions.

Physiologically.

That's all we know.

The body is used to it psychologically.

We identify ourselves with these emotions.

I am anger, not just I am angry, I am anger, I am sadness.

This sadness is mine.

Don't touch it.

You don't understand it.

You don't know.

You don't know me.

You don't know my sadness.

That's what I use to tell my friends.

And so I would isolate myself and curl up with my sadness,

with my pain,

instead of opening my heart to life, instead of getting help, instead of choosing to be happy.

To find ways to be happy.

So emotions are very addictive habits.

And.

I treat all emotions in a similar way.

Whichever it may be sadness or anger, insecurity, jealousy, etc.

we can take care of them in a similar way.

First of all, we practice simple recognition.

The mindful breathing helps us a lot.

So let us try a sound of the bell.

This is a big bell in our Ocean of Peace meditation hall.

You may have seen a smaller bell with the same exact same shape, bowl shape, but small like this.

This is an inviter.

It can be just a stick like this.

I will wake up the bell.

[Half Bell]

And when I invite the sound of the bell,

we can all come back to our breathing.

Befriending our in-breath as it is and befriending our out-breath as it is.

Befriending the breath.

Smiling with the breath.

[BELL]

The sound of the bell has a sine wave.

And our breathing pattern is also like a wave.

In-breath.

Out-breath.

In-breath.

Out-breath

We breathe with these waves.

We learned to sit up.

As if there's a string pulling gently,

from our head.

Helping our spine to be upright, relaxed.

We open our shoulders.

We rest our palms

on our knees.

Or just gently,

have our palms

holding one another like this.

Resting in our lap.

We breathe and smile.

Hello in-breath.

Hello

out-breath.

We breathe like that for a while.

Then when we

see an emotion,

we will say hello

anger.

I know you are there.

Breathe with me.

I'm breathing with you.

And as we breathe out, we relax that emotion.

We bring more spaciousness into that emotion.

More relaxation.

In neuroscience, we talk about a neural modulation.

When we are in chronic tension.

From having constant strong emotions,

constant stress,

or when we have PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

The nervous system is out of balance.

The sympathetic nervous system is activated all the time,

while

the parasympathetic nervous system

is quiet down.

And so this one put us on high alert, high vigilance, high tension.

Day and night.

The body is tense.

The thoughts are racing, the heart is beating fast, the respiratory rate is sped up.

So we're on constant

defense.

This is a stress response and it's very fatiguing.

Tiring.

Very

energy consuming.

So.

There is so much wisdom

in meditation.

Because as we sit upright and yet relaxed in our body.

As we listen to the sound of the bell.

And the sound of our own breathing.

We are bringing balance.

We calm down the sympathetic nervous system.

The parasympathetic system now

is playing a more important role.

Which is relaxation,

calming.

Only can...

We can only heal when the body and mind are relaxed,

are at ease when we feel safe.

Then the energy goes to healing,

goes to repair,

goes to rest.

It goes to rolls.

But if we are constantly fighting from within.

Then all the energy will go to fighting,

to running away,

to withdrawing.

And there's no energy for growth and healing.

So all of our mindfulness practices, from listening to the bell to listening to our breathing,

to walking gently, as in walking meditation or in eating meditation,

or in deep relaxation when we lie down.

Every single mindfulness practice that we do.

It's a sound of the bell.

Let's enjoy it.

Do this when you have.

When you hear your phone ringing or another person's phone ringing.

Just breathe and smile.

Just for a few in-breaths and out-breaths.

And that is the practice of neural modulation.

Bringing back balance to the

to the autonomic nervous system.

Every moment you can help bring back the balance so that your body and mind are more at ease, are more calm and relaxed.

The autonomic nervous system is always scanning the environment.

Am I safe?

Am I okay?

Is everything okay?

But in my practice, I learned that actually.

Fortunately, my environment is very safe in the monastery.

And many places that I go

the environment is actually quite peaceful and safe.

The people around me are kind.

It is my own internal system.

That is not safe.

My own thoughts that are not safe to myself.

My own internal dialog that is so negative and hurtful,

that it makes it unsafe to myself.

My bodily actions may be unsafe to myself when I'm not mindful,

and so in that way we need to love, to be safe to ourselves.

Quiet down the nervous system.

Come back

and breathe.

So that we feel calm and safe from within.

I have this wonderful drawing for my friend from Europe.

She drew this.

I usually talk about learning to be our own soulmate.

In Vietnamese, the word soulmate is 'tri kỷ'.

'Tri' means to remember, to know, to take care of,

to master.

T r i

'Kỷ' means

oneself.

So a soulmate is one who remembers,

who knows,

who takes care of or masters,

herself,

himself,

themselves.

So she drew the snake

with its tail wrapping around itself and said,

'be your own soulmate.'

Isn't that wonderful?

Yes.

Our emotion can be like a snake.

It can bite us upfront or from the back.

It can hurt us.

But our emotion is also our own child

that we have

fed and taken care of all these years.

That's why it has grown to be like that.

So we learn to befriend our own emotion.

To befriend, the snake wrap around it.

With our mindful breathing.

With our smile.

With our loving speech.

Hello, sadness.

I know you are there.

I'm here for you.

Hello pain,

you've been there for a long time.

It's okay.

I'm here for you.

And when you wrap your breath,

your relaxation, your love, your tenderness around it.

It will also relax and become more spacious and at ease.

And that is to learn to be a soulmate to our strong emotions.

Whether they are pleasant or unpleasant,

don't grasp one and push away the other.

Learn to treat them with tenderness and equanimity.

And you see miracles happen.

Be your own soulmate to your breathing.

Know your breathing pattern because you breathe differently with different emotions.

So when you are aware of your breathing.

It tells you what kind of emotion state of mind that you are in.

Do you know that

the mind cannot think without the body?

The brain cannot

act without the body.

So when you think of a thought.

Let's say.

Sour.

Tamarind.

Sour.

Did you swallow?

But when we think of sourness.

We swallow.

Whatever thought

that is arising,

there follows certain bodily movements,

that we may or may not be aware of.

So a thought will always come along with it,

an emotion and bodily movements.

They always come hand in hand.

We may not be aware of our thought.

But we can be more aware of the feeling.

But the body

is most

visible, perceivable.

The sensations also come along.

With the thoughts,

with the feelings,

there are bodily movements and sensations,

so we can learn to be aware of this tool, to identify them moment to moment,

so that we can be more in touch with our thoughts and our feelings so that we can relax them.

That is to learn to be a soulmate

to our own body, to our own mind, and to take care of them very effectively.

Another practic,e because we know that emotions are fed, right? As a wave, as a storm,

as a food and nutriment and as a habit.

So we learn to see how we're feeding them.

The Buddha taught about the four kinds of diligence.

The first two kinds is to deal with...

We deal with positive seeds in ourselves.

And the other two.

We deal with the negative tendencies or seeds in ourselves.

For example, we have the seed, the gene for joy, for happiness,

for positivity.

So

water them, tend them, give rise to positive thinking and speech and body lead actions.

We cultivate them, invite them to come up more often.

And once they come up.

Give rise to awareness.

Because if we are happy and we are not aware that we are happy, then that happiness comes and goes.

But if we are happy and where we give rise to the awareness, I am happy in this moment.

How fortunate I am to have these conditions of happiness.

Then we feel more deeply that happiness and that happiness will last longer, and we will know how to invite it to come again.

We know how to change a neutral feeling like, oh, I don't have anything to do.

Nothing is happening right now.

Then we can give...

We can turn that into a happy feeling by thinking, oh, it's so wonderful.

I don't have to do anything right now.

I can just sit and relax and enjoy the blue sky.

I don't have pain right now.

Oh, I'm so grateful for my body, for his capacity to heal and to transform.

You see?

You can change a neutral feeling into a good feeling.

So to water the positive seeds and to help keep the positive seeds

manifesting in our thoughts and speech and in our body more often in our daily life.

The other two kinds of diligence.

We help

the negative seeds.

If they have not surfaced, don't water them, don't invite them to come up.

Don't watch movies,

that will trigger violence, fear, trauma in us.

Dramas are

traumas.

We like dramas a lot.

Dramas in our own lives.

In people's lives.

In the princes and the queens and the kings lives.

We like to water dramas, but we know dramas are traumas.

Because when we are exposed to all these dramas.

Every thought we gave rise again will be associated with a bodily action.

Hormones, emotion hormones will be released and that will accumulate and give rise to tension in the body and negativity.

Tension in our thoughts and feelings.

So don't invite them to come up if they are negative and when they are up, like anger and jealousy, don't water them.

Because then they will be stronger at the base.

We have two wonderful Chinese characters.

This

is

'nhàn.'

Means leisure.

Peace.

This Chinese characters this for 'náo', means chaos.

Now if we look at these characters, both have these two doors.

'Môn'

Okay.

Two doors.

What's the difference between leisure, peace and chaos?

It's right here at the gate.

At the door.

This stands for the moon.

'nguyệt'

And this is a character for the market.

Now, we can regard our eyes as these two gates, two doors, our ears, our nose, our mouth, our body, our thoughts.

We should have the gate of mindfulness to guard what's going in our sense organs.

What's going in to our thinking?

Because if we bring the more positive thoughts, loving thoughts,

then we have peace and leisure.

But if we constantly bring chaos into our consumption through the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, the body, the thoughts,

it's a market we bring in to ourselves, our body and mind.

Then, of course, we have chaos.

Our life will be chaotic.

The world will be chaotic as a result.

So.

This is the first two diligence, to water the good seeds.

And these two we have to ask ourselves in our daily life, how do we water...

How do we feed chaos?

And if you watch the video that we talk about the Five Mindfulness Trainings, you also learn more about consumption.

Mindful consumption will help us to bring peace and leisure and joy in our life instead of chaos.

So this I hope you will remember this when you go to the store.

When you're

listening to music.

When you're having a conversation, just take a mental pause.

Just stop for a moment and ask yourself, what am I watering?

Am I bringing the market into myself?

Into my life?

Or am I bringing the moon?

Through the images that I used about emotions.

It's a storm, a wave, a food, a habit.

And we also learned that an emotion hormone lasts only 69 seconds.

Well, we see that emotions are impermanent.

Sometimes when we feel a strong emotion.

It seems like.

It will last forever.

It's our entire lives.

And because it feels so permanent, sometimes it becomes so unbearable,

we think about escaping it

by any means possible.

Whether that's.

Seeking entertainment.

Burying ourselves in work.

Escaping in relationships.

In sex.

In drugs.

Or.

Taking her life.

Because.

It's so unbearable.

It's only permanent because we feed it.

So we learn

to...

When we are feeling sad in the lying down position.

Breathe.

Feel the rise and fall of the valley.

Talk to it tenderly.

I know you are there.

Help me to take better care of you.

My dear sadness, my dear pain.

Sit up.

Sit in the upright position.

Bring your mind back to your breathing.

You are bringing balance to your sympathetic system and the parasympathetic nervous system.

Get out of the dark room.

Turn off the television.

Turn off your computer.

Walk outdoors.

Go to a park.

Walk.

In your neighborhood.

In your backyard.

Sit by a tree.

A big tree.

Hold a tree.

Lie down on the earth.

And breathe and feel the rise and fall of your belly.

Pressing against the tree, pressing on the earth, feeling more and more spacious.

There's no boundary between your body and what's around you.

Become more spacious.

And you know that wave of strong emotion.

It will come down.

That storm will pass.

And emotion

when rehearse

time and time again.

Become so entrenched in our brain, in every cell of our body.

The neural networks are like freeways.

You only need one triggering factor and go straight there.

Neurotransmitters are released.

The heart rate, respiratory rate, the whole body,

the whole way of thinking and speaking and behaving,

I immediately there.

So we need to

learn to come back to our breathing.

Go for a walk.

Jog slowly or quickly.

Change the peg.

Change the CD.

Change the music.

You don't have to be stuck in that one.

Change the environment.

Some environment

is not good for us.

It's not nourishing us.

Why do we have to stay there?

Why do we have to go to people that cause us to feel insecure and undermined?

Choose friends who believe in us, who show us the way.

Who bring us to the practice.

There are so many ways.

Do yoga.

Young people nowadays

are fixed

in their electronics, fixed on their electronics.

They only use their central vision.

Like this.

We don't look around anymore.

We don't see what's going on around us anymore.

Only this.

What's on the screen is not life.

You can push forward, backward, you can replay.

It's there.

It's not real.

What's real is what's going on in our body now,

all around us in the world.

Put these things down.

I have a niece.

She's only ten years old.

She has severe myopia now.

She has severe

astigmatism.

And apparently children all over the world,

now

50%, 60%, 70% of them,

are developing early myopia and astigmatism.

Because they don't play outdoors anymore.

Sunlight is important for the eye development.

It's important to the development of the whole body and mind.

Because children are indoors.

Because we...

They are babysat with electronics so that we, the adults, can do work.

And so they only focused and they focused so much that it affects their eyes' development.

And it's not just severe myopia and astigmatism that is dangerous.

It put them at risk for retinal detachment.

Macular degeneration.

Glaucoma, conditions that will lead to blindness.

I'm so sad every time I think of this about my niece and about the children all over the world.

So as adults, our lifestyle, the way we use electronics,

the way we take care or not take care of our emotions, of our thoughts, of our body and minds.

That is our inheritance.

That is our legacy.

For our children.

They watch us.

They watch us and they learn from us.

And they repeat this cycle.

So we need to know how to help them, feed them, feed themselves more positively.

So that they can have better mental health.

They can care for their strong emotions.

As friends.

As soulmates.

Whatever that is rehearsed so long, it becomes habits.

It becomes an addiction.

And the habit

will become our personality.

I tell this to the teenagers, you know,

your rehearse,

you game playing your electronics uses,

that becomes your habit.

Which becomes your personality.

Oh, I'm like that.

That's how I am.

That's who I am.

And a personality will lead to our destiny.

So my dear ones, I hope that this short sharing can help you gain some insights into your emotions and also can help you...

start a journey of self-exploration,

self-healing.

Sometimes we are so used to an emotion we cannot imagine, we...

what life would be like without that strong emotion.

And we even resist peace and happiness.

But I can I can assure you, I can reassure you that

as you practice to embrace and transform and heal these emotions.

Spaces are open up for life.

You can be with

what was that happen in your childhood,

in your life.

You can hold it without having to be swept away by it.

You can regard your life with tenderness and gratitude.

Because you have learned from it.

You can live your life.

This is all we have.

Every present moment is what we have.

It carries the past and the future,

right here and right now.

And we can hold this present moment,

as a soulmate to this present moment,

and thus, we can heal and transform the past, and we can affect the future in a positive way.

We may re-gain trust and confidence in our own capacity to be with what was, what is, and what will be.

And that is a deep, deep happiness,

it's a great power.

Enjoy being a soulmate from within,

my dear ones.