Psychologies Magazine, March 2002 —
Fear, sadness, joy, anger, jealousy... emotions express the richness of our personality and the color of our sensitivity. In themselves, they are neither good nor bad. A fear can save our lives, and a passionate love can lead us to cruel disillusionment. To participate harmoniously in the balance of our lives, our emotions simply require recognition and adjustment to reality. Repressed anger or unidentified fear create much more damage than if these emotions clearly reached our consciousness. It is then a matter of observing them from a certain distance, analyzing their cause and discerning whether their expression is proportionate to this cause.
We all know that this work of distancing ourselves and gaining clarity about our own emotions can be achieved through psychotherapy. What is less well known is that centuries-old techniques also aim to achieve this awareness. From Greek schools of wisdom to the spiritual exercises of Christian mysticism, including methods developed by Taoist masters and Sufi Muslim brotherhoods, all spiritual traditions advocate, with varying emphases, the work of recognizing and transforming emotions—sometimes called "passions."
The central idea is to remain free from them, in other words to prevent them from overwhelming us and determining our actions. Meditation or prayer create the inner space that allows us to identify them, to name them, to take a step back from them. If the recognized emotion is judged negative, excessive, disproportionate to the cause, it is not a question of repressing it, of denying it, and even less of repressing it, as certain moralistic religious excesses have, unfortunately, often preached, but, on the contrary, of transforming it into a positive emotion in order to find peace of mind, serenity.
Tibetan lamas, who have developed very precise techniques of emotional work, call this "the alchemy of emotions." Every emotion is a powerful energy. Once this energy is recognized and transformed, even if it appears destructive to oneself or to others, it contributes to the spiritual progress of the being.
I remember a woman in her fifties who had been hurt by a man and was constantly overwhelmed by feelings of anger and hatred toward him. She joined a Tibetan meditation group led by a young French lama and worked on this problem. After a few sessions, she told me that she had succeeded not only in freeing herself from these negative emotions and finding inner peace, but also in forgiving this man and reestablishing a truer relationship with him. The poison had transformed into an elixir. And this elixir was all the more powerful because the poison was violent.
March 2002