The Preliminaries for Working with Emotions

Dzogchen works in a direct way to release imposed patterns into their natural state.

These Dhyani Buddhas, these emotions and feelings, are understood to be naturally arising wisdoms. They only become tangled because we either suppress them, having been taught we are not supposed to feel them, or we justify them so that others will acknowledge that we do feel them. Both suppression and justification are driven by thought, and that is what entangles them.

In Tibetan culture, anger is often an easier emotion to access. When you feel anger, it is usually a response to fear. Fear and anger are considered a single emotion. Some people are conditioned to believe they should not feel anger, so they experience fear instead. They can admit to being afraid, but not to being angry, because they see themselves as good practitioners or good people. “Good people are not supposed to get angry.”

Others cannot admit fear, because strength is defined as fearlessness. “A strong person is not supposed to feel afraid, but anger is acceptable.” So in ourselves, we tend to find one of these patterns. We are either more comfortable with anger than fear, or more comfortable with fear than anger.

Fear and anxiety are variations of the same thing. Anger, irritation, grouchiness and annoyance are also variations of the same thing. They are simply different intensities or flavors of syrup on the ice cream.

The Clothing of Emotions: Thoughts

It is our thoughts that we use to support and justify anger and fear. We build stories to justify or suppress what we feel. “I should be afraid to walk down that street.” “I should be angry because she wronged me. It’s justifiable.” Or, “I should not feel afraid because I am strong.” These are all stories we clothe the emotion in in order to suppress or justify them.

Through these stories, we either hold onto the emotion and intensify it, or we try to push it away and get rid of it. So the first step is working with thoughts. You have to be able to get a naked emotion to work with it. When it is wrapped in fancy stories we tell ourselves about why you are angry, why you are afraid, or why you should not be angry or afraid, you cannot actually work with it. All those marvelous stories which are made of thoughts are what is entangling primordial purity.

From the perspective of the Five Buddha Families, this primordial purity relates to mirror-like wisdom. This wisdom reflects everything clearly and precisely, like a perfect mirror. There is no distortion, no center that is clearer than the edges, no bias in what is reflected. The mirror does not prefer one image over another. It reflects exactly what is present without trying to fix or improve anything.

It is our thoughts that distort this mirror-like clarity into anger and fear. Through these stories, we either hold onto the emotion and intensify it, or we try to push it away and get rid of it. Both are attempts to control or fix the experience, and both distort the underlying wisdom. It would have arisen as mirror-like wisdom quite spontaneously if you didn't mess with it. So you have to learn how to stop messing with things.

To work with emotions, you strip them naked of any thoughts or stories. To do this, you have to get good at working with thoughts. You got to strip the thoughts off by recognizing that they never were on. But you got to see it for yourself.

The Key to Working with Thoughts

The method of working with thoughts is how you strip experience naked. There are things that make this easier. They are just little tricks. You do not need them if they are not helpful, but in the beginning they can make a difference.

Aligning the channels of the body makes it easier to do this in the beginning. Sit upright, whether on a cushion or a chair, with your hands resting naturally on your thighs or in your lap. Let your chin draw slightly back. Keep your lips gently open, with your teeth not touching. Do not clothes your teeth. The tongue rests naturally, slightly between the teeth. Breath flows mostly through the nose, but there is a slight openness through the mouth.

The eyes are especially important. Let them look straight ahead, at no thing at all.

Think of that state when you are very tired, like staying up all night in a lecture, when you learn to sleep with your eyes open. That is the lack of eye focus here, an absence of point focus. You allow the eyes to relax out of point focus, not by forcing anything, but by letting the eyeballs themselves soften and release.

This matters because attention follows the eyes. You cannot look somewhere without your attention going there. So by relaxing the eyes out of point focus, you are also releasing attention from its habitual compulsive point focus.

Ordinarily, attention is tightly focused. It locks onto thoughts, listens to them, and believes them. Even though you may intellectually understand that thoughts are not true, whatever thought is present now feels true. This one seems real. And this one. And this one. Even the thoughts about these very methods seem true and real.

Some people find this easier without glasses. Others prefer to keep them on. Try both. See what works.

In this relaxation, thoughts are no longer the subject of your pointed attention.

Let attention relax into the nameless tawa, that open awareness which has no dichotomy between subject and object. Which is just there. Not no-where. 

Relax into that. And then relax again. Let thoughts drift by without giving them your attention. Do not entertain your thoughts. Do not serve them tea.

Let them arise and vanish. Like writing with your finger on water. Like the tracks of a bird across the sky. No trace. No residue. No impact. No thing.

By seeing the nature of the thoughts while they arise and dissolve simultaneously, you strip naked the feeling into a pure sensation of the ye (The gut sense) in the body. Or perhaps somewhere else in the body. People hold emotional energy in different places.

[The “ye” is associated with the neural network in the body, particularly around the gut and solar plexus area. This region is highly sensitive and responsive, especially to neurotransmitters and internal states. It is through this “sense” that feelings are experienced directly in the body. In Tibetan, this is called the ye.]

But it is not fully naked yet. It still has its underwear on. It still has a name. Fear. Anger. Anxiety. Those names are thoughts.

Naming, the arising of a word, Ah is the beginning of thought. So you relax that as well. Let the label fall away. Now there is just a nameless sensation.

Do not try to change it. Do not try to transform it. That is poking at it. That is wanting it to do something. Leave it alone. Leave it exactly as it is.

Working with thoughts means to see the thoughts as they are, without doing anything about them. Without trying to fix them, suppress them, or elaborate on them.

Thoughts are insubstantial. No matter how strongly you think something, it has no material reality. You cannot make a thought hold up a physical object. You cannot make it solid.

Pick any thought and try to hold it still. You will see that you cannot. It shifts, flickers, transforms. What you actually have is not one thought, but a series of related thoughts on a topic. One leads to another, and another, and another. They proliferate endlessly.

But each individual thought arises and vanishes in an instant. This is their nature.

It requires absolutely no effort on your part to make thoughts dissolve in the moment they arise. They already dissolve the moment they arise. In fact, no possible amount of effort can make them persist. You cannot make them not dissolve in the moment they arise. They cannot be held.

So there is nothing to do. There is no need to force anything.

The practice is simply to stop grasping thoughts as real. By releasing them in the recognition of their own natural state.

This is the key to everything. This is the key to Garab Dorje’s three words. This is the key to Dzogchen. If you cannot do this, the practice of Dzogchen cannot complete itself.

You must see thoughts for what they are (nothing at all) while you think them. Not afterward. Not as an idea. Not as a conclusion.

Thinking that thoughts are empty is just another thought.

Instead, you watch them arise and dissolve, again and again, until it becomes completely obvious through your own experience that they have no more reality than any other.

A Trick: Settling the Chi in the Channels

Take a slow breath in through your nose, and then gently blow it out through your mouth. This is a simple method to help settle the chi in the channels.

It is said that thoughts ride the chi, and feelings ride the thoughts. Since we are working with thoughts here, calming the flow of chi can help slow them down slightly. This does not stop thoughts, but it makes them a little easier to observe.

Let the exhale be like a soft sigh. Then, simply look at your thoughts as you think them.

You will notice that thoughts are naturally transparent. In fact, you cannot make a thought opaque. Because thoughts cannot be made opaque, you can look directly through them into open awareness, into tawa.

So let your attention open. Remember, tawa is not one-pointed concentration. It is not narrowing the mind onto an object. It is wide, open awareness. The “aperture” of attention relaxes and expands.

Allow thinking to continue without suppressing it. Do not try to stop it. Do not try to change it. Do not try to do anything to it at all. Just look straight through it, looking right at it and in time it will become clear to you that no thought has substance nor duration. It will become clear through watching that no thought possesses any reality on its own. Seeing this directly, again and again, is the practice.

The Doing of Not Doing

All of these small “doings” that are being taught are simply ways of making it easier to “not do.”

When you are sitting comfortably, with your channels aligned, the chi moves more smoothly. When the chi moves roughly or “squeaks” through the channels, it is often experienced as discomfort, either as physical sensation or as emotional disturbance. So the reason for sitting upright, for aligning the body, is not as a rule to follow, but simply to reduce that friction and make things easier.

The breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth like a gentle sigh, also helps settle and slow the chi. Again, not to control anything, but to create a supportive condition.

The position of the mouth releases tension in the jaw. If left alone, the jaw tends to clench or tighten, just out of habit, something to do. Letting the lips part slightly and the teeth remain apart prevents that unnecessary tension.

But it is really the eyes that matter most. Your attention follows your eyes, and for as long as you can remember, you have been point-focused on your thoughts. Not just on what is happening, but on what you are thinking about what is happening.

Even something as simple as eating breakfast, you are rarely just eating. You are thinking about something else, or thinking about the experience itself, or distracted by something on a screen. The habit is continuous. Attention locks onto thought and stays there.

This practice is simply a shift in that habit. All of the posture instructions, the alignment, the gaze, are just small supports to make that shift easier. What matters is open awareness. Not being point-focused on what you are thinking. Let thoughts arise and vanish.

Each tiny fragment of thought has no duration, no substance. See that directly for yourself. Do not take it on belief. Look.

When attention opens, thoughts begin to slip and slide. They arise and dissolve without leaving any trace. Like writing on water. Like the path of a bird across the sky.

Nothing remains. Let go. Leave thoughts exactly as they are. No thing, nowhere. Because of that, they have no power over you.

And yet, for most of your life, thoughts have ruled everything. Whether your actions led to something beneficial or something difficult, they were driven by that constant internal voice. You have been following it, obeying it, assuming it must be listened to. But it is not required. You do not have to follow every thought.

So relax. Let go. Let thoughts wobble and move however they do. Pay them no mind. This is working with thoughts. Their natural state is nothing at all.

All that is required is to stop pretending that they are something solid, something meaningful, something that must be followed or believed.

Sun Sparkles on the Water

Go down to your lake or river in the sun. Stick your head in the shade. Let the river or the lake, the body of water, be in the sun. And watch the way the sparkles arise and vanish on the water. That's an analogy for how the thoughts arise and vanish leaving no trace. Sun sparkles on moving water.

Mirror-like Wisdom

This practice is really about not being led around by your thoughts, like a bull with a ring in its nose. Instead, it is about seeing clearly, directly, without thoughts obscuring the view. This is what is meant by mirror-like wisdom.

A mirror reflects everything with complete clarity. It does not sharpen one point while blurring the rest. It does not privilege the center over the periphery. Everything appears with equal precision, just as it is.

In the same way, when thoughts are no longer in the way, you can actually see the situation you are in. You can see what is happening and what needs to be done. As long as thoughts are being taken as real, they obstruct that clarity.

So the first step is to strip them naked. You are not doing anything to your thoughts. You are not making them empty or insubstantial. You are not causing them to lack duration. That is already their nature.

What is being undone is the ignorance, the deeply ingrained assumption that thoughts are real, solid, and meaningful in themselves.

It is like believing in something as a child, like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. At some point, you discover that it was a story. It may have been a compelling and enjoyable story, but it was not real.

In the same way, you eventually have to discover this about your thoughts. You are the one generating them. They can tell elaborate, convincing stories, but they are not real.

No one can simply tell you this. These are just more words, more thoughts. Thinking about the emptiness of thoughts is still just thinking, and utterly useless. You have to see it directly for yourself.

You have to observe thoughts while they are happening, while resting in open awareness of tawa. And simultaneously seeing that thoughts arise within tawa, as tawa, without ever leaving tawa. They dissolve back into tawa, having no substance and no duration.

Through directly seeing this again and again, thoughts lose their power to confuse you. Then clarity becomes possible.

You can actually perceive what is happening, rather than reacting to a story about what is happening. You can respond to the situation itself, rather than to the narrative constructed by thought.

Because without that clarity, you do not even know whether you are truly in danger, or merely imagining that you are, or projecting into a future that has not yet occurred.

When thoughts are seen through, what remains is direct knowing. And from that, appropriate action naturally arises.

Karma

Imagine one of those mechanical music boxes where you crank and turn a drum barrel with tiny pips on it. Then as the barrel turns, each pip makes a noise producing a song. Think of those little pips on a drum as your karmic formations, the subtle twists and imprints within your energy channels created by past actions.

As time passes, it is like the drum turning. These small imprints are struck again and again as the movement of chi flows through the channels. That movement produces the sensations of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions (which is a clump of all of that).

What you experience as reality is this unfolding, the unwinding of karma through your six sense organs, including your thoughts.

If you have developed a tendency toward anger, perhaps from being raised in an environment where anger was common, then each time that pattern is reinforced, the groove deepens. The channel becomes more conditioned. As a result, angry thoughts arise more easily and more frequently.

So when you follow your thoughts, you are not exercising free will. You are following these grooves. You are following the pips in your channels as the chi blows over them, causing squeaks. This is what a “channel squeak” is like, a strong emotional reaction arising from these conditioned pathways.

And this does not only apply to thoughts. It includes physical sensations, even pain, and the way you perceive the world. What you notice, what you overlook, what stands out to you, all of this is shaped by these patterns.

If several people share the same experience, they will later describe it very differently. Each person’s perception is filtered through their own karmic conditioning.

In that sense, what you call reality is not a single, objective thing that anyone directly experiences. It is more like a personal unfolding, a stream shaped by causes and conditions.

There is no real reality going on out there. At least not one that anybody's ever seen. Just winds in the channels.

Free Will

If you make choices based only on your thoughts, then you are not truly exercising free will.

You do not choose your thoughts. They arise according to patterns, conditioning, and karma. If you have always thought in a certain way, those same patterns will continue to repeat themselves.

So if you rely on thoughts to make your decisions, you are simply repeating that pattern. The same tendencies, the same reactions, the same habitual interpretations will play out again and again. That is not freedom. That is a pattern. From this perspective, what we call “choosing” based on thought is often just conditioning unfolding.

But when you are no longer identified with your thoughts, when you are not compelled to follow them, something different becomes possible. You can see clearly. And from that clarity, a different kind of response can arise, one that is not bound by the same habitual loops. This is where real freedom begins.

From one perspective, everything is conditioned. Karma unfolds, patterns repeat, and what feels like choice may simply be the continuation of those patterns.

And yet, within that unfolding, there can arise the sense of choosing.

It may not be that you can choose what happens. Events arise according to causes and conditions. But there can be a shift in how those events are experienced. There may be some capacity to notice the story being told, and even to change it.

For much of life, the habitual story runs automatically. But at some point, it can become clear that all of these stories are constructed. None of them are inherently real.

And in that recognition, there may be a kind of freedom, not in controlling events, but in no longer being bound by the narrative. Even the sense of having free will may itself be another experience arising, another mental sensation, like anger or fear.

From this view, what matters is not resolving the philosophical question of free will, but directly seeing how experience arises. Seeing the patterns. Seeing the thoughts. Seeing their nature. And in that seeing, something loosens.

For more information on this, explore the teachings of the Buddha in the Diamond Sutra.

Resting in Open Awareness & Making it “Work”

You rest in open awareness but for the purpose of liberating yourself from the thoughts. You do not bother to be aware of their content but you are aware of their nature and location. Sit and watch. Sit and watch. Walk around and watch. Sit and watch. And let daily life handle its own shtick. You cannot do it on purpose. The moment there's a you and an it, you make that separation, the flow won't flow. So I give you the doing that will cause the not-doing to spontaneously occur. But you can't make it do so.

If you start worrying “am I doing it right?” Don't worry about it. It's just thoughts and feelings going by. You don't want to reify the thoughts and feelings. You just want to sit and do the practice and let the thoughts and feelings go dance by themselves. 

If no thoughts arise, you just sit there and stay there. You don't do anything. Well, until you got to pee. Don't worry, your bladder will put an end to it, and you will think “I've got a pee” and that's a thought.

The Next Steps

We have not yet moved into working directly with emotions, because that requires a certain familiarity. You have to become skillful with thoughts first. You have to be able to see them clearly, to recognize their nature, before you can work with what lies beneath them, the emotions. But for now, get this working with thoughts down.

So go sit and practice! Milarepa’s last words to his student Gampopa were not words. He simply picked up his skirt and showed him his callous ass. Just sit there. If you actually follow the instructions, it works. Don’t just think about doing the practice. Don’t just intend to do the practice later or tomorrow. Don’t think about how you can tweak it, or change it to make it a little be more this way or that way, or more interesting. Just sit down and do the practice.

Review of the Practice

Sit on a cushion or a chair with your channels in alignment. Do the proper thing with your mouth, leaving your teeth slightly apart and your lips gently open. Breathe mostly through your nose, though a little breath can pass through the mouth as well.

Rest your hands naturally in your lap one on top of the other. If you are sitting in a chair, place them on your thighs. If you are sitting cross-legged on a cushion, rest them in your lap, one hand on top of the other.

The eyes are what matter. Gently pull your chin back and let your gaze extend straight ahead. If you are fortunate enough to have a setting where you can look out into the open sky while remaining in the shade, use that circumstance. If not, that is perfectly fine. You can simply look ahead wherever you are.

Allow your eyes to release their point focus. Let them remain open, but not fixed on anything in particular. Then let your attention follow your eyes. The “aperture” of attention, which you usually direct toward objects, thoughts, or tasks, can now open wide.

Rest in this open awareness of tawa. Allow thoughts to arise and vanish naturally, just as they do, without trying to stop them, suppress them, or engage with them in any way. Simply leave them be.

Pay no mind to their content. Do not follow the story. Instead, notice. Watch.

Look directly through the transparency of thoughts into the infinite openness of awareness itself, tawa. Remain observing thoughts arise and dissolve, without lasting even a moment, without possessing even the smallest atom of substance.

Simply sit and watch this happen.

Do not think about what is happening. Do not pay attention to what you are thinking. Do not analyze your thoughts or pay attention to their meaning.

At times, thoughts will capture your attention, and you may find yourself thinking about lunch, a friend, or something you have read. When this happens, simply notice that it has happened. Do not judge it as good or bad. Do not add anything extra.

Gently return.

Come back again to the relaxed state of open, infinite awareness, allowing thoughts to arise and dissolve without concern for their content. No need to interfere. No need to follow.

This is the practice of working with thoughts. Become familiar with it. Get good at it.