Working With Emotions Summary

Think of something that either frightens you or makes you angry (pisses you off.) Fear or anger—start there. It is often easiest to begin with something that feels charged, something that naturally brings up a reaction.

Usually thinking about governments will do. As they tend to be bigger and meaner than we are. Feel the emotion. Think about the thing that either frightens or makes you angry until you begin to feel strongly the emotion of either fear or anger.

Now notice where you feel it in the body.

Most people find it in a combination of places such as the solar plexus, the back of the neck, the chest, sometimes the legs, or sometimes the wrists. Go find the sensation in your body. 

Accept feeling that without continuing to stare at it. Let your attention notice where the sensation is and then let go. Just be okay with feeling that. Once you have stripped the emotion naked, once you have the emotion strongly as an embodied emotion, you look through the thoughts that you use to bring it forth through the story. And looking through them they dissolve, arising and vanishing again and again without either substance or duration. Therefore leaving no residue, no thing and nowhere. Even the name fear or anger is simply a thought, a word, a name dissolved by the method of working with thoughts, leaving a sensation. Accept the sensation and leave it there. Don't hope for it to change. Don't try to transform it. Don't wait for it to transform. Except that it might feel like that forever. It's just a sensation.

When your brain, and this is definitely brain work rather than heart work. When the brain tries to wrap the sensation up in another story. "Yes, but it really is dangerous. I should be afraid." "Yes, but how can you not be angry at those who did that?" Strip it again.

Maybe the next story will be "I can't stand this." That's a story. Strip it again.

Because of your habit patterns, your mind will continuously throw up innumerable stories, attempting to co- the feeling.

What you want is to continuously strip it naked and leave it be. Don't fix it.

Step 1: Strip. Get the name gone too. Until it's only a sensation in the body. Just a sensation. Don't stare at the place. Just find it once and then go further on.

Step 2: Leave it there and continue to strip the stories that through habit your brain continually wants to wrap around that sensation. Strip them as they arise. 

This is Sopa, the third word of Garab Dorje. Look through again and again. It's obvious when you're looking.

Unthink: Looking through thoughts

You see, if you think at a thought, “this is not true” you are now believing that thought. So that obviously is not going to work. Thinking about thoughts in different ways will not liberate them. You have to “unthink” them.

To unthink involves not grabbing them but not forcing them to go away either. You have to be really loose with them because either pulling towards you or pushing away feeds them energy.

When you entertain a thought, you keep talking to yourself in thoughts along a particular story line that feeds that storyline energy. When you think "I won't think that" and try to stop thinking something because it bothers you.That also feeds those thoughts energy.

So right in between there's this very loose place where the thoughts are just flowing naturally and you're permitting that without shoving or grasping but you're also looking at Tawa, the first word of Garab Dorje, through the transparency of the thoughts.

As an example, hold your hand in front of your face and look at your fingerprints. Then look beyond your hand at the room.

You see how it's just a change of depth perception. This is an analogy for Tawa being in the distance and the thoughts being here trying to keep you from seeing Tawa. When you look at the thoughts, you can't see Tawa. When you look at your fingerprints, you can't see things beyond your hand. Whereas if you relax your eyeballs, you can see the fingerprints and beyond your hand at the same time.