How to meditate without emotions

Sounds like a relief? Well, that's how the Buddha did it!

Emotions. Let’s be honest, they’re a bit of a drag—and if you want to be free of them, you actually can, because they’re optional! The Buddha didn’t have them, neither did any of the Buddha’s contemporaries, and not even did “we” a few centuries ago.

What I’m really talking about is the concept of “emotion”. We swim in it so much today that we forget how young it is. Just about 200 years ago, people spoke of passions, sentiments, affections… but not of emotions. There is no term in any classical Buddhist language that corresponds to “emotion”. It’s a modern concept, and other epochs and cultures have organised inner life using different categories. (For the nerds among you, here’s a paper on all this.)

Consider this: are feeling sad and feeling angry similar enough to be considered the same kind of thing and thus approached in the same way? I think early Buddhists would answer “absolutely not”. What do you think?

I will speak of this in the second session of my online course Feeling Your Way to Liberation which I’ll be teaching in May & June, in English for Bodhi College and in Spanish for Espai Sati. I don’t want to spoil too much (bad marketing, right?), but let me anticipate two things:

• While I’ve heard from many teachers and scholars (whom I respect a lot) that “feeling tone” (vedanā) does not refer to emotions, I’m afraid that during my PhD I came to disagree with them: I think those two concepts overlap.

• Some dharma teachers explain the third foundation of mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna) as being aware of emotions: I disagree as well, at least in part. The contemplation of mind (cittānupassanā) is about ethics.

How we structure our inner life makes a difference. Sometimes I’ve found it useful to put aside the habit of lumping most of what I feel under the umbrella term ‘emotion’ and adopt early Buddhist categories. That alternative way of thinking (and experiencing!) can be quite valuable and freeing. It’s true we cannot forget our cultural conditioning just like that, but learning an additional and complementary perspective can give us more tools to disentangle the mess that often happens “in here”. We can practice it in our meditations and apply it to our daily life.

I must confess this is also an experiment for me… I’ve reflected about it and, as I said, I’ve tried it in practice, but in a sense I will be doing the course myself as I teach it, together with those who sign up. It’s the first online course I do for Bodhi College on my own, so I hope there’ll be a good enough number of participants—personally I tend to prefer medium-sized groups. We’ll see!

Here’s a video I made to introduce the course:

Before that, in April I’ll be in London to teach a daylong on Nirvana and at Gaia House for the Young Person’s retreat—I’ve been told there are still a few spaces.

I will end this newsletter with some gratitude and three music recommendations. Gratitude to all of you who signed up to my substack—a new adventure! Some have pledged to pay for it as a yearly thing. I hadn’t thought of that at all, but I really appreciate the intention to support me and this platform is as good as any to do that, so I will be considering it. Thank you!

My first music recomendation is Passepied Noveau by Enrico Pieranunzi Trio (Spotify / Youtube). Just because I like it. It’s blending classical music and jazz ‘well done’, which doesn’t always happen. The other two are Model Trains by Gabriel Kahane (I have been obsessed with this song for a few months now) and Just One Of Those Days by Sam Greenfield.

To me, both of these songs convey the experience of dukkha, but with completely opposite flavours. In fact, I imagine that listening to them one after the other might feel like having a pain au chocolat with a beer. Having warned you, I hope you enjoy these music suggestions.

I wish you have found this a worthwhile read, though it was more ‘marketing-y’ than what I intend in general for Berni’s dharma. Until the next newsletter in three months, please keep yourself and others well.
We really do need each other :-)