Translated Shinzen Young's instructions for a great and working technique for harnessing the energy of unpleasant experiences to enhance and spread loving-kindness.
Introduction
All spiritual traditions speak of the importance of meeting negative circumstances with love. You can often hear the words that you need to love your enemies and those with whom we find it difficult. But despite the fact that there is such an ideal in all spiritual traditions, in reality it is extremely, extremely difficult to achieve, even if only partially.
People have developed a variety of strategies to help you welcome negativity with love and a kind heart. For example, one of the obvious tricks is to let the negative arise, but leave it in the background, ignoring it as much as possible, and focus on the positive instead. Another approach is to dissolve the negative in a stream and then use that stream to nurture loving-kindness. We may call this second approach "spiritual alchemy."
In the Middle Ages, alchemists tried to convert common substances like lead into noble substances like gold. The reason they failed is because such a transformation would require putting lead into an atomic reactor and reconstructing it at the atomic level. Alchemists believed that if they could repaint the surface of lead in some qualitative way, then gradually it would acquire the properties of gold. But we now know that it doesn't work that way. One has to go down to the deepest level, the atomic level, in order to transform one substance into another. Likewise, you can go to the deepest structural level of negativity (feelings like fear, anger, shame, etc.) and see it as a flow of energy. At this level, the feeling loses its negative "color" and becomes, in a certain sense, transparent. You can then recolor it as love and kindness, and spread this new feeling outward.
The purpose of this article is to describe a step-by-step algorithm on how to do this. To be honest, this will take a little work. You need to be prepared to do it regularly and practice it a lot, as you would practice in sports or music. But as with any skill, over time, you get better and better at it until it becomes second nature. When this happens, you will find yourself covered with superior armor. You will be able to confidently cope with any situations of interpersonal interaction. So, while this technique can be challenging and will require systematic and sustained work, you will be rewarded for this work in full!
Promotional video:
Step 1
The first step in this technique involves the ability to experience discomfort as a movement of energy. Suppose someone says bad things about you, or someone annoys you, or you feel physical discomfort due to illness or weakness. Such negative external circumstances always include the spread of unpleasant internal feelings. These sensations are never permanent. They are never completely motionless. They always move and change in some way. They come and go like waves.
Tune in to these wave qualities of sensations: how they arise, get a little stronger, and go away. How they flow from one area of the body to another. How their intensity changes over time. These are all aspects of change and impermanence.
No matter how intense, catchy, and embracing discomfort is, in one form or another it always changes and moves simply because the nature of our experiences is change and flow.
So the first step in this technique is to ignore the discomfort itself, focus on how it changes.
If someone bullies you or says something rude about you, feel how this impact moves through your entire being - just like a vibration. Ignore the emotion by focusing on the sensation of its movement. This will reduce the amount of suffering and create a soft, energetic cradle in which unconditional love can develop. When you can do this, then move on to the second step.
Step 2
The second step involves deliberately creating positive thoughts and discovering pleasant sensations in the body that are associated with those thoughts. Think of something that evokes feelings of love and goodwill in you. You might think about friends. You can think about your own positive qualities. You might think about how lucky you are in so many ways. You can remember your highest values, for example, happiness for all people. All these positive thoughts will be associated with pleasant sensations in the body. They can be in the heart, in the chest, throughout the body … Do not worry if these sensations are very subtle and imperceptible; soon you will learn to increase them! Everyone has the ability to feel at least a drop of natural love and goodwill in the body.
In the first step, we learned to experience the discomfort of negative circumstances not as discomfort, but as movement, as energy. In the second step, we created a drop of pleasant feeling of love and goodwill. Now we come to the third - and final - step, in which we put them together.
Step 3
Allow the movement of energy to pick up this little drop of love and goodwill and spread it throughout your being. Let it spread like a cloud into the space around you. Just as a tiny drop of food coloring, dropped into a glass of clean water, spreads over the entire volume by the movement of water molecules, in the same way, a tiny drop of positive feeling can be carried away by those energies that flow through us; those energies that were created by experiencing the original "negative" as moving waves.
It is possible that there will be a lot of discomfort at this stage if you engage in highly negative communication. But you will probably be able to perceive at least a small percentage of this discomfort just as pure movement, and you will be able to create a drop of positive sensation. Then you have the opportunity to use the energy of this movement in order to spread and increase this droplet until it surrounds you like a cloud. In this moment, you will experience an incredible sense of security and strength. And this will encourage you to practice this method more and more.
Let me give you a clear example. Suppose that some person treats you badly, and now he is in front of you, expressing his claims. With every unkind phrase he utters, some discomfort arises in your body. Of course, the reason this person is saying bad words to you is because they themselves feel uncomfortable with which they cannot cope, so they just pass it on. You feel at least some of this discomfort that he conveys to you as something moving through your body. Every time that person says something negative, a wave of discomfort goes through your body, it feels just like a surge of energy. If at this moment you create a pleasant experience of love and goodwill, then this wave of energy will be able to spread this experience more and more widely. Subtle vibrations of benevolence begin to flow from every pore of your being. You become a kind of transformer. Someone dumps their pain on you, and it transforms in you (at least to some extent) into a feeling of love and goodwill, which radiates beyond your body. The more negative energy is awakened in you, the more positive energy begins to emanate from you.
Common misunderstandings
Now I want to discuss one aspect of this practice that is most often misunderstood. In response to these instructions, many people argue: “If I face every negativity with love, won't that make me passive and ineffective? Wouldn't that make me a rag to wipe my feet on? Aren't there situations in which we need to take the initiative into our own hands, take purposeful actions and be active in this?
In response to this objection, I propose to reflect on this: in the above text it was said only about transforming unpleasant sensations into feelings of love. Not a word was said about what actions it makes sense to take about the situation that caused discomfort. Situations need to be dealt with one at a time, each one separately.
Sometimes it makes sense to do nothing, or be gentle. In other cases, you need to be strong, and even tough. In general, the point is that actions should spontaneously arise from the realities of each individual situation. However, our actions are often distorted by being caught in pain. The ability to create loving feelings in the midst of negative experiences simply means that you are reducing the distorting effects of your own inner pain. Can a person be purposeful and tough, and at the same time radiate love and goodwill? Sure! Here's the simplest proof that this is so: Observe how spiritually more mature people react to different situations. Internally, they totally allow everything to happen and surrender to circumstances, but outwardly they continue to act effectively. The life of Christ provides many good examples of this.
Summarize
There are two main goals in spiritual life. One of them: to live from the feeling of complete freedom and satisfaction with what is happening. Second: to be a source of love and goodwill towards other people. When you can recognize negative emotions as energy, then “recolor” it into love and kindness, and spread it around you, you will simultaneously embody both of these goals. Anyone can learn to do this through exercise. This means that anyone can find an extraordinary source of strength, stability and energy in everyday life.
At first, you will probably only be able to do this with small feelings of negativity and irritation. Think about the steps to take. Negative circumstances create strong feelings. These feelings come in waves. Focus on these waves. Then, create a positive feeling, and allow those waves that were previously negative emotions - "colored" with a new positive feeling so that their energy spreads this feeling in all directions, strengthening it.
Let yourself become a cloud of positive feeling, a cloud of loving energy. And carry this vibration with you throughout the duration of the unpleasant interaction, and throughout your entire day.
Victor Shiryaev
