In the context of my daily meditation practice, I find the concept of repression of emotions hard to grasp.
Do you think meditation inhibits people from being able to repress emotions or memories?
Yeah, repression is a bit of a difficult concept.
It's not really...
It's not dealt with the same in Buddhism as it is in Western psychology, although I'm not totally up on Western psychology, especially modern Western psychology.
But the classical view of repression is that it's bad and it's a negative thing.
It's something that is the cause of all of our problems.
So digging up is considered to be a very important thing to come to terms with these things.
There is some overlap there, or some parallel in Buddhism, but it's not exact.
Momentary repression of emotions is actually technically what we're doing in the meditation practice.
When you practice loving-kindness meditation, for example, you're repressing the anger.
You're actually, through the force of loving-kindness, you're suppressing it.
Through the practice of mindfulness, when you say pain, pain or so on, the anger is being suppressed.
So this is dealt with, it's understood more as being suppression or getting in the way of it.
Stopping it from arising because from an Abhidhamic point of view there is no emotion to suppress and there is no suppressor.
There are only moment to moment mind states.
So technically when you repress something all that's happening is you're creating a specific mind state.
And so if you look, if you watch during meditation, you see that you're not actually repressing it.
You're not actually pushing it down.
You're giving rise to moment to moment mind states.
And repression generally has to do with anger, the aversion towards the mind state.
Something arises, you get angry about it.
Now, that doesn't repress it.
It's already gone, actually.
The emotion, whatever it was that you repressed, was actually not repressed.
It was reacted to with anger, with aversion, like, no, no, no.
Don't let it come up.
Or thinking that somehow you're going to catch it, something that's already arisen.
thinking that it's somehow a problem when it's already passed.
As a result of that, what does happen, and this is what people see as being the repression of emotions, is it creates a habit.
And so every time the emotion comes up, rather than dealing with it, you get angry and you go off in this anger.
It cuts off the emotion.
Suppose it was lust, let's say.
So you have lust arising, you see something, you see a beautiful woman or a beautiful man,
And you have lust arise.
And then you get angry at yourself.
You feel guilty.
You say how horrible, what a sin, what a negative mind state.
And you get angry.
So the lust has no potential to continue for the moment.
But you have an even bigger problem now because you have these feelings of guilt and anger and self-hatred and so on.
And that's what happens every time.
So what it looks like is you're repressing it.
But all it is is you're actually changing the focus of the mind.
You're complicating it.
If you want to say rather than repressing it, you're complicating the emotion.
The lust in the first place is a habit that we've developed over time.
There's no reason to have attraction to the human body.
It's, you know, science can explain it away based on genes and hormones and so on.
But in the broader point of view, from the point of view of the, or, you know, from a Buddhist belief point of view, I might say, but
Looking at things experientially, the moment-to-moment mind states, giving up the idea of birth and death and so on, there's no reason why we should come to this state of finding the human body pleasant.
It's a contrived state.
The human body and genes and hormones are all part of this contrived state that we've built up, we've cultivated as a part of what scientists call evolution.
So that's how the habit was originally Now modern human society has complicated it And so we find our habits, natural habits even, of guilt We naturally feel guilty And in fact you might even think it curious how the Bible legend in Genesis How Adam and Eve, why they wear fig leaves Is because of the knowledge that they've gained
So somehow they gain this, what the Bible sees as being knowledge, but we would say as being even more delusion, that leads them to feel guilty about it, to feel guilty about their nudity.
which complicates things.
And so you might say that this is something that we've cultivated as a race.
So people have innately in them this feeling of guilt towards sexuality.
This is a theory, of course.
Something like that.
But anyway, these habits come up and we're complicating them.
This is how repression works.
This is how what we call repression works.
It's just a more complicated habit.
And so this is what we're dealing with in meditation is, in many cases, incredibly complicated habits and mind states.
You can't simply deal with the lust or even the hatred that we have in the mind.
You have to look at how we're reacting to that.
Because our habits, our minds are so complex, our habits, our habitual tendencies.
are so complex that we get angry, and then we will be angry about it, or we will be afraid of it, and then we will try to divert ourselves by finding something pleasurable, and on and on and on.
We have these tricks and these...
methods that we've developed so haphazardly that we have to muck through in the meditation practice.
Repression is only a part of that, and it's really an inexact
explanation I don't use the word repression so much when I talk to people I think because for this reason I think it's inexact what we should talk about is the overlapping tendencies so you have underneath you have lust or anger ordinary lust ordinary anger and then you have your responses to it
And so you have to be able to skillfully deal with both and unravel it together, not just dealing with the lust or what we would call the repression, but dealing with them both together.
From time to time, you'll be the lust.
From time to time, it'll be the guilt, the anger, the fear, the worry.
I'm going to go to hell for this.
Whatever.
All of the different mind states.
And of course, even dealing with the positive mind states, being mindful of everything piece by piece.
And this is a very important topic to understand from a meditative point of view, to understand that it's not as simple as something like even repression.
It's much more complicated.
And rather than trying to say, I am repressing or I have this, you know, this is my tendency, we should look at the tendencies from moment to moment.
And meditation in one sense is simply getting more and more skillful
at dealing with more and more types of convolutions, knots in the mind.
This is why the Buddha said the mind is untying the knot.
There was this angel came and said, how it started, the Visuddhimagga, the first verse, Anto jatabhijataya jatitabhijataya
This, people today are entangled with a tangle, both the inner tangle and the outer tangle.
Who in this world, we ask the Samana Gautama, who in this world can untie the tangle, untangle the tangle?
So the inner tangle is what we've been talking about.
The outer tangle is actually equally important, our relationships with other people, how we are attached to other people.
And of course they are also complicated, these complicated relationships, our complicated relationships with our parents, our complicated relationships with our spouses, our children.
with everyone people who we work with you know going to even going to public school you know going to high school was such a nightmare because you have these cliques and you know just horrible complexities the tangle how do you untie the tangle this tangle and the buddha said so
Sile padidaya, resting on morality.
Cittang, developing concentration, panyanca, and wisdom.
Atapinipako, a wise and energetic bhikkhu, who will be able to untangle the tangles.
So basically speaking, morality, concentration, and wisdom are the practice of the Buddha's teaching.
Which, of course, I don't think I have to go into what I mean by morality, concentration and wisdom.
You can, of course, study and I'm sure you're already fairly alert as to what these mean.
But from a meditative point of view, just briefly, I suppose.
The morality is bringing the mind back to the object.
The concentration is the focus that arises when you do that.
And the wisdom is what you see when your mind is in focus.
So the meditation practice is the development of morality, concentration, and wisdom that slowly allows you to simplify your habits, make your mind work in a one-to-one relationship instead of reacting and then reacting to your reactions and so on.