Today is January 26 2025 and the tentative title for my talk is emotional diversity. I'm going to be reading from a transcript of a episode of Hidden brain, the podcast with Shankar padangam and various guests, and then going from there,
The title of the of the podcast, from a series called emotions, 2.0 whatever that's supposed to mean. And the title is, what's better than being happy? And here he's interviewing a researcher named Jordy coy Bach. Say a little more about him, but Shankar kicks off the podcast talking about a plague that hit the vineyards of France in 1863
the roots and leaves of the grapevines there were being attacked by some sort of SAP sucking insect, and 1000s of acres were destroyed. And the reason why it was so destructive, of course, was that the vineyards were planted with only one variety. It was a monoculture, a single species of grape that didn't have a resistance to these insects. So it was almost a destruction of French wine making. But what was done? Many people may know about this. There were grape vines in the United States which were completely resistant, or very resistant, to this particular insect. And they grafted the French vines onto the roots of the American vines. So our crappy Niagara grape ended up saving all the fancy French European grapes. So it.
And Joh Bach steps in and says to me, the takeaway of this story is that by introducing more diversity, you're actually making your environment more resilient and more likely to succeed in the long run.
It's, it's kind of a genius idea on this guy's part, I think, to apply this idea from ecology to our emotional life. And of course, what we see in, you know, in agricultural ecology has already been applied to human health, to our microbiome. Used to be you just get antibiotics and nuke the bad guys, and of course, that ends up with all kinds of problems and opportunistic infections. And now there's an understanding most people are aware of this, that to have variety in your gut, many different kinds of bacteria in some sort of balance, which they find on their own. There's no doctor deciding there's going to be 15% of this and 7% of that coming to some sort of balance or healthier works better. Really extends through everything. Every time we step in there with our problem solving right brain and try to lay things out, it goes awry. Can see it in Soviet Union, the old disaster of central planning and the resulting damage to their economy.
So Shankar says this, many of us go to great lengths to be happy, reading books, devouring podcasts, even joining cults like this one, even joining cults that promise to set us on the path to join fulfillment, but is our singular focus. On positive emotions actually good for us, or does it set us up for calamity? Look on the bright side, accentuate the positive. See the glass as half full, not half empty. From billboard signs to T shirts with inspirational messages, our culture has many ways of telling us to banish negative emotions from our lives. One level, this makes perfect sense. Being sad and upset are unpleasant feelings. As humans, we're wired to seek the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant. Then he says, at a sunny business and law school in Barcelona, Spain, psychologist Jordy coy Bach has spent many years studying what happens we try to live in an emotional monoculture. And as Shankar often does in these podcasts, he begins by asking Jordy about personal experience that sort of reflects on this, and he tells a story he and his wife. His wife was pregnant and she had a miscarriage, and the next day, before they'd had any time to process that, they went to visit a friend who had just given birth and had a new baby, and so not wanting to bum out their their friend, they never mentioned it. And, you know, they spent time there marveling at this wonderful new child. It's, of course, the new baby. There's nothing more amazing.
So koan somewhere that compares a new baby to a ball bouncing along the surface of a stream, which is so responsive and open and unplanned, but these two were just stepping on their feelings, trying not to bomb anyone else out. And they got through it. And then the next day, they had a trip to Japan with a bunch of friends for two weeks. And same thing, they really didn't want to ruin their fun and joy, so they just didn't talk about it for all that time. And he points out there was a lot of damage done. It really affected their relationship. Can't share what's most important. And of course, this is, you know, a good example of something we do all the time. We want to present ourselves in a certain way. We may not be worried about bumming other people out, but we don't want to lower their impression of us. A lot of reasons to clamp down and and we don't want to feel it. We don't want to be bummed out. As as Shankar says in the introduction, it's unpleasant you
It goes on and tells some other stories, having a friend who was dumped by someone, and how he tried to cheer him up by telling him, Oh, it's going to be okay. She'll probably come back, and just failing to really meet him where he was, and as a result, really not not doing any good whatsoever, then that's something we've talked about before. When you when you're dealing, when you're talking with someone who's had some sort of loss, whatever it is trying to cheer them up is really, that's your agenda. Very often, the motivation is just wanting them to stop upsetting you. Would you please feel good so that I can feel good? Or would you feel numb so I can feel numb? It's some of the most good you can do for anyone is just taking in what they're showing you, not going into fix it mode immediately. Maybe an opportunity to make a suggestion. Some things can be very helpful, you know, some kind of taking some kind of break or picking yourself back up, but it's not a good way to lead.
And then Shankar launches into a description of the movie. What's the title of it? The Eternal Sunshine. In the Spotless Mind. I don't know how many people have seen that stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Winslet, and the plot is that Jim Carrey has been dumped, dumped by Kate, I guess. And he hears an ad for a service where they can erase your memory, just take it right out. So he goes for that, and as shaker says, a lot of us would be tempted to go for their patented non surgical procedure to rid you of painful memories and allow you a new and lasting peace of mind you never imagined possible. I'm not going to go into the whole story of movie, but let's just say that things go wrong.
But Geordie quarterback points out that in everyday life, we do this sort of thing all the time. We drink too much because we don't want to feel anxiety or sadness. We avoid asking for a raise, even though we should probably ask for it, because we don't want to experience fear many, many ways in which we avoid undergoing unpleasant emotions and limit our lives. Live a smaller life because we're running away from bad feelings. We
So to
quote shine card here psychologist Jordy quarterback studies what happens when we stop trying to keep unhappiness from entering our lives, says Jordy, farmers and ecologists have long known about the value, value of biodiversity in nature. I understand that you have borrowed this concept from biology and applied it to the study of human emotion. Tell me about the idea of emotional diversity. He goes on to describe a bunch of studies that they've done, and one thing they did, which was kind of clever, was they interviewed people, I think this was in Belgium, and asked them about their emotional life, what sort of emotions they had. And some people, of course, can name quite a few. And other people, not so much. And then looking at Belgian social security data, they found out what the health results were for all these various people, their mortality, their hospitalization, average consumption of drugs and prescriptions, number of days in a hospital. So this was actually for these kinds of studies. This is kind of good data. This is not asking the people to describe I'm happy. I'm not happy. Here's a scale from one to 10. I'm this smiley face that's all kind of fraught, because people tend to not know how they feel. We can relate to that. But here they can see quite clearly that those people who had a wider variety of emotional states, including negative ones, did much better than those who did not, and even among the positive emotions or the negative emotions, having variety within those so negative emotions, you might feel fear, you might feel anger, those are two big ones which have different effects. Fear, you sort of avoid doing things. Anger, you strike out without thinking. And there's all kinds of happiness, gratitude, contentment, I like the ones in Buddhism, sympathetic joy is my favorite called muddita in Sanskrit. First time I ever felt that was kind of a shock, just joy at the good fortune of other people.
So they did a number of other experiments too. I don't want to get into the into the too much into the details, but they they would question people, some people at more length about their emotions and feelings. This was in the context of making some sort of decision, and other people, they would just ask for one emotion and leave it that, and then they came back to them some weeks later see how they you. How it was sitting with them, how they they felt about their decision, and the ones who had more emotional variety were happier with what they had chosen. So it seems pretty, pretty good indication that it actually makes a difference. I I
hear he's speaking, and he says, possibility, that's my personal favorite, is that emotions are messengers. Emotions really are information about what's going on in our lives and what we should do next. By experiencing a broader range of emotion, we have more flexibility in choosing what to do next, and we choose wiser. To give you an example, if I'm feeling extremely proud of myself I just achieved something at work, pride might motivate me to work even harder, to take on a new project, to achieve even more. If I'm feeling grateful, that might be the opposite, but I give the credit to other people. My gratitude might motivate me to express my thanks to them. In both cases, if I have only one emotion, I might work myself too hard and exhaust myself down the line, or I might always sort of put myself in the background, never have a chance to maybe take the lead on a project, but if I experience the two, my response might be more adapted and flexible.
And Shankar runs with that, the metaphor of emotions as messengers. He says, I'm thinking about somebody who might be president or a prime minister sitting in their office. Messengers are coming to you from different parts of your country with messages about what's happening in your country. You're the kind of president or prime minister who doesn't want to hear negative news, so you kill all of those messengers. You only listen to the people who are telling you how great everything is. Thus you're blindsided to problems that you're having in your country.
You it, and researcher Jordy points out also that it's limiting. If you're only listening to one messenger with the good news, it's a variety in every flavor, lots of different kinds of good news, lots of different kinds of bad news, a big mix, sort of like what's in our gut. You
Well, believe in this podcast,
which is way longer than anything you can do today. You
Shankar says this, you know, Geordie, I'm thinking about this idea that I think comes from Buddhism, which is the idea that when an emotion appears in our hearts, we should treat it like a guest who's appearing in our house, according to this idea, you know, when anger shows up in your house, instead of closing the door to anger and saying, I don't want you go away, you actually open the door to your anger and invite it in, as you would invite an honored guest. You would sit the guest down and you would tell the guest, you know, good to see you. Thank you for visiting my home. Tell me what you have in mind, what do you have to share? And in some ways, that metaphor of thinking about our emotions as honored guests, I feel, meshes really well with the idea that you're talking about here, which is, in some ways, being curious about the emotions that visit us, not simply being reactive to them, but being curious about them. Allows us to understand what the emotions are actually trying to tell us.
I'm not sure if that comes from Buddhism. I. But it certainly comes from Rumi, the Sufi poet. This is a poem of his. This being human is a guest house. Every morning, a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor, welcome and entertain them all, even if there are crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight, the dark thought, the shame, the malice meet them at the door, laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. So
there's really a different way of framing emotional upset all the bad news that we get delivered. It's all, it's all, it's all good. It's all useful. Roshi Kapleau, it's all grist for the mill, but it requires a change in our orientation, instead of being transactional, and instead of looking for emotions to make us feel better, being curious about them. Why? What? What is this like? One of the best things you can do with any strong emotion is to feel it in the body. There are two ways you can go, can't you? You can there's a story probably connected with that emotion, and you can jump into that, start problem solving, or stop, start complaining, start blaming. Or you can just feel what it feels like. Anger it's, of course, the good one. If you're angry, it's in your body. It's right there. And it's amazing, because when you when you just take an interest, when you're no longer have an agenda, got to get this to stop. Can't show this to anyone if you're just okay with being aware of it. Everything changes. There's a there's a little thing that one of the Thai Forest teachers on John simedo said, Said, awareness is your refuge. Awareness of the changingness, of feelings, of attitudes, of moods, of material change and emotional change. Stay with that, because it's a refuge that is indestructible. It's not something that changes. It's a refuge you can trust in. This refuge is not something that you create. It's not a creation. It's not an ideal, very practical and very simple, but easily overlooked or not noticed. When you're mindful, we could say when you're awake, when you're aware, when you're curious, when you're looking, when you're mindful, you begin to notice. It's like this, such a solid foundation that isn't fixed. It's what's in Buddhism is called non abiding. Come and they go.
People think that when you're in the midst of it, when you're in the midst of a depression or suffering from some insult or whatever it feels like it's going to last forever. There's a woman, Jill multi Taylor, a doctor, who had a stroke that pretty much took out the right side of her brain, her executive functioning, and she learned a lot. She survived and she's recovered, but at least to a great extent. And she says this about the how emotions last, but a person has a reaction to something in their environment. There's a 92nd chemical process that happens in the body. We'll assume that's approximate. After that any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. Something happens in the external world, and chemicals are flushed through your body, which puts it on full alert for those chemicals to totally flush out of the body takes less than 90 seconds. That means that for 90 seconds, you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening. Then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you're thinking. Thing that are restimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this psycho physiological response over and over again. Of
course, every time you buy into it, you lay that memory back down. And that's how an insult or an agreed some something you're aggrieved about, resentment can just go on and on and on. You have a phenomenon of feuds. Think of people in Appalachian pet fuels and McCoys see it between countries playing out in the world all the time.
They say in alcohol, it's anonymous. Why would you want to let someone live rent free in your head? Yet many of us do that, the anger we have when somebody transgresses against us, it's like getting back at them by exploding a grenade in your own cardiovascular system. That'll show them I'll have a heart attack.
Best revenge is living well, but the only way to live well is to forget about revenge.
Another kind of diversity that's related to this is just having different friends, mixing with lots of different people. Some were cynical, some who are so sweet, as someone I know once said you could dump a five gallon bucket over there of sugar over their head, and they wouldn't be any sweeter. It's just, it's just, it's wonderful. Everybody is different, coming to appreciate that, not looking at people with acquisitive eyes or with fearful eyes, but with open eyes, it's really something that we develop in practice. Seems remarkable that by sitting on a cushion facing a wall, attending to the breath or to some other simple direct practice change so much in our lives, but really it's the it's the lost art of the art of looking directly, the art of dis identifying with things,
learning to let things be. They used to say, don't push the river. It flows by itself. I
I want to read something from a Jesuit priest. People may have heard from before Anthony de Mello, because he's all over this stuff. Says you want to hope for something better than what you have right now, don't you? Otherwise you wouldn't be hoping. But then you forget that you have it all right now anyway, and you don't know it. Why not concentrate on now? Instead of hoping for better times in the future, why not understand now, instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn't the future just another trap says the only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas, if you're ready to listen, if you're ready to be challenged. There is one thing you can do, but no one can help you. What is this? Most important thing of all? It's called self observation. No one can help you there. No one can give you a method, no one can show you a technique. The moment you pick up a technique,
you're programmed again. But self observation, watching yourself is important. It's not the same as self absorption. Self absorption is self preoccupation, where you're concerned about yourself, worried about yourself, and I would add, it's also not control, not trying to change anything says, I'm talking about self observation. What's that? It means? To watch everything in you and around you as far as possible, and watch it as if it were happening to someone else. What does that last sentence mean? It means you don't personalize what is happening to you. Means you look at things as if you have no connection with them whatsoever. You take out the worry about, where will this go? Where will this lead? Just trust. Really requires being willing to trust. Gotta be okay. You can take it. You can take in a little bit of negative information about spinning off the rails. You You can even take in positive information. It's possible to be praised and not get thrown which one is harder? Probably, probably criticism. He says, The reason you suffer from your depression and your anxieties is that you identify with them. You say I'm depressed, but that is false. You are not depressed. If you want to be accurate, you might say I'm experiencing a depression right now, but you can hardly say I am depressed. You're not your depression. That's but a strange kind of trick of the mind, strange kind of illusion. You have deluded yourself into thinking, though you are not aware of it, you are your depression, that you are your anxiety, and you are your joy or the thrills you have. I'm delighted. You certainly are not delighted. Delight may be in you right now, but wait around. It will change. It won't last. It never lasts. It keeps changing. It's always changing. It's interesting for a teacher, especially in seshin, people come in and certain states of mind and they're just convinced that they're locked in. That's That's it. Now I understand, well, this too shall pass. It's a nice message to give them when they're feeling lousy, but sometimes you have to say and you know, lo and behold, they come back and sure enough, don't know where that went.
Why I try to freeze anything there's, there's this dance going on, and gradually we learn to tune into it. We learn to dance. When you do there's a different kind of happiness. Some people call it joy, just being with the flow. Moving on to the next thing, we begin to feel lighter, not happy all the time, but lighter. This sucks, but it's okay. It's kind of a good place to be.
Bella says it won't last. It never lasts. It keeps changing. It's always changing. Clouds come and go. Some of them are black and some white. Some are large. Others are small. If we want to follow the analogy, you could be the sky, observing the clouds. You're a passive, detached observer. That's shocking, particularly, particularly to someone in the western culture. You're not interfering. Don't interfere. Don't fix anything. Watch, observe trouble with people is they're busy fixing things. They don't even understand we're always fixing things, aren't we? Never strikes us that things don't need to be fixed. They really don't. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they changed you. I
understand them, curious about them.
So many different ways to react to the information that emotions bring to us. I I was talking with Roshi once Bodhi Roshi, and he told me that it wasn't until he had been with his wife, Angela, who's a therapist good marriage for him, that he discovered. That the sensation that he interpreted as excitement most people felt as anxiety, sort of tells you something about Roshi. It's it's the problem isn't the information. The problem is our reaction. Problem is the story we bring to it. Problem is freezing up, trying to fix it. I
there's a kind of therapy I've talked about before called act stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and it really fits in well with this theme.
Gonna read a little bit from an interview. I'm not sure who the interviewer was. Nice I had that written down. But the interviewee, the person interviewed, is Stephen Hayes, one of the, I guess, leading lights of act therapy, and he had recently written a book called, get out of your mind and into your life, and I guess it was doing well on the best seller list, and some articles were written about it, and the headlines said that he was saying that happiness isn't normal. I it. So the interviewer says, you become associated with the catch phrase, Happiness isn't normal. Can you explain what it means? And he says, Well, that was the headline of a piece in time. I don't say exactly I don't say exactly that in the book. What I say is that pain is ubiquitous, big word that means everywhere, and suffering is normal. So you can see there's a little Buddhist influence there. You kind of got the suffering market. If you ask people, are you happy? Many of them are going to say yes. But if you ask people, is this really what you want your life to be about? Many more are going to say no. What people mean by happiness is feeling good, and there are many ways to feel good, and many of the ways we feel good limit the possibilities for living the way we want to live our lives. Say you've been betrayed in love, reasonable, essential, sensible thing to do is say, I'm not going to be that vulnerable again. But precisely the reason you loved so much to begin with, was because you wanted to be intimate, known, connected. That's the reason it hurts so much, because you don't want to be vulnerable. It prevents you from being connected and intimate, even if you're in a relationship. Now, when a person is living in a relationship like that, say they're happy, they might but do they have the intimacy and connection they badly want? No, we have to ask why it is that we have such issues of substance abuse and addiction, self control problems, even suicide, when most people say they are happy because people aren't living the ways they want to be living, and that comes from how they're managing their own team,
the interviewer sort of pushes whether this is sort of like religious fasting, basically, you're going to go in, you're going to sit with your pain. Is this some kind of self inflicted punishment? What's the line between sitting with pain and masochism? And Stephen hay says, well, it's also not healthy to say To hell with your fear. Leap off a tall building and see if the parachute opens up, you big sissy. A classic example of repressing your feelings and the entrance carrying up under pain is the military. You want to see spousal abuse and alcoholism go to a military base because that kind of just do it, you big sissy message destroys human lives doing things that don't feel good. By denying your own feelings results in violence, substance abuse. What I'm saying. Is find a middle path. My work is about a loving posture. Accept your history, feel your feelings, notice your thoughts. Carry all that forward down the path that you value is neither indulgence nor suppression. Again, you can see the Buddha's hand in this
the researcher also asks, Can you explain how your approach differs from cognitive therapy known as CBT cognitive behavioral therapy. This Act and other types are so called third wave, sort of a spin off from CBT. He says most forms of empirically supported therapy, and I've seen interesting things about all these kinds of therapies, is actually they've been tested to see if they make a difference, and all of them, to one extent or another, seem to be of some help, which may be more than we can say for some of the Freudian and Jungian approaches. Although everybody has their opinion. Most forms of empirically supported therapy have bought into the idea that the real problem in behavioral health is the present of presence of private events that are negative, specifically with regard to cognitive therapy, which, for 30 years has been ascended in the field, the idea has been that you should monitor, detect challenge and change your negative thoughts, that when you do that, you'll live better. But in a recent couple of recent randomized trials, that theory was shown to be not true. I don't know what the studies are, how definitive they are, but he's saying the radical difference here is that instead of a sequence in which you get your thoughts and feelings lined up and then live better, I'm saying to live better now, carry your thoughts and feelings with you, accept your feelings, disentangle yourself from your mind, connect with your values, show up in this moment, get your feet moving in accordance with your values. It helps an amazingly broad array of problems, from chronic pain and epilepsy to doing well at work, anxiety, depression and substance abuse.
I have to say this, moving in accordance with your values sounds sort of vague. I don't know that many of us could identify our values psychologically. And Stephen Hayes replies, Well, we don't get much training in it. We get trained in what do you want, but what do you want leads to the object or feeling those aren't values. They're not goals. There's nothing you can have like an object. Values are like an advert, qualities of action. So when I say, What do you want your life to be about? I've never had somebody say what I want is to be the driver of an SUV or someone who screws everything that moves. What they tell me are things like, I want to contribute to other people. I want to be a loving person. By saying it, you're connecting to it, but it's hard, because once you acknowledge it, you know It's not bullshit, that it's not something you could ever stop doing. It's a feature of practice, a feature of this work that we're doing. You're never done saying in Japan somewhere, the Buddha is still working on himself. Our practice isn't a goal. It's a direction moving in the direction more openness, more empathy, more clarity or joy, in the direction of being okay with things as they are will be in the direction of being connected to this moment, out of our manipulative mind. Can never quite keep up
learning gradually to live better isn't a fast process. There can be there can be things that happen very quickly. The mind can change with Flash. But if you look at most people, gradual process, walking through the mist and getting wet, you.
It, but it requires perseverance, requires courage,
requires the willingness to do things, to try different things, to work differently, to be able to see when you're butting up against the same problem again and again. Other aa saying is, when you keep walking into the same wall, try turning left or turning right. Don't try harder. Try different.
Final, final question in this interview says, in a way, what you're saying is, life sucks, suck it up and move on. And he says, Well, life is painful. Yeah, first sentence of this book is, people suffer. There is a base level of pain, for example, knowing you're going to die. So yes, life includes a big chunk of pain, it includes a big chunk of living. But if you're not willing to have the pain, you're not going to get the living. You
I want to read one more thing before we close. This is from Pema Chodron, Vajrayana teacher as a monastery up in Nova Scotia. She says, This is your chance. This little, short human life that you have is your opportunity. Don't blow it. Think about how you want to use this time. Meditation is a patient process of knowing that gradually, over time, these habits are dissolving. We don't actually get rid of anything. We're just steadfast with ourselves, developing clearer awareness and becoming honest about who we are and what we do. In basic sitting practice, we befriend ourselves and we cultivate loving kindness towards ourselves. As the days, months and years of our meditation practice pass, we also find that we're feeling more and more loving kindness towards others and the world as well. When I was a young student of meditation, I received a lot of encouragement from my teacher. He always referred to unconditional friendliness as quote, making friends with oneself. This felt tricky for me, because I always saw and felt things within myself that I wanted to avoid, things that were embarrassing or painful. I felt like I was making enemies with myself, because so much of this difficult material would surface during my meditation. My teacher said that making friends with myself meant seeing everything inside me and not running away or turning my back on it, because that's what real friendship is. No turn your back on yourself and abandon yourself just the way you wouldn't give up on a good friend when the darker sides begin to show up. When I became friends with my body, my mind and my transient emotions, when I was able to comfortably settle into myself more and more and remember this takes time then staying in the present moment in all situations became more possible for me to do. I was able, in meditation, to return to my breath and stop beating myself up.
So let's stop there, and we'll recite the four vows.
