Need advice on how to handle my emotions

Question

Tell you the truth, I joined Buddhism in search of peace and harmony. Not because I have mental issues. It is about admitting what I see and feel. I am not that much aware of stuff, but sometimes I aspire to be Buddhist; at other times, I am very emotional. At times I cry because the world is not aware of the basic values of humanity. When I choose to go to the Buddha for refuge, my family thinks that I am a psycho.. When I see others losing human morals, I suffer! Today I feel a bit better than yesterday, but when I look at myself during meditation, I feel like a person who suffers. It is not at all that I am different or I am trying to be different. I want to know the reason for this according to Buddhism?

Answer 1

but when I look at myself during meditation, I feel like a person who suffers

I recommend you to listen to this talk by Ajahn Brahm about suffering.

I'm gonna summarize it shortly in order not to get banned:

• There is no happiness without suffering. You can't have one without the other. They are equally measured by each other.
• In Buddhism you have to get rid of all dogmas, especially the individual dogmas ('life must be happy', etc.)
• Suffering is part of life. So why is it that we say 'Something is going wrong, I'm suffering'?
• We have to put aside what we want to believe in and try to see real nature
• the cause of suffering is inside of us, nothing/nobody can cause it from outside
• Call whatever it is your suffering from 'Ajahn' or 'growing pain'. Let it be your teacher.
• If there is nothing to do, do nothing. If there is something you can do, give it everything you can.

Answer 2

Every unenlightened person has metal issues. The reasons are the defilements: craving, aversion and ignorance.

I would recommend doing Vipassana meditation in your daily life:

If you dislike something or someone's behavior, simply note it as 'disliking', 'disliking', 'disliking...' before it gets to crying. If you are too slow and already started crying, simply note it as 'crying','crying','crying...' instead of thinking while crying.

If you want the world to be in a certain way or want others behave to your liking or to think about you in a certain way, simply note it as 'wanting', 'wanting', 'wanting...'

Don't drop the ball no matter how tough or exciting it gets! Simply keep noting.

For more instructions: http://www.sirimangalo.org/text/how-to-meditate/

Answer 3

I am very emotional

Since you are emotional best is to pratice in the context of an organised course. Due to emotions perhaps you might not pratice as intended or in the right way without guidance. Following centres have a wide outreach and I personally have positive results thought the pratice: https://www.dhamma.org/en/index. I have not tried this out but the course most likely like the other hence would be benificial: http://www.internationalmeditationcentre.org/global/index.html

Need advice on how to handle my emotions

If meditation is done right you would be able to be more emotionally stable.

Emotions have some sensation associated with it. If you get attached or averse to the sensation you are creating negativity.

You have to try your best to study the sensations behind your emotions to understand and handle your emotions.

Also sensations and craving lead to all dogmas. [Brahma,jala Sutta] Many conceiving of self happen through craving. (Vicarita) Tanha Sutta Many of these lead to suffering. Emotions can be a form of suffering as you conceive the self as subject or receiver of any event or perhaps building of non conducive views which case suffering.

feeling of those who know not, merely the agitation and vacillation of those overcome by craving - [Brahma,jala Sutta]

Answer 4

@jitin… try to stay within the five precepts, within the bounds of what’s skilful, be true to the five precepts. Afterall there is no ‘buddhist’ or ‘ christian’ in it. The knowledge that you’ve maintained your honor can give you a lot of strength even as you go through negative emotions. Then you try to take apart unskillful emotions: You take apart the physical side, then the verbal side, then the mental side. For the mental side, you have to learn how to think outside the box. The same with the verbal side—because “verbal,” here, refers to your inner chatter, what you say to yourself. Often what you say to yourself can be a lot more harmful than what people do or say outside. So a large part of your training lies in learning how to talk to yourself in skillful ways.

Supreme Buddha taught that the most important part of the practice is appropriate attention, where you learn to look at the situation and divide it up into four categories: where’s the stress; where’s the cause of stress; what would be the cessation of that stress, i.e., by abandoning the cause; and then how you do that: the path of practice that you develop to abandon the cause of stress. In other words, you see things in terms of the four noble truths. Each truth has a task, which has to be mastered as a skill and brought to completion: comprehend the stress, abandon the cause, develop the path, so that you can realize the cessation. That’s a very different approach from simply being nonreactive, or learning to accept whatever comes.

You can consciously breathe in and out at times when these emotions overwhelm you. So we focus on the breath as a way of getting outside of these overwhelming emotions, to realize they don’t have to take over totally. We can have at least one corner of our awareness where they’re not raging and strong. Not only does the breath give us a place to stand, it also gives us some ammunition to use against these things. When anger comes, when fear comes, part of their power comes from the way they change the processes of the body. You can work with your breath to counteract at least the physical side of the emotion first. Regardless of what’s happening in the mind, you can still breathe calmly. In fact, this is an important way of retraining yourself.

That way, if something does start creeping in, you’ll notice it immediately. And you find that these emotions are a lot easier to deal with when you catch them right at the very beginning, before they trigger the hormones, before they trigger the physical reactions, because otherwise, once those reactions are triggered, you simply have to ride them out, and that may take a while.