Being Responsible for Our Emtions

Hilma af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944)
The Ten Largest, No. 5, Adulthood

 

From An Open-Hearted Mind, chapter "Being Responsible for Our Emotions"

My hesitancy to emphasize the role of our "animal behavior" or genes in accounting for our destructive emotions is becaues it is all too easy for us to then shrug our shoulders and say, "What can I do? I was born that way." For example, an alcoholic could easily excuse his drinking and have a defeatist attitude when someone suggests that he go to AA.

...

It is more helpful to think, "I experienced certain conditioning factors. Some are genetic, others biological, others derive from experiences that I had in the past. These things affected me, but their effects are not impossible to change."

Why? From the Buddhist perspective, as soon as we say the word "conditioning" -- be it conditioning by our brains, our genes or our previous experiences -- we are talking about causality; in other words, case and effect. If things are caused, it means that they can be changed (or ended). That is their very nature. They cannot remain the same even if we want them to. For example, the sperm and egg of our parents cause our bodies to form. From the moment that we are conceived our body changes: it grows ages and eventually dies. Everything that arises due to causes changes, including our disturbing emotions and unhelpful emotional habits....

One nice thing about being an adult is that we have the ability to assess the conditioning we received in the past. We can look back at our experiences and the things we heard and ask ourselves, "Is this something true and beneficial that I want to keep in my life, or is it something untrue and harmful that I would be better off letting go of?"  If we decide we would be better of letting go of those thoughts and emotions we can then go about freeing ourselves from whatever we learned that was harmful.