Speaker: Greg Seton. Greg delves into working with emotional pain, outlining the process from a ground, path and fruition perspective. Emotional pain or “klesha” in Sanskrit is loosely translated as “affliction”. It causes pain and contaminates our thoughts, feelings and actions. The afflicted ego-mind is the cause of klesha. It is afflicted because it struggles to maintain what it constructs as self-image and becomes attached to that mental image. This fixation is painful and causes one to interpret everything through the ego-image as a stream of thinking, which then sets up false duality. In the path, we need to first learn to recognize our emotions, then apply antidotes. For learning about the relative-based Mahayana approach, Greg recommends reading ‘Light Comes Through’ by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche as it covers the five, self-centered emotions and their antidotes. For the absolute-based Vajrayana approach, he suggests we bring the pain of the emotion into our experience and then stare at it, looking at its basis, seeing its emptiness and luminosity. Thus, the fruitional aspect (the goal of the Mahayana and Vajrayana) is not to end up emotionless but to have one’s nature shine forth with non-dual wisdom and compassion.

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