Member-only story
What to Do When You’re Overwhelmed by Emotions
In Buddhism, it’s said that some people can merely hear the teachings and boom, they get them. Other people meditate and that brings them into their experience. Alternatively, others can contemplate the teachings and they fully land that way. Me? I sometimes have to go through the process of writing a whole book on the topic in order to really and truly understand it.
That was certainly the case some years back when I tackled Love Hurts, my book around heartbreak and grappling with other strong emotions. I had an understanding of the teachings on strong emotions, but writing the book brought me to a whole new relationship with them.
Mercifully, there were a lot of teachings for me to hear, meditate on and contemplate when it came to what the Buddha taught about strong emotions. And what do those boil down to? Normally, when we get overwhelmed by our feelings, we tend to do one of three things:
- We tamp them down and ignore them, hoping they will go away
- We distract ourselves from them, reaching for our smartphone, a drink, or our favorite online shopping portal in the hopes that we can escape
- We act out on them in not-so-helpful ways, such as writing scathing text messages that we may end up regretting
Let me be very clear: Having emotions isn’t a bad thing. It’s awesome. When you feel them in their most direct sense, they have so much valid communication for you to listen to. But when I say “strong…
