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sity is what really matters. With a little practice it becomes
easy to rate the intensity of most valences on a 1-to-10 scale.
Once you notice that a particular impulse is a –7 or a +2, it is
usually obvious whether it is appropriate or not.
Although we tend to notice only strong valences, it is also
useful to notice the many smaller ones. They can go badly
wrong also, and their effects can accumulate. Learning to
make better judgments is just like any skill. We learn by mak-
ing slight but frequent adjustments in the right direction over
and over again, until the new skill is automated.
Do you want some practice? Can you pick the intensity on
a scale of 1 to 10 of the objects represented in the block of
words on the next page? The valence of each one is likely to
be slightly or markedly different. I’ve actually placed similar
objects together to make the exercise harder. Nonetheless, if
you find that several adjacent words seem to have the same
intensity, you probably haven’t got it.
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Remember to spend a few seconds with each word until
both the valence and its intensity level become clear. If you
move too quickly the valences will blur into one another. A
valence involves a subtle body response that usually takes
a few seconds to emerge in consciousness. Finally, can you
confidently isolate the valence itself from any emotion that
the object evokes? Don’t be surprised if you find this exercise
difficult to do. It is not how we usually operate.
Cake . Pork . Gin . Hotel . Home . Family . Father . Friend .
Work . TV . Phone . Shakespeare . Hendrix . Mozart . God .
Goddess . Ants . Meerkats . Moth . Buddha . Jesus . Hell .
Reincarnation . Summer . Winter . Ethiopia . Brazil . Dar-
win . Dawkins . Dalai Lama . Prime minister . King . Dicta-
tor . Priest . The future . The past . Mortgage . Dying . Death .
Spirituality . Football . Money . Bed .
THE VALENCE OF EMOTIONS
Although the valence is part of an emotional response, it is
not the emotion itself. The valence gives us the volume but
not the music. The brain regions responsible for valence
(primarily the amygdala) can be quite distinct from those that
represent anger or love or sorrow. The same valence can be
the fuel behind many emotions. Moreover it is quite possible
to be mindful of a valence—to feel its strength and direction—
independent of the emotion driving it. Anger or sadness or
fear or love can all have strong or weak valences, and each of
them can be positive or negative according to circumstances.
In the next chapter, I’ll present the Buddha’s full reper-
toire of techniques for managing painful emotion, but since
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those techniques apply equally well to valences they are worth mentioning here. In the Sutta, the Buddha says that
the monk should notice states of mind such as anger or sad-
ness but also “how these states of mind arise and pass away.”
The emotion itself may not change from day to day, but its
valence certainly will. A depressed or grieving or happy per-
son may remain in that state for months, but the valence of
those moods can fluctuate within a single day.
It is a big improvement for a depressed person to recog-
nize “Yesterday I felt suicidal (strong negative valence) but
today I just feel miserable (mild negative valence).” The inten-
sity may have shifted from –9 to –4. If he observes this pos-
itive shift in the valence repeatedly and objectively, he will
start to recognize what supports it. Exercise, social contact,
doing something engaging, or being around an animal—all of
these can reduce the severity of a bad mood, even if the mood
itself still remains.
Likewise, anxious people have a strong bias toward high-
lighting what is painful and discounting what is good. Their
days can be full of lovely events that they fail to notice. Psy-
chologists and self-help books often encourage them to delib-
erately “savor” the enjoyable sensations of the present to
counteract this tendency. This can be hard to do if you are
racing and stressed. I would suggest something more prac-
tical. I call it “re-valencing.” Every action has a valence that
lingers a few seconds after it is over. If you’re anxious, you are
bound to undervalue most of what you do. You can change
this habit by noticing the affective tone of simple actions.
How did it feel to put away the laundry? Deal with a dif-
ficult client or family member? Take the stairs instead of the
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elevator? Eat the sandwich instead of the cake? These are all good things, but did you actually register them? A valence
is an automatic, heuristic judgment, and it may not be quite
accurate. If you are mindful of it, you can re-valence it up or
down to reflect its true value: “Yes, I am pleased that I did X. It
was worth doing and I’m glad that I’ve done it.”
The Buddha gave high priority to the conscious recogni-
tion and “naming” of valences because this is where all our
actions start. Noticing valences is the second of the four foun-
dations of mindfulness in the Sutta, but to most of us this
practice will seem quite odd. Since “valence” is not part of
vernacular English, we are not in the habit of noticing what
it refers to. Nonetheless, if you wanted to adopt just one con-
cept from the Satipatthana Sutta, you wouldn’t go far wrong
with “valence.” If you want to understand and fine-tune your
own emotions on a daily basis, it wouldn’t hurt to start at the
atomic level.
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17
Painful Emotion
How does a monk contemplate his states of mind?
He recognizes the mind that is caught in desire and
the mind free of desire . He recognizes the mind that
is caught in anger and the mind free of anger . He
recognizes the mind that is caught in delusion and
the mind free of delusion . . . .
He carefully observes how these states of mind arise
and pass away, and what causes them to do so .
He learns how to extinguish [bad states] when they
arise, and how to prevent them arising in the future .
—Satipatthana Sutta
The Sutta addresses what we would call “emotion” in both
its second and third sections. Probably because valences
are pivotal and relatively easy to recognize, they are included
as the lone subject of the small second section. The Buddha
deals with emotions proper in the much larger third
part
of the Sutta: “Mindfulness of States of Mind.” Before we
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examine his methods, let’s look at what cognitive science can now tell us about emotion.
Psychology, the study of the mind, is now profiting greatly
from neuroscience, the study of the brain. For example,
thanks to modern brain-scanning technology we can now
link certain mental functions with activity in specific brain
regions. This is starting to give psychology a scientific valid-
ity that it has previously lacked. The mapping of functions
onto brain anatomy goes like this: Sensations are processed
in the sensory cortex in the top, back, and sides of the brain.
Emotions are processed in the limbic system in the center.
Thoughts are processed in the prefrontal cortex in the front.
Actions are initiated from the motor cortex, a strip across the
top of the cerebral cortex.
Because the brain is modular, we could say that we each
have at least four brains. We all have a sensory brain, an
emotional brain, a thinking brain, and a motor—or physical
action—brain. Likewise we can say that there are four main
cognitive functions: sensing, emotion, thinking, and action.
These four brains work together for a common goal, which
is some form of useful action. The sensory brain takes in
information. The emotional brain evaluates it. The thinking
brain considers strategies if necessary, and the motor brain
initiates action. Notice that the thinking brain is an optional
extra. Most mental activity is automatic or instinctive and
doesn’t require input from consciousness.
We can always pay good attention to any particular
action, thought, body sensation, or emotion if we want to,
but we can’t focus on all of them at once. The mental stage is
too small. Working memory has limited capacity, so we are
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forced to be choosy. We tend to give priority to our thoughts and actions, and barely notice our emotions.
We can usually describe in considerable detail what we’ve
done in the course of a day. Because we always give a high per-
centage of our attention to our actions, they get embedded in
memory. However, we may have virtually no memory of our
changing emotions or body sensations during that day. If we
didn’t focus on them at the time, we won’t remember them
later.
Our daily actions are important in ways that emotion isn’t.
When driving a car we have to monitor what we are doing
moment by moment to stay alive. Conversely, we only notice
our emotions while driving if they become disruptive. As a
result we can drive a car, or even manage a knife and fork,
with far more sophistication than we can describe or recall
our emotional states.
As we get older, we become more self-aware in roughly the
following sequence: We become mindful of our actions first,
then thoughts, then body sensations, and finally emotion (if
at all). Some people don’t get that far. A stressed person with
a runaway mind may have virtually no awareness of his body
or his emotions, apart from knowing that he feels really bad.
Yet neuroscience tells us that no brain function is capa-
ble of working on its own. Each part constantly talks to and
argues with every other part via self-regulating feedback
mechanisms. Emotions turn out to be crucial for making
good judgments. Reason alone tends to be myopic and out
of its depth in complex situations. Emotions power most of
our judgments and our consequent behavior, for both good
or bad—so it is worthwhile to become more aware of them.
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So how does meditation help? A Standard Meditation Prac-
tice (see chapter 1) corrects our natural mental bias toward
action and thought. Sitting down stops our habitual activity,
and focusing on the body interrupts our habitual thoughts.
This frees up our available attention to reorient itself toward
our bodies and emotions, as it will naturally do. Whether we
intend to or not, we invariably notice these with more subtlety
than usual when we meditate. This somatic input is what makes
us feel emotionally “grounded” and in touch with ourselves.
We eventually realize that body sensations and emotions
are closely linked, and they collectively influence thought.
Sadness and tiredness go together, for example. Anger, fear,
lust, pride, and affection—all have obvious physiological
effects. The American philosopher and psychologist William
James even argued that emotions are bodily events that are
only recognized by the mind afterward, if at all.
Nonetheless, emotions in themselves are far more diffi-
cult to grasp than are thoughts or body sensations or even
valences. Emotions are usually subtle, fluid, complex, and pre-
conscious. They can occur as impulses, likes and dislikes, body
sensations, passions, or moods—and they can last for seconds
or hours or a lifetime. We can discuss emotions in a general-
ized way, but in the flesh they are hard to identify. How would
you describe your emotional state right now, for example?
MINDFULNESS AS THERAPY
In the third part of the Sutta, the Buddha tackles what we
would call emotions and moods and does quite an acceptable
job of it. What the Buddha calls “The Five Hindrances” is a
short list of “bad” emotions: desire, anger, lethargy, anxiety,
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and despair. Any psychologist will recognize these as the primary culprits found in the pages of her professional bible: the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The Buddha said, “I teach but two things: suffering and
the end of suffering.” His teaching thus has an affinity with
the concerns of Western medicine and psychology in a way
that other religions do not.
Mindfulness is a rather new therapy in psychology, but it
is often presented as taking authority from the distant past.
Mindfulness is commonly described as “a state of nonjudg-
mental acceptance” with the assumption that this is a funda-
mental Buddhist ideal. The list of the five hindrances shows
how completely wrong this assumption is.
It is obvious that the Buddha doesn’t want us to regard
desire or anger in a nonjudgmental, open-hearted, and
accepting manner. His own judgment is perfectly clear: Emo-
tion is the root cause of all suffering. He argues that virtually
all emotions, but especially desire or anger, are the original
sources of all human misery and are the implacable enemies
of inner peace and freedom.
Although the Buddha’s hostility toward emotion is m
ore
extreme than ours, his approach toward it is still remarkably
practical. He gives a detailed, step-by-step, psychologically
acute strategy for diminishing those emotions that really are
destructive.
The Buddha suggests that we name a painful emotion as
the first step toward controlling it. As it says in the Sutta, when the monk is angry, he knows “this is anger.” This implies that
the monk has already arrested the tendency toward action,
and he is not trying to “fix” the discomfort. He is trying to
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see that cluster of body sensations and turbulent thoughts as objectively as possible.
The Sutta goes on to say that the monk carefully observes
how anger arises and how it passes away, and what causes it
to do so. If the monk continues to observe his anger, he will
find that it is bound to change. Emotions are like weather:
they may fade quickly or slowly, but they can’t maintain their
initial intensity forever. The nonreactive watching mode also
allows the monk to see how emotions naturally change: He
observes how anger passes away. His blood pressure drops,
his muscle tension fades, and he feels mildly embarrassed
about getting so worked up.
If the monk notices this dynamic hundreds of times
mindfully, it gets embedded in memory. (Remember that the
etymological root of sati is “memory.”) This inevitably predis-
poses him to be less vulnerable to similar aggravations in the
future. He will remember that he just has to wait long enough,
or preoccupy himself with something else, for a painful state
of mind to fade.
This is a good result, but there is still far more to this ther-
apy. The monk also trains himself to notice how anger arises.
Through repeated acts of observation and memory, he gradu-
ally realizes what triggers his bad mental states: He observes
how anger arises and how it passes away, and what causes it
to do so. This will help him notice danger signs quickly and
develop prophylactic habits in the future. In psychology, this
is called the “early detection” of destructive tendencies.
The monk will eventually realize that certain things
reduce his propensity to anger. These may include sufficient
sleep, reflecting on his goals, being around supportive people,