Tempering the Heart to Master Peace and Happiness

What does Tempering the Heart mean?

The idea of tempering the heart means keeping your emotions steady and not fluctuating. This is at the very core of Zen wisdom and is a very specific skill.

This skill is not easy to describe or to practice, so to better guide you through this topic, I will use the analogy of being at the bottom of a hole and using a ladder to get out of it.

If you grasp the meaning, you will no doubt take a giant leap forward in your spiritual journey. If you do not, you may be confused, angry, or agitated. So take your time to digest the materials and proceed with caution.

Learning the skill to temper the heart is important. Many events of life can cause anger, sadness, fear, boredom, loss, jealousy, and other negative feelings that lead to suffering. Likewise, many events can cause positive feelings like joy, pride, excitement, euphoria, which can also lead to suffering. 

We will first review and reaffirm our understanding of emotions before exploring 'Tempering the Heart' through the idea of 'emotional holes', which cause suffering and delay our journey along the Spiritual Path. 

Overview of Emotions

You can study my previous article about emotions here: The Power of Calmness - Understanding Emotions.

An emotion is a physical sensation resulting from a chemical reaction in the body and can be stimulated by the mind or external factors. 

There are two key aspects of emotions:

1. Emotional State. This is the physical sensation of the emotion in your body and mind.
2. Emoting. This is the physical act of communicating how one feels.

By breaking down emotions into these two components, we can better appreciate how emotions work.

What are Emotional Holes?

An Emotional Hole is an abstract representation of a very stubborn and complex perceptual layer that forms from an experience with strong emotion(s). 

It drives our thoughts, actions, and speech in a way that causes suffering to ourselves and to others, whether we realize it or not. 

We already know that through our experiences in life, our emotions become more complex as we respond to our environment (socially and physically). 

In addition, the complex and abstract perceptual layers that we learn or fantasize about must contain these emotions. For example, we learn by making mistakes, and punishment can be emotional and traumatic.

When we experience these complex emotions, we feed off them, walk blindly, and fall into an Emotional Hole. They make us react without being able to rationalize about a particular situation. And so we make decisions, act, or say things that later we may regret.

Here are some examples of complex perceptual layers with emotions that lead to Emotional Holes. 

I want you to lower your guard and humbly consider if you might be in an Emotional Hole.

• Oppression and trauma from parents, teachers, and others that turn us into 'yes' people
• Wanting approval from others
• Fear of losing a loved one
• Losing a loved one
• Fear of being poor
• Being poor and starving
• Fear of being a lower-class citizen
• Being a lower-class citizen
• Fear of rejection from a social group or people you care about
• Being rejected by a social group or a person you care about
• Coveting what others have
• Desiring excess excitement and euphoria
• Desiring excess satiation
• Desiring excess comfort

In each of these examples, you will be driven to spend your time and energy appeasing your own desires and even controlling others. This will ultimately lead to suffering for yourself and others.

How do Emotional Holes Differ from Perceptual-Belief Holes?

In the 'Finding Your Spiritual Path Through the Ego-Self' article, I defined a 'Perceptual-Belief Hole' is an abstract representation of a very stubborn and complex perceptual layer that forms from knowledge and logic. Thus, they are ideas that we believe are very important to us, and make us act and behave in a way that causes suffering to ourselves and others. 

This is similar and often related to Emotional Holes, except that Perceptual-Belief Holes are tied to knowledge-based perceptual layers rather than Emotional States. Emotional holes are usually associated with a strong emotion of fear, loss, or excessive fulfillment.

Classifying 'holes' as either Emotional or Perceptual Belief is somewhat arbitrary; on the other hand, it is useful to categorize, explore, and learn about them in a convenient and structured way.

How to Deal with Emotional Holes?

The First Step - Humility, Awareness, and Recognition

Emotional Holes arise from an illogical evaluation of your circumstances (i.e., where you want to be and where you currently are).

Here are some examples:

1. When a person you care about passes away (often unexpectedly), you may become very sad and eventually depressed. This is because you want a reality where that person is still in it. This causes you to suffer from feelings related to loss.
2. You may have experienced trauma from your parent(s), who punished you for not behaving in a way that they wanted. For instance, you get punished (physically or verbally) for not getting good grades, not doing your chores, etc. You want a reality where no one punishes you and you can do whatever you want. The greater the punishment, the more trauma and fear you develop.  
3. Hunger can be a disturbing feeling. The more hungry you are, the more disturbing it gets. You want a reality where you are never hungry, so over time, you eat more and more and suffer from being overweight. You can apply this to many emotions, such as discomfort and unsatisfied sex drive.

How do people usually deal with emotional holes that cause suffering?

Emotional Holes are sneaky because you may find yourself in one and never know it. 

People who have been oppressed since childhood will likely seek power. People who have been traumatized will seek to control their environment and others. People who are poor growing up will seek to make more money than they really need for a comfortable life. 

And many such people will expend a lot of time and energy to achieve these never-ending goals and are never satisfied. They will achieve them selfishly, they may sacrifice the welfare of others and themselves, and they may cause great suffering to those around them. Many will not even realize they are causing suffering to themselves or others.

How does humility help us become aware of Emotional Holes?

Although I describe these people in a more extreme case, many of us are in these holes. The suffering we create and cause is not as extreme, but still significant. When we are not humble, we cannot see this to be true.

A classic example would be having grown up with very strict parents. In order to pass down teachings such as good manners, being well-behaved, doing chores, and doing well in school, your parents may have been very strict with you, giving you physical and mental punishment. The harsher your punishment, the more likely you will pass this on to your children. That is because being controlled through fear tactics by your parents will naturally make you want to control others in order to alleviate the suffering that you have been harboring. Also, if you learned life that way, you are more likely to pass it on the same way. This may extend to friends, co-workers, partners, etc. Of course, this is not always the case. Some people will vow to do the opposite, and instead find a different (i.e., less traumatic) way to pass on teachings to their children.

Humility gives us time to introspect, honestly examine ourselves, our actions, and thoughts to determine if we are in an Emotional Hole. Without humility, we cannot see this, and we will spend the rest of our lives being driven to cause suffering.

How do I recognize that I am in an Emotional Hole?

If we immediately reject the idea that we may be in an Emotional Hole, we are probably in one! You may feel angry or offended by this idea.

Humility helps us take a crucial step - that is, to consider that we might be in one. There is no harm in considering this possibility because, as you read this article, you will be able to determine if you are in one. 

If, on the other hand, you discover you are in one, then now you can take immediate steps to climb out of it. 

So if you think this is possible, you've already made great progress!

To determine if we are in an Emotional Hole, we have to introspect and take an honest assessment of our lives and ask:

• Am I trying to control someone? 
• Am I manipulating someone?
• Am I in a depressed state?
• Do I get angry easily or often?
• Do I feel jealous often or have strong feelings of jealousy?
• Do I understand the emotions that I am experiencing?
• Do I feel I need to make lots of money, and it is never enough?
• Do I often feel anxious, stressed, or scared?
• Am I putting a lot of effort and time into being happy?
• Am I overweight or have unhealthy lifestyle habits?
• Do I have a lot of regrets?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, there is a high degree of likelihood that you are in an Emotional Hole.

Another way to think about this is to ask yourself:

• What is motivating your actions today?
• What is behind your motivations?

If you are uncertain, then you may be feeding off emotions, walking blindly, and therefore in an Emotional Hole(s).

For example, let's say you are working several jobs in order to afford things that are considered luxury items (an expensive car, a big house, etc.). There may be strong emotions of jealousy or loss, but you are not sure. You just want those items.

Once you obtain that luxury item, you will move on to another. Without honest introspection, you will spend most of your life working to acquire more. One day, you will surely ask yourself, "Where did all of my time go?" You may suffer from regret, health issues, or feelings of anger. 

How do I characterize the Emotional Hole I am in?

The final part of recognizing the Emotional Hole you are in is to be able to describe it succinctly. This process may reveal that you are in many different Emotional Holes. Each one needs to be described so that you can deal with them separately.

An Emotional Hole can be described in these parts:

1. What emotion(s) are you feeling?
2. What is the source of those emotions?
3. What actions (by you) result from those emotions?
4. How are you or others suffering from your actions?

Here are some examples of Emotional Holes:

• I feel lonely because I have no one to talk to, and this causes me to spend a lot of time and effort to be accepted by friends and social groups that are not right for me, which causes a lot of anxiety and stress
• Other variations of loneliness can come from feeling you do not belong in society, rejection and isolation by others, observing others in a great relationship, being ignored by the people you care about, etc.
• I feel sad and grief because my partner passed away, and I cannot accept that my partner is no longer around to give me comfort. I get emotional roller-coasters whenever something triggers me to think of my partner, and I suffer from depression. 
• I feel I need to keep making more money even though I have enough to survive for the rest of my expected life. This is the result of being poor for most of my life or early life. As a result, I am overly stingy with my money and I work many hours or have several jobs, leaving me little time to do anything else, including regulating my physical and mental health.
• I feel regret for many things I have done because I feel the result would have been better had I chosen a different path. The source of this is from coveting a life in others that I perceive to be better than mine. The feelings of regret trigger me to suffer mentally and cause me to feel sad. It also makes me lash out and reflect my regret toward others. 
• Examples of coveting what others have include more wealth, a better romantic relationship, more well-behaved kids, a better job, higher grades in school, a better car, a bigger house, a more luxurious life, etc.
• I feel sad or angry that I do not have a good relationship with my kids. This is because I cannot accept that I performed poorly in teaching my kids. I continue to get angry at them and say or do things that I regret, which causes a bigger and bigger rift between us.
• I feel helpless in life, which gives me feelings of sadness and despair. This is because I cannot achieve things that make me happy. It seems impossible, so that makes me give up and will regularly do things that give me a bit of joy, but these things are not helpful in the long run and cause me to suffer mentally or physically.
• e.g., You are overweight, and you try to lose weight, but it seems impossible, and the opposite happens, and you keep eating junk food and not exercising regularly
• e.g,. You are barely getting by in life financially, but you do not have the skills to get a higher-paying job, and you keep getting rejected when applying. Instead of investing time and money to improve skills, you spend it on entertainment (i.e., watching TV, playing video games, going clubbing, gambling, etc.).

Take the time to think through your emotions and write down as many Emotional Holes as you can think of. This will help you to keep track of them, remind yourself that you are in them, and trigger the need to do something about them.

The Second Step - Develop Your Skill of Calmness

Practicing the Skill of Calmness (described here: The Power of Calmness - Understanding Emotions), is the second step for getting out of Emotional Holes. 

Successfully recognizing you are an Emotional Hole is like picturing yourself at the bottom of one while looking up and wondering how to get out of it. 

Developing your Skill of Calmness is like having the skills and know-how to build a ladder to get out of the hole.

The Skill of Calmness involves:

• Acceptance scenarios - these help you to prepare yourself so that unexpected events and results do not cause your emotions to swell
• Daily Silent Meditation - helps you to be more present and aware of your emotional states
• Practice awareness of arising emotional states - gives you wisdom about your body and mind, and enables you to deal with emotions before emotion-related chemicals are released 

Daily practice will increase your awareness of your emotional states and help you become calmer. 

With the analogy of being in a hole and building a ladder, continued practice will increase your basic skills, which means you will be able to build a sturdier and taller ladder more efficiently.

The Third Step - Getting Out of the Emotional Hole

In this step, we will build a ladder to get out of an Emotional Hole. But are you ready to do that? That is, can you build a sturdy enough ladder to get out of the hole? Or will it break as you try to climb it and cause you to fall and restart?

To ensure the ladder is strong and tall enough for you to get out of an Emotional Hole, you must carefully design the ladder and build one rung (i.e. one step of ladder) at a time. 

Building each rung involves:

1. Understanding the Ladder
• Reaffirming the Emotional Hole you are in - helps you to understand the ladder you want to create
• Reaffirming that you want to get out of it - helps build fortitude and the will to build the rung and climb it
2. Creating each rung - determining the effort needed and the quality of the rung material
3. Installing and testing each rung - ensuring the rung is mounted securely so you can move onto the next rung
4. Installing the next rung - planning the next rung

1. Understanding the Ladder

When you can reaffirm the hole you are in, you can begin to picture a ladder to get out of the hole.

You will need to spend some time introspecting and asking yourself:

1. How big is the hole I am in? This helps you to determine how obvious it is that you are in a hole and the overall effect of the hole. The bigger the hole, the longer you have been in it, the more difficult it is to discover you were in one, and the more suffering it has caused.
2. How deep is the hole I am in? This helps you to determine how much effort it will take to get out of the hole. The deeper the hole, the longer the ladder and the more time and patience you will need to build it.

Every memory and complex perceptual layer you have that is related to a strong emotion is contributing to the size of that Emotional Hole. The stronger the memory and the emotion, the deeper the hole.

An example of a big and deep hole would be someone brainwashed since birth to be a terrorist. Their understanding of the world would be completely different and they may think they are working for a positive purpose even though they cause suffering to those around them.

In a less extreme but still significant example, someone may have been mentally or physically abused for many years or a long period of time. Their view of the world is that many people are abusive and cannot be trusted, so they are fearful wherever they go or when they are in contact with someone.

A small but deep hole could be a recent incident that gave you an emotional scar, such as the unexpected death of a loved one, which you do accept, but it leaves you feeling grief, lonely or helplessness.

A big but shallow hole could be your parents scaring you into getting good grades at school, only to discover years later that you can still do well financially and be happy without having had good grades. But before you realized this, you had a lot of anxiety and stress every time you visited your parents because they are disappointed.

With a better understanding of the hole you are in, you just need to ask yourself, Do I want to get out of it?

It might seem like the obvious answer is yes. When your emotions are swelling, you may feel depressed or be in a hopeless state, and you will find it is not easy to say yes. 

So reaffirm that you do want to get out, reaffirm daily or often, and try to generate an emotional state of passion to give you the drive to do so. You can generate this passion by thinking to yourself that you must get out, that you want to, and that you will find a way. If you can generate a feeling of excitement or angry determination, then you are ready to start making the ladder.

2. Creating Each Rung

With a better understanding of the ladder you want to build, you will now have a better idea of how much effort you need to put into it and how long it will take.

A longer ladder means the rung needs to be thicker or made of better materials, such as metal, and thus, more time and effort are needed. A shorter ladder may be built with wood that is readily available and usable.

Each rung requires careful introspection while you are in a calm state. This is why it is important to continually practice and improve your Skill of Calmness. The better you are at it, the easier it will be to introspect and make a quality rung.

The process of creating a rung requires introspection and answering a very important question:

"What is the strongest memory, emotionally, that you have related to the hole?"

Once you can find that strongest emotional memory, you need to spend time thinking about it and rationalize why it contributes to the hole you are in. If, while introspecting, you experience severe emotional states, stop this exercise and practice your Skill of Calmness. Once you are calm, you can continue. 

Here are some examples of strong memories and how they contribute to holes:

• You have a very fond and important memory of your partner who passed away. It is contributing to the hole that you cannot accept your partner is no longer with you, causing you to become depressed.
• You have a strong emotion of fear related to losing your job and not being able to financially support yourself and/or your family. Perhaps you could not find a job for a long time. This contributes to the hole that you must do everything possible in order to become wealthy and not have this problem again.
• You have a strong memory where you felt proud of an intellectual accomplishment (such as getting a high grade on a test), but then your parents scolded you for the result not being good enough. This contributes to the hole that you feel you must become smarter than them and everyone else, and once you feel that you have achieved that, you can never be wrong. If you are wrong, you cannot accept it and spend considerable time and effort to ruminate and justify yourself.

These are just a few examples, and you can take the time to think about your own strong emotional memories. Be sure to only choose one. The more you feel it is the strongest associated memory, the stronger that rung is!

Do not feel ashamed of the hole you are in or the suffering that you have caused. This is the human trait that resides in each and every one of us. Humbly realizing this means we can move on and free ourselves.

3. Testing Each Rung

You will have spent some time and effort on introspection. With a strong rung in hand, it is time to install it on the ladder. 

Securing the rung requires you to now ask:

"Can I accept what happened to me?"

This step is a lot more difficult than it may seem. If you can rationalize that memory in a way that you can accept positively or at least in a neutral way, then that rung will be installed properly.

So how do you rationalize a negative experience into a positive or neutral one?

You need to think differently and oppositely! Here are some examples:

• Your partner or loved one has passed away. You can now accept it because you realize that no one can live forever. People around you must and will pass away eventually due to health issues, reaching the age limit, or a seemingly random reason. It is not in your control. This is life. That means death is natural, and we need to embrace and honour all natural events of life. You ask yourself, "Would my partner want me to be depressed or find a way to live happily?" You realize that you must move on and find a way to live happily.
• Your child is not behaving the way you want, and this was making you really angry, until you finally accept that children do not have enough experience (and perhaps maturity) to behave like an adult. So now you expect your child to continue to do silly things or make mistakes, and realize that your approach and effort in parenting need to improve.

Effectively, you detach the emotional state from the complex perceptual layer and change that layer into one that is acceptable to you. By doing so, your subconscious and your rational thoughts will not easily generate an emotional state.

To test if you have installed the rung securely, you can think about the memory again (starting from a calm state), and examine how you feel. If the emotional states have diminished, then you have succeeded and are ready to install the next rung!

If not, or perhaps the emotional states have diminished just a little, you will need to put more effort into acceptance. Perhaps you need a few days to think about it because the complex perceptual layer is deeply embedded in your system of thought. Or perhaps you need to find more ways to think about that memory in a more positive or neutral way.

Take your time and try not to get frustrated. The tougher the memory, the more time and effort is needed to resolve it.

4. Installing the Next Rung

When you install the next rung, you do not necessarily need to climb the first rung. Give it some time. It is a good idea to install at least 3 or 4 rungs before needing to climb that ladder, and in order to reach higher to install more rungs. This gives you more time for testing and ensuring your ladder has a strong foundation for many more rungs.

Continue installing new rungs and re-inspect the previous rungs to further reinforce them. 

Also, be sure that the memories of each rung are becoming easier to create and install. If this is not the case, you need to slow down and spend more time creating the next rung.

Sometimes we have memories that may be hiding under other perceptual layers, so we do not discover them until they are revealed through this process. So if you discover a strong emotional memory, install it next.

Completing the Ladder and Getting Out of the Emotional Hole

When you reach the top of the hole, your head is outside of it, and you can finally see what it is like.

This means you can now clearly see that you were in one and that you have found your way out. 

You will know this to be true because you will have a certain feeling, like that of enlightenment (meaning that one suddenly realizes a greater understanding). 

Finally, climb out of the hole! You will feel liberated. 

You wonder if you are in any other holes, and are excited to find out since now you have gained a lot of skills and experience to get out of them. 

As you observe the people around you, you will be able to tell they are also trapped in their own holes. 

Your understanding of human nature has increased, and you will see the world differently from most. You will no doubt develop great compassion for all human beings and will naturally want to help others to get out of their holes.

Tempering the Heart and Emotional Holes

The idea of 'Tempering the Heart' and having steady emotions will sound strange at first. It will seem impossible - we are human after all. We constantly fall into Emotional Holes, and it is the natural way of our society and maybe even the human species.

But having successfully escaped one Emotional Hole means you will have begun climbing out of an even greater hole. A hole that implies it is impossible to achieve peace and happiness, and that we are meant to suffer. It also means we are more likely to see them before we fall into them.

Another way to think about all of this is to realize that the only way to find peace and happiness is to put in hard work every day to vigilantly seek out Emotional Holes and to deal with them.  Only in this way can we temper the heart, continue our spiritual journey, and be able to observe what our existence is about.