Title: How to Make Friends with Your Beautiful Monsters
Author: Tsoknyi Rinpoche
Source: https://www.lionsroar.com/how-to-make-friends-with-your-monsters/
Tags:mental-healthdharma
Highlights
I suspected that the channels of communication between their minds, their feelings, and their bodies were blocked or strained. From the Tibetan viewpoint all these channels should be connected and flowing freely. Yet I saw that my students couldn’t integrate the understanding their intellects were capable of, because they couldn’t digest them at the level of the body and feelings.
All of us have some issues, challenging emotional patterns that make our lives and relationships more difficult. It might be unworthiness, or a particular kind of fear, or self-righteousness, or envy, or some kind of irrational anger. There are many possibilities.
Beautiful monsters are patterns of reaction that are slightly or greatly distorted. For example, if we felt undervalued or underappreciated as a kid, we might overreact as an adult to ordinary criticism or blame. This overreaction is a beautiful monster.
So we could call them imprints, emotional habitual patterns, emotional knots, trauma?? Maybe overused.
Both parts of this phrase “beautiful monsters” are important. If we think of them as just monsters, we solidify our aversion and hatred toward them, which are really just parts of our own mind. If we think of them as just beautiful, however, we are denying the destructive potential they have and the suffering they can cause. It’s important to understand that they are both monsters and they have beauty.
are all feelings and emotions beautiful monsters? I would say no. Normal anger is part of the healthy, authentic relative truth—there is healthy anger, healthy fear, healthy attachment. These are not beautiful monsters. Beautiful monsters form when there is some unhealthy distortion in our mind and feelings, and then we start to believe their version of relative truth. If we become caught up by these beautiful monsters they become our lenses, the way we see the world and see ourselves. When we heal those, we have normal, healthy emotions and experiences.
It is not a method as we normally think. It is more an attitude and a way of being.
The handshake is between our awareness and our feelings. It is a metaphor for the stance we take, for how we can meet our beautiful monsters. Our minds have been pushing away or holding down our feelings and emotions for a long time. Now we are just extending our hand. Not running away, not fighting, just meeting.
To heal, we need to feel our emotions in a raw and direct way. Then the wounds and patterns of resistance can start to open up from within. Otherwise we can try all sorts of healing techniques, but they may not really open us up. To actually transform, we need to make friends with our emotions.
Actual transformation happens mostly on the feeling level
If you’ve had a history of trauma, practices of radical nonresistance like this can be intense. Please use your common sense about how much you can reasonably take.
As you adopt this attitude, you are allowing raw feelings to emerge. There is nothing special to do except be with them.
Don’t suppress, don’t avoid, don’t indulge, and don’t apply an antidote
Over time, the hand doesn’t need an object to hold, the hand itself becomes the resting, the stillness. If this experience organically develops out of handshake, this is a good sign.
if the beautiful monster gives you a slap or a punch, it’s okay. Take it. Be willing to suffer. This aggressiveness results from our suppressing them for a long time
Here patience means: You can stay as long as you want. I don’t care anymore whether you stay or go. We’re friends now.
This stage of waiting allows you to refine your handshake and make sure you are not rushing to make something happen, in which case our handshake is being sabotaged by antidoting
Suppressing and avoiding can make you feel emotionally ungrounded, like you’re not centered in your feeling world. To drop in and feel, without judging, is a gift. It’s like crying when your heart wants to release sadness, or taking a nap when you’re exhausted, or eating a nourishing meal when you’re feeling depleted and hungry.
Your feeling is real. Your pain is real. But your narrative is not true.