Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

3. Conscientiousness: Taking responsibility for personal performance

4. Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change

5. Innovation: Being comfortable with novel ideas, approaches, and information

There is one commonality that underlies all these competences: choice.Everybody wants to have all these qualities. We all like to be adaptable and innovative, for example. Who among us does not want to maintain our standards of honesty and integrity? Yet, a lot of us do not succeed at upholding these qualities all the time. Why? Because we often feel compelled by our emotions to move in a different direction. If, however, we have the ability to turn compulsion into choice, then all these qualities may become enabled for us, and we may choose to exercise them if we wish.

The ability to move from compulsion to choice is the common enabler for all these competencies.

Self-Regulation Is Not Avoiding or Suppressing Emotions

After teaching Search Inside Yourself for a while, we realized that while it is important to explain what self-regulation is, it is equally important to explain what self-regulation is not. The simple reason is many people think self-regulation is simply about suppressing distressing emotions. Happily, that is not the case.

Self-regulation is not about avoiding emotions. There are situations in which feeling painful emotions is appropriate. For example, when your best friend shares sad news with you, it is probably best if you also share some of her sadness. Also, if you are a doctor giving very bad news to a patient, you probably don’t want to avoid feeling bad. You definitely do not want a big grin on your face when you tell your patient he only has one month to live—that would be awkward.

Self-regulation is also not about denying or repressing true feelings. Feelings carry valuable information, so if you deny or repress them, you lose that information. One Search Inside Yourself participant at Google, for example, learned to listen closely to his feelings and began to grasp the full extent of his dissatisfaction in his current role. In response, he moved into another role at Google shortly after the course and became much happier and more effective at his work.

Self-regulation is not about never having certain emotions. It is about becoming very skillful with them. For example, I was told that in Buddhist psychology, there is an important difference between anger and indignation: anger arises out of powerlessness, while indignation arises out of power. Because of that difference, when you feel angry, you feel out of control, but when you feel indignant, you can retain full control of your mind and emotion. Hence, you can be emotional and fighting for change without ever losing your cool. Indignation is, therefore, a skillful state and a good example of self-regulation at its best. I think the person who best personified this was Gandhi. Gandhi was not an angry man, but that did not stop him from fighting injustice or leading massive marches. All that time he was fighting, he never lost his calmness or compassion. That’s how I want to be when I grow up.

Like Writing on Water

Still, when there are situations in life where you really need to dampen unwholesome thoughts or emotions, what do you do?

I think the first question to ask is whether it is possible to stop an unwholesome thought or emotion from arising in the first place. Based on my own experience, I think it is impossible. In fact, Paul Ekman, one of the most preeminent psychologists in the world, told me he discussed precisely this topic with the Dalai Lama. They both agree that it is impossible to stop a thought or emotion from arising. That must be the correct answer then, since Paul, the Dalai Lama, and I cannot all be wrong at the same time, right?

However, the Dalai Lama added an important point: while we cannot stop an unwholesome thought or emotion from arising, we have the power to let it go, and the highly trained mind can let it go the moment it arises.

The Buddha has a very beautiful metaphor for this state of mind. He calls it “like writing on water.” 1Whenever an unwholesome thought or emotion arises in an enlightened mind, it is like writing on water; the moment it is written, it disappears.

“My client would like the agreement to be written on water.”

Practice of Letting Go

One of the most important life-changing insights gained in meditation is that pain and suffering are qualitatively distinct, and one does not necessarily follow the other. The origin of this insight is the practice of letting go.

Letting go is an extremely important skill. It is one of the essential foundations of meditation practice. As usual, the Zen tradition has the funniest way of articulating this key insight. In the words of Sengcan, the Third Patriarch of Zen, “The Great Way is without difficulty, just cease having preferences.” 2When the mind becomes so free that it is capable of letting go even of preferences, the Great Way is no longer difficult.

The central importance of letting go leads to a very important question: is it possible to let go and still appreciate and fully experience the ups and downs of life? The way I like to ask the question is: can you have your karma and eat cake too?

I think it is possible. The key is to let go of two things: grasping and aversion. Grasping is when the mind desperately holds on to something and refuses to let it go. Aversion is when the mind desperately keeps something away and refuses to let it come. These two qualities are flip sides of each other. Grasping and aversion together account for a huge percentage of the suffering we experience, perhaps 90 percent, maybe even 100 percent.

When we experience any phenomenon, we begin with contact between sense organ and object, then sensation and perception arise, and immediately after, grasping or aversion arises (some meditative traditions classify the mind itself as a sense, thus elegantly extending this model of experience to mental phenomenon as well as physical phenomenon). The key insight here is that grasping and aversion are separate from sensation and perception. They arise so closely together that we do not normally notice the difference.

However, as your mindfulness practice becomes stronger, you may notice the distinction and maybe even the tiny gap between them. For example, after sitting for a long time, you may feel pain in your back, and almost immediately after that, you may feel aversion. You tell yourself, “I hate this pain. I do not want this sensation. Go away!” With enough mindfulness practice, you may notice that both experiences are distinct. There is the experience of physical pain, and there is the separate experience of aversion. The untrained mind lumps them into one indivisible experience, but the trained mind sees two distinct experiences, one leading to the arising of the other.

Once your mind reaches that level of perceptive resolution, two very important opportunities become available to you.

The first important opportunity is the possibility of experiencing pain without suffering. The theory is that aversion, not the pain itself, is the actual cause of suffering; the pain is just a sensation that creates that aversion. Hence, if the mind recognizes this and then becomes able to let go of aversion, then the experience of pain may lead to greatly reduced suffering—perhaps no suffering at all. Jon Kabat-Zinn has a great example of how this theory works in practice. Here, he tells the story of a man in his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) clinic:

Another man, in his early seventies, came to the clinic with severe pain in his feet. He came to the first class in a wheelchair.... That first day he told the class that the pain was so bad he just wanted to cut off his feet. He didn’t see what meditating could possibly do for him, but things were so bad that he was willing to give anything a try. Everybody felt incredibly sorry for him.... He came to the second class on crutches rather than in the wheelchair. After that he used only a cane. The transition from wheelchair to crutches to cane spoke volumes to us all as we watched him from week to week. He said at the end that the pain hadn’t changed much but that his attitude toward his pain had changed a lot . 3