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About a year and a half ago, I was going through an odd time in my life. I went through a period where I felt a way that I didn’t have a word for. My closest description was to say that I felt neutral, but it wasn’t indifference. I went searching for this word recently, and I found an interesting Buddhist concept, adukkhamasukha. “In between pain and pleasure, an area in the affective tonality of experience appears as relatively bland and neither distinctly painful nor clearly pleasant.”* It was uncomfortable to feel less in a world that is constantly trying to inspire or ignite us to feel more. In any other time, I might have mistaken this feeling for boredom, but this time, my gut told me it wasn’t. I was unsettled here. I kept feeling like something was wrong. I remember standing at my kitchen counter taking my vitamins one morning, and thinking to myself, something bad must be about to happen because things have been too peaceful for too long.
Adukkhamasukha. “In between pain and pleasure, an area in the affective tonality of experience appears as relatively bland and neither distinctly painful nor clearly pleasant.”*
Soon after that, a series of events happened that have made life difficult and stressful. I’m still dealing with some of those things, but here is the difference. I know where I’m headed; adukkhamasukha. Being on a roller coaster of extreme ups and downs is not the preference. Now that I know where my center is, I can navigate in that direction more easily. Feeling that sense of neutrality wasn’t something wrong. It was just unfamiliar, but it was also incredibly right. I had found my peace, my center, my bliss, and because I had spent so little time there, I didn’t know how to recognize it and just be there.
You might be asking, so what?
Everywhere we look today, we are being inspired to feel passion, incited to anger, prompted to sadness, and so on. There are things that we need to feel in order to experience the full range of human emotion, but we can’t live in those heightened states indefinitely. It isn’t healthy. On the other hand, we can’t suppress our feelings. That will create more long term problems. The goal is to feel the feelings, have a safe place to process them, and move back to center. If we are always in a heightened state of anger, we are more likely to be angered by everything.
I used to be a teacher. I taught in a school with a population that had more hardships than your average school. The behaviors that the children exhibited were very often a direct reflection of that. These babies would come to school already worried about how they were going to eat over the weekend, whose house they were going to that night, how they would get their sisters to bed and still have time to do their homework. They would become defensive because no one had shown them love, so they didn’t believe they deserved it, angry because their family member hadn’t kept a promise to protect them. They had already had it up to here ( holding my hand to my forehead), and then a teacher came around and would dig that knife in a little further by simply asking why they hadn’t done their homework. I’ve triggered my fair share of meltdowns by asking these questions, and the answer always comes out when you get the kid out of the eyesight of their peers.
We aren't much different than children.
We aren't much different than children. We’ve just had more experience hiding how we’re feeling, and holding it in until later, but let these examples be a lesson to us, not only to learn to have compassion for others, and compassion for ourselves, but also to set our GPS back to neutral. Feel it, digest it, and move back to peace.
Love and Light,
Maria
*https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/what-about-neutral-feelings/
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