How To Deal With Difficult Emotions, Difficult Feedback, and Difficult Parts of Your Own Mind | Diane Musho Hamilton
Dan Harris speaks with Zen teacher and mediator Diane Musho Hamilton about "spiritual cross-training" for the mind, combining meditation with emotional maturity and interpersonal skills. They discuss practical tips for meditation, transmuting difficult emotions, integrating shadow aspects, finding purpose, and the value of ethical action and community.
Deep Dive Analysis
11 Topic Outline
Introduction to Spiritual Cross-Training
Zen Meditation (Zazen and Shikantaza) as Foundation
Practical Tips for Starting Meditation
Cultivating Emotional Maturity and Transmuting Emotion
Integrating Shadow and Psyche: Seeing Difficult Parts of Self
Addressing Polarization and the Role of Compassion
Living with Purpose and Presence
The Value of Intention Setting
Ethical Action and Community Building
Navigating Differences and Conflict in Groups
Concluding Thoughts on Spiritual Cross-Training
9 Key Concepts
Spiritual Cross-Training
A concept encompassing both 'waking up' and 'growing up.' It means including different dimensions that sometimes get left out of spiritual practice, such as embodiment, cognitive maps, and developing skills and capacities to support one's journey.
Waking Up
The experience of expansiveness where one is no longer locked in egoic concern, and attention is free to move outward and expand. It's associated with tremendous relaxation and trust, often defined as identification with all that is.
Growing Up
Developing the skills, capacities, and different behaviors needed to support one's journey, including working with embodiment and cognitive maps. It focuses on cultivating emotional and interpersonal maturity.
Shikantaza
A Zen meditation practice meaning 'just sitting,' where one is not doing any internal technique. The posture, breath, and experience of what's happening are all arising at one time, with the key being the capacity to let go of a 'gaining idea' or agenda.
Emotional Maturity
The ability to move from a raw or undeveloped experience of emotions to being able to let emotions in, feel them, be present to them, and capture their inherent life force, energy, and information. It involves pausing the story to find coherence in the body and mind before responding.
Shadow
A Jungian psychology term referring to anything left out of the light of awareness that is likely to be projected out into the world and seen in others, but not in one's own psyche. It represents parts of ourselves we don't want to see or own.
Meaning
That which gives an internal experience, helping individuals give significance to their life and participate in the greater stories of being human or greater sets of values.
Purpose
What one is doing on the exterior, representing the direction in which one is moving and using their energies in life. It's about how one manifests their realizations in the world.
Zen Vows
Intentions joined with the devotion of the heart, requiring one's whole body and mind to inhabit and live them. They are taken at different stages along the Zen path and are often recited in a group setting.
6 Questions Answered
Spiritual cross-training involves both 'waking up' (experiencing expansiveness beyond ego) and 'growing up' (developing skills, capacities, and behaviors like emotional and interpersonal maturity) to support one's journey.
Accept that meditation is a natural state of mind, an 'experiencing network' that comes online when cognition quiets. Notice ordinary moments where you relax and become present (like watching a sunset or petting an animal) and try to lengthen those experiences.
When receiving tough feedback, develop the habit of asking yourself, 'What's right about what they're saying?' This helps you find even a small piece of truth, which can transform your relationship to the situation and allow for a more constructive response.
Instead of solely focusing on 'what do I want?', try changing the question to 'what are people telling me?' and listen for feedback about your natural aptitudes or areas where you are helpful to others.
When you are clear about your intention, it guides your attention, helping you focus on what is important and align your actions with your desired direction, making your efforts more coherent and effective.
Look for groups that know how to deal with conflict and difference, as healthy communities allow for both sameness and authentic expression of differences without resorting to conformity or threat.
17 Actionable Insights
1. Embrace Spiritual Cross-Training
Engage in “spiritual cross-training” by developing both “waking up” (meditation, expansive awareness) and “growing up” (emotional maturity, interpersonal skills, physical well-being). This holistic approach ensures insights are applied effectively in the world and supports overall personal evolution.
2. Establish Formal Meditation Practice
Cultivate a regular seated meditation practice (like Zazen or Shikantaza) as a fundamental ground for learning and transformation. This practice creates an open mental space, fostering better learning and deeper self-awareness.
3. Transmute Difficult Emotions
Practice “transmutation of emotion” by fully feeling emotions, then pausing the accompanying narrative, and focusing solely on bodily sensations with breath. This process allows coherence to return, making your subsequent cognition more trustworthy and your responses more mature.
4. Integrate Shadow Aspects (3-2-1)
Address unacknowledged parts of yourself through “shadow work” using the 3-2-1 technique: 1) Complain about a disliked quality in another; 2) Address that part directly (e.g., in a journal); 3) Own that quality as part of yourself, even a small amount, to transform your relationship to it and others.
5. Set Clear Intentions Daily
Regularly set clear intentions, such as dedicating daily activities to personal growth and the benefit of others, as this practice guides your attention and helps counteract self-centeredness. This fosters “wise selfishness” and contributes to overall well-being.
6. Act with Compassion, Not Hate
In conflict or political action, choose compassion as your fuel instead of hatred or rage, even when taking tough stands. Compassion allows for more effective action, reduces burnout, and minimizes internal toxicity, without condoning harmful behavior.
7. Transform Negative Emotional Energy
Recognize that negative emotions can transmute into positive qualities (e.g., anger to clarity, grief to compassion, fear to life force). This transformation occurs when you strip away egoic self-centeredness and use the emotion’s energy for the benefit of the whole.
8. Discover Purpose by Listening
To find your life’s purpose or vocation, shift your focus from “what do I want?” to “what are people telling me?” and actively listen to feedback about your natural talents or areas where you are helpful. This external perspective can reveal unexpected and fulfilling paths.
9. Establish Ethical Agreements in Relationships
Create clear ethical agreements within your relationships and communities to define how you will treat each other. These shared “rules of the road” foster common intention and enable practices like mutual support, honest communication, and balancing challenge with safety.
10. Cultivate Conflict-Capable Communities
When seeking communities, prioritize those that know how to deal with conflict and difference, not just conformity. The ability to surface distinctions, be interested in opposing views, and integrate them is crucial for healthy group evolution and authentic engagement.
11. Start Meditation with Natural Presence
Begin meditating by accepting it as a natural state of mind you already experience. Notice ordinary moments of quiet presence (like watching a sunset or relaxing in a bath), then intentionally extend these moments for 5-10 minutes, gently returning to the present sensation when distracted.
12. Practice Emotional Coherence Pause
When overwhelmed by strong emotions, consciously decide to work with the feeling by giving yourself permission to experience all aspects (thoughts, feelings, body sensations). Then, pause the narrative, move into your body, and simply feel the sensations using your breath until coherence returns and your cognition becomes more trustworthy.
13. Ask ‘What’s Right About This?’
When receiving tough feedback, develop the habit of asking yourself, “What’s right about this?” to find even a small piece of truth. This helps you reframe the situation and respond constructively rather than defensively, improving your ability to learn from criticism.
14. Remind Yourself You’re ‘For’ Others
To improve cognition and reduce defensiveness during stressful interactions, cognitively remind yourself that you can be “for” the other person, even if you don’t like them. This practice helps create new neural pathways and makes your thinking more reliable.
15. Join Growth-Oriented Communities
To support personal growth and shadow work, actively seek and join communities where people are engaged in self-liberation and learning. This environment normalizes challenges, reduces feelings of exposure, and accelerates personal change.
16. Deepen Intentions with Vows
Consider taking vows, which are intentions joined with heartfelt devotion, to commit your whole body and mind to living out a particular path or principle. This makes your commitments more profound and embodied than purely cognitive intentions.
17. Embrace Patience in Growth Journey
Approach personal and spiritual growth as a lifelong curriculum, rather than something to be accomplished quickly. Trust that you will integrate and learn different practices at the right time, guided by your natural curiosity or current life challenges.
5 Key Quotes
What good is waking up to our universal nature if we can't enact this insight because our emotional and interpersonal skills remain undeveloped?
Gabriel Wilson (quoted by Diane Musho Hamilton)
Sometimes I joke with my students that there's nothing more hellish than sitting for a long sitting period as a self.
Diane Musho Hamilton
Don't side with yourself.
Joseph Goldstein (quoted by Dan Harris)
If you want to do selfishness correctly, you should be useful to other people because that's what's going to make you happy.
Dalai Lama (quoted by Dan Harris)
When we remind ourselves that we can be for someone, even if we're not feeling like we like them, if we remind ourselves cognitively, we're literally creating new neural pathways in the brain.
Diane Musho Hamilton
2 Protocols
Transmutation of Emotion
Diane Musho Hamilton (crediting Chokyam Trungpa Rinpoche)- Give yourself permission to feel the whole thing: experience all thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the body.
- Hit pause on the story: stop the narrative about the future, the past, or blame.
- Move exclusively into the body: use the breath to feel sensations fully, identifying simple feelings like terror, anxiety, anger, or hopelessness.
- Allow coherence to return: breathe and feel until a certain kind of coherence enters the body and mind.
- Hit play on thinking mind: notice that cognition becomes more positive or workable, allowing for a response commensurate with experience rather than a reactive one.
3-2-1 of Shadow
Diane Musho Hamilton (crediting Ken Wilber)- Start in the third person: Complain about someone and a quality in them that you don't like.
- Move to the second person: In a journal, talk to that part you don't like or don't want.
- Finally, in the first person: Own that as you too, finding even a tiny amount of that quality in yourself.