Happy buddha

Imagine there is a room with two doors. One door is always open the other is normally closed. Imagine also there is a line of people at the open door entering into the room. The people here never stop entering and as you can see at some point it starts to get over crowded. At some point it gets very claustrophobic and sooner or later even the walls come under strain. I wonder what happens next in your scenario?

As you may have guessed the room represents ourselves. The open door represents life and life never stops happening that is why the people never cease entering the room. The closed door is our unwillingness to experience life as it is. I am talking here mainly of the more painful emotions such as, fear, anger, sadness grief etc. When we refuse theses natural emotions and try to block them out we close the second door and risk feeling like life is too much.

Mindfulness Meditation is not about trying to close the first door so we don’t feel anything unpleasant, it is opening the second door. All experience wants simply to be experienced for a duration then allowed to pass away. This is healthy and brings an ease of being and a joy to life. However, we tend to make a problem out of emotions that seem threatening. We don’t like to feel sad for example because we may appear weak, or it seems to point to something being wrong and life not going our way. So what we do when they show their little heads is to try and shove them back down again, we close the door on them. If we keep closing the door on our emotions at some point the “walls” will come under strain and – well we know what may happen next.

We open the door by turning toward our emotions and allowing them space and keeping the door open so they can pass on. Sadness for example is a natural response to some events in life and actually “season our soul.” Sadness opens our hearts to allow others to enter. Through experiencing sadness (if it's there as we don't go looking for it) it connects us to others because the wisdom of experience shows us that we all suffer sadness. It reveals our common humanity. If we close the door on sadness we remain locked away in our own little experience of life and experience emotional claustrophobia as a result. To open the door we need to notice how we close it. Observe how you turn away from painful emotions and allow the thoughts to run rampant. We can take our attention away from the thoughts and into the felt experience of the emotions in the body. Opening the door means to experience life moment by moment.