The 5 “Destructive” Emotions in Buddhism
Emotions can be your path to peace or your path to pain. Which path do you want to take?
Buddhism talks about “destructive” emotions—a lot.
But you know about the dangers of troublesome emotions already—don’t you?
- Anger riles you up. It can make your heart beat faster, contract your muscles, and turn your face red.
- Envy makes you feel less than someone else—minuscule, unimportant, and unaccomplished.
- Desire can cause you to covet continuously—the latest electronic device, the perfect lipstick color, the pound-adding piece of scrumptious cake— yet leave you unfulfilled, wanting more.
Disturbing emotions cause you to suffer. But still, it’s hard to separate from them. I’ve ruminated over a single emotional episode for days, weeks, and even months myself.
But having studied Buddhism for years, I also know there’s a way out of this unnecessary, self-made suffering.
If you want to suffer less, see emotions for what they are—nothing more than passing mental phenomena. Stop investing in the cause of your own suffering.
But how do you do that?
The 5 Destructive Emotions
It can seem impossible to free ourselves from the vortex of emotions. We stay stuck in our own storylines, repeating them again and again and further escalating uncomfortable emotions.
If the key to our own happiness depends on learning to let go of disturbing emotions, how can we stop harming ourselves?
First, accept the destructive nature of afflictive emotions—truly come to understand how harmful they are. Next, decide to become conscious of your own emotional tendencies.
The key to our own happiness depends on learning to let go of disturbing emotions.
Do this by cultivating emotional awareness without self-judgment. Replace self-judgment with curiosity. You want to get to know your difficult emotions rather than suppress them.
To help us out, Buddhism has identified five destructive emotions, which are also known as the “five poisons” because they destroy our happiness. The word “kleshas” means destructive emotions in Tibetan. It can also be translated as negative emotions, disturbing emotions, or afflictive emotions.
These are the five destructive emotions in Buddhism:
- Passion (craving, desire)
- Aggression (hatred)
- Ignorance (indifference, dullness, sloth)
- Jealousy
- Pride
Greed is sometimes added as a sixth destructive emotion, but it can also be subsumed under passion. Twenty subsidiary destructive emotions have been identified as well.
According to Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, fear, the most primal of emotions, functions as a precursor to all other destruction emotions. Fear occurs as soon as we split off from our spiritual nature. It functions like a doorway to all other afflictive emotions.
Once we know the poisonous nature of destructive emotions, you’d think we’d avoid them like the plague. But that’s not easy to do, is it? Buddhism has an explanation for that, too.
The Sticky Nature of Disturbing Emotions
Emotions naturally arise in our minds based on our individual propensities—the emotional habits we’ve reinforced year after year after year. If we don’t feed them, they’ll pass.
These arisings only become destructive when attachment, called “shenpa” in Tibetan, occurs and leads to harmful thoughts, words, and actions.
But attachment is the default mode in most of our minds, isn’t it?
Attachment, in the Buddhist context, means your desire for things to go a certain way—your way. Destructive emotions arise when things don’t go your way.
- You lose your job and feel angry.
- Your partner raises an eyebrow and you feel misunderstood.
- Your colleague wins a promotion and you feel jealous.
Attachment occurs constantly throughout the day as we relate to almost all that occurs, even the smallest of things, as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
- The floor is cold as you step out of bed — unpleasant
- Your eggs are perfectly cooked—pleasant
- A stranger bicycles past your home—neutral
That tiny experience of cold, indicating foul weather, can put you in a bad mood for an entire day. Your perfect eggs today can make you feel dissatisfied when they’re not up to par the next day.
Pema Chödrön describes attachment as “sticky.” It’s the glue that binds you to a destructive emotion and makes it difficult to shake it off. Shenpa is the charge you feel when an emotion has caught you in a destructive cycle. Chödron calls this entanglement “getting hooked.”
Pema Chödrön describes attachment as “sticky.” It’s the glue that binds you to a destructive emotion and makes it difficult to shake off.
You feel shenpa in your body. It might work you into a frenzy or cause you to withdraw. The response feels automatic and involuntary.
And remember, shenpa and its companion klesha occur in response to a trigger when the moment seems to take an unwanted direction.
Understanding the sticky nature of shenpa can help you be gentle with yourself when caught in an emotional vortex. Harshness towards yourself will only take you further into the vortex.
If it was easy to change emotional patterns, the world would be a peaceful place—no more wars, exploitation, or injustice.
Even though it’s difficult to unglue yourself from an emotional pattern, it’s possible through self-awareness, regular practice, and the determination to choose a new response. As concentration camp survivor Victor Frankl has said:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Get to Know Your Emotions
There are many different Buddhist methods for working with destructive emotions. For example, Pema Chödrön teaches refraining, reframing, and resting, which I’ll share one day.
But the very first step is to get to know your emotional patterns. Here are three ways to do that.
Notice your initial response
In Buddhism, it’s said we have an initial and often subtle response to whatever occurs in our environment. This is called “feeling” or “sensation” in the framework of the 5 Skandas, mental factors that give rise to attachment.
When exposed to an object, a feeling or sensation occurs instantaneously before our reaction becomes a full-blown destructive emotion.
It’s the initial feeling of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. For example, when you see a person you don’t know for the first time, you can immediately respond to pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
Mini-Practice: As you go about your day, practice noting your response to whatever occurs—whether it’s people or situations. Label it as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Don’t judge your response. Just note it.
This initial feeling or sensation can quickly snowball into a klesha. Learning to note your response can help you get to know your emotional patterns and, with practice, keep the initial response from escalating into an intense klesa.
Notice the storyline
Disturbing emotions occur due to our attachment—our wish for things to be a particular way. The emotion and the shenpa weld together and become one. We fuel the distressing emotion and the attachment with the story we tell ourselves.
Let’s say your partner is twenty minutes late. As you sit, tapping your fingers on the table, your mind is flooded with thoughts like:
- He’s always late.
- He doesn’t respect me.
- He’s having an affair.
You keep adding to the story with more and more thoughts. The minute he steps over the threshold, you explode and dump your storyline on him. You argue and don’t speak for days afterward.
Take a moment to think of a time when you created a storyline around a particular disturbing emotion? How did that turn out?
Mini-Practice: To de-escalate a disturbing emotion, you have to cut the storyline that fuels it. Notice when you’re fueling an emotion with a story. Try to drop the storyline.
Track your sticky emotional responses
This year, as suggested by Pema Chödrön, I decided to track my sticky emotional reactions in a small notebook.
I note my reactions and the ones that especially hooked me in the daily section of the notebook. I write a sentence or two about each one.
In the monthly calendar section, I write a two or three disturbing emotions in the block for that day. I also write in positive emotions to encourage myself.
This is a great way to see your emotional patterns. Impatience is one that appears more than once in my calendar section!
Mini-Practice: Keep a small notebook of your emotional reactions. Notice the emotional patterns that emerge.
Whichever practice you choose to do, remember, don’t judge yourself. We’re simply recognizing emotions as they arise so we can make the best choices going forward.
In Conclusion
Our happiness depends to a great degree on our emotional patterns. Disturbing emotions, defined by Buddhism as craving, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, and pride, destroy our happiness.
Destructive emotions are mixed with attachment—a desire for things to be the way we want them to be. This attachment, called “shenpa” in Buddhism, contains a stickiness, which makes it difficult to let go of negative emotions. Then, we fuel the emotion and the attachment by creating a storyline about what has occurred, making them all the more intractable.
But we can unravel a storyline, dissolve a destructive emotion, and let go of the attachment that binds us to it by using the practices outlined above.
Ready to begin?
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Sources:
- Pema Chödrön’s course: Turn Your World Around, Three Steps to Emotional Transformation
- 25 years of Buddhist study and practice.
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