Here is another section that I love in the book, "Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child" by Thich Nhat Hanh.
"Consciousness is like a house in which the basement is our store consciousness and the living room is our mind consciousness. Mental formations like anger, sorrow or joy, rest in the store consciousness in the form of seeds. We have seed of anger, despair, discrimmination, fear, a seed of mindfulness, compassion, a seed of understanding, and so on. Store consciousness is made of the totality of the seeds and it is also the soil that preserves and maintains all the seeds. The seeds stay there until we hear, see, read, or think of something that touches the seed, and makes us feel the anger, joy or sorrow. This is a seed coming up and manifesting on the level of mind consciousness, in our living room. Now we no longer call it a seed, but a mental formation."
"When someone touches the seed of anger by saying something or doing something that upsets us, that seed of anger will come up and manifest in the mind consciousness as the mental formation of anger. The word "formation" is a Buddhist term for something that's created by many conditions coming together. A marker pen is a formation; my hand, a flower, a house, are all formations. A house is a physical formation. My hand is a physiological formation. My anger is a mental formation. In Buddhist psychology we speak about 51 varieties of seeds that can manifest as fifty-one mental formations. Anger is just one of them. In store consciousness, anger is called a seed. In mind consciousness, it's called a mental formation."
"Whenever a seed, say the seed of anger, comes up into the livingroom and manifests as a mental formation, the first thing we can do is to touch the seed of mindfulness and invite it to come up too. Now we have two mental formations in the livingroom. this is mindfulness of anger. Mindfulness is always mindfulness of something. When we breathe mindfully, that is a mindfulness of breathing. When we walk mindfully, that is mindfulness of walking. So in this case, mindfulness is mindfulness of anger. Mindfulness recognizes and embraces anger."
"Our practice is based on the insight of nonduality - anger is not an enemy. Both mindfulness and anger are ourselves. Mindfulness is there not to surppress or fight against anger, but to recognize and take care. It's like a big brother helping a younger brother. So the energy of anger is recognized and embraced tenderly by the energy of mindfulness."
"Everytime we need the energy of mindfulness, we just touch that seed with our mindful breathing, mindful walking, smiling and then we have the energy ready to do the work recognizing, embracing and later on looking deeply and transforming. Whatever we're doing, whether it is cooking, sweeping, washing, walking, being aware of our breathing, we can continue to generate the energy of mindfulness, and the seed of mindfulness in us will become strong. Within the seed of mindfulness is the seed of concentration. With these two energies, we can liberate ourselves from afflictions."
The Mind Needs Good Circulation
"We know there are toxins in our body. If our blood doesn't circulate well, these toxins accumulate. In order to remain healthy, our body works to expel the toxins. When the blood circulates well, the kidneys and the liver cand do their job to dispel toxins. We can use massage to help the blood better circulate."
"Our consciousness too, may be in a state of bad circulation. We may have a block of suffering, pain, sorrow, or despair in us; it's like a toxin in our consciousness. We call this an internal formation or internal knot. Embracing our pain and sorrow with the energy of mindfulness is the practice of massaging our consciousness. When the blood doesn't circulate well, our organs can't function properly, and we get sick. When our psyche doesn't circulate well, our mind will become sick. Mindfulness stimulates and accelerates circulation throughout blocks of pain."
Occupying the Living Room
"Our blocks of pain, sorrow, anger, and despair always want to come up into our mind consciousness, into our living room, because they have grown big and need our attention. They want to emerge, but we don't want these uninvited guests to come up because they're painful to look at. So we try to block their way. We want them to stay asleep down in the basement. We don't want to face them, so our habit is to fill our living room with other guests. Whenever we have ten or fifteen minutes of free time, we do anything to keep our living room occupied. We call a friend. We pick up a book. We turn on the television. We go for a drive. We hope that if the living room is occupied, these unpleasant mental formations will not come up."
"But all mental formations need to circulate. If we don't let them come up, it creates bad circulation in our psyche, and symptoms of mental illness begin to manifest in our mind and body."
"Sometimes when we have a headache, we take aspirin but our headache doesn't go away. Sometimes this kind of headache can be a symptom of mental illness. Perhaps we have allergies. We think it's a physical problem but allergies can also be a symptom of mental illness. We are advised by doctors to take drugs but sometimes these will continue to suppress our internal formations, making our sickness worse."
Dismantling Barriers
"If we can learn not to fear our knots of suffering we slowly begin to let them circulate into our living room. We begin to learn how to embrace them and transform them with the energy of mindfulness. When we dismantle the barrier between the basement and the living room blocks of pain will come up and we will have to suffer a bit. Our inner child may have a lot of fear and anger stored up from being down in the basement for so long. There is no way to avoid it."
"Taht is why the practice of mindfulness is so important. If mindfulness is not there, it is very unpleasant to have these seeds come up. But if we know how to generate the energy of mindfulness it's very healing to invite them up every day and embrace them. Mindfulness is a strong source of energy that can recognize, embrace and take care of these negative energies. Perhaps these seeds don't want to come up at first perhaps there is too much fear and distrust so we may have to coax them a bit. After being embraced for some time a strong emotion will return back to the basement and become a seed again, weaker than before."
"Every time you give your internal formations a bath of mindfulness the blocks of pain in you become lighter. So give your anger, your despair your fear a bath of mindfulness every day. After several days or weeks of bringing them up daily and helping them go back down again, you create good circulation in your psyche" Thich Nhat Hanh
Awesome! My psyche now has great circulation...however I used to live trying to keep them all down the basement. Yet, every now and again, my children paid the price when my anger arrived in our living space and all holy hell broke lose. I would vent and then stuff it back down. What I failed to do was embrace and meet it with understanding, to see it as the wounded child.
I instead would vow to not let it happen again...forcing down deeper and try harder to keep my living space free of those feelings. Little did I know I was blocking what I needed in order to have a healthy psyche.
