Making Peace with Feeling

an essay

by Thaniyo Thero

By making peace with what is felt, one is developing metta or non-ill will. By that I mean, no longer interfering with what is felt, by no longer trying to change it, but by withstanding it, by not craving it, by fully comprehending it.

When you feel pleasure, your default mode is to try and keep it, you want it to stay, you try to increase it because it does not feel adequate, there is something about it that just isn’t satisfying you, yet it is ‘pleasure’, it is already enough of what it is in itself. In other words, pleasure is not good enough for you, you crave for it to be more, to last longer, and so on.

Your delighting in pleasure will not make you content, because it’s an agitated attempt to keep pleasure, it’s a holding on to something which is not yours and impossible to make your own. Such an act is not only lustful but also aversive and ignorant, an act of wanting things to be the way you want them to be and not the way they are.

When you feel pain, your default mode is to try to get rid of it, to decrease it. Yet it is the way it is and your attempt to change it is again not peaceful, it’s not kind, not compassionate, not content, not equanimous. You don’t want pain so you seek pleasure but when you get it, still you are not satisfied. After all, it can never be yours. Your gratuitous attitude of craving can never be satisfied no matter what you put in front of it. Its nature is to be unfulfilled.

You want the pain to change and you want pleasure not to change. You want anicca and you don’t want anicca. Wanting anicca is wanting dukkha. This wanting or interfering with feeling which changes is maintaining your liability to be affected by feeling, which means you will never be peaceful, your mind will be dragged around with feeling in whichever way it goes. This wanting and touching feeling means that you will always be affected by it. In other words, you love when it’s pleasant and hate when it’s unpleasant. You are on and will continue to be on an emotional rollercoaster because you take feelings personally, you are holding them.

By detaching from a feeling through understanding its nature, and by no longer touching it with your attitude of wanting/craving, by way of not acting out of intentions based on greed, hate, or delusion, the feeling will not affect you anymore, you will be unable to love and therefore unable to hate. Your mental state will be brought to equilibrium, peace, and upekkha.

The reason I am emphasizing having the attitude of metta towards what is felt is because it’s a refined act of non-craving, which if sustained, will eventually result in there being no possibility of hating anyone, because the only reason you find another person or situation irritating to the point of hatred, is because you hate the pain that has arisen and you long for the pleasure that is forever out of your control.

Love or non-hate.

The problem that you can encounter if you think the metta practice taught in the suttas by the Buddha, is the practice of love, is that you will continue to delight in pleasure dependent on the senses, which means you will also hate or be irritated when there is not enough of it. The degree to which you love is the degree to which you can hate.

Metta is not about love but non-hate. It’s a quality that a great friend has. They can never hate you because they cannot love you. They are not emotionally dependent on feelings, their minds are undisturbed, peaceful, and therefore can be of great benefit to another who is clouded by love and hate or affected by feelings. No matter what you do, they see clearly when you do not. Their benevolence, their metta is “unconditioned”.

Metta when fully developed becomes upekkha, complete peaceful detachment, and that cannot come about when you are doing something which is not peaceful, like fighting or even delighting in pleasure desperately holding on to it so that it doesn’t change. That is not the path of peace or renunciation.

Renunciation of pleasure means not interfering with it, renunciation of pain means not interfering with it. Renunciation means non-craving.

When there is pain practice metta towards that. When there is pleasure, practice metta towards that, not wanting it to stay or change, i.e. unconditional friendliness.

If you want to practice metta for the uprooting of the cause of suffering, then you must let go of the feeling, let it be what it is, patiently withstand it, without interfering, and then you will be in a good position to see its nature, which is agitating. All feeling agitates and by holding on to it, by touching it, you are agitated, sometimes a lot as with pain or only a little as with pleasure, either way, feeling is an agitation. You can then realize that there is no such thing as pleasure, there are only different degrees of pain, and all this time, what you thought was pleasure was just less pain, and due to that assumption you held on to it as yours, as yourself, and thus were affected by its agitated nature.

The more you let go of your craving regarding a feeling the less it will affect you and the more peaceful/upekkha you become. This means that no matter what happens in life, no matter how much pain is ‘caused to you by another being’, you will be peaceful, and you will not be able to get angry, hateful, or irritated. Your mind will be a brahmavihara/a heavenly place because you removed the cause of love and hate from it.

Sutta Nipāta 1.8 Metta Sutta: