Mangala Shri Bhuti - The Link

Speaker: Greg Seton. Greg delves into working with emotional pain, outlining the process from a ground, path and fruition perspective. Emotional pain or "klesha" in Sanskrit is loosely translated as "affliction". It causes pain and contaminates our thoughts, feelings and actions. The afflicted ego-mind is the cause of klesha. It is afflicted because it struggles to maintain what it constructs as self-image and becomes attached to that mental image. This fixation is painful and causes one to interpret everything through the ego-image as a stream of thinking, which then sets up false duality. In the path, we need to first learn to recognize our emotions, then apply antidotes. For learning about the relative-based Mahayana approach, Greg recommends reading 'Light Comes Through' by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche as it covers the five, self-centered emotions and their antidotes. For the absolute-based Vajrayana approach, he suggests we bring the pain of the emotion into our experience and then stare at it, looking at it