A Systematic Approach to Emotions

How to consciously navigate our emotions, see with clearer eyes, and make wiser decisions

Preface: Concepts discussed in this post like “emotions”, “perception”, and “well-being” are nuanced and experiential. Any words and models used will be imperfect, but hopefully good enough to convey some helpful ideas.

The map is not the territory. This is one “map” taught by Nyingma Buddhist teacher Longchenpa that I’ve found particularly digestible and practical. I invite you to consider these ideas, try them out, and keep what’s useful to you.

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Some people spend their entire lives trapped in anger, impacting their relationships and limiting their ability to change things.

For example, anger often helps us realize what we actually care about or when our boundary is being crossed.

I will walk you through this model below, step-by-step.

We can be ATTACHED to many things, including people, things, goals, ideas, expectations, and beliefs. When our attachments don’t match reality, this leads to emotions like the ones above.

Aman and I schedule monthly check-ins to ensure we make time for “compassion” conversations like this.

Scroll further down for ways to cultivate each Element of Well-being

We can find ourselves in multiple parts of this model at the same time. For example, I can feel intense love for my partner, grief for a lost relative, and excitement about a new job - all at once. I can also feel a combination of anger, sadness, and fear towards the same subject, like what’s happening geopolitically.

Escaping from any Pit of Suffering may be a gradual process. It can take days, months, even years to process deep-rooted emotions. It’s normal to fall back into a Pit, and we often do. Just acknowledging and understanding our emotions is already a big win.

Let’s be patient with ourselves as we learn to cultivate more love, compassion, joy, and equanimity in our lives. Small daily habits can lead to transformative changes (see below for some practices and reflection prompts).

I hope that you’ll find this tool useful in navigating your emotions, seeing with clearer eyes, and making wiser decisions. Learning it has certainly changed my own life by helping me become a more conscious human. I wish someone had taught me this when I was much younger, but better late than never! I’ve since used it every day for almost 10 years.

I’ve included a guide and additional resources below so you can try it out for yourself. I recommend printing out the Cycle of Emotions and referring to it throughout your day. There are many more layers to this that can be studied - I have only scratched the surface here.

Credit goes to Hans Kruegar for introducing Longchenpa’s teachings to me at Overlap 2016. I made adaptations and new visuals for my recent presentation to Applied Rationality Toronto. Thank you Raf, Sean, and Alex for your helpful feedback.

I love that there was so much interest in this topic. Over 50 folks signed up / were waitlisted for the Applied Rationality event. Great discussions with this thoughtful and open-hearted community.

You can read more about the Cycle of Emotions in the book “Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Part One: Mind” by Longchenpa.

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More resources:

• I’ve been developing and testing well-being practices for many years, and have included my favourites in my book “Finding Your Authentic Self”. The story itself is inspired by my personal journey of cultivating love, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

• Related blog posts:

  • The Path to My Authentic Self (on cultivating love towards Self)

  • 10 Days of Silence - My life-changing Vipassana journey (on cultivating equanimity and recognizing attachments)

  • How To Grow a Thriving Garden of Relationships (on cultivating love and compassion in our relationships)

  • Agile Dating: A Less Painful Way to Date (on cultivating love and compassion while dating)

  • What is truth? What is vessel? (on cultivating compassion and equanimity towards those with different beliefs)

  • We are an octopus (on cultivating love and compassion in community)

  • The Cycle of Emotions - A guide to influencing reality (my previous post on this topic that takes a slightly different spin, published in 2020)

Feel free to reach out if you’ve got questions, thoughts, or would like more recommended resources.

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