How to Become a Spiritual Rebel
Part One - Destructive Emotions, and an Antidote for Each
Ondy Willson · 103 minutes · recorded October 5, 2024
Spirituality with the religion stripped out, and emotions as the ground of ethics. The four opponent powers arrive by way of Atisha climbing down off his horse: take refuge, regret it, apply a remedy, resolve not to do it again. Then constructive and destructive emotions, a guided meditation that washes an anger out through the soles of the feet, and an antidote worked out for each: patience, empathy, forgiveness, gladness at another's good fortune.
Ondy Willson defines spirituality by stripping religion away from it, starting from the Dalai Lama's claim that the basic spiritual qualities need no religious belief system to develop. Because emotions feed ethics, destructive emotions produce destructive actions, and the story of Atisha climbing down off his horse whenever he noticed he had breached his ethics brings in the four opponent powers: refuge, regret, a remedy, and the resolve not to do it again. From there the ground becomes secular, with emotional intelligence and Daniel Goleman's research, and the argument that emotions visit us rather than define us. The group picks out its three strongest destructive and constructive emotions, which brings up anger, fear, shame and anxiety, and Ondy Willson works through them, including why Buddhism counts shame as constructive, and how sympathy can look down on someone where empathy stands alongside them. A guided meditation on anger uses visualisation and analytical thought. An incident is replayed like a film, first for what caused it from outside and then for what in the ego was stung, its weight and colour located in the body, before white light rains down through the crown of the head and washes the heaviness out through the soles of the feet. The antidotes are then worked out together: patience for anger, empathy for intolerance, compassion for pride, forgiveness for blame, gladness at another's good fortune for envy. Envy is treated as a habit rather than a character, loosened by saying you are happy for someone through gritted teeth until one day it is meant. It closes with a second meditation in seven steps, taking one destructive emotion and putting its antidote to work. Recorded on 5 October 2024, the first of the two workshops.
Anger and aversion Buddhist psychology Emotional balance Habits and change Analytical meditation The four opponent powers Vajrasattva purification Visualisation