From the point of view of Highest Yoga Tantra, difficult emotions do not need to be suppressed or eliminated, as some more elementary meditations strive to do. Their energies can, instead, be used for enlightenment. By moving the attention from a complete immersion in the feeling to the observation of it, the emotions could be harnessed for spiritual purposes. The mind is a terrible master but a wonderful servant, this approach proclaimed. Evocative paintings of wrathful or erotic deities adorning the Tibetan temple walls made this point with graphic emphasis. Anger, no longer an obstacle to meditative attainment, was portrayed in these paintings as an instrument of insight. Desire, no longer viewed as an obstructive impediment, was embodied as a vehicle of empathy. Ambition, no longer for personal aggrandizement, was represented as the intention to help others. As if to highlight the connection between the personal and the spiritual, the four esoteric stages of Highest Yoga Tantra were named for four stages of falling in love. Looking, smiling, embracing, and orgasm are the closest one comes in regular life to the joyous celebration, and spontaneous loss of ego, uncovered in successful meditations of this type.

Buddhist thought has been helpful for me with this because the Buddha’s first noble truth—that life is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness (or suffering)—takes it as a given that there is always some way that we feel unseen, unknown, or unrecognized.

Psychoanalysis has explored many of the most obvious parental failings that contribute to such feelings but, in trying to find the source, or the cause, of personal uncertainty, it has encouraged people to overly blame their families of origin rather than taking on the responsibility of reaching out to establish whatever kinds of connections are actually possible in life.

The true target, of course, from a Buddhist perspective at least, is the overly inflated sense of self that is nourished by one’s personal grievances. Once one identifies that target, it becomes possible to free oneself from an exclusive identification with it. In that direction lies freedom.

The Buddha’s teachings run counter to this tendency to find fault. He normalized feelings of inadequacy and threw responsibility back onto the individual to sort them out. He taught mindfulness as a method of probing the self and found that impartial attention to moment-to-moment experience yields surprising but predictable insights into the self’s

contingent and relational nature. These insights, which precipitate spontaneously out of concentrated attention and mindful reflection, make abundantly clear that our habitual efforts to defend ourselves against our intrinsic groundlessness make things even worse.

This is the ultimate Buddhist therapeutic maneuver. The trick is not to ignore the emotion but to leave it alone, allowing it to appear in its own way, appreciating it for what it seems to be without getting taken in by it.