The Alchemy Of Emotion

By RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR

Mindfulness helps us to identify our hidden emotional patterns. It also brings to the fore the light of awareness to freeing ourselves from their stranglehold, especially in today’s context, where our constant battles have little to do with actual situations, but much to do with symbolic meanings of what happened, and why.

What we need to have in place, to attaining mental composure, therefore, are the right tools of awareness, since we already have the potential to being our own inner alchemists -- to refining, or redefining, alertness. The idea is simple; it is also profound. Here goes -- the physics of consciousness, for instance, parallels emotional alchemy in more ways than one… like the classical cloud build-up and its dispersal. It transforms dazed emotional states into clarity and lightness of being.

Mindfulness is more than awareness; it is a state of meditative awareness that cultivates the capacity, in us, to perceive things as they are -- from moment to moment. While it is agreed that our focus oscillates rather immoderately, in the general sense of the term, it also conforms itself to a different rung. It is distraction-resistant; it is sustained attention to the movements of the mind itself. Rather than being swerved away, and captured by a thought, or feeling, mindfulness unswervingly watches thoughts as they come and go.

Mindfulness has its roots emblazoned in the ancient system of Buddhist psychology, which holds a refreshingly positive view of human nature. The strategy places great emphasis on what is right with us -- not what is wrong with us a la the primal obsession of Western psychology. Not that Buddhist psychology is dismissive of our disturbing emotions. On the contrary, it sees them as covering our essential goodness… like the clouds covering the Sun.

Noted psychologist Tara Bennett-Goleman’s research, for example, brings about a fascinating synthesis of such a medley of sources: from Buddhist psychology, mindful meditation, and Tibetan Buddhism to cognitive science, cognitive therapy, and neuroscience. She also, in the process, unravels new, or novel, scientific discoveries behind emotional alchemy -- that mindfulness shifts the brain from disturbing to positive emotions.

In so doing, she distils why the brain stays “plastic” throughout life, changing itself as we learn to challenge our own very old inclinations -- not just because being creatures of habits we know fully well what-is-what-as-it-is with us. Finally, she perceptively reveals, in her fine book, “Emotional Alchemy,” the crux of modern thinking -- a crucial, select fragment of neuroscience -- how we all have the ability to rejecting a self-defeating emotional impulse in a jiffy. In other words, in a magically split, quarter-second.

According to Goleman, cognitive therapy holds the key, or answer, to a better outcome. It details, for one, the emotional contours of the fear of loss that somebody close is going to leave us; or, our own self-instilled apprehension that a small setback at the workplace means that we’d end up jobless. However this maybe, what makes Goleman’s research a wonderful, and truly rewarding, experience is her facile blueprint.

To bring home a point, she retells, by way of an example, a classical sequence from “The Wizard of Oz,” where Dorothy and her companions finally get to Oz, thanks to the handiwork of the little dog, Toto, who quietly goes and pulls back the curtain.

The result? It “exposes” an old man crouched over the controls -- manipulating a mammoth Wizard image!