I need to learn to suppress my emotions.

I need to learn to suppress my emotions. Anyone who tells me otherwise can shut up. anyone who actually wants to help, please talk to me.

 

Do you mean suppressing feeling them or expressing them?

 

@Beldaran go ahead.

 

@rigorist i mean I need to not feel emotions, or at least not express them visibly.

 

One very basic thing to try is the simple mindfulness exercise of concentrating on breathing. Think very hard and pay attention to each inhalation and exhalation. Try to think of nothing but the sensation of breathing. Do that for ten breaths and it can disrupt the emotional cycle.

It sounds kind of silly, but it works sometimes.

 

Rigs brought up the advice I was going to provide. If it seems hard when you start that makes sense. Meditation is a skill you need to practice at to get down. So don't be daunted if it doesn't seem to help at all. If you're serious about this though I'd suggest finding a bhikkhu to speak to about this sort of thing. And see if you can get some sort of tutoring thing going on. This thing here can help you find temples.

I'm no longer Buddhist myself, but I did practice for seven years and had serious intentions to go through ordination. So while I'm definitely not a monk I may be able to help answer some questions about meditation and mindfulness or describe the practices some.

 

similar to paced breathing, if you need to kick yourself out of an emotional reaction very quickly, and you have the resources:

Fill the sink with cold water and hold your face under for thirty seconds. Or if you don't want to duck your head, put a cold washcloth or some ice cubes across your cheeks for the same amount of time

your heart rate will drop on reflex, and your emotional intensity will go down correspondingly

do not try this if you have a history of heart problems or if you're under the influence at the time

 

The thing that can be daunting about Buddhist practice is all the weird words. Or at least they sound weird to me.

But you can skip all the hard words and just do the stuff and it still mostly works.

 

True. I do think that's part of why speaking with a monk about such things is a good idea. And it's part of why I spent time trying to find ways to explaining it involving examples featuring cookies and sad puppies.

If all you want is the method, I can definitely break that down into not twenty letter long hell words.

 

Emotions Are Bad and I Don't Want Them

 

And @Aondeug huh. Never had a Buddhist try to convert me before, thanks but no thanks.

I understand the value of meditation. I guess I can try it, but I can't meditate in public or at work.

 

I'm not trying to convert you, though I'll admit that Buddhism is a missionary faith. As I said I'm a former Buddhist. I'm offering you a solid plan for learning meditation. It can be practiced without the larger body of Buddhism attached to it. It does, after all, predate Buddhism.

Also after some time of practice bits of it can be applied to things like work I've found.

 

I don't really believe that it can be applied to work, but okay.

Fuck it I already have a meditation app. Maybe I should try using it again.

 

It's a matter of being able to get into the "mood", I suppose it can be called, on the spot. Meditation isn't so much about blocking the world out and entering a trance as one might be led to believe. It can certainly do that, but it can also be done during things like walking or organizing shelves or whatever in the hell else. As a way of focusing, cutting off emotional strains, or just otherwise opening up and becoming more of aware of one's surroundings. That's the essence of mindfulness really. An increased awareness of the world.

So basically taking the basics of it and say instead of having breath be your focal point have folding shirts or whatever be the focus. The rest of the world isn't cut out. Just that's your focus point and you're drawn away from it at times, but you can always head back to it.

Alternatively the breathing can be done on the spot. Which can help calm things down. It takes practice but it can be actively applied to other situations beyond just the sitting or walking.

 

... how can other things be the focus of meditation??

 

Well the thing is that breathing isn't the only focus. It's just one type of meditation. Along with walking there's a list of like...42 traditional focuses for meditation? I think is the number. You basically just need to find an action or thought that you're able to pinpoint in on and keep on. That's all that's really needed for something to be meditation.

So with the breathing the way it works is that you breath in and note this. You breath out and note this. You may even note your intention to breath in and breath out. You note other things too. Like sounds you hear or thoughts you have, but you always return to the focus point. Which here is the breathing. So let's instead look at, say, shuffling a deck of cards. You intend to pick up the deck, and note that. You pick up the deck, paying attention to the movements of your hands, the feel and weight of the cards, and so on. Then you take two halves of the deck, noting that and all that goes with it. And shuffle it, again noting all this. But let's say you think about, I dunno, a cute kitty you saw an hour ago. That's fine! It's just a thought. So you make note of that. That it's a thought and one about a kitty you thought was cute. Instead of going down the trail though you head right back to your card shuffling. Mindfulness meditation is basically just the fine art of watching your body and mind while still being aware of what's happening around you. Breathing happens to work well because I mean it's a thing you can do without tools, it's very repetitive in a simple manner, and focusing on breathing tends to naturally force the body into a state of calm as your breathing slows down.

 

I always rec StopBreatheThink as a meditation app because it allows you to input your emotional state and get meditations designed to help bring you back down to a base neutral or positive. They work in the same way that the ones Aon mentions describes for the most part, except like the one for going to sleep which is more of the 'trance state' thing. Body Scan is one of my faves - the shorter version for me bc the extended one can actually push me into overstimulation - because it forces me to go exactly through the process Aon describes and also notice if I'm carrying any tension and release it. It won't make you stop having emotions, it will help them be Less Pressing and help you think with a little less buzz.

 

The Good Thing about Buddhism is that its core can be summarized as, "lol calm down".

The Bad Thing about Buddhism is that people have been trying to explain "lol calm down" for a couple thousand years.