Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Although any particular emotional response is involuntary — emotions just happen without our either thinking about them or choosing them — the conditions that give rise to all of our emotions are subject to meditative cultivation. Although we cannot determine how we will respond emotionally to any particular event in life, we can shape the background conditions out of which emotions arise in ways that make enlightened emotional responses much more likely to prevail. The most important of these background conditions is simply the attitude that we take toward our emotional dispositions. A constructive attitude would include honest self-knowledge, a posture open to observe and understand how we do in fact respond emotionally in life, and how these patterns of response both enable and harm us. We must want to understand our emotional life and to educate and shape it, like other dimensions of our character, as skillfully as possible. Instead of thinking of emotions in simple causal terms as beyond our control, we can begin to take responsibility for them in the same way we do other dimensions of our lives.’ (The Six Perfections)