Having the Right Frame of Reference

So as you meditate, it’s important to understand that you’re not here to suppress an emotion, to deny that it exists. You want to be very clear about what’s going on in the mind, but at the same time you want to learn how to use the mind wisely, to approach your emotions wisely.

When fear, greed, anger, or delusion come up in the mind, it’s not necessarily helpful to express them outside because sometimes that makes it difficult to observe what’s going on, too. There has to be a middle way between the expression and the suppression. This is important.

Often as you meditate you try to tell yourself, “Don’t react. Just be equanimous. Don’t get excited. Don’t get worked up about things.” And then you try to convince yourself that that’s what’s actually happening. You see ideals of what an enlightened person is like — very calm, peaceful, equanimous — and you try to clone the calm, to clone the equanimity. Remember, though, that Right Cloning is not one of the factors of the Path.

The relevant factor is Right Mindfulness, having the right frame of reference for dealing with pain and pleasure as they come. If you view the pleasure simply as something to run toward, or the pain as something to fear or run away from, you’re creating a situation in which the emotions that arise — the liking and the disliking — are going to get in the way of really seeing anything.

So you want to create a different frame. Instead of seeing yourself as a person partaking of the pain or the pleasure, you want to dismantle that perception. You want to have another way of approaching pain and pleasure so that you don’t feel threatened by the pain and don’t simply indulge in the pleasure.

This is why you need a technique as the foundation of your meditation. We’ve talked many times about meditation as not just a technique, but you can’t meditate without a technique, either. You need to view the technique in the context of certain values, certain understandings, but you can’t denigrate technique — because it provides part of your frame of reference.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the Dhamma Talks Section, Meditations Series book Meditations 3, “Suppressed Emotions.” (Also in audio format at, “Suppressed Emotions,” December 11, 2004.”)