Essence of Life

Enjoy life to the fullest when you taste the full range of your emotional palette.

By Sally Kempton

Many years ago I walked into the kitchen of my guru's ashram and found him shouting at the cooks. Waves of anger were bouncing around the room, almost visible to the naked eye. Then, in midsentence, he turned, saw us standing there, and smiled. The energy in his eyes went soft. "How did you like the show?" he asked. Chuckling, he slapped the head cook playfully on the back and walked away. The cooks giggled and went back to work, galvanized by the energy he had injected into the afternoon.

That moment changed my understanding about emotions. The clarity and fluidity with which he had shifted from intense anger to good humor was only part of it. More interesting, I felt, was that he had been using anger as a teaching tool. Was he truly angry? I don't know. All I know is he seemed able to ride the wave of his anger with perfect ease and let it pass without a trace. To me, that moment was the most stunning demonstration of emotional mastery I had ever seen.

One of the ideals of yogic freedom is detachment from emotions. Yet because we have so few models of what genuine detachment looks like, we tend to confuse yogic detachment with being buttoned up, inexpressive, or even unfeeling. My teacher was modeling something quite different. Rather than demonstrating freedom from emotions, he was displaying freedom in emotions. In other words, his mastery included the ability to choose and use emotion—even to play with emotion as the situation demanded.

I wondered if it was possible for all of us to be like that. Along with learning to disengage from, transcend, and balance the problematical aspects of your emotional nature, could you also learn the art of playing with emotional currents or inhabiting emotional energy without being ruled by it? Could the path to inner freedom include giving up the fear of emotional expression and even expanding one's ability to enjoy different emotional states? Could it be that just as you might practice enlightened emotions like gratitude, generosity, and compassion, you might also find it liberating to try on expressions of anger, sadness, and fear?

That was certainly the view of some Tantric sages. In fact, one of the greatest of the Tantric teachers, Abhinava Gupta, a 10th-century philosopher and an enlightened yogi, approached life as an art form. He saw God as an artist and human beings as microcosms of Divine creativity. Gupta felt that humans could use feelings and emotions as a palette for creating each moment as a work of art.

Gupta's famous treatises on aesthetics explored the basic "flavors," or rasas, of emotional expression. The Sanskrit word rasa is sometimes translated as "flavor," but it also means "juice"—the delicious essence of something. The sweet taste of a ripe peach is its rasa, its essence. Applied in a deeper sense, rasa is the juiciness in life, the subtle lusciousness that gives the world its taste. Without rasa, life would feel dry and flavorless.

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