ivory:
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DN is all about working through your psychological stuff and living a healthy lifestyle (food, exercise, friends, etc). When I first told my meditation teacher that I hit DN, he said, "Meditation isn't going to help you." And he was right.
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Okay, but not all cases are the same.
Whether meditation will help depends on the type of meditation, the source of the unpleasant emotions, and other factors. If the emotions are due to emotional baggage and not a purely organic issue, then the right kind of meditation can help in some cases.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu explains this type of meditation here.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/concmind.htmlThe Path of Concentration & Mindfulness
by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Many people tell us that the Buddha taught two different types of meditation — mindfulness meditation and concentration meditation. Mindfulness meditation, they say, is the direct path, while concentration practice is the scenic route that you take at your own risk because it's very easy to get caught there and you may never get out. But when you actually look at what the Buddha taught, he never separates these two practices. They are both parts of a single whole. Every time he explains mindfulness and its place in the path, he makes it clear that the purpose of mindfulness practice is to lead the mind into a state of Right Concentration — to get the mind to settle down and to find a place where it can really feel stable, at home, where it can look at things steadily and see them for what they are.
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Suppose that anger is interfering with your concentration. Instead of getting involved in the anger, you try simply to be aware of when it's there and when it's not. You look at the anger as an event in and of itself — as it comes, as it goes. But you don't stop there. The next step — as you're still working at focusing on the breath — is recognizing how anger can be made to go away. Sometimes simply watching it is enough to make it go away; sometimes it's not, and you have to deal with it in other ways, such as arguing with the reasoning behind the anger or reminding yourself of the drawbacks of anger. In the course of dealing with it, you have to get your hands dirty. You've got to try and figure out why the anger is coming, why it's going, how you can get it out of there, because you realize that it's an unskillful state. And this requires that you improvise. Experiment. You've got to chase your ego and impatience out of the way so that you can have the space to make mistakes and learn from them, so that you can develop a skill in dealing with the anger. It's not just a question of hating the anger and trying to push it away, or of loving the anger and welcoming it. These approaches may give results in the short run, but in the long run they're not especially skillful. What's called for here is the ability to see what the anger is composed of; how can you take it apart.
One technique I like to use — when anger is present and you're in a situation where you don't immediately have to react to people — is simply to ask yourself in a good-natured way, "Okay, why are you angry?" Listen to what the mind has to say. Then pursue the matter: "But why are you angry at that? " "Of course, I'm angry. After all..." "Well, why are you angry at that?" If you keep this up, the mind will eventually admit to something stupid, like the assumption that people shouldn't be that way — even though they blatantly are that way — or that people should act in line with your standards, or whatever the mind is so embarrassed about that it tries to hide from you. But finally, if you keep probing, it'll fess up. You gain a lot of understanding of the anger that way, and this can really weaken its power over you.
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Releasing emotional baggage is ultimately the same as becoming free from the fetter of identity view, which is the goal of all forms of Buddhist meditation.
This is because our baggage is ultimately due to attachments to self that originate in the way we distinguish between self and not-self, self and other. When we let go of our baggage, we are letting go of attachments to self, freeing ourselves from identity view, and ending the separation of self and not-self.
When one practices as Thanissaro describes, digging through the layers of baggage one uncovers layers of suppression and denial hidden underneath stories we make up to rationalize the conflict between our desires and expectations and reality. Releasing the baggage dispells layers of ignorance and delusion allowing us to see things as they really are.
