Reddit reviews Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama

Goleman also has a book based on his 5-day interview session with the Dalai Lama.

Would say the key here is to eliminate destructive emotions by replacing them with altruistic motivations and meditations. In that, our goal should be the undermining of the absolutism of the three objects (friend, enemy, neutral), thereby uprooting the three poisons (attachment/greed, aversion/hatred/fear, and ignorance) by realizing that their ground in the objects is actually baseless, thereby transmuting them into the three virtues (generosity, compassion, wisdom). Going for the root.

Judy Leif has a great bit about this here. A great teaching on how we label our world away. I like to say that one of the ways that we can talk about the problem is that we are going around making maps that are subtly intended to be absolute, but making these maps out of relative phenomena.

Meditating on emptiness helps greatly in working with the root poisons that give rise to all of the rest of the kleshas (destructive emotions). The Dalai lama has a book out labled Destructive Emotions, which is kind of a guidbook in how to understand what to define a destructive emotion, how to identify one AS a destructive emotion, and how to work with it directly. Spoiler: meditation on compassion and concentrated meditation on emptiness.

This teaching on labeling, and the destructive emotions that arise that, are profoundly beneficial. Once we can see how our feelings are self created in this way, and how it is a relativistic, empty enterprise, we can begin to let them go, transforming out experience from one of escape, to one of compassion and wisdom, which trumps habit and intoxication.

According to the Buddhist view of the mind, there are amotions that are inherently destructive; they are usually summarized with the so-called "three poisons": greed, anger, ignorance. Connected to them there are others, like jealousy, pride etc.
There is an interesting book about the negative emotions, it compares the modern scientific view of emotions and the traditional Buddhist one, it originates from one of the yearly meetings that the Dalai Lama holds with scientists about different subjects.

Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Ah. I seriously hadn't even noticed you were the same guy. Some very impressive deductive skills right there, ha ha! But I'm very happy that we got off so much better in this thread actually.

And yeah, I'm a bit sorry it went sour like that as well. It's not like I was behaving terribly enlightened in that threat. It's good of you to be forgiving like that. Thanks:)

And no, for most people the symptoms of PTSD never entirely go away. In fact one of the things my therapist used to stress was exactly the point that the symptoms - in all likelihood - would stay, and that the main purpose of the therapy was helping me find good ways to deal with this fact.

And yes, meditating specifically before a social event is something I do as well. Sometimes it seems to do little difference, but at other times it has been extremely helpful.

Like recently, for instance, - when a friend visited and out of the blue told me about his brothers sudden death, which I didn't know about yet. It was heavy stuff, of course, and he cried and freaked out a bit. But having meditated before his arrival, although I was just expecting us to have a beer and listen to new records, - it made a ton of difference. This way, being more calm and centered, I could actually help and comfort him, - instead of just panicking myself.

For this, and many other reasons, I actually think that basic meditation skills (non-religious) should be be part of public schooling. Some scientific work seems to point to the fact that if children are taught basic self-awareness/mindfulness techniques, - if they later in life are subjected to traumatic events, the likelihood of them developing PTSD is A LOT smaller.

If interested in this sort of stuff (scientists trying to figure out how to make meditation part of Western school curriculae), this book served me as a good place to start - although it is a few years old already:

http://www.amazon.com/Destructive-Emotions-Scientific-Dialogue-Dalai/dp/0553381059/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1370433763&sr=8-2&keywords=negative+emotions