Beautiful Monsters I

We are beginning a short journey into a deeper understanding of the Handshake practice, as taught by Tsoknyi Rinpoche.

Beautiful monsters are patterns of reaction that are slightly or greatly distorted. For example, if we felt undervalued or underappreciated as a kid, we might overreact as an adult to ordinary criticism or blame. This overreaction is a beautiful monster.

Both parts of this phrase “beautiful monsters” are important. If we think of them as just monsters, we solidify our aversion and hatred toward them, which are really just parts of our own mind. If we think of them as just beautiful, however, we are denying the destructive potential they have and the suffering they can cause. It’s important to understand that they can be both monsters and have beauty within them.

The beautiful monsters have two types of beauty: the first is by their very nature. No matter how monstrous an emotion might seem, its deep underlying nature is very different. Like the raw material of full-colored 3D images projected on a screen is only pure light, the underlying raw material of our beautiful monsters is openness, clarity, and energy. So beautiful monsters have that beauty. The second is that beautiful monsters seem ugly at first, but when we heal one, it becomes beautiful.

Beautiful monsters are formed in various ways: sometimes we develop habits because of challenging relationships; sometimes tendencies get provoked by circumstances; sometimes repeated stress just makes us develop reactive habits. Something that was once helpful, like protecting ourselves in an unsafe environment, can become a beautiful monster when it gets hardened and habitual. We hate a certain kind of person or situation even though we are no longer in danger.

Rinpoche calls these patterns “overreactions,” and we may know them by other names, such as defensive reactions or difficult feelings. These are feelings that we often desire to push away, bury or otherwise ignore. If they can’t be ignored, then we distract ourselves with food, sex, video games, gambling, binge watching TV, etc. These distractions tend to absorb our full capacity for awareness which makes them so useful for ignoring what is arising in the mind.

The goal of Handshake practice is to take that same full capacity for mindful awareness and apply it to meeting our “beautiful monsters.” We will never understand why these habitual patterns keep arising for us until we are ready to see them for what they are. And, as Rinpoche says, even though they are scary, unnerving, hateful, and destructive to our happiness and the happiness of others, they have their own Beauty. That is what we are looking to uncover, the openness, clarity, and pure energy of these feelings.