Passion Is Morally Neutral
Passion for something is neither good nor bad. It depends on what accompanies it: greed or love.
The same activity, whether coding or making music, turns into suffering when it’s driven by wanting to gain something or earn external validation.
A Relationship With Emotions
The place to look for is where you neither deny your emotions nor get overwhelmed by them. For someone whose default is avoidance, that means actually feeling them. The move lines up closely with ACT.
Spiritual Bypassing
Noting a feeling and declining to engage with it can be aversion in disguise. The instruction was never non-involvement. It was non-fusion plus non-avoidance, and the tell is a hidden agenda for the feeling to leave.
The classical tradition already diagnosed this: the near enemy of equanimity is indifference. What you release is the holding, and the feeling stays. If you’re the one deciding when it goes, that’s still a control move. The term comes from John Welwood (1984), coined for Western practitioners using practice to sidestep unfinished emotional work.
RAIN
Recognize, allow, investigate, non-identify. Very similar to the core moves of ACT and to the method in The Power of Focusing.