What does it mean that disturbing emotions are raw material for enlightenment?

Lama Ole’s answer:

Christianity considers disturbing emotions to be sins, and in other religions they are also seen as negative. In Diamond Way Buddhism, however, disturbing emotions are raw material on the way to liberation and enlightenment. You draw energy and power out of them and make them useful.

The symbol for this is the peacock. The Tibetans say that the peacock eats poison to produce all the beautiful colors in its feathers. Similarly, one takes all the disturbances, suffering, and difficulties in oneself and converts them into energy and strength. See the disturbing emotions as organic waste: if you work with them well, you get compost and new seeds will sprout.

But it is important that you first have enough distance and stay in control. Only then can you see that disturbing emotions are not so real—that they appear, change, and dissolve again. Then, you go one step further to observe how an emotion comes and goes. You are like an empty house which it enters without being able to cause any trouble.

This last level is very useful for Westerners, but in the Tibetan imagination it doesn’t exist. Here, you catch the energy of the disturbing feeling and use it to do something useful—like wash the dishes. As soon as you’ve gotten over the peak, the emotion can’t hook you anymore, you don’t react the way you did before. In that moment, you can use its power to dig in the garden or whatever. This way of channeling the energy is bit of practical advice from me; I didn’t get it from my teachers. But it is very useful to put the energy of the emotion to use to achieve something.