This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So, good evening everyone. Good evening. I want to first thank Hakusho for inviting me to give this talk. Hakusho and I first met back in 2008 when we thought we were just visiting. And I want to also thank Vicki for her presence here in the Valley and in the Zendo and everyone who is here from her workshop and the other guests who are here relaxing. And I also want to thank all of my Dharma friends who are in the valley, who are here in the Zendo.

[01:02]

And even I want to thank those who didn't show up for the talk for maybe taking care of themselves and getting some sleep or something. So I know how hard it is here in the summer. So thank you to everyone for being here. I decided to talk today about emotions. And mainly because I feel that in Zen Buddhism sometimes we don't discuss emotions so much. And I think also perhaps, also perhaps maybe, we don't discuss emotions in general, depending on how we grew up, where we grew up, and what our workplace was like and other factors. So I'll just start out with a story about emotion. So a long time ago, before I ever even heard of the word zen, I was in my 20s living in Annapolis, Maryland.

[02:05]

And I was beset by a lot of depression and grief on my way home from work one day. And I lived in this really beautiful old farmhouse about 20 minutes or so outside of Annapolis. And I was weeping a lot and I felt really heavy. with emotions and a lot of difficult thoughts were arising. And I drove up this long driveway. We had a very long driveway to get to the house and then I pulled in the driveway around the farmhouse. And my roommates were mostly strangers before I moved in. And some of them remained strangers while I was there as well. And I was just hoping that there was nobody there when I walked through the back door because I didn't really want to talk to anybody. And of course, as soon as I walked in, there was one of my housemates standing in the kitchen, and she had this bouquet of daffodils in her hand. And the whole image just shocked me.

[03:06]

I was like, oh, well, where'd you get those daffodils from? And she looked at me with this disbelief on her face, and I followed her to the front door, and she had this weird smile on her face, and she opened the front door, And lo and behold, in our front yard, there's hundreds, or maybe not hundreds, but at least 50 daffodils right there in the front yard that I drove past in my car. So I did not even see these daffodils standing there like these little sun-faced sentinels because I was so blinded by depression and my mind was really thick with lots of thoughts. So this is what Buddhism would call an emotion. this depression, right? We call it emotion, they call Buddhism, I guess I'm a Buddhist, I keep saying they like I'm not part of the clan or something, I don't know. So they, we, we, they, depends on how I'm feeling I guess. If it's a cool clan or not. So we Buddhists would say that emotion is something that conditions the mind and causes us to perceive

[04:17]

reality in a certain way. So it affects our vision. And this is true of a negative emotion as well as a positive emotion. And positive emotions, we're all familiar with those. And some of us are familiar with negative emotions as well. So across the board, emotions in general are what color our perception of what's happening in life, ourselves and others in life, which is all life together. And I want to just focus on negative emotions because These mental afflictions are what often cause us difficulty in our lives. So according to the Buddhist scriptures, there's 84,000 negative emotions. I'm not exactly sure if that's just hyperbole or if there was somebody actually counting them. I don't know. But the Buddha, fortunately for us, distilled them into five emotions, five negative emotions. Hatred, desire, confusion, pride... and jealousy. I think depression for me would be somewhere around like a confusion with internalized hatred maybe, something like that.

[05:27]

So because I was so afflicted, my mind and my body were so afflicted and agitated by this depression and grief, like I said, I didn't see these daffodils. So an emotion, a negative emotion, really restricts our worldview and it also flattens it out so there's not so many nuances, right? There's black and white, me and him, she did this, he did that. There's not a lot of space in there for flexibility, right? We try to paint, we paint ourselves and other people into corners sometimes when there's a lot of strong emotions in our body and mind. And another word for negative emotions is suffering. And this is the reason why Buddha left his palace and his princely life was to investigate the causes of suffering. Why do human beings suffer? And his goal was to end, to figure out how to end suffering. And I read somewhere that the name Siddhartha actually means one who achieves a goal.

[06:35]

And if some of you know the story about Buddha, It was predicted that he'd either be a great king, which is what his father wanted to be, or he'd be this influential spiritual master, which his father wasn't so happy about. But that's what, fortunately for all of us, he did instead, because we wouldn't maybe be sitting here right now if he hadn't struck out and investigated suffering and trying to figure out how to end it. So one of the main teachings of the Buddha is the Four Noble Truths. The first noble truth is that suffering exists in life. The second one is that there's causes and conditions, you know, why suffering arises. The third is that suffering can cease, which I think we should, sometimes we don't, people who don't know much about Buddhism often focus on the first noble truth and say, oh, it's so depressing Buddhism, all you do is focus on suffering. They don't seem to get down to the third one, which says that suffering can cease.

[07:36]

And then the fourth one is there's a path. There's a path that you can follow to help your suffering cease. So suffering in Sanskrit, the word is called dukkha, D-U-K-K-H-A. And it can be translated as discontent or stress, like a general dissatisfaction with what's going on in your life. And what I recently learned from somebody who knows Sanskrit, that it also can mean constricted consciousness. So consciousness suffuses everything, including us. We're part of that everything. And this dukkha can be seen as something that's constricted or contracted, whether it's in our mind or in the body. They're connected. So to be liberated from suffering, to be liberated from dukkha, we need to become really intimate with it. So we need to understand when it's present, so when we're suffering, what gives rise to our particular brand of suffering, when it ceases, and how to prevent, not suppress, but how to prevent the future arising of suffering.

[08:46]

So the content of suffering, our individual karmic conditioning, all the causes and conditions that created this particular person sitting right here, where I was born, I was born the first girl in an Italian-American family in New York. I had two older brothers. My mother's from here. My father's from there. So all the causes and conditions, biological, logistic, everything that comes together that created me, that's my own karmic conditioning. So everybody has their own individual karmic conditioning. It's unique to each of us. However, the source of suffering... is the same for all of us. It's a sense of solid me. A constricted, solid sense of me. This is me. So the Buddha discovered through many years of concentrated effort that there's an aspect of human consciousness that grasps onto arising thoughts, emotions, and sensations and creates this sense of a solid, continuous me.

[09:49]

We think this me exists. We think it exists as an independent, abiding, and monolithic entity. And what Zen Buddhism helps us with is learning how to pay attention really closely. And the Buddha said, pay close attention with diligence to what's going on in the present moment. And what we'll notice is that everything changes, including us. We're always changing constantly. There's that old saying from this Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, that you can't step into the same river twice. But if we change it to more... A Buddhist slant is the same person can't step into the same river twice. So not only is the river constantly changing, but also the person who's stepping into that river is constantly changing. And so like in the morning when I greet the guests, hi guests, and I interrupt you while you're having breakfast to ask you what you're gonna be doing for lunch, that's a different heather than this heather that's sitting here right now, right?

[10:53]

So the heather that's arising right now with everybody in this room There's a different heather from the heather that arises in the morning. I do seem to ask the same question, though, if you want to have bag lunch or lunch in the dining room. But maybe I say it differently every single time. So there's this dynamic process that's happening where we are arising in each moment. And if we keep paying attention, we'll see that everything is changing. And this is one of the other important teachings of the Buddha is impermanence, that everything is impermanent. So nothing ever stays the same. This gets to my next point about impermanence brings up this idea of the self being a verb rather than a noun. We often say self, but very rarely do we say the word selfing. And it sounds really odd even as I say it because it's not something that's familiar. Self is not a noun, is not this monolith.

[11:56]

If it were, then we'd all still just be babies. We never would change. We'd still just be little babies if no change was possible. But in fact, all we are ever doing is changing. So if we start to view ourselves to self as a verb instead of a noun, it could be helpful. So we're always becoming in each moment. We're just these nano moments of consciousness and sensory experience. That is constantly flowing. And the 13th century founder of Zen in Japan, his name is Eihei Dogen, some of you might have heard about him, he phrases it this way, that reality is an icicle forming in fire. And I remember I said this to somebody who's not a Buddhist, and the person said, it was my sister, and she said, oh, well, you know, an icicle can't form in fire. It's like, right, that's right, an icicle can't form in fire. But what happens is we become a little pebble stuck inside that icicle.

[13:00]

That's the sense of self, the solid me. I'm stuck in this icicle that's constantly changing, but somehow I keep staying the same, or at least I keep perceiving myself as being the same. But reality is that we're not the same, that we're constantly changing. So the more that we are able to flow, the less we suffer. And I would say the less that that suffering persists, the more malleable it is, the not so thick it is, the less we resist what's going on, the less we feel like a pebble in the middle of the icicle. So when suffering arises, like most animals, human animals want to avoid it. However, unlike... Other animals, human animals, have lots of ways to avoid what's going on in the present moment. And the most habitual way that we avoid suffering is to retreat into the mind. I think this is especially true if we had a chaotic or traumatic childhood where we didn't feel safe in our bodies, so we retreated to our mind to stay safe.

[14:08]

And, you know, the mind is an escape artist, and our consumerist society... as many ways that reflect this. We have all these, basically it's a den of distractions that can eventually become addictions, working, entertainment, relationships, drinking, shopping, surfing the net, you name it, almost anything really could become an addiction. So we numb ourselves through these addictions, the main addiction being to the sense of self, of who I am in this moment and I need to be this way in order for me to feel a certain way. But, This numbing out, this avoidance does not end suffering. That's not the path to the end of suffering, as the Buddha said. It's not the fourth noble truth. Binging on Netflix is not the path to cessation of suffering. I've tried it and it doesn't work. So distraction actually perpetuates suffering. So back when I was a teenager in the 1980s, this new gadget came on the scene, almost seemed like overnight, called, does anyone know what it's called?

[15:12]

The Sony Walkman, right? So for those of you who are too young to remember the Sony Walkman, it was a precursor to the MP3 player and the iPod. So it was an audio cassette that you would pop in. It was a little device that you'd pop an audio cassette into. And you close it up and you put in your headphones and you listen to your favorite songs, right? They were called, back then, they were called mixtapes, right? Mixtapes. So this image of plugging these headphones in, this mixtape of me, retreating, tuning out to what's going on, And my father, who was born in 1925, before there was television sets, never mind Sony Walkmans, he was just like confused. Why are people, why are they wearing those things? They can't hear the birds, right? So what we're tuning out, we're actually tuning out life, right? We can't hear the birds. We are not present in the, we're not present to the physicality of that moment, right? We're listening to something else, right? Mentality is very strong. We identify quite a bit with our thinking mind. My father never bought me a Walkman, by the way, but I did buy one later on when I was in college, but I never told him about it.

[16:21]

So when suffering is present, when the body-mind is contracted and agitated, it's often because we're plugged into the story of me, this mixtape, these narratives that we learned from our childhood, from unfathomable causes and conditions, our parents' own karmic momentums. It's just everything that came together. the body, when the mind reacts to bodily sensations in certain ways, either negatively or positively. So even though they're mental afflictions, the origins of them arise, the origin is actually in the body. So when these stories play over and over again, one teacher, what she would suggest is she would say, is it a story you're believing or is it actually an experience you're having? You could put in the sounds of the birds in the Walkman and listen to the sounds of the birds, but they're not actually the real birds. The birds are out there, not in your mind. These stories often tell us who we are, who we should be, what we should be doing, what the other person should be doing, what life is like.

[17:31]

They just tell us there's lots of narratives that go on. Basically, there are dislikes and our likes, our preferences. So the more strongly we believe or identify with these arising thoughts, and one meditation master, Trungpa Rinpoche, called emotions heavy-handed thoughts. So the more that we identify with heavy-handed thoughts and sensations, the more that we're suffering, the more that rock, the pebble inside, that icicle starts to get bigger and more solid. However, what happens is, for most of us, This mixtape of me goes on in the background unnoticed, like that television set in the other room, right? It's just going and no one's really paying attention to it, but there's this background noise. So we often aren't aware of how we're being afflicted by this mixtape of me, these stories. I guess to use a more up-to-date metaphor, the mixtape of me is like a computer application that insidiously runs in the background. I've had that experience on my iPad where all of a sudden the battery goes dead because there's all these applications running.

[18:35]

So it's sort of like that when we don't know what programming is running, what program is running, then our life, our energy gets drained and without our knowing it. And then also we often act out of this programming, act away from our suffering. and sometimes cause harm to other people and ourselves. So I was hoping I didn't have enough time to tell this story, but I do, unfortunately. So I have a confession that a week before I left Tassajara, a week before I left my home in Austin, Texas, I punched my ex-boyfriend in the stomach. And I feel I was on the fence about saying this because, You know, I'm a Zen priest, and I'm not supposed to... I mean, I didn't punch somebody as a Zen priest, but still, it's a little embarrassing. It wasn't a very strong punch, but I'll spare you all the details. However, I think we were both at the time feeling kind of anxious and sad about my departure, and he said something that really upset me, that he had slept with somebody the night before.

[19:45]

And even though we weren't dating, I still was really in love with him, and I really felt hurt by this. and I felt this, what I call this dread rising in my body. It was just a lot of, it felt like I described in my journal like the beat of a thousand bat wings, a storm of adrenaline and panic and anger and it rumbled up through my chest and shot down my arm and there was this fist and then it just punched him in the stomach. Yeah, we were both really surprised by that. I've never punched anyone ever again, fortunately. But on the surface, it looks like what he said was what caused me to punch him. But actually, it wasn't that. What it was was my inability to stay present with that dread. I couldn't stay close enough to what was arising, so I moved away from it. When we can't stay close to what's happening, we move away. We move away from that suffering inside of us. We often project it onto other people and say, this person's the cause of why I'm feeling a certain way.

[20:50]

And this Tibetan teacher that I had the privilege of working with just for a short period of time, her name is Pema Chodron. She says that most people can't get past the panic that they feel when a strong emotion or sensation arises. So instead of staying with that panic, we move away. And they have a word for that. It's called shenpa in Tibetan, S-H-E-N-P-A. It's that urge to move away. So I call this punch the fist of suffering or the fist of self. And to remind myself what it feels like to feel contracted, to feel like a solid sense of me, I have this acronym. It's called Separate Ego Limits Freedom or Suffering Ego Limits Freedom. The image of a fist reminds me when something feels threatened. this contraction feels threatened. So something feels closed off and stuck. So one way we often protect this me is by blaming someone, like I said, or some circumstance outside of ourselves for how we're feeling, right?

[22:01]

If only my boyfriend didn't sleep, my ex-boyfriend didn't sleep with somebody else. If only my boss didn't do this. If only that guest didn't say that. If only my coworker didn't say this, right? If only that we, all these conditions that we want to have in place in order for us to feel a certain way. That's giving a lot of power to circumstances and people outside of ourselves. So even though we really aren't in control of what's going on in our lives, right, we don't really have control, although we think we have control of what's happening. We are responsible for that. We're responsible for our body, for our speech, and for our thoughts. So even though I couldn't stop, if I could have stopped from punching him, I would have not punched him, of course. And in the morning, every morning if you're here for service, we have this confession that we chant. All my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hatred, and delusion, I now fully avow.

[23:06]

I now fully acknowledge and openly declare that I am responsible for my body, speech, and mind. It doesn't say that you're avowing my karma. You're not responsible for my karma. I'm actually responsible for karma. Because if we continue to blame other people or circumstances, we'll never be liberated from suffering because we're looking outside ourselves for salvation. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh says that to be really alive... To touch life deeply, you have to become a free person. Cultivating mindfulness can help you be free. So what we do a lot here, especially during the cloistered practice periods, is we sit, meditate. We have what we call Zazen or seated meditation. Zen meaning meditation in Japanese. And we practice Zazen in the morning and the evenings during the summer. But during the practice period, we do quite a bit of meditation, like six hours a day. So by sitting and meditating, we are helping to cultivate this mindfulness, and that fist of self slowly starts to unfurl.

[24:13]

So Zazen is the process of tuning in to our suffering, to what our bodies are feeling, to what thoughts are present, tuning into our emotions. So investigating body-mind is what we Zen Buddhists call taking the backward step that illuminates oneself. Taking this backward step is the first step toward being a free person. Buddha taught many ways to study this verb of self. For me, the most effective one has been being mindful of breathing because being mindful of breathing for me helps to break up that solid sense of heather. So by placing our attention on the breath, following the inhale, noticing the pause, following the exhale, it helps interrupt what feels like a continuous stream of thinking. It helps to slow down the thinking process by dropping what's going on in the mind and coming back to the body. So as my teacher would say, drop fascination with thinking. Stop retreating to the mind. She's like, you can do that if you're off the meditation cushion.

[25:16]

If you want to keep practicing. It's not really even practicing. If you want to just keep suffering, you just do that. But when you're on the cushion, just make an experiment and drop fascination with thinking and see what happens. So just let go of the stories, let go of that mixtape of me. So the mind, it thinks, it's just what it does, and the less we take those thoughts personally, usually the less we suffer. Of course, some thoughts have more shenpa than other thoughts. Usually, if we ask, well, what's for dinner? If that comes up, usually that's not a huge issue for many of us. So we don't feel any sort of suffering or solid me around that, unless you have strong... food preferences, which is true for many people in this room, so sometimes they do suffer about food. So Pema Chodron suggests that we just touch the thoughts, feel the texture of them, and then just let them go, right? One example, one image is like the sky with clouds coming through it. Just let the clouds of the mind, clouds of thinking just float through.

[26:17]

Because if you imagine if the sky were... clutching onto everything that went through it, the clouds, lightning, the airplanes, the birds, thunder. I mean, the sky would be a mess. It would just be polluted with all these things, and we wouldn't be able to see its vast spaciousness, which is what happens to this, to this one. The mind becomes cluttered because it becomes more and more solid the more attention and identification we have with thinking mind. So when we take our attention away from the content and bring it to the body, we begin to be in touch with the physicality of the present moment. And we can start asking ourselves, where in our bodies do we feel a certain emotion? Where do we feel anger? Where do we feel the depression? What are these sensations? Is our jaw tight? Is our gut in knots? Is our heart palpitating? Is our head pounding? So anger, depression, grief, all emotions, like I said, positive and negative ones, are just labels. It's impossible for this mental concept of anger or grief or depression to actually encompass all the nuances of what's going on, what's happening in our bodies and minds.

[27:27]

So when I say I felt this dread, It's shorthand for all the physical, emotional, and psychological processes that were arising internally before I punched my ex-boyfriend in the stomach. So giving attention to the why, to the content, I am angry because, takes the focus away from the body. So whenever you hear maybe that language, you're saying that, just remember to take that backward step. Pay attention to where your breath is. Pay attention to what's going on in the moment. If you're in the kitchen, you're chopping vegetables. Bring your attention back to the veggies. If you're in the bathhouse, bring your attention back to the lovely bathhouse, to the hot springs, to the leaves, to the sun on your skin. Just bring yourself back to what's going on in the present moment. And the less attention we put on to arising thoughts, especially the ones that have a lot of shenpa, they become more attenuated, they're not so strong. Instead of being like people shouting at you in your house, they're like tiny, tiny little voices that you don't really always even hear so much and you don't pay attention to so much anymore.

[28:35]

So the less energy that we give to arising thoughts, the less we identify with arising thoughts and emotions, the quicker they dissipate. And the more settled the thinking mind is, the more mental spaciousness we feel and the stories that are embedded in our body The trauma in our body starts to break free and we feel just more lighter in our body. So what I've noticed from my practice is that the stories don't arise so much enmeshed in sensations. There's just this arising emotion sensation and there may be a story, but that story just sort of falls away and I'm able to sit. more often with just like a bare sensation, just energy in my body with not a lot of thoughts telling me things that aren't true. So the body-mind becomes lighter and feels less contracted and agitated.

[29:36]

It takes a lot of energy after all to keep your hand clenched into a fist to keep this sense of me going. So by sitting on our meditation cushions, this fist of self slowly unfurls and we begin to discover what we truly are. When the concept of self falls away, we experience our true nature of openness, compassion, stability, and brightness. And all we need to do is stay present and change nothing. And maybe one day, that fist of self will be holding a bouquet of flowers that we can give to the person who's annoying us the most in the moment, which is us, ourselves. So I think that we have maybe one time for one question, if anybody has a question. Yes, Parusha.

[30:40]

You mentioned about a temporary distraction. I think if we have that much mindfulness before we temporarily distract ourselves, that would be a huge victory. that you know something's going on and for whatever reason maybe it's too intense or there's other people in the room, maybe your children or your parents or there's something, some circumstances that you're in the middle of that you feel like you can't stay present for something or you need to distract yourself because maybe you'll end up punching someone in the stomach. Maybe I could have run out of the room and done something differently at the time. So I think that if there's space before you tune out, that at least is making it less of a habitual response and you're bringing more awareness to what you're doing.

[31:49]

So I think, I'm not, I mean, I'm not a purist where I never watch television or anything like that, but yeah, I just think being aware, being aware before you do something makes it that less addictive. Thank you. Okay, I think that was the one question. So thank you everyone for your attention and your patience and your practice. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[32:35]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_94.69