For a number of years I live and teach at a small practice place down the road. Usually at this time of year what I like to talk about is the practice of gratitude, since I think Thanksgiving is completely the inspiration for giving thanks for appreciation. But this morning what I want to talk about comes out of gratitude for this wonderful path that gives us some resources for training the mind, for cultivating the mind for openheartedness and the capacity for calmness and clear-sightedness and love and kindness.

[01:04]

So, in fact, what I'd like to talk about this morning is fear. You laugh, but my sense is these days that the fear factor for many people is quite high, especially if one makes the mistake of reading the newspaper or watching television. But also there's a kind of atmospheric escalation of fear these days. A friend of mine and I sometimes talk about some apprehension about going across the Golden Gate Bridge and having our children on the other side of the bridge if something terrible happens. We can, of course, feed fear.

[02:08]

We can, of course, cultivate a fertile ground so that the messages that can be fear-provoking have a way to grow. A few weeks ago I did a retreat on negative states of mind, and most of what we worked with was habitual judgment, self-criticism, and the criticism that gets directed out onto the world, onto others. And of course what became quite apparent to all of us in the retreat is that if we just allow ourselves to be present with a state of mind, habitual judgment being only one of a number that would fit this category, what we eventually drop to as what I think

[03:16]

of as the spawning ground is fear. Fear of what will happen if we make a mistake. Fear that we are somehow flawed. And fear that arises when we say we're going to do something that we then don't do. I think anger is another emotion which if we can bear to stay with anger as it arises within the mind, what we will eventually uncover is that underneath anger is almost always fear. My experience is that most commonly what happens is that people think, oh, I shouldn't be afraid,

[04:24]

or fear is an emotion I want to get rid of. And I think in the tradition of the teachings of the Buddha there is another possibility which is to consider, to examine, to come to know what my relationship with fear is, and to develop a capacity to be present with fear, that is to change my relationship to fear rather than try to get rid of it. At least in my experience I've not yet had any success at getting rid of fear. All the strategies seem to end up increasing the fear, and the best I can do is to distract myself.

[05:25]

For those of you who have some experience with meditation in this tradition, you know that the classical focus is attention resting on the breath. I had a very interesting experience last night when I went to sleep. I seem to have spent the night dreaming about what I would say to you this morning. I've never had that happen before. But I have been thinking about this emotional territory and what the Buddhist tradition has to offer in working with this area of emotional reactivity. And when I woke up, I could hear Suzuki Roshi saying, these teachings are simple but not easy.

[06:34]

So, for many of us, the practice of bringing attention to the breath is an encounter of what seems simple but isn't easy, particularly because we're so practiced at distraction. But also, we get discouraged because the mind, the untrained mind, is quite busy. You may have noticed. The minute we sit down and are a little bit quiet, we get to find out a lot about the characteristics of the mind, and in particular, at least initially in practice, the characteristics of what might be called the untrained or conditioned mind. And distraction and busyness are right up there at the top of the list. So, what I want to propose, and I'm speaking from my own experience,

[07:45]

but also the experience of people that I practice with who have reported similar consequences, that the more I cultivate my capacity to let attention rest on the breath, the more likely it is that I will be able to stay present with the arising of anger or fear or anxiety long enough to not think about the emotional state but to actually be present with the emotion as it arises. I can then have some possibility of noticing how I keep the emotional, reactive emotional state going with storytelling or variations on that theme.

[08:49]

Storytelling in my own mind or saying to other people, you know what she did, that kind of thing. For many people, the ability to stay with an emotional state that has a lot of energy and certainly anger and anxiety and fear are right up there, lots of energy in those emotional states. Unless I've cultivated a highly energized capacity for attention, I'll initially have a hard time staying present with what I'm experiencing. So my suggestion is that you do what I'm about to describe, walking, initially walking. We can stay with more difficult mental and emotional states more easily

[09:52]

if we're moving than if we're sitting still. Once we discover our capacity to be with the state that we thought we couldn't stand, I can't stand this, it makes me crazy, those kinds of self-messages. And we discover I can stand it, I can be present with anger or fear, particularly if it's good enough to be present with the emotional state for one breath or maybe even just an inhalation or an exhalation. That's a way of putting a kind of wedge, a very small wedge that opens up the possibility in a little while to be with the emotional state as it arises again for a couple of breaths.

[10:58]

And I've repeatedly had people say that once they have that experience of being with a challenging emotional state for a breath, there arises then some confidence in being able to be with a challenging emotional state for a little bit longer. And, by the way, you can walk as fast as you want to. And, of course, as you develop some confidence, you have more capacity to try being with some strong emotional state, walking a little more slowly, and in a little while to even see what it's like to sit down. One of the things that happens

[12:14]

when we have the direct experience of an emotional state, a reactive emotional state, is that we also experience that it arises and then gone. May arise again in the next moment or two, but with every arising gone. Unfortunately, thinking about, oh, this fear has the mark of impermanence doesn't make any difference. We pay so much attention to our thoughts as an alternative to being present and experiencing what we're afraid to experience. And yet, the actual experience of fear or anger arising and then gone

[13:19]

is what leads to a change in my relationship with that emotional territory. Many of us get quite critical when we have a hard time staying with some difficult emotional state for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever our idea is of what it should be. And I want to encourage all of us to consider that it's good enough to be present with a difficult emotional state for even part of a breath, and that if we accept and respect that capacity, we will begin to discover that we can slowly, repeatedly, develop our capacity to stay with a difficult emotional state

[14:24]

as it rises and falls and rises and falls for longer periods of time. I sometimes read the International Edition of the Herald Tribune, which is a very interesting newspaper to read as an alternative to American newspapers, because, of course, the news that's reported is much more from Europe and Asia than is usually the case in American newspapers. And these recent reports of the possibility of some significant, unexpected terrorist attack

[15:25]

is coming not just from our own government, but from information sources, both in Europe and in Asia. We can paralyze ourselves with imagining all kinds of possibilities. We can paralyze ourselves simply letting ourselves imagine what it's like to be a parent, for example, in the Middle East or in Afghanistan or Iraq or Indonesia, for example. And I think it's extremely important for us to understand what's happening in the world and what the possibilities are.

[16:27]

But we also have to be very careful that we are realistic about the difference between being awake to what is so and scaring ourselves with the worst possible imaginings so that our ability to see clearly and to act appropriately in various kinds of situations as they present themselves. Our capacity to be present and appropriate is not something anyone can give us. That's a training that each of us are the only ones who can do that cultivation for ourselves. If I go into a dangerous situation

[17:30]

and I'm respectful of fear, but I also have some sense about how to be present, how to be lined up and standing in my shoes, I may surprise myself with my capacity to be in a situation I didn't think I could be in. I also want to say something about the quality of patience in doing this kind of training for being present with difficult emotional states. Very often the patterning, the conditioning that we're working with has come to be characteristic of our mind stream

[18:37]

over many, many years. So when we think, well, I can change this habit, this mental habit or this emotional habit in a few weeks or a few months or maybe a year for some habit that we've been cultivating unconsciously for 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years, probably not. So my encouragement is to be patient, be quite patient with the process of training the mind, to be modest about the duration you ask yourself to take on for being present with a difficult emotional state. Start out with a breath,

[19:44]

and if that's too much, start out with an inhalation or an exhalation. And let yourself discover or uncover your capacity to be with these emotions slowly, both in formal meditation and at other times. It may be that understanding that attention placed on the breath, which looks and in some ways is a very simple practice, is also a challenging practice. Oh, I'm going to be bored. Oh, the breath isn't very interesting. Et cetera.

[20:46]

What we know from the meditation literature in the Buddhist tradition, but can only really know out of our own experience, is that as I develop my capacity to let attention rest on the breath, rising and falling, I have at the same time the capacity for awareness of sensations of all kinds in the body, sound, if there's movement in the room or I'm outside, the sense of the movement of air on the skin. But in terms of working with strong emotional states, emotional states always have some accompanying body sensation.

[21:53]

Sometimes I may not even be aware of what the emotion is that I'm in the midst of. But if my attention is resting on the breath, I can, with that focus on the breath, have some simultaneous awareness of sensation. And with that, in time, some awareness of emotion arising and gone. Attention resting on the breath doesn't have a fence or a wall around it, one of those sound walls that are on either sides of some freeways. Breath isn't like that at all. But the only way any of us will discover

[23:00]

that attention resting on the breath can bring with it a capacity for what I sometimes think of as kind of field awareness for everything in the moment. One of the consequences of working with challenging emotional states in the way that I'm talking about is that you can begin to stumble into some appreciation and, in time, quite authentic interest in the breath. And begin to have more patience with the longer-term cultivation of attention resting on the breath

[24:03]

for longer and longer periods of time. Heaven forbid, even for an entire period of meditation, or longer, you'll begin to have some interest and capacity for observing the characteristics of an inhalation or an exhalation and begin to notice that they're not all the same. You'll begin to notice the characteristics of breath as there's a kind of settling and extension of the breath. As you know those characteristics, you'll also begin to notice the accompanying characteristics in the state of mind and in the body. So attention on the breath

[25:03]

can open up our capacity for awareness, for presence, that's not just mental and emotional states but also the body and, increasingly, the range of breath. There's an early sutra on mindfulness of breathing called the Anapanasati Sutra. For anyone who is a student of the breath, this is a sutra we should all know. And there's a quite fine and very accessible commentary by Larry Rosenberg, who's a teacher in the Theravadan tradition in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called appropriately Breath by Breath.

[26:06]

But don't be distracted by reading about the breath instead of being present with this inhalation and this exhalation. To go back to fear and anger for a moment, one of the things I've discovered is that until I was able to develop some relationship with these emotional states and the accompanying mental states, a relationship that's not significantly one of aversion, I was not able to have some access to the arising of anger and fear in others.

[27:19]

Until I could begin to be in relationship with my own suffering as it arises, I was not able to have some access, some empathy, some relational way with the suffering of others. And it does seem to me that the world now needs as many of us as possible developing our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes regularly and often. We live in a culture that has perfected the fine art

[28:25]

of distraction and busyness. And to do what I'm talking about means giving up distraction and busyness on a regular basis. You don't have to go cold turkey right away. But when you begin to uncover the ineffectiveness of keeping busy and of distracting ourselves, when one begins to have some taste of the possibility of being present with anything, and that is everything, as it arises in the moment, not as we are afraid it will be in the future. The cultivation of the mind

[29:27]

does not happen with a focus on what could happen in the future. We repeatedly don't know or forget that the future comes out of this moment. Can we also keep in mind that even these very challenging emotional states have the mark of impermanence? They come and go. When we haven't examined our own experience with emotions, we sometimes think, oh, this is going on and on and on and on, and we're not noticing the ways in which we're feeding or fanning the flame. That's the first layer of noticing

[30:36]

that can be a significant cause for giving up the fanning the flame activities. As I've said in talks I've given here before, my practice is to read the newspaper when it's two or three or four weeks old. I rarely read a current newspaper. Sometimes I read a newspaper and sometimes when I can't stand it, I look at the headlines on the newsstand and then I give it up again. Very interesting to read the news later.

[31:37]

You can read the newspaper very quickly. The other day I was with my husband at the blood bank where he was having some blood drawn, and there was a New Yorker from June of 2001. Just so interesting to read. This is before September 11th. I notice that reading the newspaper in this way is quite useful because I'm reading the newspaper as a Buddhist text, as the source for descriptions of the suffering in the world. And as a result of that intention

[32:45]

in how I read the paper, I'm not cultivating the ground in which fear can take root and grow as though on its own. So this is just one example of something that I've found useful. Mostly what I want to invite you to do is to think for yourselves about what is the fertile and receptive ground of your mind. And to what degree, when you think about horrible scenarios, are you actually double-digging the bed that is receptive to fear taking hold?

[33:45]

The ways in which that's going on for one person may not be the same for another. We do have in this culture a very high tolerance for violent movies, and we're quite known for being a culture with a high tolerance for violence. The only solution I know of is for each of us to take on seriously our own capacity for training our mindstream. So I think that's enough on this cheery subject.

[34:56]

I'm going to be doing a ceremony this afternoon for children who have died, primarily for aborted and miscarried fetuses, but not only. So during the tea break, if any of you are interested in the ceremony, let me know. It's very nice to see you all, and I hope you have a sweet day. Thank you very much. May our intentions...

[35:41]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ