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 here we all are in the midst of it. We've all come to the Dharma from different places for different reasons. Probably as many reasons as there are people in this room. Speak up more. Can you hear in the back? Yeah? A little bit more. Okay, I'll try to speak up. Raise your hand if you can't hear me. So many, many reasons to come to the Dharma.

[01:02]

Some of us come from suffering. Some of us come from interest, from maybe a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with our lives. Some of us come from traumatic experience, from having some kind of wound or trauma in our life that we need to look at in a new way, in a different way. I want to talk tonight about trauma and dharma, from trauma to dharma. Trauma, the definition of trauma is an event in your life that is so overwhelming that your body, your organism can't handle it, gets overwhelmed. And your nervous system is kind of... pulled asunder.

[02:03]

You can't respond to this event in any way. Your nervous system gets dysregulated. And when that happens, if that is not somehow healed, then it will create a bunch of symptoms. It will sort of go underground and a lot of energy that has been mobilized will freeze over and be locked in your system. And it can lay dormant like that for many years. And since it has taken a whole lot of energy with it and it takes a lot of energy to keep it submerged, it creates a sense of distance or a sense of alienation or disconnection from yourself, from your friends and family, from the world. Here at, I was going to say Spirit Rock, here at Green Gulch, at Green Gulch, every day, and as well at Dharma centers all over the world, every day you chant the Heart Sutra.

[03:17]

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Form is none other than emptiness, emptiness none other than form. There is a space between those first two lines. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. And when I was 21 years old, I fell right into that gap. This happened in the 60s, way back in the 60s. And back then, it was pretty common for young people as recreation to take drugs and see what would happen. So on this particular day, I went with a group of friends on a canoe trip on the St. Croix River in Minnesota. It was a beautiful day in early summer. We rented canoes and we paddled up the river to this beautiful little tiny island that was set right in the middle of the river.

[04:28]

And then we all dropped mescaline. And I remember that day, just a beautiful day. I was mostly a water turtle. And I spent the day just laying at the edge of the water, just feeling the sun warm my body, feeling the cool water, and feeling completely at one with my environment as a turtle. At the end of the day, It was time to pack up and so we gathered our trash and made a little fire, which is what you do in Minnesota. And we made a little fire to burn the trash and I was watching and all of a sudden the entire scenery, the sky, the trees, the island, the water, it turned into a giant scream and it caught fire.

[05:31]

and the flames consumed the entire screen, and nothing was left but blackness. Entirely black. I could not feel my body. I did not know what had happened, but I made the only logical conclusion that I had died. I was sure I had died. I did not want to have died. And my entire being resisted this truth. And I started screaming bloody murder and running around like a maniac. I was pinching myself. I was running into the water to try to feel something, to try to get sensation, to try to get life back in my body. You can imagine what that was like for my friends who, of course, did not know what I had experienced. They suddenly saw me going crazy. So they were rather concerned.

[06:31]

And what I saw was a series of the faces of my friends, but they had turned into masks of horror. And I just would look from one to the other, these faces of horror. And that even further confirmed my conclusion that I must have died. And they were all terrified and horrified by that. So my mind began to come up with all kinds of scenarios and all kinds of explanations and proofs that, oh no, this couldn't have happened and if this thing was in that place where I had put it, then that would mean that it was only a time warp and my mind was just going crazy trying to come up with scenarios and trying to find a reference point for this experience. But everything I came up with was met with this uproarious laughter.

[07:33]

It was like the whole universe was laughing at what my mind was coming up with, all my explanations. It was a cosmic kind of laughter. I didn't know what to do with this. So eventually my friends put my body, my dead body, into the bottom of a canoe and we started paddling back. And by now the visual field had come back in and I remember laying in the bottom of the canoe and looking up at the sky and it happened to be just an exquisitely beautiful night, sunset. But I could not enjoy it because I knew that it was fake. I knew It was only a projection. It was only a screen. It was only a movie of my making. And I could not enjoy that.

[08:36]

It had lost its freshness. It had lost its spontaneity. It wasn't real. And even though my friends were by now, I could talk to them, they were relating, but they also weren't real. I knew now the secret. I knew the truth. It wasn't real. I was devastated by that. I did not want that knowledge. I didn't see how I could live like this. And so all I could do was to just pray and beg to forget. I just wanted the illusion back. I just wanted to come back to my naivete, my innocence. and not have this terrible knowledge. If I had had some of the tools then that I have later learned, such as inquiry, I might have posed the question then, well, who is experiencing this?

[09:49]

But I didn't. It makes me think of Eckhart Tolle. Some of you probably have read his book, The Power of Now. And he talks in that about his dark night of the soul, where he, after a long depression, has come to the point where he wants to end his life. And he has this thought that is recurring and circling in his mind over and over. I cannot live with myself any longer. And then all of a sudden, he realizes, whoa, are there two of me then? If there are two of me, maybe only one is real. And with that, he has this awakening. For me, the aftermath of this

[10:52]

I was having flashbacks. Anything could trigger a flashback. I became scared of everything. I started closing off my life, my experience, closing it down to what was manageable for me. I avoided movies, I avoided books, I avoided conversations, especially if anything that touched upon Anything that might have to do with metaphysics or spirituality or anything kind of out of the ordinary could trigger flashbacks. So I became afraid of everything. And my body tightened and tightened and tightened. And my life and my body shrunk down until I was literally a 90-pound bundle of fear. When I look back, I can see how stressed I was.

[12:09]

I didn't know what had happened. I didn't know I had suffered a trauma. I didn't know to seek help. I didn't want to talk about it, for one thing. It was too scary. I also didn't want people to know how crazy I was. I was trying to appear normal. I didn't want to be locked up somewhere. sent away. So that was a very difficult time. It's warm. Referring to my crib notes here. Form is emptiness. Later on, I moved to California, and every once in a while, my friends would take me to Green Gulch, which had just begun in the 70s.

[13:18]

And I would hear the chanting, form is emptiness, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no consciousness, no this, no that. And it really spooked me. just spooked me. I couldn't go there. I just wasn't ready for that. I couldn't go there. What I needed at this point, I needed something to hold on to. So about a year later, I was saved. And what saved me was that I got pregnant. And that just took my attention away from my thoughts, from my head, and right into my body. Because it was inevitable. I could not focus on anything else because all these amazing changes were happening in my body.

[14:21]

And the wonderful thing was that this was charted territory. Women had been there and done that, and there was a clear progression of slow changes that I could be with and they were joyous changes, and they made me normal. I was beginning to feel normal. I was part of humanity again. So at the same time, it also made me very aware of just how tight my body was, how just my body was so tight, especially when it took me 36 hours to push out my tiny baby girl. I was so uptight. So as some of you know who have had children, motherhood is all-consuming and joyous. And there was suddenly a lot of love in my life and a lot of joy and also more connection with my body, which helped make me feel more confident and more...

[15:36]

closer to my life, closer to myself again. So I also knew very well that I really had to pay attention to this body that had become so tense. So I started studying the body. I studied body work. I studied body awareness. I started doing yoga and dancing and really taking the body as my reference point, as my refuge. at this point. And I learned a lot, and it was very helpful for me. I started feeling more space in my being and more confidence. And it was at that time that I sought out meditation, but not the kind that talked about emptiness. No, no, no, I didn't want to go there. No, it was a kind of meditation that focused on the body, that focused on body sensation, breath, attention to that.

[16:37]

And I learned a new way of paying attention, a new way of being with my experience, with my body, with myself. Moment to moment, being present with sensation, with kindness, with openness, and without judgment. I learned that by holding, by being with, say, a pain in the body or a troubling thought, being with that in the way that I was with my baby, with kindness, just holding it and being with it, that it would open up, it would change, it would yield some kind of insight. And so through that, Over time, I developed a more kind and more loving and intimate relationship with myself.

[17:43]

I started judging less and being more accepting of myself. After the trauma and that whole period of shutting down, I really had come to believe that there was something wrong with me, something deeply wrong with me. And so, of course, the judge was all over that. And it started easing a little bit in those years. But there was still this deep, deep, hidden vortex of trauma that had gone underground by now. I had by now pretty much forgotten that I had had this trauma. I didn't think about it. The only sign, and I didn't know then that it was a sign, but I had this recurring back problem. that kept every once in a while it would just kind of strike and I would be out for several days or weeks. I didn't know it had anything to do with the hidden trauma, but I'm convinced now that it did.

[18:46]

But as I was going along in my life and things were pretty good, I heard about trauma work. I saw a book called by Peter Levine called Waking the Tiger. And I read that book which talks about what trauma is, what the symptoms are, and how you can resolve trauma. And I read that and I was electrified by it. It just, I didn't know why, but it just spoke to me. And I was sure I needed to do the training and I signed up right away. So the trauma work that Peter Levine taught, you approach the trauma vortex very carefully. The metaphor here is that one of Medusa, the Greek goddess, the one with the snake's

[19:56]

And she is so scary that you die if you look at her directly. You can't look at her directly. You have to look through a mirror or askance. And in the same way, you cannot approach the trauma vortex directly because it has so much energy in it that if you unleash that, all of a sudden you re-traumatize the system. So the whole way it works is by coming in... releasing a little bit at a time and a little bit at a time like that and using resource, which is an image or a person or something that makes the person feel safe. So I did the training, but I didn't think I had any trauma. Everybody else did, but I didn't. It wasn't really until well into the second year of the training, and we were at that point studying cataclysmic traumas like earthquakes, natural disasters, war, really severe traumas.

[21:14]

And the teacher said that in this kind of trauma, they pulled the rug out from under you. There is nothing, there's no place to go, nothing to hold on to. And as he was talking about that, my body started to tremble. And it just wouldn't stop. I was just shaking and shaking. And I started remembering this experience that I had had on the island. And I was so activated that when it came time for the demonstration, that the teacher usually does a demonstration session for the class. And nobody volunteered in this category, so I tried to talk him into considering my trauma, a cataclysmic trauma in this category, and he did. And he agreed to work with me. So finally, after all these years, I was ready under this very safe,

[22:19]

of having the container of not only the teacher, but also the whole group, to approach this experience again. And the way it works, as I have said, it's very, very careful, and the teacher is looking at... You don't have to track your own body. The teacher will track it with you and for you. Everything that happens, every little body movement or facial expression or breath pattern will be monitored and fed back and very slowly opened up. It's similar in some ways to mindfulness meditation, but it is much slower and it is done with another person. So it's very safe. And so over the next half hour as he worked with me and worked with resource and worked with the trauma vortex and pendulated back and forth and back and forth, the material and the energy started releasing just very slowly.

[23:33]

It's kind of like if you imagine a balloon that's full of air. You know, if you smash it, it just goes like that. Instead, you just let it out, just a little... like that, real safely, really slowly. So that happened over the, you know, he worked with me and the energy started releasing and I was shaking and shaking and shaking and shaking. I probably shook for about an hour in front of the class and after the session and over the next days I kept discharging and discharging and discharging. And I was amazed. I had no idea how much had been held in there. And to think that all this energy had been held and it had been, of course, I hadn't had access to it. It had been not available to me to live my life.

[24:35]

And so now that it came back, it was like suddenly I was feeling all this space in myself, in my body, in myself, in my life. And it was a wonderful feeling, just a real sense of healing. So both the meditation and the trauma work are both concerned with this thing of expanding capacity, our capacity for experience, for good experiences, for joy as well as for scary experiences or negative experiences. If we don't have much capacity, we are so easily knocked over. So having capacity is very important and it creates resiliency and gives courage.

[25:41]

I noticed in the months following this that I was much less afraid. I had been afraid a lot of my life. I had been afraid of change. I had been afraid of new situations. I had been afraid of a lot of things. And I noticed that that kind of basic fear started lifting, which was a real gift. So, coming back to the question of emptiness, I felt now not so afraid. I felt more... curious. What really was that? What really had happened that day? Had I seen a glimpse of the truth and I had not been ready for it? Or what was it? I had to now, the next step was to find some kind of meaning. So in the way of all good stories or fairy tales, things happen sort of on cue.

[26:43]

And at this point in my life, I met a new teacher. And she was a teacher in the Mahamudra tradition, which is a Tibetan tradition, very similar to Dzogchen. And she spoke about emptiness all the time, no holes barred. Emptiness this and emptiness that, and with so much joy. It was joy. And I would go to the center and we sang songs about emptiness and songs about awakening and these songs, these spontaneously written texts by awakened masters like Milarepa and others in the tradition. It was a really wonderful feeling. At the beginning, before each meditation, we would take refuge. We would take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha.

[27:46]

And I really loved that. And I incorporated it into my daily practice right away. Something about taking refuge, about the whole idea of refuge, it's very similar. I've used the word resource in connection with the trauma work, something that gives us a sense of safety that we can relax and open to. And refuge, at the end of when I had that terrible experience, there was literally nothing to hold on to. And so here we took refuge in the Buddha, but what we are really taking refuge in is true nature, our own true nature, which is empty. So it seems so paradoxical that it was... liberating for me to take refuge in that. And I can't really explain it, but it's a little bit like the story that a Dharma teacher told years ago about the situation.

[28:59]

You're falling out of a plane, and your parachute is not working. So you're falling through space, You are scared and the ground is approaching and you're falling and you're falling and then you look down and you see there is no ground. So what happened to that moment? You're falling, there is no ground. What happens? The shift there, are you now flying? Are you floating? There is a shift that happens there and somehow Somehow that explains to me, or it says something about how it can be so wonderful and liberating to take refuge in true nature, in Buddha, in true nature. True nature, which is what we are, what we always were, what we always have been. Empty, true nature. Dharmakaya. So true nature, my teacher also talks about the two truths, the relative truth and the ultimate truth.

[30:21]

The ultimate truth being that of emptiness, that out of which our experience emerges, arises out of this emptiness. out of this mystery. And so that here is the second part. Emptiness is form. The part that I had missed. I had only gotten a very skewed and distorted experience of form is emptiness and stopped there. But now I was beginning to hear emptiness is form. all of this form is emptiness. And this emptiness results in form after [...] form. So, somehow, full circle. So the relative truth is that of our existence, is that of our experience.

[31:27]

And the best part, that they are inseparable, that they are the same, that they are like waves, an ocean. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. Form is none other than emptiness. Emptiness is none other than form. And so it goes with feelings, concepts, mental formations, consciousness, all of the parts that make up our experience. And so my teacher says, we take these to be a self, and that's where we get in trouble. That's why we feel so alone and alienated, because we think that we are this self, and so we separate from our experience.

[32:29]

Just one great misunderstanding. Well, I have a quote by the great patriarch Huyneng about emptiness. The capacity of the mind is broad and huge like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do, you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness. Emptiness includes the sun, moon, stars and planets, the great earth, mountains and rivers, all trees and grasses, bad people and good people, bad things and good things, heaven and hell. They are all in the midst of emptiness.

[33:37]

The emptiness of human nature is also like this. So who was it that experienced this thing on the island? What is this awareness? that is aware all the time, all the time of everything. It was always there. To begin to even have the notion that it's possible to experience that in Mahamudra, one of the ways we practice is that we take fruition as the path, which means that we take the view of being true nature.

[34:52]

Instead of buying into being this little separate person, we take the view of being true nature and we attempt to see each other that way and live our lives that way. Which means that the separation between meditating on the cushion and being in your life is minimized because every moment is an opportunity to practice. And Every moment in your life is actually your teacher. So it has given me a sense of joy, really, a sense of excitement, a sense of joy, a sense of confidence, and the practices to more and more try to open.

[36:04]

to that place, open to that awareness. Relax. It's really the Tibetan teachers, all they say is, relax, relax, let go, let go. And oh, did I need to hear that? I've always needed to hear that. Relax, let go. And open, open. when you open the love can flow the compassion can flow compassion for how hard our little egos try you know how hard I have worked so hard like even in putting this talk together my little ego was so busy thinking she had to do it all you know and it's

[37:05]

You know, to have compassion for that rather than judging it. Compassion for yourself, acceptance of yourself and others. Because when you open, open really, it's about opening your heart. That's what opens, is your heart. When I was looking back over my life, 40 years of my life, in order to do this talk.

[38:08]

It was a very interesting experience, and this poem came to mind. It's a poem by Antonio Mercado, and I think I'll end with this. He says, Wanderer, your footsteps are the road and nothing more. Wanderer, there's no road. The road is made by walking. By walking, one makes the road. And seeing behind the vista, one sees the path that will never be traveled again. Wanderer, there's no road. Only waves in the sea. So that was my long and winding road from trauma to Dharma.

[39:20]

Thank you for listening. If any of you have any questions you want to ask, I will do my best to answer. You? And I wonder, I guess I wonder how, or if you need to, but mostly how you remind yourself when you forget. Good question. Seeing and actually walking with it for some time, but then it changes too. And then you feel traumatized by a new event. Right. Yes.

[40:23]

I forget and forget and forget and need to be reminded every moment. Yes. Well, you know, that question that I posed a couple of times, you know, tricks. There are some tricks. And, of course, then you have to remember to do that. But that question, it comes, I think, from Ramana Maharshi and other teachers. Who is having this experience? Who is having this experience? That, for me, I think everybody maybe has different, but that helps to slow me down. and kind of just for a split second and then I forget again. But I think it's, you know, I certainly am most, I'm always in the forgetting mood, but I think that what has changed for me is the orientation.

[41:34]

You know, it is still for me a concept, but... It is such a wonderful concept and it is so, I just feel so hopeful about it or I have such faith in it that it makes me want to remind myself to practice it. Yes? Hi.

[42:35]

Can you describe a little of the research you talked about with the trauma therapy, how about going into the vortex and then the safety? Mm-hmm. Safety is provided in that? Yes. It's called pendulation. It's that you think of it as the trauma vortex is the trauma itself, the situation, and that holds a lot of energy. And in order to release that, you need to have the person with the trauma be very resourced and feel very safe. And so resources are anything that you can think of that makes you feel safe. It can be... dog. It can be a person in your life that you feel completely safe with. It can be a place. Like sometimes you think of a place in nature or a place that you've experienced in your life where you felt extremely safe and then you can summon that.

[43:45]

And the amazing thing is that actually for the nervous system it doesn't matter if you are thinking about this experience, bringing it into mind, or if you're actually in that situation, the nervous system will respond the same way. And so we are talking about the autonomic nervous system here, and this is the parasympathetic branch, the branch that relaxes our system. So it's all about you want these two systems, the sympathetic and the parents sympathetic, to be in balance, to be working with each other rather than stuck like this or both on at the same time. So that's why the resource is used to balance out the trauma vortex. And, you know, it's a dance, really. It's a dance that you're working very carefully and monitoring whether it's too much or too little. The other word here is titration. You work with titration the way that medicine is measured.

[44:46]

Yeah. Does that? Yeah. Okay, good. Yes? You may have had one trauma in your life or many traumas in your life. How do you go about determining which trauma caused this life-changing experience? How do you determine that? Yes. You have professionals around you that help you do it. But if you were to do it on yourself... How would you reach back into yourself and figure out this is the trauma that's causing these issues? Well, it will usually let itself be known if thoughts come up around it. But sometimes the trauma can be forgotten. And then what you're working with then are the symptoms themselves.

[45:50]

And by working with the symptoms in this way that I just described, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it doing it on your own. It's helpful to have somebody with you. But when you do work with the symptoms in that way of paying close attention, you know, either you can work with the symptoms and the energy in the symptoms, and it will resolve, even without the story ever coming to the surface. And sometimes in going into the symptoms, the story will emerge. It's completely individual. But the important thing to remember here is that our systems, our bodies are designed for healing, that there's a very strong tendency in the body, and this is what we work with in the trauma work. There's a very strong tendency in the body towards self-regulation. And so even when it's been thrown off,

[46:51]

by a trauma, you know, it wants to come back and regulate. And so the symptoms are like messages saying, hey, look at me, deal with me, open me up. I have something here that needs to move, that needs to be helped back into balance. Can you say something about why one event may be very traumatic to one individual and another person might have the same event and not be touched by it? Yeah, yeah. That has to do with resilience. And this again has to do with the amount of energy available in the system. So if you have a trauma early on in your life, say, And children, of course, are very susceptible to trauma.

[47:56]

So if you have a childhood trauma and it's never resolved, a lot of energy gets sucked up by that unresolved trauma. And then there's less energy left in the system, less capacity in the system, so that it can be thrown off more easily by a subsequent trauma. So this is why, you know, really... working with this idea of capacity, which trauma work, but also meditation really helps expand our capacity. So meditation is a great trauma preventive, as well as it can also help heal trauma, but it's really a great preventive. And I really wish that we would have meditation in schools for children, you know, so they could really learn well, for one thing, that trauma would be then detected and treated perhaps, but also so that children could really have an opportunity to work with this and expand their capacity for life and their capacity for intensity, intense feelings and intense experiences.

[49:12]

Is that answered? Yeah? Well, any other questions or should we call it a night? Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[49:57]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.85