This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. My name is Susan O'Connell, and I'm a priest here at the San Francisco Zen Center. How many of you are here for the first time? Oh, my goodness. Wow. Okay, so I'm going to give a talk, but actually the talk is the talk that we're giving together. I have some words written down, but I have no idea what is actually going to come out, and that will be influenced by everybody in the room. So this is your talk, too. Yesterday, Laura Trippi, who works with our web interface and Facebook and things like that, asked me what the talk was about.

[01:05]

And usually you don't ask a Zen person what their talk is about because it could change, you know, like from walking down the steps to the room. But I had to think about how to describe it. And I knew the basic topic, but this is what I told her in Facebook. It was about, it's about fear. And about practicing with fear. And I'm going to go into three different antidotes or ways of working with fear that I call calm abiding based on radical acceptance of what's happening. Not approval, but acceptance. And adaptive reasoning with fearful thoughts. And the third is... expressing compassion for our vulnerability. I've been studying fear, and it happened, it became alive in my life when I recognized a very strong reaction I was having to other people's expression of fear.

[02:20]

I was in various meetings, and often I would hear the phrase, I'm worried about. And I noticed that when I heard it repeatedly, it felt like, the word I use is, it felt like an anvil on my buoyancy. And my job right now is in the development area for Zen Center, and I rely quite a lot on my buoyancy, on my kind of coming back again and again to an uplifted sense of offering and receiving and maybe being blocked, but coming back again to buoyancy. So it felt rather threatening to me to feel that vulnerability to fear being expressed. So instead of looking at myself,

[03:23]

I talked to the abbot about this, Abbott Steve, and I said, you know, maybe we could ban that phrase from all meetings. Maybe we could ask people never to say I'm worried about. And he actually entertained it for a while, and we went back and forth, and he agreed to maybe work with some people. And so in the conversation, which was on the telephone, I got through that part of it, and I felt fairly satisfied that I'd brought up my concern. You won't believe what I said next. I said, what I'm really worried about is... I really did. I really did. And it had to do... My worry had to do with... I had a concern about how I was being perceived in the community because my work... Well, this is true. Anyway, I don't go to the Zendo as much in the morning as... Other people do. And some of it has to do with my work life and some of it has to do with, I think, resistance.

[04:26]

So the view of the community of me was very important. And so I talked about worrying and I thought later, well, what did that expression, how did that help me to express worry? And for me, I felt, well, there was a little magical thinking in there. that if I expressed it to someone else, they would help me solve the problem. So somehow by expressing it to someone and sort of garnering resources of greater numbers of people to address this issue, there was a little of that in the expression. And what was the other thing? Oh, just a sense of sharing the burden. So just sharing something that felt difficult to hold. But more important, just because I stopped and looked at my own practice, a little bit more tenderness started to develop in my heart around fearfulness and expressions of fear.

[05:33]

So I just want to say, be careful what you start studying because you might have to actually look at yourself, particularly if it starts with studying others. So I think this is that maybe a few people would even agree that I'm considered kind of fearless. I have a fearlessness that manifests in various ways and there's a bit of a self-definition in there that I am somewhat fearless and there's a history about that. I was born with a particular condition with my hips and it required many surgeries and being on my own and needing to come back again and again and again after having had surgeries, starting to walk again, those kind of things. And because my parents were who they were, they encouraged me with the phrase something like, there's nothing you can't do.

[06:36]

That was their gift to me. It's a bit of a not true statement because, of course, I can't do anything by myself, which is what the study of Buddhism has definitely brought alive for me. But when I was a kid, that was a pretty helpful antidote to the condition that I was born with. But it set up an imbalance, I think, an imbalance for me. However, in that stance, in that kind of fearlessness stance, there are certain things that I think I've learned that I also might be able to share. which in their unexaggerated form might be helpful. What I'm learning is that actual fearlessness is being intimate with your fear, intimate with our fear. And I see, I'm coming to see that my strong kind of stance of fearlessness is just a way of avoiding that intimacy.

[07:45]

Perhaps the strong stance of worry and concern is also an avoidance. Any exaggeration is trying to find our way out of the situation and not actually touching it and being intimate with it. What I've discovered in this is, you know, it's just this. I just want to stop for a second. I love this practice. I really love this practice because it's endless. It's just completely endless. There's always something new to turn over, either some brand new thing over here that you hadn't seen before that community life or your teacher or your friends bring up for you, or something really, really subtle, which by sitting still is easier to see. So what I came to see is that because I was in a body cast off and on from the age of 17 months until I was about four, What I'm afraid of is I'm afraid of fear because fear has the potential in it for being paralyzed, for not being able to move.

[08:58]

So I know this about myself more now because of this study. I know that when I feel fear arising in myself or if I sense it in others, that aversion, that wanting to pull away from it, has something to do with with me not wanting to be paralyzed with fear. And what's so interesting and fascinating too is that our practice of zazen, of meditation, is about being completely still, about not moving. So this for me is a very, very rich realm. It's an additional insight into why I love this practice. Just to remind you that some of you may not have heard this before, but others may have. One of the most spoken about practices of Buddhism is giving.

[10:04]

And when we talk about giving, we talk about three kinds of giving. Giving of material goods, helping people in that way. Giving the Dharma, sharing our understanding of the Dharma. And the third gift... is fearlessness. So this is something that is a really basic study for everyone practicing the way. But fearlessness does not mean no fear. It does not mean no fear. It means being willing to sit with that vibration. This morning, when I was over in my apartment, I did not print my talk last night. I worked on it a little bit this morning, and I made a change. And you know that little colored spinning thing that happens? It started spinning, and I hadn't saved all the changes I'd made all morning, and I didn't have a copy of my talk.

[11:06]

And I had to crash it. I had to shut the whole thing down and start over again. with the possibility that I wasn't going to be able to print the talk out. I thought about bringing my laptop over, but that anxiety, the kind of adrenaline, I don't think we can avoid that adrenaline. I think that we are so vulnerable as beings, we're vulnerable physically. And I've been looking at the fact that our hearts are covered with ribs. But our belly, our gut is completely soft. You know, it's really, really vulnerable as just creatures. And so the adrenaline comes up in a situation of no safety. In this case, it was about my, you know, public interface with you all and whether I could tolerate being here with no talk.

[12:09]

So, but I just... I recommend, if you want to avoid fear, print the talk the night before. So just a few words about what is fear and what is worry. I looked up definitions of this, and to me, worry, because my investigation started with looking at the word worry, it's kind of like the shark fin of fear. You know, it's just what you see. It's a way of expressing what is really fairly deep. And worry, according to Wikipedia, is thinking vividly about what we don't want to happen in the future or dwelling on an unhappy past event. It's a mental attempt to control negative outcome. And... One of the, there's this book that if those of you are interested in studying this a little bit more, this is called In the Face of Fear, Buddhist Wisdom for Challenging Times.

[13:19]

And there are a lot of wonderful essays in here. And in one of the essays, I think it was Michelle Richard said, worry is the misuse of our imagination. We have imagination and we can use it in a lot of different ways. In a minute I'm going to give you some of the rational approaches to that imaginative process that Michelle Richard recommended. And in the Abhidharmakosha, which is an ancient text, an ancient Buddhist text, it calls fear an unwholesome state of infatuation. An unwholesome state of infatuation. And to me, fear is based on our magical thinking, that we can worry ourselves out of danger. So what are the antidotes? How am I doing on time? Not bad. So to genuinely free the mind from fear, we can't deny that there's any reason for fear.

[14:26]

It's not saying there's no reason to be fearful. But we need to overcome the cause of fear. And it's this delusion that we have about being separate from others that makes our fear, which sometimes is about some very real situations that could be dangerous, like we should always put our seatbelt on, those kind of things, crash helmets and things like that. We need to have awareness. We need to allow certain kind of a fearful awareness to guide our self-care. But if... it's about protecting ourselves or controlling the environment, that's when it starts to become unskillful. So, antidotes. And I'm going to start with the most difficult one first. And that is what's called calm abiding.

[15:32]

Another word for it is shamatha. And to me, when I think about Zen meditation as opposed to other forms of meditation, I think about radical acceptance, radical not doing, radical, radical. And this acceptance is an antidote to fear, not... agreeing with a fearful situation, not approving of a fearful situation, but completely accepting that this is what's happening. There's a little story I'll share with you. A fierce and terrifying band of samurai was riding through the countryside, bringing fear and harm wherever they went. As they were approaching one particular town, all the monks in the town's monastery fled, except the abbot.

[16:33]

When the band of warriors entered the monastery, they found the abbot sitting at the front of the shrine room in perfect posture. Zazen. The fierce leader took out his sword and said, don't you know who I am? Don't you know I'm the sort of person who could run you through with my sword without batting an eye? The Zen master responded, and I, sir, am the sort of man who could be run through by a sword without batting an eye. Radical acceptance. Does that bring up fear for you? Feel it. Your life. From that place of radical acceptance is where appropriate responses arise. Not from planning how to avoid these difficult situations, but from the situation itself.

[17:39]

All appropriate solutions arise out of the situation. So in the face of being killed, you have two possibilities. You can fight physically, mentally, which will create more turmoil in your mind. Or you can say, this is simply what's happening, and then see what happens next. In this case, saved his life. So that's shamatha, radical acceptance. And perhaps maybe the most difficult antidote is to do nothing. But it is what this practice of zazen offers us, practicing that, practicing that in the safety of the meditation hall, in the safety of sitting still, sometimes with others, with the community to support this turning towards what's...

[18:41]

providing this sense of fear. Another antidote is, well, there's two kinds of reasonings. One also, which is very difficult, which is kind of the ultimate reasoning of no separation of self and others. So often our fear is coming from feeling threatened by others. And the more we don't recognize our connectivity and that mutual arising of self and other, the more we feel we need to protect ourselves. So there is a promise that further study, deeper study, continued study will allow that realization to benefit us in these fearful situations. It's kind of the ultimate emptying out of the delusion of the separation of self and other. But there's a rational step before that step because that's very difficult.

[19:49]

However, there's a way to work with the mind and what's arising and study the content of our thoughts. So the thing I just mentioned is actually emptying out the content of the thoughts. But here, there's a possibility of also reasoning with ourselves and being flexible and adaptable. in a situation where fear is arising. So these are some of the suggestions that Michel Richard makes in his essay. He says, and this will help settle in to that radical acceptance, because you'll start to settle, perhaps, and then some thought of, well, what about, will come up. And these two work together, shamatha and this... His questioning is called vipassana, shamatha vipassana, shamatha vipassana. He says, accept the facts with realism. So that's what the Zen master did with the samurai warrior in front of him with the sword drawn.

[20:55]

And then know that you can always do better. So if a situation is in front of you and there's been a mistake or it looks like You're not quite sure what to do. Well, you just did something, and the possibility of doing something even better is always there. He said, look at the situation and limit the damage, and find an alternative. This is a constructive use of our imagination as opposed to a not-so-helpful use of our imagination. And he says, know that you can rebuild whatever was destroyed. So sometimes there's a sense of something is being destroyed. Is it us? Is it something we hold dear? Is it, you know, something is in danger. Our fear is a response to what we think is something is in danger.

[21:59]

But you can rebuild it. It can all fall apart. Has it not all fallen apart at some point? Have you not faced it anew? Each moment falls apart. You face each moment anew. That's the practice of Zazen. He says, take the current situation as the starting point. Pema Chodron, she has wonderful books with wonderful titles, and one of her titles is, start where you are. That's where you start, right where you are. And know... Whatever comes next may take sustained effort. It may be a very difficult situation. But know that you can actually maintain that sustained effort. Have that confidence. And he says, know how to rapidly identify the positive in adversity. This speaks to our habit mind.

[23:05]

So for some people, that is... almost a natural response. Oh, you know, isn't it wonderful that the car just ran over my foot? You know, that's an extreme. I'm not talking about that extreme. The other extreme is this always happens. It's going to happen again. You know, these are something to avoid. But in the middle, there's an appropriate way to look at the situation and find the roots of the next moment. Just find the roots of the next moment. And he says, and I think this is pretty important, be free of regret. Regret also, for me, feels like an anvil on my buoyancy. And always willing to imagine a new situation. Which, against the background of that serene mind that you've been working on to...

[24:07]

radically accept what's going on, those things support each other. The serenity, the calm, stable, meditative acceptance, wide, wide, wide shamatha, and then razor-sharp vipassana, questioning, asking, considering alternatives. Just a word on optimism, too. I think optimism is innate in our bodhisattva vows because we make vows that are impossible. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. These are our vows. So coming back again and again and again. And again, there needs, I think, to be the light of optimism.

[25:12]

It's possible. Also, the Buddha said there's an end to suffering. It may not be apparent right now. But returning to the possibility of the end of suffering, which is the teaching, checking it out. Don't just believe me, he said. Don't just believe me. Check it out for yourself. There's a root... to this suffering, to this basic anxiety that we carry around all the time. I mean, I'm talking about fear and worry, but really, the root of this is this basic dukkha, anxiety, suffering, discomfort with what? Everything changes. There's basic discomfort with everything changes. And our attempt to lock that down, to keep something good here and to keep something bad from coming back, is that basic vibration in here when we sit still that we feel.

[26:25]

Because when we sit still, all we can see is that everything changes. So... It's a really basic Buddhist practice to study this in all of its manifestations, concrete and more subtle. And again, I want to come back to balance, to talk about balance, because I can lean on the side of over-optimism, over-positivity. And I've noticed that one way of seeing that in myself, one way of watching this, where I am in the balance of things, is to notice I go for solutions quite quickly. If there's some anxiety in the room and someone brings up a problem,

[27:29]

I'm going to be the first person with my hand up with a solution, right? Pretty much. Yeah. So this is something I know about myself, and I now am more aware because of this study that I'm just trying to get rid of the anxiety in the room. And some of the solutions are quite helpful, I think. But that's not important. What's important is that I not push away the concern. with a quick solution. So a rapidity of response is something any of you share this similarity you might want to check out. I found it's helpful. Trungpa, in doing this study, I've been exposed to teachers that I knew and teachers that I didn't know. I had of course, read Trungpa before.

[28:30]

But he says, he has a whole book about, I think it's called Smiling at Fear. And it is radical. It is about being a fearless warrior. But he said, don't try to cast out fear, but regard it as the kindling to build a big fire of fearlessness. Fear is the starting point of fearlessness. Let the experience in. And I would say that as I've been studying this and practicing this myself, I found that by letting it in, becoming more intimate with it myself, it contributes to a kind of a gentleness and a forgiveness of both, you know, The people who are like making me feel fear, right? You know, that doesn't happen. But it feels like that, right?

[29:32]

It's coming at me. And I have to find a kind heart in the midst of that. Or I'm not going to be able to actually touch my own fear. If I can't touch others' fear, I can't touch my own and vice versa. If I can't touch my own, I can't touch others. And then I can't actually be in relationship with others. There's a barrier. There's a barrier there. The last antidote that I said I would bring up is loving kindness, which I just started to talk about. And I'm not going to try to explain it. What I'd like to do is, during my time being exposed to various sutras that have a long list, paragraphs and paragraphs of practices, ways of looking at loving-kindness, I've developed a seven-phrase mini-metta.

[30:48]

that when I sit, particularly in a long meditation retreat, I will return to when I'm feeling particularly unstable or anxious, not able to settle, and I will repeat these phrases to myself, short little phrases, and just even two or three, kind of going through them, two or three versions of it, will give me that kind of sense of stability. I'm going to say these seven phrases one at a time, and I'm going to invite you to repeat after me out loud, if you'd like. And we'll do them two times, aiming the loving-kindness towards ourselves, and then the last time we'll do it, aiming it towards others. Because ultimately, I think, I was thinking this this morning, That practice of loving kindness towards others, once we stabilize our own heart, really melts away, really melts away that sense of separateness and reduces that fear that comes out of that separateness.

[32:03]

So if you'd like to try, please, please join me. May I be happy. May I be joyous and live in safety. May I be buoyant and flexible in body and mind. May I be buoyant and flexible in body and mind. May I be free from greed, hate, and delusion. May I be free from anxiety. May I live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. May I dwell in peace.

[33:06]

May I be happy. May I be joyous and live in safety. May I be buoyant and flexible in body and mind. May I be free from greed, hate, and delusion. May I be free from anxiety. May I live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. May I dwell in peace. May all beings be happy. May they be joyous and live in safety. May they be buoyant and flexible in body and mind.

[34:16]

May they be free from greed, hate. May they be free from greed, hate and delusion. May they be free from anxiety. May all beings live for the benefit of all beings. May all of us dwell in peace. Thank you very much.

[35:25]

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