from gringotts that center
and i'm happy to welcome you all to be from nine talks on the meaning of buddhism american culture
it's been a pretty good series so far and tonight's talk i think will really
be pretty accommodating moment in that
the note the final talk in the series is a during the first tuesday night during the first will be closing session with a number of different speakers michael winger said centers president who work put this thing together call me to mentioned to you that they'll be a secret mystery speaker
and he wouldn't even tell me who it was i don't ask me because i don't know
tonight i am very pleased to be able to announce my friend and teacher jack kornfield a jerk is a guy who like they say needs no introduction instant probably all of you are aware of his teaching of his books of his work
he is certainly one of the key buddhist teachers in the bay area in the country
ah he's a writer
psychologist
i reposted a teacher leader of the men's movement
an all around great personal
so tonight he'll talk about something that i think he probably because more able to address than anyone i know and that is the relationship between buddhism and psychology
so without saying anything else i'm very happy to introduce can check on
thank you know
the trouble with good introductions is then you have to live up to them i'll do my best good evening and welcome to this series of talks i've been asked to address the relationship of western psychology and buddhist practice
this
as a part of the series of teachings about dharma coming to america before i start speaking i'd like to ask how many of you practice here at zen center or are part of the zen center community
came out half how many of you are involved with cis which i know is a co-sponsor of this please a few cis and where the rest of you come from
how many of you do some other form of a this practice to know and that's another group
and then the rest of you are in better shape obviously than that
my teacher at jinsha when he came to visit our center in massachusetts and teach there was during the long retreat were giving and he gave dharma talks and interviews and he would wander around it was in the spring and people would be out doing walking meditation the lawns and so forth
and he would kind of walk by people and then he nudged me at one point he said it looks kind of like a hospital here in huston and or maybe a mental hospital i said yeah there's some of that quality and so he go up to people and he'd say i hope you get well soon
well
there's something in that
so my own background and training is having been a monk in the monasteries of thailand and burma and india for a number of years doing intensive retreat training i did a a year long silent retreat in a room of just sitting and walking for eighteen or twenty hours a day
i lived in the forest monasteries were you go out with your ball for food once a day and walk ten miles to some village and they put in whatever food they have and you come back and eat it share it with others
and studied in that process as well the traditional buddhist practices of mindfulness and compassion forgiveness and an exploration of body and mind in different ways and a wonderful training
after which i returned to this country and
over the years have completed a phd in clinical psychology and gotten married so i'm a husband in a father and in some ways a storyteller which you will hear tonight
and i want to start with a story
perhaps is a by way of using myself as an example of the relationship of eastern and western psychology it's one that's in the new issue of the inquiring mind comes out let's just come out in the mail in the last not many days
my first comeback came back from asia i was in robes as a monk i wanted to see what it would be like to live in nineteen seventy two as a buddhist monk in america and there weren't very many and they weren't very many monasteries not of the caravan of variety and or any kind really so i stayed with my parents and after
her
some time with my mother and father i decide to visit my twin brother in new york so my mother put me on the train to go up from washington where i was and because i was a monk i was barefoot and i was in handling money and i was just taking what people put my begging bowl so she got me take it and put me on a train
i got off in new york city and i was to meet my twin brother's wife
she'd recently had a birthday and he gave her as a gift a day at elizabeth arden
which is facial and hairdo and manicure and massage and stuff like that and actually sounded kind of pleasant but anyway i was to meet her when she was done in front of elizabeth arden's
i got out of the train and grand central station started to walk up fifth avenue you know and i was i was stoned basically i'd been in the forest for some years and meditating all the time and it was added tiffany's was going by and all traffic and i just walking calmly like i was still doing my walking meditation and it was interesting and was okay
hey finally i got there and no one appeared i waited and waited and waited fine so i went in the receptionist was surprised they don't see a lot of buddhist monks of elizabeth arden in those days and may i help you sell okay i'm looking for mrs cornfield she's not finished yet there's a waiting lounge on the fourth floor so i went
up and i sit down the reception is there says may i help you i said yes i'm i'm just waiting for this person miss conscious please take a seat
so i sat forbidden what else to do a cross my legs closed my eyes start to meditate that's not what monks do right mean that nothing else to do this kind of sitting there
and after about five or ten minutes i hear all this noise people talking and voices and then this woman yells out really loud as he for real
so i opened my eyes and there were about ten women wearing elizabeth arden nineties these kind of smocks you were married elizabeth aren't for the day hundred miles on their faces and avocado green and their hair in curlers in these kind of fishing rod things for different shame really wild looking like out and some africa
dr and i just looked back and i said are they for real
we kind of look at each other and at that point i realized that i had to figure out something different than what i was taught in the monastery to survive your that there was some meeting of cultures that was kind of be necessary
so when i returned back after the initial period of five or six years training in asia and i've since gone back to those monasteries over number of years for further training
i'd had wonderful meditation experiences in illuminations understandings and visions that came to me
but as i came back i discovered all of this unfinished business in my life
and so one hears and spiritual practice about the development of energy and the development of awakening as a kind of arising raising of the kundalini and i found myself in my spiritual practice actually going down the shockers rather than up the chakras what
happens in the be get what happened to me in the beginning is that i spent ten years in the university studying buddhism and chinese and asian studies and then in peace corps and in these monasteries practicing and i did it mostly with my mind and i had pretty good power of concentration and i had lights and visions and grey
eight kind of open openings that happened and a lot of insight
and then when i came back and i got a job driving a taxi and i went to work for a while and a mental hospital maybe it reminded me the monastery in some way i'm not sure and i went to graduate school i got involved in an intimate relationship with this woman i started to live with
in during the time when i returned i was just in this place of great equanimity and tremendous spaciousness and peace that's how low that i went and i discovered that i was kind of how to put it emotionally retarded maybe as the best that after ten years of inner work with my mind
i came back and found the patterns of my relationships particularly with women with family with work all the things that make up life
we're not really any different than before i left except for one horrible fact i could see them more clearly they were more apparent and this is so for anybody i mean if you go away from the culture whether it's to go live in india or or some monastery or even go to live at tassajara green
gulch were certain period of time and i i've done a lot of counseling of monks and nuns not as buddhist but catholic and other people coming out of monasteries usually their parts of us that are just put on hold for that whole period of time and then when you come back out again they're they're waiting for you and i ever a friend who was a
monk for example for twenty five years and came out and he was fifty years old when he came out was when in robes and when he was twenty five years old and he was like a fifty year old in i mean a twenty five year old and a fifty year old body and he was just like this big boy you came out said well why do we do out here and
it took him a long time to catch up so i found in myself that i needed to do a lot of work with my heart work with understanding my patterns and relationship the fear that underlay a lot of the unfinished business the pain that i'd never really dealt with from my early childhood
a lot of work with compassion loving-kindness meditation and psychotherapy and gradually over succession of initially difficult or disastrous and slightly better and better relationships learned how to have an intimate relationship
and after that time then i discovered that as i went further down the shockers that not only did i have to include my heart and my emotions but my body as well with central to practice and i had used it i could sit all night without moving in the monastery or sit on the ganges and go do kind of yogic practices
but in the end
i was using my body rather than inhabiting it in a wise and conscious way and so then it becomes apparent to me that i have to were to include the way that i sit and walk and how i eat and the actions of my life as much and my spiritual
practice as anything else
buddhism as it comes to the west
is having a great dialogue with western philosophy with western science physics ecology but perhaps the most significant dialogue and influence on buddhism coming to the west so far has been western psychology
particularly the the psychotherapeutic aspect of it some people fear this they are afraid that mixing therapy and meditation will dilute the pristine purity of the buddhist dharma and the junior tal the realization of emptiness as no place in that for talking about your mom and dad and your neuro
roddick problems
others find it helpful
to consider the influenced between the two because it is great let us look in a very honest way at what works and what doesn't and that's what i'd like to do somewhat tonight i just came back also from some meetings with the dalai lama in india twenty two buddhist teachers from the west and tibet
one vipassana all talking together for a week with a dialogue about the problems and possibilities of buddhism coming to the west how to avoid the sectarianism that's rife in asia and among the suggestions that came out as what's happening tonight that we invite one another to teach in each other centres so that there's some raw
respect for the many forms that dharma can tank
things and we put up propped to the dalai lama all the kinds of ethical problems that i'm sure you're aware of happened in any kind of spiritual community and he said don't think it's so difficult for you alone he says me dalai lama same problems he said my own teachers my reagents who are ruling tibet for me in india
i'm not in tibet when i was growing up he said they became power hungry and starting to fight and called in the tibetan army in one fighting against the others as terrible he said finally i had didn't announce my own regions whom i love to wear my teachers denounce my regions to the whole country of tibet
he said but you must sometimes you must do this even necessary put in the papers he said let people know this is the dharma this is what's true and beneficial and this other stuff is not
and the whole meeting was very straightforward and very empowering and when we talk about psychology and psychotherapy and meditation
he said you must make the changes you are the westerners and it is you who will find the best way to translate the practice was very empowering to
all of the participants particularly ones who were in communities where they were still very much under the tibetan lamarr this and roshi who brought it from a different culture dalai lama said in the end you cannot listen to your teachers he must find your own way
so we want to look very honestly at what meditation and buddhist practice does for us and it's than the relationships to psychotherapy in psychology tell you a story as an story if you don't mind like bringing coals to newcastle but
there was a zen monastery very rigorous training
you got an interview stoke son sons and once every ten years and you are only allowed to say two words
so this student came in very very determined sat walked practice ten years finally went in to see the roshi is tough time bow row she said how's it going he said
hard bed grossly said now you know this is not a bliss trip joseph cambell aside this is a trip where you really learn a kind of inner renunciation and the ability to go through everything find your own buddha-nature in the face of difficulties just keep practicing ten more years past practice practice come back in
browse to the roshi well how's it going now
bad food
it isn't what you think this is a luxury i mean the buddha said that we are practicing must take whatever is given to us and it's to learn to be gracious and accepting of all things that we do this practice and as must continue so he went back ten more years of practice
finally came in bol ro she said how's it going i'm leaving
the girl she looked at him and said i didn't think you'd make it all you've done since you got here is complain
the
so what makes us practice and what makes us leave practice in a very honest way
the buddha said i only teach one thing i teach suffering and the end of suffering that's all anything else is not what the buddha teaches might be something interesting but it's not what the buddha taught i teach one thing alone suffering and the release of the what he called the sure hearts release the free
item in are being the freedom from suffering and then he caught taught in the four noble truths of course because of that suffering greed hatred aggression delusion blindness and a path to the end of it
now western psychology is also based on suffering and it's alleviation
although it started to focus more on the the sphere of dysfunction rather than the best possibilities of human beings it was looking at how unhappy we aren't trying to get us to be at least somewhat adjusted to our situation
but both of them share this ground of working with suffering and working with the alleviation of the causes of suffering
both western psychology and buddhism are based on a deep belief in the unconscious forces that work within us a whole of western psychotherapy speaks about the kind of habits
it's unconscious defenses inappropriate repetitions that we do over and over again what we learned in the past and that's what in neurosis is really where you learn some strategy to survive in the painful situation of your family or your school or your childhood and then you keep doing it over and over with everybody else even though you don't need to
so western psychology believes in the unconscious that they're all these forces going on that were not so aware of this is the ground principle as well a buddhist psychology but even though you might sit and have a cup of tea or drink a glass of water and everything's peaceful and you say are i'm enlightened in this moment and you are perhaps
apps
as the buddha's head or habits and patterns a fear agreed of aggression of blindness that given the right conditions get touched a car according to certain causes and they arise in us and again create are suffering i'm sure you have all noticed that in your life
western psychology sees that we repeat our past and unconscious ways
buddhist psychology sees that we repeat our past the past patterns based on ignorance blindness as greed hatred and delusion over and over again in unconscious ways
now there are many forms a western psychotherapy and when i speak a western psychology and particularly gonna speak of it in the clinical terms the way people work with one another not so much the the be the theories
of other dimensions of western psychology and the earliest methods of psychotherapy were mostly talk therapy you understand kind of based on freud's talking cure
but now there are many many ways in which western psychotherapy use to drop below the story to drop below the thinking mind to drop below what we normally are aware of to begin to understand that which is unconscious bed acts in us
and in buddhist teachings it said that you need to dimensions of spiritual practice one is the com and qualities of com and samadhi and equanimity concentration
these are mostly missing in western psychology initially is half of the factors of enlightenment the other half are the qualities of investigation awareness mindfulness discovery western therapy has quite a lot of that but recently the new or kinds of western psychology real nice
san play reich and breathwork psychosynthesis hola tropic breathing whole variety of kinds have have or are developing ways that combine a clear seeing with a deep vehicle to understand what's not conscious in us to take us to the levels of the unconscious
just as buddhism does through samadi and a very deep penetrating meditation
now
as we undertake a spiritual practice it can happen that these unconscious forces which we
act out over and over in our lives and repetitive and painful ways arise in spite of our meditation in spite of trying to be were in meditation
or even as a result of it in some ways i'll tell you a story
a friend of mine who was a monk in sri lanka and a very m
skillful yogi he had a real ability to concentrate and and meditation and had a quite developed yoga practice did all the buddhists in the sri lankan version of the buddhists and samadhi practices and lot of the inside practices and finally he went to india
to travel and visit other teachers and he met this great master of another tradition a sikh tradition who said what are you doing as a monk in robes in a ball you should get out there and make your own living know we in this tradition don't believe that anyone should have a free lunch and and the religious life is for everyone you shouldn't just depend
on people to support you and gave him a very hard time and my friend who was a kind of anti authoritarian person and kind of like to argue anyway said what do you mean there's a great tradition india from the buddha and the yogis and so forth a for society support renunciate and they got on a kind of fight about it this great guru with
the hundreds of thousands of disciples in my friend finally they said they finish that and my friends and kind of sat quietly in the master said well you came here to study do you want to some teachings and monk said yes indeed so that are i do this particular sacred mantra do this visualization practice in this way
and if you're any good if you are a good yo you'll have some results you will see so he went to his little cottage and after four or five days because he had a good ability to concentrate he entered this one of the realms of samadhi that come through the powerful repetition of montreux and certain visualizations really left
his body went into a different state of consciousness filled with light and there by reciting the monterey and doing this sat the master and so he sort of traveled over one does to see the master in this state and the masters hidden i see you're not such a bad yogi after all you know and you know you
see how beneficial our practices cause you attain this state and by the way the other things i was saying we're right also about not being a beggar and taking from other people and my friend being the kind of character he was said you're absolutely wrong about that i mean your practice is all right but this is not so there's a great tradition and there's a reason for being renunciate and they continue
you'd their argument in this plane of light and it didn't matter where they were
you understand what i'm saying that wherever you go there you are and it doesn't really matter what kind of attainments you have
tell you another story these are sort of laying out the problems if you well i was on the burmese border
and i met a monk who i've known in burma was a beautiful monk and teacher
who had been part of the anti there's this horrible dictatorship in burma great tragedy and people being killed monasteries been closed and and people being raped and exported to the forest lands as slaves and all kinds of stuff and he'd sort of fought against this has been one of the key
monks in rangoon to to help inspire people to fight against the injustice and finally when he knew he was about to be thrown in jail or killed the escape to the border camps and there he opened a monastery in this grey people are dying of malaria and there was hardly food in the mill like this beacon of light was this lovely temple that he opened
so
people could come and get inspiration with lovely man while it so happened as he was their teaching and is difficult circumstance that some thai villagers would cross the border and bring food to the temple as they do devout buddhists and bring think bring offerings and one of the young women who came to visit the temple
and this monk had a very strong connection
the next thing i know i'm in bangkok and i hear that my friend this monk is gonna come to bangkok and pour gasoline on himself in immolate himself
so i didn't want this to happen i was quite upset i went up to the border camps to find him and i said what is this true are you gonna do it and he said yes i said what why you gonna do that he said the world isn't that isn't listening they've forgotten burma i'm gonna sit on the steps of the american embassy and pour gasoline over and at least some will pay attention to our pain
so i talked to him some more what what makes you think people will listen to that and try to understand him and how's the rest of your life going and as we talked over some time it turned out that wasn't the only thing going on
in fact this young girl who'd come over and he was now and is sort of mid late forties miss this young woman was in her early twenties they'd fallen in love just fine but he was someone who'd been a monk since being a very young boy
and he couldn't imagine himself as anything but a monkey and you know what he would do for work or how he would live seemed impossible to him
and on the other hand he couldn't imagine somehow living without this young woman
and so he was looking for something to do and he thought well maybe burning himself was you know politically there would be some mileage in and i looked in my said listen you've lived through malaria you come through the jungles you live in this border candidates bombed all the time you worked against the soldiers in rangoon and and deadly danger you've been through all
all of this and getting close to a woman and now you're gonna burn yourself and he understood it was kind of find me at some point i said you mean relating to a woman is harder than all the rest of that he kind of nod and said yes you know and it's true the other way don't let me give the impression that it's only one sided in this game i'm sure the women in this room understand the
equally
so as we conversed about it it became clear to him that his motivation which wasn't so conscious prior to doing that wasn't all noble but some of it was rather escapist and so he didn't end up doing it instead they talked on together and finally she went away for awhile and they agreed to be friends and in the anti turned out to have
deal with a lot of unfinished things in himself that twenty or thirty years of of his spiritual life had not address and it's made him a wonderful and much kinder and more truly more compassionate teacher
now this problem of dealing with suffering and the end of suffering and the unconscious roots of it in us that come from our past which we all experience is compounded by the fact that dharma sanders and dharma teachings a trap
fact many of us and i certainly include myself is the walking wounded attract people in grief people with histories of abuse sexual abuse emotional abuse families of addiction and i know it's popular to talk about dysfunctional families and so forth but it's also true and it's very sad especially
on sabbatical the year before last and really living in a village where families were connected with one another and we have lost the kind of connection that key kept human being sane for hundreds of thousands of years i went to this temple festival with the family i was living with and a nearby village three villages over there were
nine hundred people at this festival and i asked my day the body i was living with i said how many of these people do you know he looked at me shock he said all of them and it was just amazing i said i can tell which village and who's related to whom and there was such a sense of communion and community and care
airing who shares the land in what way but the dharma tracks for good reason for healing people who are isolated betrayed abused wounded
and out of this we want healing we want repair hunting maybe this spiritual community will do it for us or our teachers will do it
we want to find some alleviation for are suffering and in fact we need to do that because without that spiritual practice would just be some mantle ideal he know and when you try to practice and don't deal with your wounds in your past history and so forth later the shadow comes out of the closet and what we
do is recreate the pain of our family again in the spiritual community has happened many many places
now some people divide the need for these kinds of work into the spiritual and psychological and they say well i do spiritual practice sufi practice or xander so other kind of buddhist practice or or
i don't know what is kabbalah christian mystical practice jewish whatever and i do spiritual practice and i don't bother with that psychological stuff that's kind of low level stuff
for me that's a false split and a false argument it's like saying that there's a difference between inner and outer or a difference between our body and our spirit
it's the old kind of christian dualism that gives rise to ascetic practices and hair shirt mentality and so forth where the body in the emotions are low and the spirit is high and that's just the sickness of our world
the the pain of warfare of the fact that we are now the number one exporter of weapons in the entire face of the earth we now export more weapons than anyone ever did
killing machines and we do it so to pay balance our payments so that we can import things from japan nice cars and stereos and oil and all the things to keep our game going how do we pay for it we sell killing machines around the world billions of dollars and then we worry about our security
it's madness and the madness of this world comes when the mind is disconnected from the heart and the body so we a mean it's an interesting game to think where you're gonna target nuclear weapons and where they're going to target there's it's like chess but you can't do it if you're in your body or if you're connected to you
heart it's just not possible
so it's a false split to divide the spiritual and psychological
or to say this part of my life is sacred and that part isn't the buddha said there's only one work their suffering and it's end where they're suffering that ask our attention and that brings us to a place of freedom so i like to change the language i don't even like to use psychology
oil and spiritual because i think it's false i don't do psychological work i call it universal and personal
that we need to work and understand the universal level of our being and as well to integrate that to live that in the most personal way to understand our personal predicament as human beings it's much harder to say i don't i mean as much artists i don't work on the personal level i only do universal practice you can't get away with their
it's easy the lava thousand it's easier to lava thousand people in your thoughts when one person intimately you know what i mean to a great compassion meditation for all the beings of the world and then go home and deal with your wife or your lover your husband or whoever it happens to be
so understanding that we can't divide our practice it's a false division and that the roots of buddhist psychology and of western psychology or understanding the the unconscious forces that we have learned the habits that motivate us and entangle us and seeing the need for freedom for suffering
what are some of the other guiding principles for healing and freedom
the first guiding principle that unites them both his awareness to be mindful or aware so we're not so unconscious so we don't keep reacting as if it was our mother or father or family or whatever our past history is over and over again and as i said part of the gift for
ritual practice is you can see it more clearly i remember
early in my teaching career
i was to lead the closing meditation of a ten day retreat been teaching for a few years and on the last morning we do a guided loving kindness meditation buddhist practice of evoking feelings and thoughts of kindness toward all beings and i just had a conversation with my girlfriend at the time and it
was not a pretty conversation we were quite i was really angry at her and she was equally angry me and we're really into it and the bell rang and i had to go and loving kindness meditation
so i go in and i sit there and as a hundred people who will all just and meditating for ten days and it's my job right so close my eyes
take a few breaths and start in my softest sweetest kind of loving kindness meditation voice you know began to cultivate thoughts of loving kindness and then direct them toward someone that you log a law and then i would pause for a while and i think that bitch i'm going to call her back and tell her this is unfair
air and this and that they now think if someone else you love ally direct your loving kindness to them and i think not only that it was before she said that and i'm really get and i just i went back and for them for the whole twenty minutes or whatever it was of all these sweet words in one side and then this angry jealous right
and all those other things in the other and at the end i couldn't help but laugh the mind will do anything it has no pride at all
and the first game is simply to be aware of it that's part of our practice more deeply this awareness is that is the basis for a shift of identity a shift from our small self to notice something good
trader to notice not only what's present there was my anger and there was the loving kindness but with spaciousness the whole game of body and mind it is what the buddhists or even on the night of his enlightenment mec
it's good
the buddha sat there on the night of his enlightenment as you said anyway i concentrated my mind purified bright unblemished rid of imperfection malleable steady illuminated
and look back over hundreds of births thousands hundreds of thousands of births and saw myself being born such a re such an appearance such who'd experienced such pleasure such pain such a life term passing away reappearing elsewhere according to conditions and karma again and again this
isn't that past life and then i directed the divine i and saw all creatures in any direction passing away and reappearing at reappearing fair and ugly happy and unhappy inferior and superior according to their actions worthy creatures
l conducted in body and speech revelers of the of the dharma with those in wrong view and the fate of them and death those who are happy creatures the buddha looked and saw in his own life his past life is manny past lives and the lives of others
so awareness has two functions wanted to see what's here to notice it and the second is to see the process of life itself so you notice what's present and the you notice how it's happening what's happening to it which is this shift of identity
i'll tell you a story there was a woman who came to see me
who had been practicing meditation for some time and decided she wanted to do some therapy as well she had a seven year old son
she felt very stuck in her spiritual practice she was depressed a lot in her life
she'd been divorced for a few years her husband left her when her boy was four years old and we began to talk about her life and it turns out her dad had left her mom when she was three
and so we talked and she told her story sometimes the first healing thing that's necessary is just to tell your story and haven't heard by somebody who's heart really listens
and then we began to do some deep work with breathing and opening in her body and out of this came grief grief of the divorce abandonment from her father things that never happened in her childhood sorrow and we spent some weeks and months just allowing that delicate process of feeling the green
this carry around for so long and don't really acknowledge and therefore never is healed
and after these months of work of holding the grief with awareness and with some greater space
finally she came ready somehow to face the very center of her pain in her body in her heart at least of this great pain and she saw herself at age three standing at the top of the stairs overwhelm was pain as her father walked out the door and didn't turn around to say good
bye to her and she never saw him again so that was the memory that was really agony for her and the profound sense that came from it that he didn't love me he doesn't love me
so at this point she was ready i had her stay in that place and picture all the details of the scene
and that i said now feel yourself and how you felt and all that which was should i mean she fell she feels it all the time she didn't have to go very far to feel that i said now see if you can describe what your father looks like what he's wearing what is carrying how he standing she described it i said now see if you can go and be in his ba
body
what does his body feel like she said oh i'm i'm full of tension it's incredibly painful in here i said how do you feel as as as your father oh i feel terrible i'm frightened i'm trying to escape from a disastrous marriage i'm really unhappy man i don't know where to turn i know i am
after leave
i said and why don't you turn to say goodbye to your daughter who's waiting at the top of the stairs is it because you don't love her
and her jaw dropped open in this moment speaking as her father she said no i love her too much i couldn't bear to say goodbye to her and leave
so then we waited for a bit and i said while the belief the story
that no one loves you and that you can't be logged who makes that story where did that story come from
she said i do i did
i said is it true
this was very hard for to say she said no it's not really true
and i had a rest in that space a little longer we continued i said before your father and father and mother
this sense that you carried for so long of who you are this unlovable person is this really who you are
is this who you are
who were you before your father left before you were even born
and in that moment in the right moment that question opened a a huge space and her of mystery of not knowing
and she saw that her mind contained her parents they were sure still in there and every other possibility as well and it was there long before her parents had entered and would be there long afterwards
and we breathe together and worked in the process of letting go and body and hard until she came to this place of pure piece of a kind of timeless space or awareness
and for months we went back and forth between that space and the old identity and how strong where the believe no one will love me and and and people will always abandoned me and so forth and as she did she began to learn to rest in this new identity this new sense of who have her true nature and
herb depression gradually released and an eventually she remarried and started her life in a different way
now my question for you is is that psychotherapy or is that meditation
which is it and how could you even divide it it's an awareness of the small sense herself and in giving it a true attention the discovery of a whole shift of identity that that is not who we really are
now this shift of identity can't be done to soon you know buddhist especially like to do what is called a spiritual bypass more in and ron mm okay let's go for emptiness and forget all this human sheer you know and i mean
it can't be done too soon and it can't be avoided
rather the true emptiness that we seek is in the middle of things otherwise that's a false emptiness it's the emptiness of running away anybody can do that a mice will use drugs and it's easier
then coming and sitting on your sappho that's not emptiness that denial or avoidance true emptiness is what she not found what she knows in the center of that that what is so if you go right to the middle of it all the beliefs and constructions and unconscious things
open to show you that none of that is who you are
but each place were wounded h not each grave wound that we carry and you know what they are very often we know what they are must be met with the second principle that joins eastern and western psychology and that's the principle of compassion
not only awareness and a shift of identity but compassion for all forms of life and for all the creatures within new there's a wolf a new says carl sandburg and a baboon's new and a monkey howling and yapping you got a menagerie under your heart
he says under that bony rib cage you are the keeper of the zoo
doesn't take much meditation to discover the
so the second principle is that for these grave not the unconscious small self that we've carried to open we need attention and compassion
when i first practice and worked as a teacher i thought it was in order to overcome get rid of all these pollutants of body and mind you know
and later as i've practiced and taught more i've discovered that all these agree the hatred the fear the delusion the restlessness the laziness or generated within me from one source which i would call the body of fear it underneath them is a contraction her sense of fear
read i'm not say that i can't make myself vulnerable and then i get angry or want this or that or feel deficient all based on this body of fear
this body of fear this small self never opens by force
if you try to use force you just get bounced into your mind at best
it or not and opens like a rose a flower in the garden was sunshine it opens with kindness so we are asked can we hold all the creatures within us just as we must in the earth around us and i see disarmament worldwide as starting with ourselves
can we hold all these with forgiveness
if we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm them all
forgiveness one re-posting the teacher at harvard jack angler said that the whole of spiritual practice is grieving is really an honoring and a letting go of outer things and enter things till we really lack over at all
another way to express it is that the whole of spiritual practice is forgiveness for things not being the way our mind wanted them to be that we wanted them to be
if we couldn't forgive there would be no liberation the buddhist work would be useless
because forgiveness is a letting go of the past and that's what liberation isabel
it's hard cause we're human which is very difficult position to be stuck in
this paradox of being human and a human body and it needs to be held in the great heart of a buddha a friend of mine richard heckler who said i quito teacher and
body workers psychologists did a six month training for the us army special forces green moray
to teach them meditation and gestalt and iko and all these kind of new things some of his friends wouldn't talk to him cause he did it but his notion of it was that it would humanize the army so he had this program for eighty of the top us army special forces the toughest guys in the army and
the most elite and they trained in martial arts and they trained in bodywork and stalled when so forth they were thinking make them better soldiers and he thought it might make them more conscious
in the middle that they had a one month retreat when a boy scout camp in the woods in massachusetts and these are guys who parachute they do halo jump high altitude low opening they jump out of the plane at night and pull the chute right when they're near the ground or near the cold ocean and then swim into the rocky shore of maine and bivouac and put a
mark
and have all been indifferent combat situations these are really tough people so they sat this month or treat said it was the toughest damn thing they've ever done in their life
kick the it out battlefield was nothing compared to sit in a month in meditation so he said here i go in this old boy scout camp ah and there they are in their uniforms with an m sixteen behind sitting on zappos meditate
and i look in and there's this guy strong barrel chested tattoos on him you know the best of the u s army wearing this shirt that says eighty ninth army airborne where the big skull and crossbones on it death from above and i kind of blink and i say people don't wear t shirts like
that and meditation retreats but he is meditating there was sitting following his breath breathing a neither airborne division death from above
this is the problem of being born in the human realm it's the realm of paradox and the only thing that's great enough to hold the mind can't deal with it the only thing that's great enough to hold it is the great compassion of the buddha the great heart of a buddha so whether it's psychology or meditate
asian or whatever you want to call this process of healing
it needs a very deep compassion
a woman friend of mine
who is also a student in new mexico has a long history of abuse sexual abuse in a has passed and she eventually became a healer and a therapist herself and finally when she was ready she decided she was gonna work with perpetrators and so she started this
group for it was man that she was working with where's the group for a dozen men aged eighteen to seventy two who had sexually molested or abused other people and she said at first it was took her a long time just to get the courage to go in the room when she began to work with them and it was really scary and frightening
for quite a time and gradually she began to hear their stories
and as she got to know them and listened to their stories she found as i'm sure you all know that of those twelve people every single one of them had in some way themself been abused as children and she said all of a sudden one day the whole consciousness of my mind shifted and i found myself not see
eating in a room with twelfth enemies twelve perpetrators but with twelve little boys all of whom had suffered in the same way that i had at the hands often of their mothers or their grandmothers are there uncles or their grandfathers she said and then i said to myself who can i
blame
who can i blame
much of genuine therapy and genuine dharma practice is simply holding the pain that we share in our life as humans with our high
talking to rom thus one time about doing spiritual psychotherapy he said i do therapy still sometimes for some close friends or people but i i only see them once a year one session a year he said that way we don't get too attached to one another so that's your problem around us or whatever anyway
ah i said well what do you do he said what we do a long session five hours and for the first three hours i have them lie down right in front me and i simply put my hand on their heart and i look into their eyes and that's what we do for a few hours
a poem from mary oliver you do not have to be good you do not have to walk on your knees for one hundred miles through the desert repenting
you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves you do not have to be good he do not have to walk on your knees for one hundred miles through the desert repenting you only have to let the soft animal body
your soft animal body love what it loves tell me about despair yours and i will tell you my
when you hold the heart and mind who had compassion it opens it wants to open it longs to open
that doesn't mean that your hearts always gonna be open like you know some kind of stoned pepe or something like that the heart has its seasons it's like a flower and it opens and closes
just a breeze the same way the breath breeze and the mind as it's waves but there's an openness it contains it all and this kindness this compassion is the ground or spiritual life and therapy
now a third principle with this
is the non transferability of awareness
rat is awareness doesn't automatically transfer from one area to another a lot of us read these great spiritual books in our early years of
spiritual practice or we're told are led to think that success in our meditation will make us all better
make us enlightened and have satori in the law go away all our problems and our neurosis and so forth
anybody still believe that i'm just checking
it's okay if you do should try it out for a while you'll see
come on it's not so when and i think it's one of the kinds of spiritual maturity that we've all come to over years as a as a community as a culture
part of the principle of this is that awareness in one area doesn't transfer to another tell you some examples a friend of mine a man who was a really great yogi in india and it's worked a lot of practice with his body was able to be of
dissolve his body into light turn his body into different things put his consciousness in any cell of his body quite extraordinary yogi he also had a very difficult family upbringing kind of the usual painful story of alcoholic family
abuse and other such things anyway he came back to this country and is one surviving parent
his mother his father died long ago his mother who was drinking and in and out of hospitals and so forth finally she does she died and it was terrible in some ways for him and other things that were difficult were going on he had a good meditation practice but he knew he needed some help so he went to see this therapist who didn't break
and breathing had had him lie down and begin to breathe gently feel what was going on so he started to tell the stories and his pain in his meditation and all of his stories and the therapist would ask how do you feel
he say well my face gets flushed and there's energy moving in my spine in the lower part of my spine and then i feel a tingling around my heart made breeze more and tell similar stories the therapists would say how do you feel and he'd say well now my body feels more rigid in this part and i feel attention going down my legs and
so forth and this went on for weeks how do you feel and he could describe this guy could tell he was going on the second sell over on his kidney a fantastic samadhi and attention and finally one day the therapists and how do you feel
and he said i feel terrible and he broke into tears and he wrapped the grief that had been in him for a lifetime
he knew a lot about his body and he knew a lot about samadi and a lot about certain realms and yet he used them as a defense to not feel his feelings does this make sense to you
another monk who i work with for a long time who again had been in a monastery for a dozen years prior to that was very depressed a kind of intellectual person and when he came out
he never got in touch with his body who sort of the opposite he did it all with his mind and he could recite dharma and give you the most amazing discourse on the you know interdependent origination and everything like that but talk about living in your body can hear you know and that's where all his wounds
who are so he used his practice to not feel the wounds that were too painful to feel
the buddha speaks of awareness in the four foundations of mindfulness body feelings mind all the stories and thoughts and attitudes and the dharma that is the principles the laws impermanence and emptiness that govern them all we must in our spiritual life actually direct our attention to each of these
areas otherwise you get people who are very aware of their body and cut off from their emotions are some people who feel everything but they don't know all the beliefs that are stuck in their mind about themselves are some people are very aware of their mind and forget their body
a good teacher or a good therapist listens for what area you're stuck in where are you afraid
central in this in central to the buddhist teachings is particularly the domain of feelings so the third principle was that awareness doesn't transfer automatically from one area to another you need to actually practice it and all the different areas of your life or it won't happen he can be great and one and and and really unconscious
s in another
this leads to the fourth principle that's common to therapy and meditation read feelings are central are particularly central in the teachings of the buddha in the first
teachings of his enlightenment he spoke of the jewel of his awakening being entered dependent arising a teacher some okada
of how the whole world arises out of consciousness the twelve links and in these twelve links that he taught he taught that there's a body that arises in the various senses and then their sense impression since contact and based in each st contact there's feeling present neutral and unpleasant kinds of feelings and based on pleasant we grasp and
on unpleasant we resist and based on grasping and resistance there comes craving and clinging and all kinds of karma and entanglements that create the suffering of our life
he said the place for you to study liberation is the link between contact feeling and clinging er grasping in each moment pleasant or unpleasant kinds of feelings arise or neutral feelings if we're not aware feeling we grasp we cling we get entangled
and when we are aware of feelings and see just feeling as feeling liberation happens
now we as a culture but it's not just as the asian cultures japanese burmese thai indian are very repressive about feelings
we limit the amount of feelings women can have they can cry and not a whole lot else or get hysterical maybe and man even less you know that cartoon in the sylvie she was sitting there one time she had a little
and
crystal ball as a madam and this woman came to her and said
it kind of seeing her for fortune telling she said my husband won't talk to me about his feelings she said so what's new
said well could you consult your crystal ball so she looks in the crystal ball and she says our next january men all over america will begin to talk about their feelings women all over america will be sorry within minutes
the
we have this kind of ambivalent relationship to feelings you understand i mean i've i've done a lot at mansour treats and there is much emotion and feeling it's wonderful so this is kind of a caricature that's not accurate but as a whole culture men and women alive we're not a culture that so versed in our feelings and that
it's because we're afraid of them we don't know that they're empty we believe that they're solid and in meditation practice one of the key domains is to be aware of a name sad and happy and angry and frightened until the whole menagerie becomes part of what we embrace with our awareness
now if we pay attention to feelings we will see that they are often at the center of the entanglements in our life the knots that keep us repeating our past history unconsciously when you sit in meditation the thoughts will come the top ten tunes you know what i mean they come over and over when you say it's a shame
i call them insistent visitors after why you can be aware of i'm easy come easy go you can't have become what robbed us called a connoisseur of your neuroses oh there's a good example of and you just see it common notice it but if something keeps coming back and bothering us over and over
what it's asking for is some deeper acceptance why does that thought keep coming again and again or that worry your that fear or that imagining or that memory
what makes it come back over and over again you know why because there's something there that's asking to be seen and accepted but until it's accepted it will keep coming back and it might be grief for it might be love that you've never expressed are my be anger usually it's rooted these complex
exes are rooted in feelings
so we need to allow them to feel them to bow to them to say when something comes back ten times instead of saying oh good i wish i could get rid of it say what's this i wonder what i'm feeling
and as soon as you do that what's asking for acceptance it's not analysis or thinking it's feeling what's present
when i sat my first really long retreat i had huge bouts of lust fantasies x rated movies of every kind you know and partly it was that i was twenty one years old or two thousand and two years old and i was a young man you know who is in a monastery should have been out playing around or whatever
are so he thought anyway and i would know didn't be aware of it and make space for and try to be mindful and so forth didn't make any difference that kept coming more and stronger than a new name the vision i had it did it was van women animals in everything so
then i kept pay try to just be aware of it so he was doing meditation ride make a big pasture let it come and go the cows are multiplying
then i said all right my teacher said after a while there's some reason this is coming back this isn't to analyze but there's something here that's going on so as i listened more deeply over time i realized what was there i listened what was there when it came what did i
i actually feel and of course there was the fantasy and all the excitement from it but when i discovered i felt was lonely and that those fantasies came i was here as far away the other side of the world no one knew i was and i was alone meditating and i was terribly lonely
and this pain of loneliness ran would translate itself into the fantasy of caught sexual contact and when i began to be aware of loneliness the fantasies began to diminish not because they were bad but because that was really what was fueling them memories come back cause of some guilt or some grief that needs that says i
need to be exacted fantasies of the future come again again because of some fear that wants to be heard and for the me loneliness is very very deep one of my deepest pains i'm a twin i think that i got my twin brother is say come on let's go in the womb together we'll have a little company you know even before birth
but even as i felt the loneliness it kept coming back and i'd be aware that and he kept coming again again finally i had to listen more deeply and feel what is it and there was fire i felt the physically the earth air fire water it was hot the temperature the fire element though it was contracted the earth element
it was pulsating read if i really felt in this place where i felt lonely all the time in my body and the feelings were longing and fear and sadness and loneliness kind of hunger and as i let myself feel the feelings deeply than all these different scenes of childhood came all the that are layered in our bodies
if we let ourselves feel birth womb things past lives all that stuff as they're not around very deep feelings and in it i felt there's something wrong with me i mean i'm always rejected i'm always lonely always be left in some way and that was what fuel this keep
come on over and over again so i let it be there and i actually read it open to a great there's just took held it with kindness and when i found in the middle was the kind of a whole this emptiness that i'd been dr phil with sex or anything else did not feel this emptiness
and as i felt it and just held it with real kindness that space of emptiness opened and it got bigger and clearer and emptier and as it got bigger it lost its sense of tension it was just space and somehow in that i felt a wellbeing and contentment and
a piece that was the opposite of that longing it was as if somehow going into the middle of it and allowing it to open and be as big as it wanted i came to the very thing that i've been seeking that nothing from the outside would have filled with please make sense to you
so that the the key is the acceptance of feelings and the opening in the very center of our be
give you another example i had a student come
an insight meditation society at the end of the three month retreat and for the first month of his practice he had a very powerful meditation and really sat very strong and had very clear mind and he started to feel the power of attention that could develop and then all of a sudden after six weeks he got very very sleepy
and he was sleepy and sleepy any spent six more weeks just fighting sleep
so i wasn't there that retreat i came at the end and i began to work with him
and he said actually two things happened i said how do you feel the sleepiness in your body close your eyes while i feel a certain with lethargy and i just try to be aware of it but also my shoulders get incredibly tight when i get sleepy and this pain has been here along with sleepiness for the last six weeks i started that's interesting let's pay attention to it
feel the pain what's it like it's hot what else is it like while it pulsates it vibrates that's the fire element or rather the air element of vibration it's hot as the fire element of temperature it's yellow colored it spreads across my back it does this america just feel it really explore what that's like
and i said now as you feel at what feelings there he said fear which is usually a sign that there's something else about to come so i feel the fear and then see if you can sense an image or memory are feeling that's just there that wants to arise under it and all set in his mouth opened he said all i said what was
it
he said i'm sixteen years old
i'm a football player i said the our he said this is one of our big games and i go up to block this guy and i'm really intent on knocking him down and i do it so forcefully
i smash him with my with my forearm that i break his arm in graz drops to the ground and rise in pain
and he said that the scene i see
anna he said it's terrifying i said how'd you feel he said i felt guilty and ashamed and afraid and here i was trying to be a football player and trying to do this in and i broke this guys are
i said i just stay with the feeling skilled fear grief all that are there
i said now as you feel that also see if you can sense once the connection between this and your shoulders the sleepiness and the meditation widened all this start what do you know from this image and he said all my meditation was getting very strong i felt really
powerful and away i never felt in meditation and what happened is i became terrified that if this speak if i became powerful in this way i would hurt somebody and so my whole body and mind shut down the same way it shut down when i was sixteen year old in the same place
so we hold this small identity and unconscious ways in our body and he comes up in meditation or therapy and by listening with compassion and some depth things get released you don't need to go looking for them they'll find you it's not analysis it's presence
this leads to the fifth in the last principal and we'll talk about tonight
and that is that many of these things you can't do alone
one of the great statements about the buddha is i did it myself i'm the buddha cause i could do it alone myself for course he did have to good teachers prior to that in fact and then he built on their teachings and the buddha said what makes me unique as i can do it alone in you can't even a booty used to say that
much of the really deep work of healing or awakening that comes as a part of our spiritual life has to be done in relationship to another and the best psychotherapy is like a joint meditation where together someone asks you to pay attention to those places where your stock
where it's so hard or fearful or unconscious that you couldn't do it alone
the deepest wounds in our life most often are produced in relationship to another person
and the place that they need to be healed then is in relationship they don't even come up when you're by yourself they hide they come when you're with your lover or your spouse or years and teacher or or your roommate or your child
and because they're created and relationship they need to be untangled in relationship and that relationship is a kind of sacred trust i did sand play for a while with dora cough the woman who developed the union practice of sandboxes and figures as a very deep kind of symbolic
therapy with her in europe she had this wonderful house in switzerland that dated back to the tenth century and this one room was filled with ten thousand figures from teepees or navajo figures to soldiers to boats to temples to trees every kind of figure in the world and these two little sandboxes
in the middle she was kind of the archetypal wise woman the old wise woman and i walked into her room she was eighty years old and i had known her i said i really want to work do some work with you and i sat down it was like entering a temple
she said the work that we do is to create a free and protected space for the psyche where you feel totally safe and totally free for whatever needs to arise and then to provide a form not just words but in this case it was symbols and sand it could be paper art music something that
bypasses your store your mind
and i felt like i had waited lifetimes to walk in that room it was such a treasure to enter that room and have someone say this is a free and protected space and phila and know that i could do anything and i picked figures and made scenes and the deepest things came out of me
the healing of our heart takes place in relationship it's done together as a dance and in it we learn to trust ourselves by the trust that's communicated by the space of the other the buddha recognize this that's why there's transmission and meditation that's why
there is such a thing as teachers it's the gift we give one another we remind one another
there's this shift of identity like we borrow another person's identity that we can step outside of the pain and make this great compassionate heart they can hold it all
we remind each other of our buddha nature so one last story and then a couple more comments to make
this is a true story about two children
one six year old boy and an eight year old girl the eight year old girl had a blood disease very rare and needed the only way she could be healed with with transfusions but because of her blood type they couldn't find a match the only match was her six year old brother
for the doctor and her parents went to him and said your sister will die from this rare disease if we don't have your help would you be willing to give blood to help her to save her life six year olds your kind of thought we said i gotta think about it you don't know six year old so he did for
while he thought about it finally came back he said okay i'll do it i will do in the doctor had him come to the clinic and lay them both together he and his sister on these on these little beds and drew blood from him the bottle and then transported over so he could see the blood going into his sister
many call the doctor over as this was happening and he said to the doctor
real i start to die right away that was his question
because being six years old it wasn't explained to him quite right he thought that giving his blood man to give his life which is why i had to think about it for a little while before he did the central story
we all have that place in us we all know there's a place that longs to express greater compassion and greater wisdom
that knows that we are nothing and that we are everything that we are connected with all things in this nothingness
and so whether you call it psychotherapy or meditation or just the of freedom the awakening of the heart our practices to see the emptiness and form and the form and emptiness and to bring an intimacy moment a moment to see where there's constriction and fear and to to
touch that with compassion and openness and allow that freedom to come from or be
for buddhist students the questions very simple are we more compassionate are way more spacious and easy are we more honoring of ourselves and others
that's the measure of our practice so i read you a poem to and from david vaudeville called bugs in a bowl
that great old crazy chinese poet hon john of a thousand years ago said we're just like bugs in a ball all day going round and round haven't you noticed
i say that's right up the sides and back down again round and round over and over sit in the bottom of the ball head in your hands cry and moan or look around see your fellow bugs say hi how you do and say nice ball
hello
on somehow i think all the work we do i mean how do you divide it is that simple work of looking around and offering your heart to yourself and to others and to the world and that brings your blessings now lot of what i've talked about his in the new book that's coming out in a month you
can ask your bookstore to order it if you will call the guy through the perils and promises a spiritual life i path with heart and it's teachings on psychology and meditation on the nature self no self true self compassion and codependence the the mistakes of teachers and why they make them
i'm so let's take a few minutes for questions ten fifteen minutes said right
comments i've spoken on and on non and i don't know why i guess i just did so
where do you think
anyone please
yes

if i said the second thing about the mind in the heart not being separate in a way where all not separate and your question is well taken but there are these apparent boundaries and i think that they need to be honored as much as we need to honor that we drive on the right hand side of the road instead of the left and the reality i
i wanted to talk really both personally and practically tonight and not philosophically the reality is that awareness is only sammy transferable but you learn it in one area but unless you ask yourself what is the shadow where don't i pay attention where am i stuck and bring attention to that all the good work you do in one
place won't necessarily transfer to the other and that's true between the heart and emotional body and mind or the physical by

other questions comments poems
fox please
in focusing on

yeah i guess

yeah

is
so what what kind of things would might you be afraid of manifesting in like anger for example
yeah
sure if you really look into your in yourself you find that there's rage and if you have not yet had help in and some skillful way in dealing with that rages really frightening i mean that's what's making yugoslavia somalia and it's not just there but it's in us i'm so can be frightening and it can be
overwhelming and part of the gift of good dharma practice and part of the gift of good therapy is to provide a sacred place a safe container to learn how to feel all of that without doing harm to yourself or another if you feel like it's too much that stuff comes up and it's too much to handle in meditation
than you need help from a teacher or you need to find someone to work with so your question is very well put
it's not that you need to do a lot of analysis about it it's more that we open naturally as i said like a flower and a things come and all of a sudden you realize well this is what's going on in me can i do this myself fine or maybe this is the time to get some one else to be with me to understand this piece because it's too difficult
and that's really kindness to yourself
please
i got the impression that
was beautiful
i'm an addiction
that way of staying away from here i call it is a it can be an addiction or denial basically we're a culture that is that is misused everything in a certain way and the whether it's the environment or science and technology or all kinds of other capacity so
why shouldn't we miss you spiritual practice it is our habit right and so like anything it can serve us or we can use it to defend against certain things or to hide i know people who've wonders who came to a whole series of three months retreats and did retreats all over around the year and he has came from this enormously wealthy
family and had been given some millions of dollars when he turned twenty one and he is the kind of were driving an old volkswagen and wearing you know kind of torn tattered blue jeans and a lot of his meditation practice was to avoid having to deal with the particular karma of his family
and he didn't for some years till i kicked them out i said we now go and get the money i don't care what you do with thrown away for all i care but deal with it deal with your pants so anything can be used in that way when meditation is well taught and when meditation as well used it's the antidote to that and that's the purpose of it
teacher is to listen to sense
what it is that we need to pay attention to and what will bring us read
please you are talking about feelings and honoring your feelings your feelings of raise you talk about expand a little bit feelings of emptiness we are
the feelings and emptiness could i expand about that everything's empty and i don't mean that in some kind of big philosophical sense although it may be so if you pay attention thoughts come and go by themselves you don't ask them they think themselves feelings arise mostly were overcome by happiness sad fear anger
someone pushes the right button like your kids are your parents for example they know all of kind of notes to play and these feelings arise doesn't take much they're not us we don't own him we don't direct them very much we all possess him if you thought you were your feelings you'd be in trouble for you thought you were your thoughts you'd been worse trouble maybe but
they're empty in that they arise of conditions they are interdependent they arise for certain time they pass away
mostly i've noticed in spiritual communities and buddhist communities that
there's a kind of danger of saying well feelings on so important you know what we really need to be clear in our mind or negative feelings should be let go over something like that and it's actually because people are frightened of them they take them to be more real than they are if you sit and you discover yugoslavia and ray
rape and maiming and and your own ability to cause pain to others which i certainly have seen in myself is there and you learn how to feel it
then you realize it feelings are empty because they come and go and you don't have to act on them and their no more real than you choose to make them they are actually real in the ignoring of them an empty in the awareness alpha so it makes sense but i don't know if that answers your question
what go ahead when i was i was thinking about the honoring the feeling and yet knowing that the feeling was that give the space with feeling defeated on earth
everything's empty i mean and we honorary we honor one another we on our bodies by eating but i think people kind of forget the feelings are empty and they they take him seriously and avoid i'm so to know that it's empty allows you to honor i really
please
i have three brothers one of whom
to whom live in the city here they're not my twins one is the chief building inspector for the city of san francisco new study with harada roshi one of her outer but one of the hirata oh she's in japan for a little while another younger brother who's a works at genentech as an engineer who also done a bit of spiritual practice my twin brothers done the least of it
he's a marine biologist and a professor at the university of maine
so were were pretty different
yeah we're fairly close and we're we're different
i love my brothers they're wonderful and that it's really great gift to have brothers that you're close to
please
you're talking about feelings
sensation
the question is i'm talking about feelings is this the same thing as sensation know it's a wonderful question
it partly depends on what your type is like if you think in young in terms of feeling type for thinking type or sensation type certain people know themselves primarily through their body that what is what you call the sensation type and each mood or emotion happy sad and so forth will have a reflection in the in your body when you're sad you
feel a certain way when you're angry you might feel hot and riled up when you're fearful you'll feel cold and contracted and clammy but the anger the fear of the sand as those are moods your emotions that are not just the sensations were an entirely different dimension of your being we have a physical body sensations we have an emotional body one of the five
have a set of thoughts and perceptions and so they're there to be distinguished were related but their separate what makes you ask trees

feeling right
yes
was teaching it
sensation know there's feelings both mental and physical there are but by feelings he didn't mean just sensation feeling is not the sensation contact is a sensation feeling is the feeling tone pleasant or unpleasant or neutral in the body and in the mind that arises that qual
cities that arise with
yeah you can have a even at paying a you can have a sensation and they'll be certain contact and then when it there's a certain feeling quality
and the same in the mind i find him sitting just in really cracked
contact with brian i told him
reaction to try
trouble even getting
sensation
it becomes interesting in practice to pay attention to different dimensions of experience what the buddha called contemplating or or examining the five processes that five scanned of life so sometimes it's useful in meditation just a feel life as
as a physical flaw sound comes in you feel it on the ear sites come if you're really careful you can feel them almost hating the i
moods com and you feel them reflected in your body pains pleasure arise all and the by and so you can take some time in just feel that this kind of the body many could feel the pay attention to moods and feelings and just be where those for why then you could be aware of perceptions and then it becomes very useful because we identify
get entangled in one or another area to see them as they are which is simply empty processes
think it's probably enough time i i don't know what you would like but it's it's ten after nine we were supposed to end at nine is that correct
what i tried to do