Increasing the Capacity to Hold Uncomfortable Feelings – Judith R.

Good afternoon. Carol was supposed to talk now, so I'm talking instead because she's not here. And so I feel a little uncomfortable that my voice is going to be the main voice, particularly this afternoon because I'm going to be talking a lot so I don't know if that's good or bad but anyway, that's the way it turned out for today. Tomorrow there's a lot of variety in the speakers there was supposed to be variety today but it didn't happen so you're stuck with my voice so I decided to talk about some of my favorite things during this time because I wasn't assigned a topic and some of the things we've been discussing to be able to discuss them a little more and also to prep for what's coming ahead so the first thing I'd like to speak about is Katagiri Roshi's very I don't know what to say about it but words that he often said which is what we are trying to get to is some kind of spiritual stability a spiritual core or a spiritual root that stays stable in the the ups and downs of our life okay so that's Kabagiri Roshi and we've been talking about that how do you find a place in yourself where you can maintain your composure or your contentment that's a word, a new word I've been using we entwist up your serenity in the face of different conditions in your life so going to what we were talking about earlier about learning how to find contentment or serenety in your meditation posture will help you find stability and serenITY as you're in the activities of your life it will remind you it teaches you what that is so this is very much about the second noble truth in Buddhism about a non attachment or no preference to side and we were talking about non duality in the morning so this is the idea that we don't attach or reject the opposite like attached to health and reject illness attached to life and reject death attached to pain and reject no attached to pleasure and reject pain the one I'm working on is attached to success and reject failure okay these are the eight worldly winds right they come you can't avoid them sometimes you're successful and sometimes you are not sometimes you're happy and sometimes you are not sometimes it's pleasurable and sometimes it is irritating this is the way it is right however you can find a place in yourself where you can hold anything that arises you can be intimate with we talk a lot about intimacy particularly in Zen practice that we're We're trying to be able to be intimate with our life and intimate with the things that are occurring in our life, which means not defensive, not pulled away, really able to be right with what is happening in your life at the present moment. so in the second notebook so the first noble truth is that life has suffering contained within it up and down we have ups and downs we have old age illness and death so those are bummers right so but they're part of life you're not not no person in this room is going to avoid those three things so so the Buddha said that life contains suffering in it But the suffering is produced by our attachment to what we like, our pushing away of what we don't like, and then this space of neutrality. But neutrality can be sometimes positive, like non-attachment, but sometimes it can be negative, like denial or automatic, Automatic, like going through your life automatically. I would call that a neutral place. So I'd like to just talk about this wonderful slogan from Lojong, which is three objects, three poisons and three seeds of virtue. So the three objects are the fact that sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't like it and sometimes I'm neutral or automatic or non-understanding of the situation. Ignorance is something. Greed, anger and ignorance are the three poisons. So the 3 objects are just that there's a fact like a worm I don't like it so much a bluebird oh kind of like that I don t know what I'm neutral about in the bird kingdom because I love the birds what so so those are just the facts you like something you don't like something or you're neutral to something the poisons are when you add on the attachment the aversion so you add on to experience I want this I like it I'm going to have it I've got to be greedy for it I am going to possess it I hate this I reject it I have aversion towards towards this. And neutrality, I'm sorry, I am kind of blanking on neutrality. Oh yeah, boredom, spaciness, taking for granted, denial, we all know denial, and ignorance. ignorance. So do you get the difference between an object and a poison? That's important. And then the third one is three seeds of virtue, which is knowing that sequence, instead of doing a poison with I like it, I don't like it and I'm neutral, you can actually plant a seed of virtue. You can actually respond with something spiritual, something virtue. For example with hatred you might respond with forgiveness or you might respond with going towards instead of going away and saying that piece of shit is Buddha too. We just did the koan on the shit stick so it's on my mind or Or with greed, you know, you could plant a seed of generosity. So this is how we work with trying to cultivate ourselves the sense that we can accept everything. That we're not dividing the world into two. That which we like and that which we reject. that I'm allowed to be intimate with all things. This gets a feeling of oneness, of wholeness in my life going. So that brings me to the next thing I used to. A couple years ago I really taught a lot about this. I haven't been teaching this very much, but it was in my notes and I thought, oh yeah, that's a good one. So, a lot about what I'm doing when I'm meditating and when I'M working with my spiritual life is trying to increase my capacity to stay with what I say are negative things, uncomfortable feelings. I'm trying to increase my capacity to be able to hold uncomfortable feeling so that goes back to what we were talking about why would you sit in pain or with intense sensation the next two days well I could say you are practicing increasing your capability to hold on comfortable feeling now Now this is very, very important for an addict that we increase our capacity to be with what we are actually feeling body-wise. Pema Chodron calls it the queasy feeling. I feel it quite a bit, the queazy feeling, anxiety or grief or not knowing what to do or paint you know real anger that's the way I feel it like well that either I know how to deal with that or I go to my addiction or one of them thankfully these days I go through my lesser ones you know my big ones are pretty much gone the ones that got me into 12 steps I'm pretty much okay except for food but food sneak you know so easy that's when I do you know but I don't want to it's not what I want to do it's not my vow especially now as a Zen teacher to cover up my feelings are not my vow but as an addict it's very hard to do so that's what we're trying to cultivate the ability to hold all of human life even the hard stuff and for some of us there's a lot of hard stuff if if it hasn't been cleared out or healed yet there's a lot of woundedness in our particular group right so so that's what we're trying to do is to be able to stay with the human emotions and to act from clarity rather than from our reactions to things so another thing that Pema children teaches which I like a lot is this idea of the queasy feeling and she says that you don't repress it deny it or stuff it down so this is very interesting because you can use meditation as a means to repress your emotion you just get really good at concentrating and then you don t have have to feel it. You kind of blank it, blank out. But I've been around Sanghas long enough that the people who do that, it has a name now called spiritual bypassing, where you bypass the things you actually have to digest. And what happens is it blows up usually after After five years or ten years, if you haven't gone through the difficulty, if you've only gone around it, it will come back and goose you. And many of us know about that. And, you know, it's true too with addictions that if you only concentrate on a few addictions and you say, well, that one is okay, how I am sexually is okay or my gambling is okay at least I'm not drinking and not doing drugs but I've been around long enough that I see that oh 10 years or 15 years later that one you ignored there's a volcano there and all of a sudden you're back to coming to meetings a lot have you seen that with people that all of a sudden the place where they hid erupts so you have to really be willing to look at it all and to look at the compulsive nature if we don't get to the root then we just drift around and of course the root is becoming more and more spiritually satisfied or seeing the world through the spiritual lens that will help our anxiety our feeling of emptiness inside it can heal our woundedness I mean I know that many people have been victimized and then we become the perpetrators you know that vicious cycle you're beaten up by your parents and then you beat someone up those kind of things especially with addictions you know our parents mod all their behavior and then we follow along even when I thought I was rebelling against my parents behavior pattern I then find out that I wasn't that it just was a sneaky subtler way like my father was very much of achievement drive he got ahead in business he made lots of money he was very successful and very powerful. And I just saw all the problems that happened in my family because of his achievement drive. And I'm not going to do that, I said to myself. So I was a hippie. I did everything opposite of my father. But now I see the achievement drive in me, even spiritually. Or I have to be the head teacher. The clubs and water has to be the best place, it's sickening. It's nauseating. That's what Trimpa Rinpoche, the Tibetans call it. You have to be nauseated by your habituated patterns before you're willing to change them. So you have to hit bottom. But even with the small ones, like competition, finally I just feel nauseated but I'm just so I can't bear it anymore it's making my life so anxious that I have to be the best I'm revealing this you know I'm working on it and I work on it a lot and I can get it to go away but I am surprised how much it comes up you know and I I say this forthrightly because I know if you look in yourself, you have these things too. Things you wish weren't there that just constantly come up. So I think this is where we start to move into steps four through nine. How do we look at ourselves honestly and forthrightely and start to make some movement in our, what Buddhists would call, habituated patterns. These patterns that, because they haven't been looked at, just go on and on and on. So the thing about, I want to just go back because I didn't finish my idea about we don't want to repress our crazy queasy feeling you don't wanna bypass it then we don' t want to act it out which is the other way to go which is very much we can do all the time you know is instead of holding staying with the feeling and working it out digesting it inside we just get rid of it by screaming at someone and then that person has to hold it right we got rid of it but the environment of other people or situation at work or in your family gets worse actually by acting it out so the third alternative is to stay Stay, stay, stay. Stay with the raw energy of your experience. Of your emotions, of your physicality. Learning how to stay like a dog. Stay. and that's a lot what we're doing in meditation too is we're learning we're teaching ourselves how to stay with our life experience which includes everything right includes grief it includes joy it includes anger how to say with my anger that's the big one for me and not act it out but to stay with that energy so that's a lot of what we're doing especially when you come to a retreat where you're sitting more than a period a day or some of you maybe even sit two periods a day but when you start to sit four or five periods you start uncover your anxious feeling or you start to uncover some of the emotions that you've been pressing down so that might be happening or not So one thing also, I think, and we're going to start to move into this too this afternoon, is in order for us to have the courage or the strength to look at our behavior patterns and to look and stay with our queasy feelings whatever they are we have to cultivate a spirit of gentleness or a spirit of kindness or of acceptance or of well those are good words generosity towards the self forgiveness kindness gentleness now the other thing I found is in Buddhism they say healing or the steps four through nine is when you turn the light of mindfulness and you light up your neurosis what is it called the laying down of our neurotic crimes that's from for room to say isn't that great he just calls all these uh we call them false and imperfect uh what do we call those character Character defect. He calls them neurotic crimes. Anyway, in Buddhism they say if you can shine the light of mindfulness on your neuroses, they will dissolve. And there's a kind of faith in that. We were talking about faith. they have Buddhists have a faith in the process say that if you work if you look at them if you stay with them they will change now the problem is if we don't have enough kindness if we We don't have enough gentleness, which who of us has? I'm speaking just from my... I come from the most neurotic, violent, icky, alcoholic family. How am I supposed to know gentleness? You know, I didn't learn that. That's not what I learned. And my inner critic is not gentle. I don't think addicts' inner critics are terribly gentle. I think that's something we have to learn. And we learn it in AA and our 12-step programs. Just the love of the group teaches us gentleness. But in Buddhism, you actually have practices that you can cultivate feeling that gentleness so that you could hold yourself and your faults with this love, loving kindness. If we're able to do that, then we can keep shining the light on it. But if I'm not able to do it, if I don't have enough gentleness, then I look away. Now, I'll just say with my food, which is getting better, but if I, if I am not kind to myself, I don' t want to look at it. And I know I'm very good at not looking at it, Like, that didn't matter. That didn't matter. You know, that didn't mater. But if I keep my eye on it, my light, but I think it's my loving light or the light of Buddha. If I keep Buddha's eye on it, it seems to I want clarity there. So I keep trying and trying and pretty soon you have a different habit. Do you know what I mean? It starts starts to resolve or as in four five six seven some grace or i don't know what grace is in buddhism but something happens where it's not that much of an issue anymore but i think that And that happens through shining the light of mindfulness on our habituated patterns. Now, I think I'm supposed to be done now. so the pain of revealing our pattern is balanced by the gentleness of kindness and we come to understand that the negative is the doorway where we can turn our faults into jewels so I can turn my competitiveness into generosity I truly can if in each moment I'm making that switch when I see it I switch when i see it i switch or do you know or I'd like to say one other thing I didn't get into the four hours but we're going to continue with inventory in very different ways throughout the afternoon and tomorrow I'd like to say just one word about shame I have well this is one area where I have for the most part what should I say give it a percent seventy percent or eighty percent I've learned how to work with my shame which used to completely paralyze me in the beginning of my program well as a young girl well really up until I was 40 I would say I was completely paralyzed by beating up on myself constantly and one thing that I worked on is someone told me that shame is a parasite that glans onto an emotion so So if you can get the parasite off, then what you're left with is the queasy feeling. So the more I'm capable of attending to the actual queasy feelings, increasing my capacity for uncomfortable feelings, the more i can digest that, the less this has to glam on. but I still have to sit in the middle of the fire that's the way I think of it I have to sit in a middle of uncomfortable feelings but at least they're the essential the primary uncomfortable feeling rather than the secondary one which is I hate myself and I did everything wrong and whatever your shame is so again it's pointing to this idea that we're able able to sit with our uncomfortable feelings and face them. I just have a really quick question. Okay. So is shame in that context like a lot of anger? For me, when I experience anger, often it's as a secondary emotion to something else that I don't want to experience necessarily. Not that there isn't shame also, but I didn't see that at all. well i think we all individual i think you've identified in your individual psychology what's going on but i think other people you know like crying can sometimes it looks like you're feeling emotions but actually you're masking them so sometimes yeah so there's all different it's all over the park um but there was something i wanted to say uh from yours say what you said again just that I recognize that anger is often a secondary emotion so I was relating that to this idea oh yeah now I remember so shame has a couple of meanings or wording one is the negative kind of shame which is very involved with self hatred and giving yourself no room or accepting what others say about you too you have no room to breathe even you're just a bad person and forget about it but there's also shame which the Buddhists it's hard to know how to translate it but there is regret so regret is a little bit I'm using that in a different way and one thing about regret Regret I like to say is, regret is very important in a useful quantity. It's very important to feel the regret of your action because that regret is the energy for changing your action. If you don't, if you bypass that feeling You won't have any impetus to try and change Your bad or hurtful habit pattern But you have to do regret in the right amount If you do it too short You don't have enough energy to change But if you do a too long Then you're bogged down and not forgiving not moving on so it has to be the right amount of feeling and as I'm getting older and more mature I'm starting to get a sense of what is the right amounts and I notice when I'm usually for me I go too much I feel regret too much so I'm noticing when is the place where I have to let it go okay anybody want to say make a comment about that yes I really like what you just said about shame having all this regret because there's no thing being shameless or having no shame I think that's really saying having no regret for things you've done maybe in a moral sense you could be shameless if you don't have regret you could violate some moral standards right or shut the door on it too much I know when I first got sober, my sponsor was really good at helping me gauge that barometer of where I was going. Too much. That's exactly what he was talking about and that was really useful. So talking with other people can give you some reflection back. And I was thinking that today about spiritual life. Like, if you do spiritual life in isolation, you can really go down some weirdo paths. Like you were saying today. You know, like you can say, you know, I got this vision and I'm going to do it and stuff. But if you talk to someone about it, they can say,"You know, I don't think that's so hot." You know? Maybe you should rethink that. So it's very... I think, well, I think that's one thing I've learned from 12 Steps is I don't do things by myself very much anymore. I'm learning how to trust my intuition and act on my intuition. That makes me feel whole and self-empowered. But I still don't do radical crazy things without checking with people. No, I... Please. I found this Just light on my neuroses. I found another person much more helpful in helping me with that life and keeping that life in a rational, loving, kind way, finding that balance of the correct, identifying things that I was regretful and remorseful for that I didn't need to be regretful or remorseable for. Well, I think particularly if you're coming out of the fog of alcoholism or drug addiction you really can't rationally make those kind of assessments so it's very nice to use another person sponsor, therapist, priest or whatever you do to help you engage. But even, you know, I've long been out of the fog and I still sometimes can't see that I'm blaming myself for something that is not mine to take on. Codependence is the word right for that when we take on other people's problems. Okay, so what do we do now? We have a choice between taking a break or doing walking meditation. And then we're going to be working next on Nikon, if any of you know it. It's a type of inventory, a Buddhist type of inventory that's very interesting. So I'll present a little bit of how you do it. Then you're going work on it by yourself for half an hour. and then we're going to split up into small groups and discuss it so that's what's next on the agenda so you can decide what you want to do for the next 15 minutes either do walking meditation or take a break