Emotional Avoidance In Meditation Practice

In this talk, I make a distinction between detachment (checking out), non-attachment (neither clinging nor pulling away), and fearless intimacy (meeting experience without any strategy at all), arguing that the ideal of the serene, unruffled practitioner can seduce people into using practice to avoid their emotions rather than meet them. I close by noting that psychological inquiry and meditation practice aren't opposites — sometimes a recurring feeling needs honest examination, and the goal isn't a sanitized, emotion-free self but something more like becoming a conductor through whom life moves freely.

Transcript

So I received a request to address emotional avoidance in Zen practice. What was that? I said yay. Yay, Okay. Emotional avoidance in Zen practice. There were some other aspects of the request that I tried to thread in. So who decided how we are supposed to feel? Who and what is the normative for emotional being? Who decides? Yes. Do we agree on the emotionally and spiritually mature people and how they would be in the world? If we like took a poll here and wrote down the top three qualities and how they would be at dinner with their in-laws, At home with their partner and on the freeway, Would we all kind of be on the same page about what emotional mature being is? And say that we have that notion or we know what that is. Do we know that person? Have we met that person? What and who is the normative for how you be an emotional creature? So think of how environment, History, Language, Culture and climate shape temperament. A little dangerous getting into stereotype territory, But think about that. Is one temperament better than another? People in sunny places are a little sunnier. People in cold places are a little cooler. Are the sunniers better than the coolers? So my first point in this is, What is the standard? What does it mean, Avoidance? We have each our own body, Mind, Character, Structure, Way of feeling feelings. For example, Some people weep easily. And some people don't. But it's easy to think that the person who weeps actually feels more than the person who doesn't. But how would you know? Tears aren't evidence of someone feels more than another person. Tears are evidence of tears. So going forward in this little contemplation, Who decided how or the way we are supposed to feel or be emotionally? And then, How does Zen practice interface with that? So I'm calling into the question that we can pin down, We can recipize a way that we say this is emotionally healthy, This is a person who's not cut off, This is a person who's mature. And yet, There are people who clarify within themselves that they are cut off emotionally. They recognize that something has got a lid on or is locked away. Or just as possible, One can recognize, Maybe through contrast, That there's a diminished range of aliveness. So Zen practice generally amplifies equanimity in a person. Equanimity, I think, We think of that as merely calmness. Calmness is an aspect of equanimity. The deeper meaning of equanimity is that your stance of presence is equal as different things move through you. There's an internal steadiness when there's happiness and sadness. There's an internal steadiness when there's anxiety and calmness. Equanimity is bigger than calmness, But includes calmness. Zen practice generally amplifies equanimity in a person. For some people, It really gets put on the altar. Equanimity. For some people, You think of what's the ideal Zen practitioner and you get some image of a bald person who's very peaceful. Kind of imperturbability is the image that a lot of people have of a Zen ideal. So herein is where emotional avoidance begins to become an option. When one starts to access different kinds of equanimity. Now the teachings have always had this on the radar. You're probably familiar with the Near Enemies. Have you heard of the Near Enemies in Dharma? So of the four sublime feeling states that the Buddha suggested cultivating, There's equanimity, Loving kindness, Compassion, And kind of empathetic or resonant joy. All of them have what's called a Near Enemy. Which means you could mistake equanimity for this. Or you can mistake loving kindness for this. In the case of equanimity, The thing you can mistake it for is indifference. Or how it really looks is you don't even know you're mistaking it, But you've just become that. You've just become indifferent. So that's part of what we're exploring here. So indifference, The Near Enemy, Is sort of like I don't care. First of all, If you have to think I don't care, It's not true that you don't care. It's evidence of indifference a lot of times. Indifference is I don't care, But equanimity is I care in right proportion. I care at the moment of caring's necessity. That's a very worthwhile investigation inside oneself, Indifference and equanimity. And sometimes we get confused. There's some people who begin touching genuine equanimity, And they're not as internally disturbed by the world. And they say, Hey, What's wrong? Is this going haywire? Is this kind of going askew? How is it supposed to be like this? If we've only known a state of reactivity, Equanimity could be misunderstood, Or it could feel kind of foreign or a little too cool. A little too cool there. Or we could have the image of the calm person, Or we could think, Oh, The people in the zendo, They're so calm. And then we perform indifference. And, You know, The more a spiritual culture has sort of outward presentation of the practitioner, The more the performance of the qualities becomes enticing, If not habitual. Here's what it means to be a Zen Buddhist. You're XYZ. Okay, Well, I guess I better start acting like that, Even though it's not a conscious thought. Equanimity interfaces with people in different ways. So if somebody comes into practice and they're just a kind of like bubbly, Juicy type person, Equanimity hits that person differently than someone who comes in who's had a hard life and they've had a lot of struggles. It imprints them different. You get a different kind of outcome. From good practice, A time of impersonality may come. Impersonality. That is, You are in a different kind of relationship to this being. You are beginning to experience the elements of yourself as just a natural process. And in a way, It's one of the things the Buddha strongly encouraged as conducive to wisdom. All through the original teachings, Buddha says, View thoughts as thoughts. View feelings as feelings. View sensations as sensations. View the phenomena of yourself as actually not yourself because they're a natural process. You're not doing any of this. You're not doing any of it. Is nature doing this? Is Buddha doing this? From good practice, A time of impersonality may come. Now, If you don't have a teacher or good models in the practice, People who can spot that, Because people who've practiced for a long time can spot when someone is in that place, This is one of the times where emotional avoidance and things can start getting a little sideways. Because in that impersonal relationship to body-mind, There's a coolness there. There's a pacification. There's an absence of entanglement. And if you've been somewhat entangled in your emotions, Your thoughts, If you've been embroiled in that dimension of being, This impersonal stuff is really seductive. It's so nice. If you have relational wounding, It is so nice to be like, I'm just cool. I'm cool as a cucumber. And I think that's exactly what the tradition is saying. Yep, A+. Let me see if I can sit in the row so Hogan Roshi will see how cool as a cucumber I am. I'm being approved of cool cucumber. This season of impersonality, Do not reject this season. Because for some people, It's one of the first waves of the fruits of practice. It's just kind of like that. This isn't all that personal. Don't reject that season. It may be bringing or teaching a quality of wholeness. It's not our final destination in the Zen tradition. In one of the kind of poetic explorations of the ripening of a practitioner, And you can look up the, I think it's the ten oxherding pictures, Equanimity is related to something like the third or fourth stage of practice, Or the third or fourth facet. We don't have to make it hierarchy. So, From good practice, A time of impersonality may come. It may come. But sometimes we retreat here. We retreat into that. And the question is why? There's a difference between just stuff happens and I'm not ruffled, And stuff is happening and I retreat there. I've started to touch that place. And then I, In a way, I just sort of, I can, Maybe therapists would say it's a form of dissociation. Even though impersonality in this case is not dissociation. It's just a Dharma lens. But when we retreat, Why? What is going on that I do that? Now, I could be slicing this like, Why do we retreat into always being happy? Why do we retreat into smiling? Some people always feel like they have to smile. Non-Americans think that's just absurd. Why are you people smiling all the time? I don't know if that's true. I was looking at some foreigners. It could be retreat into anger. But the particular stronger pitfall in Zen practice is the retreat of equanimity because we cultivate it. I hope you're not cultivating anger. I hope you're not cultivating faking being happy. I can talk about this stuff because I've done it. Right. And when I, When I, When I examine this kind of retreating, There's a seduction of being unassailable. There's a seduction. There's, There's a, It's almost a taking of power. Other people are feeling stuff. And, Oh, I know how to not be with you there. I know how to be apart from this. And we kind of then, We go from equanimity to the near enemy of indifference. The seduction of being unassailable and the more intolerance for feeling or the more fixed beliefs we have about, About the feeling dimension of being, The more misuse of equanimity will be seductive. The more likely it is, We come into practice and we already are kind of scared of our anger. We're kind of scared of our horniness. We're kind of scared of our whateverness, Our confusion or anxiety. Then it's going to be all the more appealing. So there are problems with idealizing calmness. A fully alive human being is not just calmness. I remember being at, A monastery in Japan and there was a, A monk who was, I think he was in his seventies, American. And he was seeing something in me. And he said, You know, You even have to let go of equanimity. I didn't really understand that at the time. So years ago, I would find myself in this place of, Of impersonality. And then further, The, The seduction of being unassailable, Kind of, It was like a, It's like an icy coolness. Icy coolness in a way, In a way, But it's not. And it was interesting. I would be drawn towards music that broke through that and brought me into certain feelings. Kind of broke the calm. I listened to lots of Radiohead. I listened to so much Radiohead. I had an altar to Tom York in my head. Cause I would put it on and I would be like, Oh, I'm fee, I'm feeling something. I'm really like, Something is blossoming in me from deep. That's why it's unequivocally the world's greatest rock band. Because even, Even a lopsided Zen practitioner, Radiohead can save that being. So the Radiohead talks for later, But my main point in bringing that in is that spiritual bypassing doesn't really happen. Spiritual bypassing doesn't happen, Never will happen, Never could happen. Spiritual bypassing, That idea is just looking at someone. We don't really ever know that much about someone else. We're looking at ourselves from a kind of a tight view of time. It looks like spiritual bypassing, Maybe in a year's span or two year's span, But in the span of really engaging a contemplative life, Spiritual bypassing can't happen and never will happen. Because everything will find a way to ooze out. It's like a secret. The other, So the problem also with emotional avoidance in Zen practice is we can, We can have the desire to succeed at this and our image of succeeding is kind of emotionally sterile. And you can even read some of the old teachings and it sounds like they're saying, I kind of sterilized myself emotionally. Transcended desire. And we think, Okay, Then that means success is when I don't feel this anymore. When we read about someone who's all love and we think, Okay, Well I still have anger, So success will be when I get rid of this. And then what happens is we sort of, We have trouble trusting different currents that move through us of the deep logic of Buddha nature. For example, Unfolding in our practice might look like hating a layer of raw loneliness that might be exactly the maturing, The ripening of your practice. But wait, I thought I was supposed to feel interconnected with all beings and all this juicy love stuff, But wait, Maybe I'm doing this wrong or maybe it's Zen. I always thought I should abandon Zen and become a Sufi. Now I understand that. Right at this moment, I'm understanding that more. It's because I was in my little icy cave that I would read Rumi and I'd go, These people are juicy. Let me get some of that. Unfolding in our practice, The logic of Buddha nature coming through might look like anger held down for so long but it starts seeping out. I had this, I don't know if I've shared this before, But I went through this time where I would be driving and I would have this intense fantasy of rear-ending the person in front of me. I was just going to slam on that damn accelerator and just crash into them. They didn't even do anything. I just needed the violence or scarier kind of violent things like, Oh, I can think that? Wow. I think that sometimes. People act on it, But wow. Because I was thawing a layer of anger in myself that I probably was afraid of previously. Afraid of because I didn't know how to let things arise as impersonal. That's why going through that stage matters. It's good though because you really understand when you encounter this, Because you really understand more why people do some of the things that they do. You don't separate yourself in the same way. When these things come forward, Do we embody it? What does that mean? I want to stop saying the word embody. It's become one of those words like, I don't know, There's so many words I'm going to get in trouble if I say them, But we don't say anything anymore and nobody knows what they mean, But we say them and people go, Yup. We all nod our head, Yeah. Embodied. Do we swim in it? Do we drink from it? Do we be it? Do we zoom in? Do we zoom out? Do we do both? Is it more like there's a river? A river comes to visit and we just yield into its currents. It's interesting that of all the emotional experiences that human beings are in for, Grief is the only one that I hear people talking about in terms of surrender. There's some sort of folk wisdom that grief is a river that we actually just have to relax into and we just have to go through it, But we don't talk that way about other emotions. Is grief special? Is it that different? I want to come back to equanimity with more nuance. Let's say for sake of exposition, There's three different things. There's detachment, There's non-attachment, And there's fearless intimacy. Detachment, Non-attachment, Fearless intimacy. Detachment is the way we numb out, The ways we pull away our little gestures of denial, The ways we lie to ourselves or we kind of disinhabit our bodies in particular ways to manage emotion. Sometimes that's all we can do. It's possible to completely cut off feelings. Think about on the way over here there was somebody who was being arraigned for a mass shooting and they said the person was silent and showed no emotion. And I thought well that's exactly what it means to be cut off. That's how powerful you are. You can cut off the profound shame, Terror, Embarrassment, And kind of bloody conscience after having done a mass murder. You can do that. Human beings have that capability. That's kind of astounding. So if that person can do it, Of course in little ways we can micro numb out, Pull away, Deny, Cut off. That's not non-attachment. That's not non-attachment. Sometimes there's like a teenage fantasy of non-attachment and it's detachment. That's what they're valorizing. That's not non-attachment. Non-attachment does have, When we're genuinely beginning to have that imprint us, It does have this experience of the elements of self are neither me nor not me. It's the middle way of identity. It's identity's middle way. Non-attachment is the absence of both possessiveness and distance. People often really get, Or they want to get the absence of possessiveness. I can't tell you how many times, Or probably could if I really thought about it. We got a call at the monastery over the years from some guy who was divorcing his wife. He's like, I'm ready to be a monk. Can I come to the monastery? And they would show up and it was really creepy often. Because the person had a trunk full of unaddressed emotion that they thought, Oh, I'll just go be not attached. That's what these people are doing. Non-attachment has an absence of possessiveness and distance. It's right down the middle. My favorite phrase about this, Which is a kind of koan, Meaning you have to companion it to unlock it, Is from the Precious Mirror Samadhi. It's describing the state of Zen presence. It says, Turning away and touching are both wrong. You can just think about that from your own feeling experience. Turning away from it's wrong. Touching it's wrong. What are you left with? The middle way is really just understanding the extremes and not going with them. So non-attachment, Different than detachment, Then there's fearless intimacy. And with fearless intimacy, There's no strategy whatsoever. There's no strategy whatsoever because why would we have a strategy if we're not afraid of experience? If I'm not afraid of anxiety, I don't actually do anything about it when it arises. If I'm not afraid of anger, I don't actually do anything about it. If I don't feel like my emotions are some beast I have to tame, I don't apply an antidote, Whether that's therapeutic or Buddhapeutic. In fearless intimacy, There's really no self-facing objects. There's just the undivided experience of life. And I'm not talking about a rarefied mystic state, But I might be talking about something that we continually sail over because of our habit energy. A lot of the Dharma of Zen is like that. That's why we don't talk in terms of some people have attained something and some people haven't. It's just that some of us are sailing over something that's inherently liberating or our habit energy is sailing over it. It's hard to practice fearless intimacy because it's not a practice. Non-attachment, Self elements arising as neither me nor not me, There's something you can do something with that. You can sink into that a little bit. So coming back to one of the images we have about practice because somebody who's been very influential in my thinking and practice is James Hillman and the whole Jungian tradition. Hillman and the Jungians, A real Jungian would probably tell me I'm wrong, But I'll just go with my amateur Jungian, That in a way the mind is structured around images. And so we come into religious traditions and we have an image of Buddha or we get an image of it or it resonates some image that we carry. And in contemplative traditions sometimes the image that we get is like sanitized self purity. The thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to sanitize all the unkempt aspects of myself. I'm going to get this all in order. I want to contrast that with what I think is more accurate for this tradition which is you become a conductor of life. You are dropping internal friction to life moving through you and so life can move through you. And it might look like you're cool as a cucumber because your reactivity doesn't stay all that long or your anger comes and goes very quickly. Things have more flash. They have quicker transits. But your image, The image of letting life move through you is very different than having a stainless zone where no bacteria are able to intrude. Now some of what I'm talking about maybe there are stages and there's some deep architecture to that and we just have to make our mistakes. I don't really think that path is a very good image or metaphor for this practice. I just don't think it is. I think it's more like an experiment. It's an experiment that's gone well for lots and lots of people. But you know, On the eightfold path there's not like the fold of total self-delusion. That's not one of the folds but if it was accurate to what I observe in human beings doing the practice there would be the ninth fold of total self-intoxication and delusion. Right? And you'd assume that you'd walk that part of the path. So this sanitized self versus the life conductor is sort of like in the moment of a thought or feeling arises that is uncomfortable or we feel it doesn't belong or scares us the sanitized self-purity image wants to kind of cut it and sweep it away right away. I'm not supposed to be feeling or experiencing that. I'm a so-and-so. This doesn't belong. Because it's not just Buddhism or Zen that has its normatives versus recognition letting it move through. Recognition letting it move through. The person who asked me to talk about this one of the things they said was where does psychological inquiry end and Zen practice begin? And I should have asked more about what this meant. But I think lots of people think about this and wonder about this. I think what was meant here is when do I need to really examine something that's arising and take it personally? When do I need to take what comes up in my witnessing of presence and really say what is this about? Why do I why does this keep coming up? And when do I take the embody the stance of non-attachment neither turning away nor touching? Right? Or the Buddha's recommendation this is just a thought. This is just a thought. That means the content doesn't matter. This is just a thought. So feeling out when there's merely karmic momentum meaning our conditioning is going off. We're thinking the things we've thought before or we're thinking the things that we've been in culture to think and therefore I don't need to investigate that. It's just my karma going off. It's like you know we all have buttons or like strings and kind of pull it and we go ow! Stop doing that to me. I don't like it when you don't have it as perfect as I want it. We have our little strings. We have our things that we say and once we know what those are what is that called? A see and say? Remember see and say? No? Who's Gen X up in this place? I need some Gen X homies. No? Speak and spell. Well no. Something like that. Anyways. There's some things that we've thought the thought a thousand times. We've had the reaction. We don't need to investigate it anymore actually. But also sometimes we keep thinking the thought. It keeps coming up. We need to investigate. Why does this keep coming up? Why do I keep why am I am I haunted by this? Why does it keep capturing me? It doesn't seem to be working to just let it flow through. Some thoughts rise out of truth in us. And you can begin to feel and hear the difference. Some thoughts rise out of truth in us. And the more willing we are to tolerate truth the more that will be the soil our thoughts reach out of. The more truthful our inner being is the very things we think begin to change aside from our karmic runoff. The speak and spell kind of stuff. The more we are willing to tolerate truth the more thoughts arise from that. And you could just say we have a more refined conscience. Do you want to live with that? Are you willing to live into that? Because even with truth rising thoughts we can listen or not. I find that kind of amazing and discouraging actually. Even with truth rising thoughts we can listen or not. Even the truth rising thoughts can be drowned out. Externally, Internally. Hogen Roshi was given a rakasu by Shoto Harada Roshi at his kind of recognition of his transmission. He wasn't given it by Harada Roshi. He didn't have transmission from Harada Roshi but he was given a rakasu, A teacher's rakasu in Japanese and he asked him later what it said and it said to examine one's behavior is the highest form of awakening. It's interesting. To examine one's behavior is the highest form of awakening. So we always do this practice as full-blooded human beings. You're never not gonna do zazen without a every time you do zazen there will be a body, A heart, A mind, There will be insects, Instincts. I guess if we had the eyes to see that would be true. There are insects. There's insects. Instincts. There are dreams. There are fixed beliefs. There's conditioning. All that stuff's there. You never don't do zazen as a human being. You might through your human being touch something that is more fundamental than a human being. In a way that's the point. One of the points. But you never do zazen without a body, A mind, A heart, Insects, Dreams, Fixed beliefs and conditioning. And that's good and right and has no fixed unfolding. Nobody else can tell you how it's quite gonna go.