So I want to explore with you how we can cultivate patience and steadiness under insult or conflict.
What can we trust when our trust has been betrayed?
An easy answer to that is we can't trust the neurotic mind.
Not that any of you have a neurotic mind,
But I'm sure every now and then the mind is a little bit out of control.
Spinning stories on repeat with something that may be anxiety based or aversion based,
Unclear saying.
I think it's probably accurate to say that the more time we spend in our minds caught up in the spinning,
In the thoughts and in the ideas,
The more it's something that we put our trust in.
We put our trust in doing that in our thoughts and our ideas.
Something in us thinks that this is the way to go,
Like thinking and figuring things out,
That it's valuable.
Kind of like this is what I'm supposed to do in order to be safe or in order to find my way in this life.
All this thinking is where the solution is going to come from to all my life's problems if I just think about it some more.
And if I don't figure it out today,
Well,
I'll just pick it up again tomorrow and keep trying,
Thinking,
Thinking,
Thinking,
Right?
I've done this.
Maybe you have too,
Particularly in circumstances where the tendency is to get angry and agitated.
I've latched on to circumstances that I'm angry about,
Irritated by,
Sometimes furious at other people.
And I've latched on for months and months trying to figure out and solve problems.
So it's kind of like just churning away.
And at the end,
The end,
The solution didn't come from that churning.
So to be steady when there is mistrust or when there is anger and insult being thrown at you in a way,
Or you're encountering it in the culture.
It's a kind of tolerance of people being unkind,
You know?
A tolerance when mean things are said or there's gossip.
I'm learning that just tolerance of things coming at me from others is not really a helpful orientation because tolerance is a focus outward on the other person or situation out there.
And in Buddhism,
The practice more often begins not with others,
But here with ourselves,
Like what's going on here in this body,
In this mind.
So rather than kind of tolerating insult or agitation or mistrust,
Maybe it's more a kind of of a flip where there is an intolerance for anything that diminishes us inside.
An intolerance for anything to land that causes suffering or harm for us.
It's this kind of intolerance,
Like,
No,
I don't want to harm myself with this situation.
I'm not going to harm myself with this situation.
And one of the areas that I've learned to trust is my body.
The body is always here.
The body can't be anywhere else.
You know,
The mind can be all over the place,
But the body is always here and now.
I heard this Zen teaching once that the body's like an antenna,
And I find that's very useful,
Because if you think of the body as an antenna,
Then we can become more interested in,
Well,
What's the body picking up?
Like,
What's the static that it's picking up?
I received an email some time ago that was kind of pretty cutting.
I received an email some time ago that was kind of pretty cutting,
Actually,
And insulting,
And I felt it right away in my body.
And the heat of the of the anger and a strong compulsion to respond.
And I did respond,
But I didn't send it.
I deleted it.
I just tolerated the discomfort in my body.
Because as I was writing,
And I could see that I was getting tighter and tighter,
And there was more heat and more righteous anger and all this stuff happening.
And I'm just like,
Okay,
Let me let me tune my antenna to what's happening here.
And it was like,
Oh,
Yeah,
This is not the time to respond.
And it was like,
Oh,
Yeah,
This is not the time to respond.
A wise friend of mine reminded me to offer myself care and compassion.
And I was like,
Huh,
Oh,
That's right.
I don't want to harm myself with stress,
With anger,
Or my fixed views about something.
I don't want this to harm me.
This harms my body,
This stress.
Hostility towards others always hurts the one who is being hostile.
It always hurts and harms us.
And this is hard to see when the focus is on other people.
Being really angry can actually be kind of pleasurable.
When the anger is focused and directed one poignantly someplace else,
It can feel,
You know,
We feel alive in anger and energized.
Some people feel very powerful when they're angry.
You know,
My father was very powerful in his anger.
I think he enjoyed it.
Interesting,
Right?
And so how does that land in my body as a conditioned response?
When we stop focusing on the other and what feels like,
You know,
Being other directed and start to feel intimately what's happening for us centered here,
Then we can experience for ourselves how hostility harms us.
And we don't want to harm ourselves.
Buddhist practice always begins with us and it doesn't end there.
You know,
It ends with caring for the world.
But if we can care for ourselves properly,
We will have more to offer the world.
We're safer for the world.
We're not so liable to get swept away in our reactivity,
In our spinning mind,
You know.
To cultivate steadiness when mistrust and insult is present in our lives,
I believe begins really with a certain level of restraint.
You know,
To restrain oneself from causing harm through speech.
And to cultivate a certain level of self-restraint.
And that includes text messages,
Emails,
All the ways we communicate.
When we feel angry,
This is when we listen,
You know,
To what's happening in the body.
We start to become very,
Very careful with speech when we are angry.
When we are angry.
And we don't cross the line and speak in ways that express hostility.
I was responding to this hostile email and I tuned into the antenna of my body.
And as I said,
There was so much heat and tightness that I deleted my response and I stepped away.
It was so valuable to wait.
And maybe that's not always appropriate.
Maybe you need to respond more quickly to something.
But to let the body and the mind calm down.
And hold back until you can feel,
You can respond without hostility.
It's really a deep cultivation of wisdom to be able to restrain oneself.
And it's much more effective in the long term.
Hostility sometimes feels like it's effective in the short term,
Because you can frighten people and then they pull away.
Or stop what they're doing.
So there's kind of a reward for being hostile.
But the long term consequences in human relationships are not good.
They're actually more harmful.
So to be restrained in speech.
And I think the question that I grapple with is how to be restrained and hold back in a way that is not repression,
But is really for our own good.
One way is by recognizing when we are othering.
Directing our mind and our concerns towards others.
And thinking others have to be different.
Others have to do things in a certain way.
Others have wronged us.
Sometimes that kind of thinking is accurate.
But to be preoccupied with that thinking and caught in it is an alienation and a loss to ourselves.
We're disconnected to ourselves.
When we focus externally,
We're not grounded in ourselves.
And that's when hostility can kind of slip out.
Because we're not following what's happening in our body.
We're not being mindful and careful about what's going on here and this body and mind.
And to learn to recognize what's happening here and focus on here and being careful and attentive to what's here.
You know,
When we're right with ourselves,
This is where you can relax.
And when we relax,
There's an ability to let go.
This is where we can settle back.
So we don't cause harm to ourselves.
And then we don't cause harm to others.
Restraint is the right action when the alternative is worse.
And through this practice of restraint,
We learn to let go.
We can stay close to those places of health and care.
And we can learn to let go.
We can stay close to those places of health and care.
When we're kind of free from and not caught in these impulses of anger and mistrust.
We might still feel angry.
We might still feel hostile.
But there's no tendency to pick it up.
There's no tendency to go with it or do anything with it.
The anger has no power over us,
Even though it might bubble up.
The power is in us.
It's our ability to be mindful and attentive and care about ourselves.
Centered and having choice about how we work with all these inner impulses that come along.
So thank you for your attention.
I welcome your feedback.
