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Guided Meditation: Accompanying the Breathing Body

Good morning all. Yeah, how's the sound? Yeah, great. So we'll start with a sitting. Is it a little high? Thanks, good. Thank you. Yeah, we'll start with a sitting. Let's welcome ourselves to the seat, beginning with reconnecting our bodies to the Earth, this companion of ours that's always with us.

So first, inviting the attention to the point of contact with the Earth: sits bones, low body, finding your stable base. And upon that stable base, little by little, allowing the spine to grow long and tall all the way up through the crown, the back top of the head.

As the spine grows long, you may find your body adjusting itself. You may want to roll your shoulders back and let go of any of the tensions in the upper body. And the invitation for this half hour is to let the upright, steady, alert, yet relaxed body guide the attention.

Bringing our attention to this breathing body.

And as we settle into contact with this breathing body, you may notice tensions or contractions build up over a few minutes. And with an easy deep breath, a full inhale and exhale, just letting those go and renewing the posture.

To accompany this breathing body with our simple, straightforward attention in its textures and temperatures.

And when the inner worlds, the images, fantasies have the attention, the moment of recognition—oh, fantasy—and then gently releasing the thought, the idea, like a helium balloon, letting it float away into the sky.

To accompany this breathing body, releasing any of the tensions, the holdings that build up or accumulate, easing into a simple, settled awareness here and now.

And in our last minutes of this sitting, the invitation is to release, relax any effort in the meditation, relaxing the body, relaxing the mind, to sense into your experience now. If there's any hint of the wholesome qualities of settling or ease or collectedness that have arisen, just a minute to appreciate those. And if there's no hint of that in the experience, just continuing to accompany the breathing body.

Joy and The First Noble Truth

So again, welcome. So nice to be with you, and my name is Kodo. It's such a pleasure, such a pleasure to be here. I have a lot of appreciation and respect for the practice at the IMC and IRC communities here and in Scotts Valley. I feel a very, very strong connection to this place, so it feels wonderful to manifest that here with you. And a pleasure to sit together. I mean, to spend a Sunday morning sitting in meditation, sharing in the Dharma, talking about the Dharma in this bit of relative stillness, which, I'm not sure for you, but stands in some real contrast to how the attention can be during the week. Sometimes I feel like a caffeinated bumblebee moving around from flower to flower. It feels quite nice to just simplify and settle the attention on the body and the breathing.

So the theme for today is joy and the First Noble Truth. And the perspective that I want to discuss this morning is that there's a way of looking, there's a way of understanding this path of practice. Of course, it emphasizes this First Noble Truth of dukkha^[1], which I'll unpack a bit, but step by step there's also joy, happiness, and pleasure in different forms all the way along. So, of course, there are many paths in Buddhist practice, and many of them emphasize this teaching of dukkha, the First Noble Truth: dukkha, suffering, unsatisfactoriness.

Now, why is that emphasized so much? And just what is that? Let's start with the why, and then we'll talk about the what. So to illustrate this, I'd like you to imagine—let's say you have a little bit of an injury. Let's say you've twisted an ankle, and it doesn't seem to be getting better. Maybe you have a sprain. You have decided to consult a doctor, so you make an appointment, you make your way there, you make your way to the second floor, you wait a little while, and then it's time for you to see the physician. As you make your way to the examination room, usually they're empty, but you see the doctor is already in there, and you think, "Huh, okay." You take your seat, and before the doctor can turn around, before they can ask your name, before they can see your ankle, before they can feel, look, talk to you, ask any questions—for the sake of this example, they have no information—they write a prescription and they hand it to you and send you to the pharmacy. How effective can we imagine that remedy might be compared to one where there was an examination and such? Maybe not so effective. So it seems pretty natural as a principle that to have an effective remedy, we have to understand the ailment, and that the more fully we understand the ailment, like deeply, really, the better. So it's just like this, so similar in our Dharma practice. And this is one reason that the teaching of dukkha, this teaching of suffering, is emphasized so much. It's the ailment that we study. It's the condition that Buddhist practice, mindfulness practice aims to address. Emphasizing this point, the Buddha is often quoted as saying, "In the past, monks, and also now, I teach suffering and the cessation of suffering." In the ancient texts, one way that the final goal of the practice is described is as the full understanding of dukkha, the full understanding of suffering that then in turn liberates.

So this gives us a sense of why this is focused on so much: the liberating potential of understanding dukkha, and the metaphor to be healed, to be freed of the ailment through full understanding. And how about the what? Just what do we mean by dukkha? It's an ancient word that apparently connotes a wheel that's a little off-kilter: clunk, clunk, dukkha, dukkha, clunk, clunk. And in brief, the teaching points to this entire spectrum of experiences of suffering and stress. Everything from—maybe we can relate to some of these—like the fiery grip of ill will, the stress of that, or something as profound as the grief of the loss of a loved one, all the way to something quite mild, the stress of mild physical discomfort that comes along with having a human body. And then the very subtle stresses involved in the simple acts of perception and knowing, very subtle. And then back out to the most profound things we all share, like the stresses of aging, illness, and death at some point in our life. I say those three quickly, but as I say them, I notice I kind of want to slow down and appreciate that it's something that we all share. So this entire spectrum, from the gross to the subtle to the profound of suffering and stress, in brief, that's what we mean by dukkha.

And for this talk, what I really want to emphasize is that with a working definition like this, our understanding of dukkha deepens and grows wise as we practice with it, as we practice the recognition of stress in our lives and its conditions and its release. Not just wise mentally, but our heart grows wise. So where do we begin with the practice of dukkha, the First Noble Truth? The first important principle I want to bring in for the practice of dukkha is that we don't address suffering in the abstract. Dukkha doesn't address suffering in the abstract, but in fact, it's presented to address specific stress, this specific stress for specific people. That's us. And just as the skilled doctor doesn't address the concept of the twisted ankle, they actually get in there and relate to your own body, your own ailment. In this sense, the teachings of dukkha point our attention to our own direct experience. And I think that welcomes us to pause at any time and say, "Oh, how is this for me now? What's here now? Is there any level of suffering and stress here? How is it?" And just as we were doing in the meditation, feeling in: What are the textures here? What's the temperature? The particulars? How is this manifesting in my body, my heart and impulses, and in my mind?

And this way of looking at dukkha is very closely related to our practice of mindfulness, our sitting practice, our practice of awareness. What is it I can know and understand directly through my experience? So it applies whether we're seated, applies whether we're walking, whether we're talking, whether we're working. This careful attention, this mindfulness, and this skill of discernment—what's going on here?—begins to reveal more and more layers and subtleties of dukkha. And this growth of understanding is the trajectory of our practice.

So in my own experience, and also talking to other people, there are certain things that begin to reveal themselves as we practice mindfulness, as we practice mindfulness of dukkha, mindfulness of stress. And one is, it won't take long before we encounter these sorts of stresses that we all share, that I paused to appreciate a moment ago. We all go through the sufferings and stresses of birth, presumably, though I don't know how many of us remember. Those of aging, when my body stops working the way that I relied on it for. Illness. And eventually, thankful to our very sophisticated minds able to know that someday we will pass. So simply our practice of mindfulness with dukkha again reveals these sort of universal experiences in their particular manifestations, and all of their dynamics, and all of their shapes and structures. And again, this in itself is the path. And there might be something in there where we have these experiences of dukkha and mindfulness meets them, and maybe there's just a touch of relief. Maybe there's just a touch of ease that comes in through a practice of awareness. Maybe something in the heart begins to grow easeful and still and wise. This can start to hint at the relationship between joy and dukkha.

Another thing that might begin to reveal itself in the practice of mindfulness of suffering and stress is the particulars, this practice of how is it now? How is it manifesting now? How is it shifting, changing? A great example is while we're meditating: physical pain. Physical pain, I don't know about for you, for me it often arises as a single monolithic signal. It's like a big no in the mind, no thank you. But mindfulness practice, getting a little closer both to that big no thank you and into the actual sensations—this phrase is really coming up for me this morning—textures and temperatures. How hot is it? Is it moving? Is it pulsing? Is it sharp? Is it soft? Mindfulness of stresses begins to reveal these particulars. It's true in the world of physical sensation. It's also true in our emotional life when anger arises as a big no thank you. Advanced practice: what's the constellation there? The constellation of sensations, thoughts, and impulses that I call anger. So again, the practice of mindfulness begins to reveal, through discernment, the actual situation. And because dukkha is shifting and changing and it's not just one thing, actually that's one of the most hopeful points of the practice, because these experiences rely on conditions, the conditions can also fall away. So as our discernment deepens...

...another thing that begins to reveal itself is the importance of clear discernment of the experience itself and our relationship to that experience. The experience itself and our relationship to the experience, and how a skillful or unskillful relationship to experience can either compound the stress or maybe undermine it. Undermine. To illustrate this, I want to tell a little story. It's a story about two phone calls. When I was younger, the first phone call I received, and I learned about the passing of my grandmother. I remember hearing the sound, I remember the shock, and I remember the following days kind of actually just being numb because it was so much for me. It was so much I couldn't feel much, and the grief took a really long time. Second phone call, some years later, I received on the very last day of a meditation retreat. I'd been sitting, doing mindfulness of the body for 10 days, and I got this important message: "Kodo, there's a phone call for you." Phone to the same ear, almost the same sound: "Kodo, your grandmother has passed away." My other grandmother had passed. Owing to the state of the mind and my relationship to experience at the time, what happened this time? I heard the sound go in, I felt the body register. The body really registered the experience, and it was amazing. It was like bubbles from top to bottom, and within a couple of minutes the sensations had actually passed. I hadn't suppressed or pushed away the experience; it fully registered, and it was entirely clean. Such that after my body processed in that way, I was able to completely be there for the person on the other end of the phone. Two very, very similar stimuli, very similar news over the telephone. Wildly different experiences in terms of compounding the suffering or not. And I want to take care here, it was through no fault of my first version of me that the suffering was compounded. Those were the conditions of the moment. But just to say, there's the experience, the relationship to that experience, and how it can either compound or not compound suffering. This is one of the things that starts to reveal itself as the practice of mindfulness and discernment grows in us.

So this development of mindfulness and discernment in relationship to suffering, on this path toward full understanding of suffering and stress, this full understanding of dukkha, it happens gradually, of course. Just like the other ways we grow in our lives, right? But I often find myself coming back to this quote from the Buddha describing this, saying that just as the great ocean has a gradual shelf, a gradual slope, a gradual inclination with a sudden drop-off only after a long stretch, in the same way, this Dhamma and Vinaya^[2], this practice, this way of life has a gradual training, a gradual performance, a gradual practice. And I find that encouraging, because a practice that so emphasizes mindfulness of suffering and stress, especially on the mental level, it can hurt, can really hurt. So it's encouraging to me to know mindfulness and discernment develop gradually, gradually, even if it doesn't feel so good as we're going.

And of course, there is good news. One of the next things that we begin to discern in mindfulness and discernment practice is how dukkha and joy, happiness, well-being, they accompany each other all the way along the path. And I find this so interesting, that if I zoom out, if I take any particular experience, if I view it wide enough, both elements are there. That's fascinating to me. And isn't it more complex, and aren't there instances in our lives where of course there are the joys and the pleasures, and of course there are the sufferings and the stresses, and how they mingle? I think this is a very rich area for practice. I think of maybe something many or all of us remember. Do you remember the pleasant anticipation of the ending of shelter in place? Like, "Oh, I'm going to see people." I see hands going up. [Laughter] And I don't know about you, but that was followed by a real awkwardness and overstimulation. It was so easy to be overstimulated. The joy and the stress right there together. Or in terms of work, I can imagine the joyful direction of working toward a project or a promotion coupled with the stresses of overwork. Or even leisure, a day at the beach and then there's the sunburn. These are just some everyday examples at a broad view that incorporate both.

And then, of course, we see this close relationship between dukkha and joy in the teachings. I think even of the First and Second Noble Truths: dukkha and its arising, dukkha and its cause. Sometimes real emphasis on the difficulty, the stress. And then the Third and Fourth Noble Truths: there's cessation, the path to the ending of suffering, the relief of release, the joy, happiness, well-being represented by the Third and the Fourth Noble Truths. And I really appreciate how close they are, what the relationship is. I think this is well represented by a Zen phrase: "In front of the cliff of dead trees, flowers and plants are always in spring."

So to look further into the teachings, I think we can see that dukkha and some form of skillful happiness, whether it be joy or gladness or well-being or happiness, is associated with the entire path in terms of the three trainings: the training in sīla^[3], the precepts, virtue; the training in samādhi^[4], concentration, collectedness; and the training in wisdom, liberation, and letting go. In terms of the training in sīla, one of the great pleasures of the ethical training is called the bliss of blamelessness. The bliss of blamelessness, where the mind that's free of remorse, knowing that it has not harmed a being, such joy and settledness in the mind. And it has a very close relationship to understanding how we create dukkha for ourselves and others through our actions. A very close relationship that actually encourages our restraint and gives way to this sort of pleasure.

And then, of course, in terms of the training in samādhi, this very deep, settled joy and well-being that comes from a unified mind is very closely related to developing the discernment of the stresses and the mental activities that actually get in the way of the mind unifying. The real discernment, full understanding. And then the training of wisdom: joy is a factor for awakening, of these seven factors that, when they're fully mature, issue in a full understanding of dukkha and awakening.

Another teacher puts it this way: there's no scarcity on the path of beautiful scenery, the flowers know how to laugh and the birds know how to sing.

Another interesting twist here is that the same practice of mindfulness and discernment that we apply to dukkha also applies to our pleasures, our joys, and happiness. Very generally, very roughly speaking, we might begin to see that there are ways of relating to our pleasures that bind and fetter, and there are ways of relating to pleasures that free and liberate. And again, here it's the relationship to the pleasures. Of course, there's this teaching of the five cords of sensual pleasure that are said to fetter or bind. And Venerable Sāriputta^[5], one of these chief disciples of the Buddha in the time of the early Sangha, when explaining this, someone had a really good question for Venerable Sāriputta and said, "These experiences we get tied up with, these five cords of sensual pleasure: the eye and sights, ear and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes, the body and tactile sensations. Venerable Sāriputta, is it the eye that is the issue here, or is it the thing? Is it the sight? Is it the ear or is it the sound? Nose or the smell? Tongue or the taste? Venerable Sāriputta, give me a clue, I want to learn how to be free." And he said, "Oh, in fact, it's neither. It's not the eye, it's not the sights. It's not the ears, it's not the sounds. In fact," he says, "it's the craving and clinging that arises there that fetters."

This is really good news. Sometimes—I don't know if this ever arises for you—but sometimes a practitioner will get the notion that, "Oh, I'm not supposed to see, hear, taste, or touch anything." Venerable Sāriputta is saying no, it's okay for you to be a human and live a human life, to have these sense experiences. And the thing to see, the thing to become intimate with is: is there a relationship of craving and clinging relative to these senses? If so, binding, fettering. And these, of course, stand in contrast to these liberating pleasures or liberating forms of happiness that we talked about a minute ago. This bliss of blamelessness doesn't tend toward generating craving and clinging. The mind is in a wholesome state, doesn't tend to develop that relationship. Same with the pleasures of a collected mind and the happiness of letting go, moving in the opposite direction.

So a simple question, a simple heuristic as you're going through your practice of mindfulness and discernment relative to joys, just as relative to dukkha, relative to suffering and stress: What is it here that's arisen? What is this experience, and what's my relationship to it? Is there clinging here, or is there freedom? You can let that be information.

I find a lot of inspiration when I ask myself, "Oh, just how far can this go? How far does this go?" Which is a little dance step to me thinking about practitioners and their qualities. There's this book written by Douglas Abrams called The Book of Joy. If you haven't seen it, lovely cover, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama smiling. I think somewhere, maybe on the back cover, they're dancing. They're dancing together, just fabulous. And the one thing that really stuck out to me about Douglas Abrams' comments about being a part of these conversations was how much the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop laugh. They laugh. Someone like the Dalai Lama, who has known such profound difficulty, and the Archbishop, and still this joy, this laughter. I find that so encouraging. I hear the same thing about Suzuki Roshi, who was the Zen teacher that founded the Zen Center. If you ever read transcripts of Suzuki Roshi's talks, he'll get halfway through a sentence and he'll laugh. I just love it. There's a levity. There's a levity along with this intimacy with suffering and stress, there are these beautiful, joyful heart qualities in these folks that have dedicated their lives to practice in their own way.

So just as dukkha is conditioned, so too is joy. And this opens a doorway for us, this opens a possibility in our practice that we can, through our observation and discernment, start to recognize or deepen our recognition: how did this come to be? Not always an intellectual exercise, though that reflective exercise is helpful, but even on our meditation cushion, just abiding there with the body and the breathing as suffering and stress arises and passes away, as joy arises and joy passes away. And through keeping a contact as continuous as we can, even if the mind doesn't recognize, "Oh, this is how dukkha was constructed, this is how joy was constructed," the heart knows something. The heart has watched it happen. One of my teachers really likes to remind me that maybe even more than three-quarters of communication happens non-verbally through the body. I haven't seen this anywhere, but I like to apply that principle to mindfulness practice. Maybe three-quarters of what we learn isn't through intellectual understanding, but something, even if we don't hear it or think it, something is recognized.

One more encouragement and then maybe a story. And that encouragement is something about holding joy and dukkha, joy and stress close to one another, recognizing that they can be aspects of one experience. What this opens up for me is that it's not necessarily like there's an on-off switch. "Oh, it's just going to be 100% dukkha," "Oh, it's just going to be 100% joy." But in fact, there can be this mixture. And actually, I can influence this process. There can be these little moments of wholesome qualities, little moments of mindfulness, tiny moments of discernment, tiny moments of recognizing, "Oh, this is well-being," just a moment. And just like in the Dhammapada^[6], drop by drop the jar gets filled. Developing our full understanding of dukkha and just filling our bodies and hearts hopefully over time in this direction, so we'll be dancing like the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop.

So a story to close. This is from the Udāna^[7]. In the time of the Buddha, there's a monk, Venerable Bhaddiya, a former king who became a monk. And he's been practicing the Dharma as he does, going on alms round, and then he'll finish his alms round and do his—love this phrase—his day's abiding, his day's meditation at the root of a tree. And the other monks nearby overhear the Venerable Bhaddiya in his meditation exclaiming, "What bliss, what bliss!" And the monks think in their compassionate hearts and their wish for well-being, "Uh-oh, the former king is thinking about the joys of kingship. I think he might be about to run away from the training. We had better go tell the Buddha." Such compassionate ones, good friends in the Dharma. So they report this to the Buddha, and the Buddha invites Bhaddiya to visit. Oh, the other way, Venerable Bhaddiya goes to the Blessed One, to the Buddha. As he's sitting there, the Buddha doesn't assume anything. I love this too. He says, "Is it true, Bhaddiya, that on going to the wilderness, to the root of a tree... you repeatedly exclaim, 'What bliss, what bliss!'?" "Yes, Bhante^[8], yes." Doesn't assume anything, the Buddha. "What compelling reason do you have in mind? Like, why are you doing that? When you go to the wilderness, when you go into meditation, why is it that you repeatedly exclaim, 'What bliss, what bliss!'?" And the Venerable Bhaddiya gives his answer. He says, "Before, when I was a king, maintaining the bliss of kingship, every luxury, I had guards posted inside the royal apartment, outside the royal apartment, inside the city, outside the city. Just layers of guards. And I dwelled in fear, agitated, distrustful, and afraid. But now, when I go to the wilderness, when I go and do my day's abiding, my day's meditation, I dwell without fear. I dwell without fear, unagitated, confident, unafraid, unconcerned, unruffled, living on the gifts of others, with my mind like a wild deer." Which sounds very pleasant.

So joy in the First Noble Truth. In sum, our path, our practice of mindfulness and discernment, of comprehending fully suffering and stress, practicing with that, I'll say it will not be without its joys. And our path of joy and well-being, it will not be without its stresses. So may it be at those times of joy, and in those times of stress, and those times when it's very clearly a mix, may these practices of mindfulness and discernment support this onward leading path toward a full understanding of dukkha, and complete freedom for ourselves and for all beings without exception.

Q&A

Wonderful. So we have just a few minutes if there are any questions. Does that seem like that will work?

Questioner 1: It's on? Okay. Hello, thank you for your talk and the meditation. My question comes in... I love this sense of the suffering and the joy being present at the same time. I feel that's true in my experience and resonates very well. This opening or the release that allows you maybe to shift towards feeling joy more fully and a little bit less compounding of the suffering... I guess the question becomes, how do you remember? How do you remember that, "Oh, this knee is caught right now, let me release that knee," or, "Oh, there's somewhere else that I'm unaware of that I'm holding"? Even as I speak this question, I feel mostly released but a little bit of energy that I'm the center of attention of the question.

Kodo Conlin: Sure, thank you for the question. I imagine this resonates for many of us. It's mysterious, isn't it, remembering? We can ask a similar question when we're practicing meditation and the mind moves into a distraction. How is it that all of a sudden there's a moment of recognition? It's not like we put it there, we didn't put the recognition there. For me, I think there's comfort and confidence in knowing that we can trust our intention for the practice. As I said, that principle of maybe 75%—I'm making that number up—of communication being non-verbal, I think we can trust our sense that we have invested something in the practice, and the body and the mind know, and that intention will manifest in the moment of stress and you'll see, "Oh, there it is." And this begins to mature or deepens through repeated practice. This phrase I kept using of the heart growing wise—it's almost like the system or the heart begins to recognize sooner that it's in a bind or a stress or a tension or something. Sometimes begins to recognize sooner, and then through trial and error, skillfulness in releasing grows.

So for me, the question is how to keep supporting that intention, and then it will work on us. How to support that intention? I think there are all sorts of ways we do this: consistency in the practice, good Dharma friends, good reminders, a sticky note. Personally, I get a lot of support from the practice being regular. So if it shows up in my day at a certain time, it's like all of the forces of the mind and heart coalesce and we're doing this, we're doing this practice. And something about doing it at the same time of day builds it into the system, and that really helps the intention. And then, of course, there are explicit ways that you can do this. You can write about your intention. Friends of mine who practice, at the beginning of a sit and at the end of a sit, will give one sentence of their intention for practice just to remind themselves and let that guide. Those are some ideas.

Questioner 1: Thank you.

Kodo Conlin: Sure. Maybe time for one more? Great, hold it like a rock star.

Questioner 2: So you were talking about anger kind of like saying no thank you to mindfulness, right? And so a question is like, when you have that feeling of anger, it's often hard to control yourself because you're just really upset. It's a really hard tool in that moment. So how are you able to control that and just bring it back and just kind of lower it to, "Okay, I'm upset," but to the level where you can use mindfulness in order to just recognize that dukkha and the joy that comes along with it?

Kodo Conlin: Wow, fabulous. Thank you for the question. What's your name?

Aviv: Aviv.

Kodo Conlin: Aviv, Kodo, nice to meet you. Two things come to my mind... well, three things. One is like this upwelling of appreciation for the question. That is a difficult thing to develop that skill, maybe we'll call it impulse control, where the compulsion from anger is so intense, or can be so intense, and it almost comes along with like this promise of yumminess, almost, "Oh, if I act this out, this is going to feel really good." There's something that balances that, and that is actually recognizing after the impulse has made its way out—say I've acted on anger—the balance to the yum is actually recognizing how it hurts. How it hurts someone else and how it hurts you. And paying attention to that is very, very skillful training of the mind and heart, because you have more data. And like I said, the heart starts to grow wise: "Oh, if I take this yummy feeling step by expressing my anger, oh look, I've actually hurt someone, and I can feel how that's hurt." That's one approach.

And then there are sort of practical things that we can do to support impulse control. One thing is just like over time practicing it, but I'm certain whatever you can do—and maybe you have some ideas about this—whatever you can do to slow down the momentum. If the impulse is there, if the anger is coming up and really wants to express itself in some kind of way that may harm someone, what can I do to slow down the process? Classically, one of the approaches is to feel the anger in the body, feel its heat, and sort of let it radiate out. When you're doing that, you're not harming anyone, you're not suppressing it or pushing it away or saying, "Oh, I'm not angry," but you're also not causing harm. Something that I like to do when I feel that impulse, I take my—oh, this is a Gil^[9] phrase—I take my anger for a walk. I let the body move because often—this will be the last thing that I say—the body gets charged with it, and the charge is reinforced by all the chemical changes that happen through anger, and it needs a way to move through the system. So I take my anger for a walk, do a little stretching, do a sprint, or occasionally I'll go into my room and I'll grunt. I'm not grunting at anyone, but I'll make like a [Grunt], and that seems to really help.

Aviv: So basically, try to just like feel that anger, the heat, without really doing anything and just let it slowly radiate out until the anger is out enough that you can just then... that you have done enough impulse control that allows you to be able to like recognize the upsetness?

Kodo Conlin: Well said. And as you reflected it back, I realize there's one more point, and I know we're a minute over, but it feels important to say. Anger, one way to relate to it, it's really good information. This can mean that something important has just happened, or like something's happening that actually my body is signaling that I or someone else is in danger. And the information that you receive once you have sort of processed anger in the way we're talking about so far, then you can take a wiser mind that's not under the influence of that emotion as much, and actually discern: is there harm here? Is there something I should do about this that I can do skillfully that won't harm another, won't harm me, and can keep us all safe? How's that sound to you, Aviv?

Aviv: Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you very much.

Kodo Conlin: Great. We've come to the end of our time. Again, my appreciation for you and your practice and your kind attention. I am full of joy, and I hope you enjoy your Sunday. We'll see each other again soon.