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Working with Fear in a Fearsome Time: Lessons from the Bhayabherava Sutta

Well, it's really nice to be here with all of you. I would like to start the way I usually start my teachings with Ocean Mind Sangha, by doing a short dedication. So, I'm going to share that with you. This is a short excerpt from Samantabhadra's King of Prayers^[1]:

May we purify an ocean of worlds. May we free an ocean of beings. May we see an ocean of dharma. May we realize an ocean of wisdom. May we purify an ocean of activities. May we fulfill an ocean of aspirations. May we make offerings to an ocean of Buddhas. May we practice without discouragement for an ocean of eons.

That last one especially. May we practice without discouragement for an ocean of eons.

Introduction and Meditation

I would like to begin the morning with a little bit of meditation. As you might know, in the Zen tradition, we do a lot of silent sitting. We like our silence and we like what becomes possible within it. And so I would like to begin our time together by sharing a little bit of silence so that we can really arrive at this place, this moment in time, so that we can be present in our bodies, to our minds, and to this community of practitioners that has coalesced just by virtue of us being here today.

In that spirit, if you are able to turn on your camera, I would encourage you to do that so that we can really be together and open ourselves to the profound teachings of the Buddha Dharma, so that we can be receptive to hearing them. This is really such an important aspect of practice, to ready oneself to receive the teachings, to hear the dharma. I think it's important always, but particularly important when we gather virtually like this, because it's just easier to get distracted, so we have to work a little bit harder or a little bit differently to be present, attentive, receptive, and hopefully responsive.

The Vajrayana^[2] teacher Patrul Rinpoche said that when listening to the dharma, or when reading the dharma, when in the presence of dharma, we should apply the three supreme methods.

And so before we begin, we give rise to bodhicitta^[3], the aspiration for enlightenment. We deliberately prepare our mind and our body to receive the dharma and remind ourselves of why we're doing it. We have set aside this time, which is not nothing. It's a good bit of time in this day, morning, afternoon, or perhaps evening for some of you, that we have decided to turn to the teachings, and we did that for a reason. So this first method is to give rise to bodhicitta, the aspiration to awaken for our own sake and for the sake of everyone.

The second method is to give ourselves wholeheartedly to the practice as we do it. When we're listening, we just listen. When we're sitting, we just sit. When we're speaking, we just speak in the moment, instead of planning what we're going to say next. And this isn't easy to do in any group. There are always group dynamics. There are the people who are very comfortable speaking up, and there are people who are a bit more shy. In any group, what makes a gathering work is all of us being able to hear each other's voices. I encourage you to share if you would like to do that. If you're a little bit more shy, you can use the chat, but to bring yourself to this time.

Many years ago, I had just arrived at the monastery where I trained and I was kind of shy, but most importantly, I didn't want to seem stupid. I didn't want to look like I didn't know what was going on. But of course I didn't know what was going on. I was completely new. How could I know what was going on? But I didn't want to look uncertain in front of my teacher. And so at first I just wouldn't go to see him in what we call face-to-face teaching—the daisan and dokusan^[4], the private interviews we have with our teachers. I just wouldn't go, until finally the attendant came to get me and said, "The abbot really wants to see you."

So I went in there, and he knew a little bit about me at that point, so he decided to use a sports metaphor. He used to call me a jock affectionately, and he was trying to connect with me. He said, "Vanessa, this is like a tennis game. If you don't throw the ball, if you don't hit the ball, I have nothing to hit back." In other words, this is a relationship. We're doing this together. As I reflected about it afterwards, I realized that what was stopping me was an image of me that I wanted to maintain, and that was directly preventing me from doing what I had said I wanted to do: which was to study so that I could wake up, so that I could be and stay awake. I thought, I don't want to miss this chance. And I began to fumble my way through what it meant to actually be a student, what it meant to not know, and to come to my teacher and say, "I don't know," and then for him to be able to guide me.

So this is really the second method. And in a context like this, a virtual context, I would encourage you to, if you haven't done so already, turn off your desktop notifications, put away your phone, really give yourself permission and the gift of being present. Let people in your household know for the next few hours, you're meeting the dharma. Have an appointment with the Buddha, as one teacher said, and with the dharma, and with the sangha. The second supreme method ensures that we don't have any room for regret, because regardless of the results of our practice, while we're doing it, we just do it without any other concern.

There's that famous passage in the Vimalakirti Sutra^[5] which I really love, in which Sariputra^[6] comes into this tiny room. It's completely empty except for the bed where Vimalakirti is lying, and there's all these thousands upon thousands of bodhisattvas that magically come into the space to meet the great enlightened lay teacher. Sariputra is looking around and thinking, Where is everybody going to sit? Vimalakirti reads his mind and says, "Sariputra, did you come here for the dharma, or did you come here for a chair?" And Sariputra is brought back to himself. "No, of course I came for the dharma." And then there's a very well-known, profound dialogue. He lists all the reasons that one might come to the dharma: to be a good practitioner, to practice compassion or the precepts, to realize emptiness. For all the many reasons he says, "This is not it, this is not it, this is not it. You come for the dharma just for the sake of the dharma." That's the second supreme method.

And the third is to end well, to offer the merits of our practice. You can think of merit as karma. I think of it really as the energy, the goodness that is created when we come together like this. Good actions, good words, good thoughts, good understanding, good practice—and we extend it in all directions so that others can benefit too, others who were not able to be here, who chose otherwise.

So we'll begin by raising the bodhicitta mind, and for this I like to use Nagarjuna's prayer:

Wherever precious bodhicitta has not arisen, may it bloom. Where it has arisen, may it not fade, but increasingly flourish.

And so now we'll sit for about 20 minutes. I will start the period with three bells and I will end with two. It will be a silent meditation. I won't guide you through it. I encourage you to let your breath be your anchor. It is really what keeps you staked, you could say, to this moment. You can count your breath, you can follow your breath, you can be the breath. The point is to let all of your attention, all of your awareness just rest on the simple physical act of breathing.

To get us started on this work we're doing today, I'm going to also introduce a question. The question is: What is your strength, or strengths? So once your mind is quiet enough, you feel that it's stable, you just drop that question in like dropping a pebble into a body of water. What is my strength? Okay.

[Silent Meditation]

One of the gifts of zazen^[7]—seated meditation—I find, besides the gift of silence which I think is increasingly rare, is that it teaches you how to be with something. How to be with a question, how to be with a situation in your life, and how to hold that with your whole body and mind. Part of what we're going to see this morning is that fear arises. It is first a physiological response, but what happens is we very quickly move up right to our heads. We get caught in thought loops which move very fast. I once had someone tell me that the body moves seven times slower than the mind. I'm not really sure where she got the number from, but I could intuitively sense yes, the body moves a lot slower than the mind.

And so what meditation does, and certainly Zen meditation, is it teaches you when you are holding something in mind—like the question that I offered you, What is my strength?—that you do that with your whole being. You're not trying to figure it out. You're not trying to come up with an answer. As Einstein said, "If somebody gave me a problem and gave me an hour to solve it, I would spend 55 minutes clarifying the question and five minutes on the answer." And in fact, the moment you fully get the question, you don't even have to worry about the answer. The answer is right there because they're not separate.

When we want to use our meditation to address something that is going on in our minds, the way that we would do that is, as I described, like dropping a pebble into a lake. And because the lake is still—or that's what you're trying to allow it to be—you can see the pebble touch the bottom. There's a bubble, it hits something, and you can see it. You don't miss it. So using the breath as the anchor, that's really the muscle of concentration. You're bringing yourself back. But then insight really comes from what we do with that concentration.

The Value of This Precious Human Life

When I think of the time that we find ourselves in... I mean, the world has always had its challenges. Human beings have always had challenges. And so, in that sense, this time is no different. But I think there's something about now that is different. Besides, of course, the scope of our power—the effects of our actions and the consequences of our actions are much more far-reaching now.

But there's something else, and I guess "entitlement" is really the best word. I think we take so much for granted. We so often assume that tomorrow will be the same as today, that what we have now we will have tomorrow. We will have next week, we will have next year. And I think we all do this to some extent. But when those who hold that view have great power, then the consequences of such a view become more poignant.

And so certainly Buddhism, but really any religious tradition that has a contemplative component, is really trying to make space to see, to highlight the importance, the reverence, the sacredness of even the most mundane moments. If we really saw that, we would care for the world. We would care for one another. We would care for ourselves, for our bodies, for our minds very differently.

I've always appreciated Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching on celebrating a non-toothache. That's really what he was saying. Don't take for granted the fact that nothing hurts right now. Celebrate it. Be grateful for it. Anything from a non-toothache to this precious human life. It is so incredibly auspicious that we have been born human, that we have somehow encountered the dharma, and that we have the ability, the space, the resources, and the inclination to practice it.

One of my favorite stories in the lore of Buddhism is that of the one-eyed turtle. In the Lotus Sutra, it says that to be here doing this is as rare as a blind turtle finding a log with a perfect hole floating in the middle of the ocean. She comes up from the bottom of the ocean every hundred years to find a log to swim through and lodge herself in to cool her belly and warm her back in the sun. The likelihood that she will find that log, and that she and the log will coincide—this now is just as rare.

The early suttas and the Chinese agamas say that it's a blind turtle. Nichiren, the founder of Nichiren Buddhism, has an even better version of the story. In his version, it's a one-eyed turtle. She has a little bit more of a chance, but apparently she doesn't have limbs, and she lives at the bottom of the ocean that is 80,000 yojanas^[8] deep. 80,000 yojanas is roughly 400,000 miles. That's how deep that ocean is. And once every thousand thousand years the turtle comes up to the surface because her belly is as hot as heated iron and her shell is as cold as the snow mountains. And she's looking for a red sandalwood log. Red sandalwood is a sacred tree. And it must have a hole that's just the right size for her to swim through, climb up, and wedge herself in it to cool her belly and warm her freezing back.

Of course, the chances of her finding any log are very, very slim. They're even slimmer that she'll find it with the right size. And then there's the wind, the waves, her one eye, and no limbs. Nichiren really understood the power of a good story and he used them in his own life to great effect.

So this happening now is as rare, to not take it for granted, to realize how miraculous it is. I think about this often. Not just the fact that conditions have been such in my life that I was able to encounter the dharma pretty young—I was about 18—and that I was interested. But what I think about so much is that my mind works enough that I'm able to even consider these questions. Not only that, I'm not in a war-torn country. I'm not living hand-to-mouth. I'm not being persecuted for my beliefs. Not only that, but my mind is still together enough that I can be sitting here speaking like this with you. I don't take that for granted for a moment because one day it might not be. I don't know what I will do then, but I want to think that I'll find a way.

To have this precious human life, and to have the dharma, and to have these profound teachings... My training was really in Zen. I studied in a Zen monastery for many years. My home, you could say, is Buddhism, and the living room is Zen. That's where I'm most comfortable, particularly because of zazen, because of meditation. But over time I have cultivated a great appreciation and respect for all the many teachings of Buddhism, and by extension all the many teachings of the contemplative traditions that help us to be clearer about who we are.

This is really what we're trying to do. And it's not just an interesting exercise. Buddhism is trying to show us how to see ourselves, how to see the world, and hopefully because of it, be kinder. I sometimes say to my sangha, "Just be decent human beings. We don't have to be heroic. Just decent human beings, and decent human beings to this great earth which is our home." We're not doing such a great job with that.

In my own practice life, I grew steeped in the teachings of Zen, Mahayana Buddhism^[9], the sutras, koan study, and shikantaza—just sitting. But over time I became really interested in the early teachings of Buddhism, particularly the Pali Canon, because I had never encountered a more thorough, more precise study of the human mind. Zen is very direct. It just cuts right through. Koan study is really designed to cut through the intellect to bring about spontaneous insight, and that is its strength. But the suttas—there is no state of mind, no state of being, no emotion that someone hasn't identified, cataloged, and given you at least five ways to work with. It's really an astonishing body of work, and largely very, very consistent. I often turn to the early suttas for guidance whenever I'm wondering what to do, how to be with a difficult emotion, or with a confusing state of mind. I turn to the suttas for instructions on living, on being.

Lessons from the Bhayabherava Sutta

And so today I chose the Bhayabherava Sutta^[10], the sutta on fear and dread, to speak about working with fear at a time where that is very present for many of us. I am not going to do an analytical reading of the text because I think there are many teachers who are more qualified to do this. I want to use it as a springboard to explore how to work with fear and dread at a time when this might be very present for us.

Although this time presents very specific challenges—the fact that we can know what is happening everywhere all the time—our bodies are not wired to process that. Before, if you wanted news about what was happening in the next village, you had to travel. It would be months, sometimes years, before they would hear anything about what was happening in other parts of the world. The Odyssey being one of the famous tales of this. But now, with the push of a button, you can see what is happening anywhere. And of course, a lot of it is not good because that's what sells. That's what gets people's attention, and we're not built to be constantly imbibing that kind of nutrient. Remember that in the Satipatthana Sutta^[11], the discourse on the foundations of mindfulness, one of the meditations is on nutrient—to be very conscious of what it is that we're taking in as food. And a lot of what we take in does not nourish us.

Let's assume that a sutta like this, and certainly a meditation practice, presents us with two questions generally speaking: What is going on inside me? (What am I feeling? What's happening?) and What do I do about it? When I think of turning to meditation as refuge, that's what I think of. It's not that we're hiding from life or escaping from the world. Quite the contrary. We're coming closer to it on our seats, on our cushions, so that when we step off the cushion, we can live more clearly, more skillfully.

In this sutta, there's a conversation between a Brahman, Janussoni, and the Buddha. Janussoni was a wealthy householder who often appears in the suttas asking philosophical or ethical questions. He comes to the Buddha and says, "When disciples leave home, when they enter the life of homelessness into the monastic sangha, do they follow the example of Master Gautama? Do they do what you do?"

The Buddha says, "Yes, they do."

Then Janussoni says, "But it seems to me that if they were to retreat to the jungle to practice seclusion, as you do, this would be hard for these monks. You would think that going to these places would rob the monks of their minds if they have no concentration."

I really love how that is phrased because I think it so aptly describes what happens when we're in the throes of fear and dread. We're robbed of our minds by what is a very strong emotion. To distinguish slightly: fear is immediate. There's an immediate threat, an immediate danger, whether it's real or perceived as real. There's a physiological response, fight or flight, as a defense mechanism. There's nothing wrong with fear or being afraid. Dread involves the future. It involves anticipation. There's this perceived sense of an impending consequence or event, and the worry and weight of that thought about the future. Of course that robs us of our mind, of our tranquility, of our peace.

Janussoni is referring specifically to the practice of retreat, of being alone in the forest or jungle, as monastics did and still do. There were real threats and dangers from animals and bands of robbers. But if we extrapolate that to any situation that causes us to be afraid, it robs us of our minds and our tranquility.

The Buddha says, "Yes, you're right. I also thought about that when I was an unenlightened bodhisattva. But then I thought this will only be true—fear will only rob a practitioner of their mind—when they have unpurified bodily, verbal, or mental conduct. When they're already ill at ease."

It's a very interesting teaching because he's essentially saying: if your karma is such that you are acting in ways that are harmful and unskillful, and then you feel afraid, this will rob you of your mind. But if that's not the case, if your actions are aligned with the dharma, aligned with the precepts, and aligned with what brings about the end of suffering, then you will not be robbed of your mind.

Q&A and Reflections on Fear and Practice

Let me stop here for a second and ask you, what do you think of this? What do you think of what the Buddha is saying? He's essentially saying live in a way that is ethical and then fear will not rob you of your mind. How do you hear that? Is that true? Is that your experience?

Participant: "It feels like blame to me. Like the Buddha is saying you don't have your act together and that's why you're afraid. That if you are having fear, it's because you're living unethically in other areas of your life, you're not following the precepts well enough."

Zuisei: So there's a sense of blame, a sense of your own worthiness perhaps being questioned. We are dealing with a translation by Bhikkhu Bodhi, and I certainly trust his discernment. But there is something that feels like, wait, what is the Buddha saying? I suspect he wouldn't want his students to feel blamed or lessened in some way. But the fact that some of us might hear it that way is valid.

Participant: "Through my life, every time I did anything wrong, I always felt bad. I felt guilty. I became fearful of the consequences. Now when I was living truly ethically, I was happy. When I acted in an unwholesome way, fear did accompany it. And it actually played out. I don't think I ever got away with anything. There's always a consequence."

Participant: "For me, fear doesn't always come to a place where I've done something wrong. Sometimes the fear is a projection into the future. It feels real. Therefore, meditation and dharma make me review that, unpeel it, see where that fear is coming from, and then I can potentially address it, which gives space for that particular fear."

Zuisei: Yes. And I think you're touching on what I believe the Buddha might be pointing to here. When the mind is unsettled as a consequence of having acted in a harmful or unskillful way, the mind gets muddied. So fear has a quicker way in. Because what he follows with is a list of good qualities, and then the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt. They all have images for a mind that's muddied. So I think he's saying, let your base be firm. When the water is clear, fear might come in and you might in fact be afraid, but it won't rob you of your calm in the same way.

Participant: "There's fear from some ethical violation you realize later and the consequences, and very clearly there's a tie between 'I'm stressed about this thing I did' and 'therefore I feel fear.' The causal chain there seems easy to perceive. But if you think about a lion or a robber who's coming at you and you feel fear from that, it seems pretty difficult in the moment to connect that to doing something wrong. I get the point about if your mind is settled you won't be robbed, but I think it's hard to experientially get that teaching in that kind of example."

Zuisei: Generally the expectation would be if a tiger is chasing you, you run. You don't stop to think, Did I break the precept last week? But this is an investigation. Janussoni is asking him a question that in one sense is hypothetical. He's saying these monks are going to be sitting there by themselves in the jungle. I'm going to be sitting in my apartment opening up the newspaper or looking at social media, and fear or dread arises in me. And the Buddha is saying: when you're calmer, as we are now, study what happens in that moment. Could you experience the fear differently?

Some of you know this mantra from Dune: "Fear is the mind-killer. I will face my fear. I will let it pass through me." What's interesting is the wording: "Fear is the mind-killer." I will face my fear, and as I do that, it will pass through me, which is a quintessential Buddhist practice. It never says I won't feel afraid, or I'm ashamed of being afraid. Fear is a very natural response. But we die a little death in the grip of our fear and dread, and what happens is we tend to then act unskillfully some more.

In another sutta, the Buddha speaks of hiri and ottappa^[12]—shame and fear of wrongdoing. Ottappa is external: I did something wrong and now I'm afraid of the consequences. Hiri (shame) is that gap that I feel when I know I could have acted well, but I didn't. The sutras call it a loss of honor. The Buddha calls these two the bright guardians of the world. Not because he wants us to feel ashamed, but because in that moment we feel that gap, we realize, Oh, I just tore the fabric of the universe, which is whole and harmonious. When we do something that tears that fabric, we feel it. It hurts, unless we don't have the capacity to feel that emotion, which is a different problem.

Participant: "I'm having difficulty understanding the connection between 'because I did something, there's fear.' Let's say there's a robber who's going to attack you, and there's a fear. You may not take action. The fear that you feel is real. I don't understand how to connect what you're saying to those kinds of situations."

Zuisei: What the Buddha is saying is that fear will arise in certain situations very naturally, and if I have laid the ground through my own actions, then what will happen in that situation will be different. I will be able to maintain a clarity of mind that will help me respond to the situation. If, on top of already being in a dangerous situation, I don't have that clarity of mind, I will be doubly lost. The sutta is not denying there will be situations where the natural response will be fear and we might respond unskillfully just trying to stay alive. The sutta is speaking about the mental component of fear and dread. The Buddha is saying there's something you can do now to protect your mind so that when fear arises, you can meet it more skillfully.

Participant: "Yeah, it's the preparation, the foundation, that all the work we're putting in is going to come in when we need it in that situation."

Zuisei: Exactly. We spend a lot of energy in fear. When we think about things we're facing as humanity—climate change, AI, rising nationalism, xenophobia—there are real forces operating in our world now that naturally might give rise to fear and dread. The point of studying a teaching like this is to train the mind to see what is a skillful response. Every time we reinforce a thought with anxiety and fearful anticipation, we make it that much more likely that the thought will arise again. It is very much like watering a seed. You water it every day, the seed keeps growing. You let it dry out, and at some point the seed dies. Every time we nurture fear by the way we use our minds, we make it more likely that fear will arise.

The Buddha says, "When I guard the three karma doors of body, speech, and thought, then I am more likely that when fear arises, I am able to see it for what it is and to let it pass when it passes."

Many years ago, I was driving on a busy road with my partner. We noticed a young man in front of us at the wheel who seemed to be having trouble, falling asleep. He would go, stop, and all these cars were behind him. I got afraid. My partner said, "Drive in front of him and park so we stop and see what's happening." My family has a long history of addiction, and I was in situations that were just not very comfortable. I did not want to enter a situation like that again. I was afraid, so I didn't do it. My partner called 911 and described the scene. We kept driving.

I felt so sad afterwards that I let my fear get in the way of responding in a situation that perhaps could have saved other people. I saw why I responded the way I did, and I thought, I really would like to do this differently given the chance. The universe responded. The very next week, we were at the movies, and a guy in the row in front of us suddenly slumped over. His partner freaked out and started screaming. I was out of my seat and in the next row before she had even finished screaming because I know CPR. The guy had just fallen asleep; he was fine. But I responded because I promised myself I never want to let my fear hold me back like that in a situation where I would want to respond.

The Buddha goes through the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt. He uses similes for each:

• Lust or sensual desire is like water mixed with dye or paint; you can't see through it.
• Ill will and anger are like boiling water; with all that froth, you can't see through it.
• Sloth and torpor are like algae covering the surface of a stagnant lake.
• Restlessness and worry are like choppy waves roiled by wind and rain.
• Doubt is like muddy, turbid water sitting in a dark place.

He's not equating any of these with fear itself. He's saying: in order to train your mind to not be so susceptible to fear, work with these five hindrances so your mind will be clear. Vajrayana Buddhists say outright that all of practice is to train us for dying, so that in that moment when we might be afraid, we can keep our minds.

A fellow teacher told me a story about how he writes down all the good things he has done in his life. He wants to be able to remember the goodness he's brought to the world at the moment of his death, if he starts to be afraid. One day he was on a plane with horrible turbulence—the plane was shaking, suitcases were falling out, people were screaming. He thought, This is it. He tried to focus and bring up the things he had done in his life, and his mind was completely blank. The plane landed, he got to his hotel, sat down, and made a list that he now always carries with him and periodically recites. He wants this to be uppermost in his mind so that in the moment he is most afraid, he has something to turn to.

This brings us to the question I asked you to sit with: What is my strength? What are the things you have to draw on in a moment when fear robs you of your mind?

[Five Minute Break]

Participant: "I'd rather be in a serene forest meditating than in modern society. When you gave your experience about the car accident, you meditated on it and contemplated on that situation. Your reactions were different the next day because you took time to reflect. Also, you asked about our strength. I would say attention. But a strength is always going to come with impermanence. Even if my strength is attention now, I know it's my weakness as well because it's not always there and I can't count on it."

Zuisei: What the Buddha is saying is that attention will soften the power of fear. The more I train my mind, the more space and capacity I have to respond to an unexpected situation. One who trains their mind has more tools to work with. Sometimes a student will say, "I am racked with anxiety." I ask them to describe their day, and it's full of reading the news, talking about what's going on, endless activity. I ask, "Are you sitting? Are you spending some time being quiet?" They might say they do a few minutes at night. I suggest starting the day with that so the first thing put into the mind is not the news.

We draw very strong lines between practice and the rest of our lives. We don't realize that everything we do is either nurturing that fear and dread or helping to quiet it down. We build more supportive habits. One teacher thinks the mention of the five hindrances in the sutta is redundant. I actually feel they're very helpful, because I hear the Buddha saying: When you sit, protect your mind. If you're feeling restless, work with yourself. A big part of practice is learning to work with our own wily minds.

Dipa Ma, the Indian lay teacher, had students who would say, "I don't have time to meditate." She said, "You have time to pay attention to three breaths. Then you have time to meditate. Pay attention now. And you pay attention now. And you pay attention now."

Participant: "Living in controlling religious situations or cults, children and girls are often told to control their emotions and be responsible for other people's comfort. You are told you are to blame if you are uncomfortable. I think that is a particular problem for women that doesn't get directly addressed in Buddhism. But the fact that you are responsible for your feelings also means you have some ability to affect them. It gives you enormous power because when we don't see it, we continue responding and acting out of it anyway, but we aren't aware of what we are holding."

Zuisei: Whenever I have doubts about a teaching's intention regarding blame, I remind myself of what the Buddha said: "I only teach suffering and the end of suffering. That's it." The Buddha is saying you have a choice. There are many things that are not in your control, things that happen to us that we did not choose. But we can choose how to respond to that which happens to us. That is what practice is.

In the sutta, the Buddha imagines himself in scary jungle places where ghosts were thought to live. He notices he's feeling fear, but then he asks, Why am I expecting the fear? He makes a clear distinction: there is something that happens, and then there's what I do. He decides: If I'm feeling afraid when I'm standing, I won't sit, walk, or lie down. I will just remain standing. Instead of running away, he remains for a moment to see what is there, facing the fear and letting it pass through him.

Pema Chödrön told a story of sitting up with a friend in retreat who was facing difficult memories. She just held her hand throughout the night and kept saying, "Stay." Sometimes we need a noble friend. It's too much to do it on our own.

The Buddha says, Let me be with the fear. In Zen, we say: Be the fear. Become the fear. What does that mean?

Participant: "Is it about really feeling it as a weather pattern in the body? Letting these energies move around without saying 'I'm afraid.' Just staying with the heart racing or the rising energy."

Zuisei: Remember the Sallatha Sutta^[13], about the arrow. The Buddha said all beings experience an arrow of pain, but those who are not awakened take a second arrow and pierce themselves with it by lamenting and suffering. Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. The gap between the two is where practice becomes possible. You don't have to follow the fear with the arrow of suffering. You close that gap and let fear be fear by embodying it completely. You get out of the way by letting go of the thought that creates the gap. "I'm afraid" is not the same as the fear itself; it's the processing of the fear an instant later.

When I was the Zendo monitor at the monastery, sometimes people would cry during long retreats. We could tell the exact moment the sadness went from an authentic emotion to the moment the person thought, Oh, this is kind of nice, turning it into a concept and keeping it going. The self had come in and turned the emotion into a thing. The practice of being the fear is essentially closing that gap. If you don't fight it or try to enhance it, it will pass.

When my brother died, I was at the monastery doing a silent meditation retreat. I saw that grief comes in waves. If you can stay unmoving, the wave passes. One moment I would feel overwhelmed with sadness. The next instant I was thinking about potato chips. I saw the fickleness of the mind. Nothing has intrinsic existence; fear has no substance. Evolutionarily, we have a negative bias. If we hear a rustle in the jungle and think "wind," but it's a tiger, we're dead. If we think "tiger" and it's the wind, we're alive. Training the mind is important because you need something to counter that evolutionary response.

So what are your strengths? What can you draw on when fear robs you of your mind? My teacher says, "Practice when it's easy, so you're more likely to do it when it's hard."

Participant: "When I start to feel anxiety, I just start letting go of the judgments. I focus on other things in the room. I count everything that is red or blue. My body still shakes, but I'm just the anxiety. I'm not the judgment around it."

Zuisei: That's the basis of somatic experiencing therapy. Peter Levine noticed that animals in trauma shake out their stress if they escape. We follow social mores and constrain ourselves. Somatic experiencing works through the body: Where do you feel this? What's the texture? What's the temperature? You move at the speed of your body instead of the speed of your mind. Taking a breath brings you to this moment because you can't take a breath for tomorrow. If you're fully with your breath, you're fully in your life.

Participant: "I find the image of tying yourself to the mast helpful. You let the waves come. You're not pretending you're going to swim smoothly. They'll batter you, but you'll survive and they will pass."

Participant: "My strength is love, and I would use metta (loving-kindness)."

Zuisei: The Karaniya Metta Sutta's origin story is fear. Five hundred monks went to retreat in a forest. Tree devas lived there, and out of respect they stayed out of the trees. But after a month, the devas wanted the monks to leave, so they transformed into evil spirits with horrible stenches and screams. The monks ran away to the Buddha in fear. The Buddha gave them the Karaniya Metta Sutta, an instructional manual for peace, and told them to go back. The monks chanted it, the devas were moved, the monks' fear was dispelled, and they all lived happily. The practice of loving-kindness protects from fear.

Participant: "Persistence. I'm a slow learner but I keep showing up."

Zuisei: Persistence is one of the greatest virtues in practice. If you want a tree to grow, you can't yank it up. You water it a little bit at a time. It will grow in its own time.

Participant: "I noticed my tendency is that anything I thought of, I immediately thought of the flip side. I can see that perfectionism in my reaction to the sutta—thinking we just have to be 'good enough.' Can perfectionism actually be one of the five hindrances?"

Zuisei: As a recovering perfectionist, I vote for that to be included in the hindrances! We speak in a dualistic framework of wholesome and unwholesome, but the Buddha is pointing to a state of mind that goes beyond that. It's not "good" as in "good enough," but a goodness that is all-encompassing. When wisdom, conduct, and concentration align, what you see is a place of no harm, no fear, utter safety. But nobody lives in the absolute permanently. We have to grapple with the relative. I know what my strengths are. I am a perfectionist, which means I can be very persistent and stubborn. I will just sit here until I see it. Take that and let it be your strength.

Participant: "How can fear be tied up with judgment? Like thinking 'those people are bad and stupid and will destroy civilization.'"

Zuisei: There are five gates of speech in Buddhism. Before speaking or thinking, ask: Is it true, beneficial, kind, necessary, and timely? Thinking "those people are stupid" might feel true, but is it beneficial? Does it help me take care of the situation? We need to call out harmful things, but I am disciplined about how I use my mind because I don't want my peace of mind robbed. I'm concerned about the world, so I choose to use my energy where it can make a difference.

Participant: "My strengths are openness and flexibility. Staying in 'don't know' mind and not believing everything I think. I don't have a lot of sudden moments of fear, but I deal with a constant, underlying feeling of dread—a feeling that I'm going to get what I don't want."

Zuisei: When do you feel that dread? First thing in the morning? That is the moment to apply your strength. We only ever feel fear now. Zen is very good at pointing that out. The moment you feel it arising is the moment to practice fear, to meet it, and counter it so you don't get swallowed by it.

Participant: "I try to locate it in my body, but it doesn't seem to be getting at it."

Zuisei: During a silent retreat, I was very hurt and angry about something. I was just stewing in it. I decided to be the anger. I felt it in my chest as burning and constriction. It was intolerable, so I'd escape into the story: "They did this, they shouldn't have..." I'd catch myself and return to the feeling. Little by little, I felt as if a trapdoor had opened under me. The thought came: I'm going to be okay. I meant I was fundamentally okay. The situation was painful, but fundamentally, I was okay. That's the place we want to return to. We try to get as close to the primal fear as we can, instead of running around on the surface trying to plug the dam, so we can realize we were always the water.

Participant: "If I wasn't afraid of something, I wasn't interested. I needed the challenge."

Zuisei: Fear is energy. If you take the energy of fear or anger and turn it into compassion or action, you use that energy to live and act, rather than just resigning yourself to it.

Participant: "Sometimes when I deal with fear and anxiety, I review it, but it still comes back like a pattern. Sometimes I just have to leave it and come back later because I've already settled it in my mind, but it stays engraved."

Zuisei: Working with mental formations (samskaras^[14]) involves noticing what you incline toward and nourishing the wholesome habits while letting the unwholesome ones dry out. Right effort is simple: if something unwholesome arises, drop it. If it hasn't arisen, don't cause it to. If something wholesome arises, nurture it. You take the action and check: How did that go? Your life will show you.

The Strength of Gratitude and Joy

I want to leave you with a powerful strength to work with fear and despair: gratitude.

We always have more than we think we've lost. If we give rise to that question in our mind, we see we still have so much. Practice gratitude and deliberate joy. Not to pretend everything is okay, but to counter our negativity bias. Turn to something simple each day just because it gives you joy: sitting with a dog on your lap, having a cup of tea, taking a walk. Make it low-hanging fruit, because the other work is hard.

A friend has a practice of remembering all the good things he has done. Once, during a difficult time, I devoted a long meditation period simply to listing out loud all the things I felt grateful for. By the end, I felt humbled and realized how much I still had.

Peace is the natural state of a unified, clear mind. Coming full circle to the sutta, the Buddha is saying: cultivate a mind and heart that is peaceful, that has no regrets. The natural, organic result is a mind at peace that, when confronted with fear, will know how to meet it and will not have its peace robbed.

Thank you for your presence and your attention. I would like to close by dedicating the merit:

May the merits of this practice and this teaching that we share together benefit all beings. And may that merit extend in all directions, in all times, in all ways.

Thank you.