This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Note on Teaching and Vulnerability

Welcome to you all. I've been getting a lot of nice questions and inquiries in the anonymous submission line. I wish I could say something to all of them, but I thought to just say a word before we sit about one that I wanted to speak to.

"Can you share some advice for dealing with the vulnerability hangover I imagine you experience after giving a dharma talk, especially after one of those talks where you speak right from the heart and cry? Those are my favorite, especially when you speak into the camera and then sign off afterward without the warm appreciation of an in-person audience."

I appreciate the question, and I don't know that this is advice exactly, but just to say, yeah, teaching is kind of wild. The inquiry gives me a chance just to say something about the experience of being seen and not being seen.

Vulnerability, you know, is sometimes a kind of code word for shame. I'm kind of a shame-prone individual, I think, temperamentally in a way. I'm careful about the context in which I teach because a dharma talk effectively needs to be requested. In monastic settings, there's a formal, ritualized manner in which a talk is requested. There's consent. I would feel shame and vulnerability if I were talking to people who didn't care about love. I do not go to dinner parties with ordinary civilians and talk about love and cry. That's not how I roll.

But if I feel like a sangha has actually given consent to enter the dharma field together, then I feel entirely unselfconscious. The experience of teaching is a kind of weird combination of deeply being seen and there being no one to see. So we can inquire whether we are in a kind of public role or not. But when the gaze falls upon you, what does it feel like gets seen? In one sense, you; in another sense, very much not you.

I don't think much at all about what has been revealed or seen. I'm more afraid of being misconstrued than of too much being seen. But what gets seen, what gets construed, what gets misconstrued—it's not really my business. In fact, what anyone makes of any of us is not really our business.

Sometimes we experience a vulnerability when our words say too much, when we have the sense we don't own them. We're training such that maybe we can say we are unembarrassed even by one's unconscious, unembarrassed by what exceeds our words, what leaks out. I have no doubt that some of you know aspects of me better than I know myself.

To be a self is to be shame-prone, and to be a self is to experience some measure of impostor syndrome. The deepest protection from those fears and that vulnerability, from impostor syndrome, from self-consciousness, is just to speak as best we can from true love.

So, let's sit together.

Guided Meditation: We don't choose to let go

Whatever ways in which it feels like we might be found out. We instead perceive the innocence of Paṭiccasamuppāda^[1]. The innocence of dependent arising, the innocence of causality, or what we call 'me'. Something is seeing, but someone is not. Lights on, doors and windows open. No one home. Mahasi Sayadaw^[2]. A subtle fear sponsoring greed and hate. How much can that be soothed? A kind of greed to attempt to solve our problems. A kind of greed to attempt to fix ourselves. A kind of aversion. Can we rest in the futurelessness of this moment? All right. We don't get to choose the end of our clinging, to put down greed and hatred. We see what happens to it in the space of awareness. Even though we know that some of our problems get fixed when we stop trying to fix them. Surrender is not bartering. And mindfulness is a moment-by-moment gesture of surrender. Then our Zen friends say zazen meditation is good for nothing. Perhaps this is what they mean.

Dharmette: Working with emotional pain

Oh my god, I was muted. [Laughter] That's really bad. Really bad. This deep into Zoom time. Okay, we regroup.

What matters to us is feeling, and what makes anything matter is feeling. When we suffer emotionally, we look for relief. We look to very naturally feel better. But often the choice in the throes of emotional difficulty is not a choice between feeling bad and feeling good. That's where our mind goes. It feels like there's some option to feel good. But the option is often between feeling bad in a looping, cyclical way and feeling bad in a useful, dharmic way.

The useful way of feeling I often experience is a kind of grieving. The way pain works its way through our system feels like grieving, even when we haven't lost something. As I have said over the years, the dharma is better at preventing fires than putting them out. Some pain is a kind of function of the karmic corners we've somehow backed our way into. Dharma cannot always put out the fire^[3]. We do our best. We bear it with as much grace as we can muster, understand the forces that led us into this corner, and we let the pain consolidate our motivation to live a life tethered to wisdom and love.

Our emotions are trying to tell us something important, but their wisdom is bound up with their delusion. If we take all of our emotion all the time entirely seriously, we'd be in big trouble. But on the other hand, if we don't heed the wisdom within our feeling—the intelligence of our emotions, as Martha Nussbaum^[4] said—we actually will never be able to put down the delusion, because some part of us knows there's a pearl in there. So, we have to keep listening.

To untangle the intelligence of our emotions from our delusion, we need to come into balance to listen, to actually deeply listen, and we listen without a pre-ordained conclusion of what we're to hear. We listen and we feel. We have to feel without trying to make phenomena begin or end. To be mindful of feeling is to feel.

Our moods often function as devices of confirmation bias. We see what we're in. Balancing our energy often means some measure of tranquility. Much of the dharma is simply self-soothing. Sometimes we regulate emotion by redirecting our attention. We hear no avoidance, approach, mindful on, but sometimes things are too hot to digest, and the awareness continually collapses into the feeling. There is such a thing as skillful avoidance, right? We think that's such a bad word. But when the choice is between drowning and avoidance, it's very clear: Okay, let me turn away as best I can. There's some measure of equanimity just in that gesture of turning away, because it's the non-equanimity that makes the background so sticky.

We tend to think that working with emotion is purely internal. But sometimes we actually must act in order to move through the internal work that's necessary. Sometimes we stay with the internal intrapsychic practice because we're afraid to act. But there are certain things where the action actually leads the way. Maybe we cannot let go of grief until we've at least given ourselves a chance to love again or in some new way. Or we cannot let go of anger until we've said our deepest, clearest "no." Or we cannot let go of shame until we fully exposed ourselves and still been loved. Much of that requires spiritual friendship.

Part of how we work with painful feeling is changing the view. Buddhism is very much in part a cognitive therapy. The high-level view we pick up has to become realized. We pick up this view captured by Rilke^[5]: No feeling is final. Just keep going. We take up the view that pain can be medicine. That is almost unbelievable for some part of our mind. But pain will soften or harden our heart. It will do one of those things. We vow to let it soften us. In other words, pain either tastes like suffering or tastes like purification. There is tremendous goodness that emerges from feeling bad in just the right way. And the kind of love left in the wake of purification is very quiet. It does not need to say much, but is potent.

Sometimes more tactically, I think of the Vitakkasanthana Sutta^[6]. It involves a very direct kind of cognitive intervention in our pain—replacing one thought with another that's more wholesome, or contemplating the consequences of the unwholesome thought or course of action following that pain in an unwise way. We are encouraged to examine the conditions that have given rise to the painful mind state in the first place, to trace that back. And then lastly, if it's desperate times, if you're going to cause some huge harm, use force: crush mind with mind, it is said.

Sometimes feeling gets reified. We make it more real. We take it more seriously. We don't question its status as an object. We let it orient us. Sometimes it is important to de-reify^[7] feeling. Meaning, from a kind of deeper sense of soothing, of tranquility, we can investigate, untangle. Who will untangle this tangle? The suttas ask, Who can untangle this tangle? Sometimes we get baited into looking for the riddle's solution to the tangle, but it's just a tangle. And to untangle is not to solve the riddle. It's just to deconstruct, de-reify the phenomena of the tangle—empty phenomena tumbling on, as one teacher said.

And so the moment-by-moment perception of anicca^[8]—impermanence—becomes a kind of refuge. Everything is kind of dissolving, and for that to feel okay. Even the notion of my life, my problems, my needs—all of that is de-reified.

You know, not every pain is actually meant to be consoled, purified, deconstructed, de-reified, or cognitively reappraised. Not everything is meant to be consoled. I think how we grapple with inconsolability is an important question for each of us. Sometimes we just stand under it, bear with it, live alongside of it. Some dukkha^[9] must simply be known on its own terms. Nothing further to do, just to be known. It's not meant to be regulated, not meant to get better. It just asks for our blessing and bows, reverence maybe. There's nothing to do but maybe refine our relationship with helplessness, the helplessness that is, in the end, dukkha. In order to not make it worse, we can't try to make it better in moments like that.

So I offer this for your consideration. Please pick up whatever is useful and leave the rest behind. Okay.