
Working With Emotions
Ken takes up students’ questions about anger, desire, and jealousy, and how to work with emotions that feel overwhelming or hardened. He points to the simple but difficult practice of experiencing what arises without being consumed by it, asking, “Can you experience this and be at peace at the same time?” In response, a student said, “It was a hell of a lot easier when I just got angry.”
In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind. This is the third in a series of sutra sessions held in Los Angeles. In these sessions Ken converses informally with students about life and practice.
Joining with experience
Ken: There are many ways to think about meditation or to approach it. There’s a phrase in the traditional texts, which says that when the mind joins with the object of attention. For many years that phrase confused me, because so much of the instruction that I’d been given was about watching the breath, or focusing on something. And this notion of the mind joining with seemed very strange. And yet it cropped up at the very beginning of meditation instruction.
One way that I’ve found very helpful is, rather than to think of focusing on, more as opening to. So we have the breath, and we open to the experience of breathing. When we open to the experience of breathing, we just sit here for a moment. We breathe; it’s part of what goes on quite naturally in the body. And if we open to that, we become aware of the sensations of air moving through the nostrils. We become aware of the movement of the chest and stomach. We become aware of a lot of things going on in our body. But it’s not so much that we are watching them, or focusing on them, but more that we’re opening to them. And as we continue down that, we find ourselves opening to everything in our experience. And this is what I think is meant by the phrase, the mind joining with the object of attention.
We actually open to the experience, which in this case is breathing. And now we’re right in the experience. Does this make sense to you? Good. So this is a kind of crude analogy, but I’ll do my best here. This is our experience of breathing and this is our attention. By opening to, they come together. And now all that’s necessary is to rest there. There is a small problem. The attention falls off. But as many of you have heard me say before, there’s something else about our minds or about how we operate. It’s like the solution is already in the problem. Yes, the attention falls off, but something else always happens.
There comes a moment of recognition. It may come half a second later, it may come five minutes later. At certain portions of my life, it’s come five years later, but it always comes. And you go, “Oh.” Now, at that moment you have free attention. That moment of oh is free attention, and you can either go back into the distraction, or join with your experience. So, many people think of meditation as focusing on, concentrating. And maybe it’s just something that’s fundamentally wrong with me, but I’ve never been able to do that. So, I’ve found that regarding meditation as: resting, recognize, return, rest, recognize, return, rest.
And so it looks like this. Now, people say, “It doesn’t look very interesting.” It gets interesting. We’re going to meditate for about half an hour. If during that half hour you do this a thousand times, that’s really good meditation. If you only do it once, you may have a problem. Does this help? Okay. Any questions from anybody before we start?
[Gong] [Pause]
The role of dialogue in learning
Ken: What we do at this point, you ask questions, and I respond. Now, a part of the reason for this, my own feeling is, there’s been a great deal of emphasis—part of it cultural, I think—placed on the teacher. And so people come to learn from a teacher. But in that sentence, all the emphasis has been on the word teacher. And I think we need to put the emphasis on learning. Because, when the emphasis is on teacher, it’s very easy for there to be a kind of one way communication. You know, people come, somebody talks, everybody listens, people take what they take. And that can indeed be very helpful.
I’ve been struggling for a way to express what I feel here, and I found this in a book I’ve been reading lately:
True education is always oral, because only the spoken word makes dialogue possible, that is, it makes it possible for the student to discover the truth, him or herself, amid the interplay of questions and answers and also for the teacher to adapt what he’s teaching to the needs of the student.
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Pierre Hadot, p. 62
So, it’s only in this interplay, which I hope some of you will be willing to engage, otherwise, I’m going to look stupid for the next 40 minutes. And it’s challenging, it’s challenging on both sides. You’re presenting something, you’re opening yourself up, that can be a little frightening. And my responsibility is find a way to respond to you, which is other than assuming a pat answer, or a privileged position, or whatever. But to respond to you from the training and experience I’ve had in a way that is actually helpful to you.
Now, we have a mic here so that everybody can hear easily over the air conditioning and so forth. Makes it a little easier. The other thing is, and I want you to be very clear about this. It’s all recorded because this goes up on the internet. Now we only want you to use first name. Don’t have to use any identifying information, but I want you to be clear about that. The feedback that I’ve got from the podcasts that have gone up from these kinds of events has been very positive, because there are a lot of people scattered all over this country—in fact, I can say scattered all over the world—who actually don’t have the opportunity to come together as a group, practice together, and engage a dialogue of the kind that we’re going to. And they have questions. So, my own experience has shown me that if you have a question, then there are probably 3 or 4 other people in this room who have the same question. So you’re asking the question is actually an act of generosity. And out there, there’s probably 3 or 4 hundred, a thousand people who have the same question. So this makes anything that you engage here not only beneficial for you, but potentially beneficial for a lot of other people.
So with that as a preamble, the floor is open. And let’s be very clear about this. All of you came here to learn something. I don’t know what it is. It may be different. It probably is different for every one of you. So this is your opportunity to take a step into what you actually want to learn here. And I will do my best to respond to that. Go ahead with your question. We can repeat it. Okay.
Working with anger
Student: We find it more and more possible to figure out when we’re starting to feel an emotion, to be able to recognize it. What’s frustrating sometimes is not being able to recognize it or, “Oh, I’m just about to get really angry.”
Ken: Sorry, I didn’t hear the last part.
Student: It’s really interesting through meditation, when we’re out in the world and we can realize, “Oh, I’m just about to become really angry,” and you want to, but you also want to work on that. But it’s impossible. What’s crazy is, “Okay, I’m going to be really angry,” and you feel yourself starting to heat up. You can recognize it. That’s something you’ve talked about. But, there’s so many different levels of it. You think you’ve handled it and are able to relax yourself. Then all of a sudden it just comes back at you, this huge wave. And then, “Okay, I can work on it coming back.” Is there a strategy so that you can let some of it go? How do you steam out so that it doesn’t keep catching you? Is that clear?
Ken: Well, first, congratulations. Just from your description, your practice is quite effective. And you’re quite right. As we sit, we develop an ability to recognize what’s actually happening in us. And then we find it is usually a lot more powerful than we realized.
You remind me a bit of my old office partner. I was at a celebration of his 70th birthday on Friday night. And, he’s changed a little bit, but he started off as a student of mine, and we ended up doing a bunch of things together. Now, this is one angry dude. He was the kind of guy that if you cut him off on a freeway, he would follow you home and punch you out. He’s a very successful businessman, but he was a really, really angry guy, extremely volatile, flying off the handle and firing people at the drop of a hat. Sound familiar? Okay, I just want to make sure we’re in the same ballpark.
One day, I needed to ask him a question. I came back to his office, and he was sitting there like this. His feet up on his desk, his arms folded, and there’s a look of, severe impatience on his face. I said, “What’s the matter, Dave?”
He said. “It was a hell of a lot easier when I just got angry.” Because, when we express the anger, we don’t feel it—everybody else does. When we suppress the anger, we don’t feel it. It goes into our body and causes illness, stress, what have you. What we’re learning through developing this capacity in attention, is a way to experience what arises, so it doesn’t go out into the world, and it doesn’t go into our body. We have spent much of our life not doing this. So it’s it’s both a skill and a capacity, and it’s not something that you’re going to just turn on a switch and be able to do. It’s, as you totally accurately observed and commented on, there are levels, there are degrees.
Many years ago—you know how family relationships are, they can be a bit intense—my older brother said something to me. I got out of the room very quickly. I went and sat down—45 minutes. Every cell of the body was inflamed with rage. I had developed the capacity to to experience that, but it was pretty intense. But it didn’t go to him and it didn’t go into my body. I experienced it, and that made a very big difference. There’ll be many, many things like that. So there’s both the skill, knowing how to do it, and the capacity developing, you might say, the strength, or the quality in attention that allows us to do that. And that’s what we do when we practice. We are actually developing both of those.
But that is only half our practice. The other half of our practice is what we do in our lives. And here again you’re saying, “Okay, there it is.” And now you’re recognizing it. And you feel how deep and how powerful it is. In my own training in Buddhism, we have three levels of morality, you might say, which correspond quite precisely to levels of capacity.
We could start at either end, but I’m going to start at the higher end here. The first is, if we have the capacity, we just experience it. And that’s very interesting in your case, anger. And there you are, and suddenly somebody says something and there’s this volcano going off inside you. Can you experience the volcano? Okay. If you can, great. You can continue with the conversation while you experience the volcano. It gets a little intense, but it’s doable. But that’s not always possible.
So the second level is, “Okay, I can’t just experience this.” So we do something with it. And, in the way that I was trained, what we do with it is we use that anger to generate a seed of virtue.
Student: A seed of virtue?
Using mind training
Ken: Yes, and this is a technique in Tibetan Buddhism known as mind training. And if you go up on my website, unfetteredmind.org, you’ll see a link to mind training. And there’s going to be more there than you want to know. But the technique comes down to something very simple. Whatever we’re experiencing that is unpleasant, we take the same unpleasantness from everybody in the world. And we give to them whatever joy or happiness we’re capable of. So there you are in anger. “Oh, I’m just about to punch this guy in the face. May all the anger of the world come into mine.” And you breathe in. And in that, you’re generating the thought of compassion.
You’re generating a thought of compassion. By taking in the anger of the world, you are freeing the rest of the world from anger. You get it all. A little tough, but we tend to be extreme in the Mahayana. So, “May all the anger in the world come into this anger of mine. May I experience it for everyone.” That’s an astonishing intention. And then as you breathe out, “May all the happiness and well-being that I enjoy in my life go to everyone, including this person that I’m a little annoyed with right now.” And again, that’s an expression of compassion. Or, more accurately, that’s actually an expression of loving-kindness. And so there it is.
And again, that’s something you can train in meditation. But it changes things right in the moment, because when you take that anger in and you express that happiness and joy out, you change your relationship with your own anger. Do you follow? And that allows a bit more space, so that it doesn’t just run. Okay?
The third level is when we can’t do that. And in the third level, there are certain actions that we just won’t do. This is where: we won’t hit somebody, we won’t hurt somebody, we won’t speak maliciously to somebody. And our own commitment to those ethical guidelines inhibits the actual expression of the anger, so it doesn’t harm anybody else. And we get to work with it on our own.
So we have those three things. One is, can we just experience it? Great. Then it’s just an experience. Okay? If not possible, can I do something with it? And what I offered you there was seed of compassion. Okay? If that can work, great. If not, “Okay, I’m not going to hurt anybody. I’ve got some work to do.” Does this help?
Student: That’s great. Thank you.
Ken: Is there anything else you want to follow up there? Okay. Good.
Tom: Hi, I’m Tom. Aren’t there circumstances where a certain expression of anger is appropriate to the situation, if it is controlled?
Ken: I love this. [Laughter] You see, we’re always looking for a way out, aren’t we? So I’m going to give you a way out. This way out comes from no other than Aristotle. “It’s very easy to be angry. It’s very difficult to be angry with the right person for the right reason, at the right time, in the right way.” There’s your way out. Yeah. Please.
Student: I realize I’ve had the opposite problem of being an apologist for people. It’s been a long time coming that I even get angry, because contrary to what you said before, I think it’s much easier not to get angry than to get angry.
Ken: Well, this is how you’ve practiced.
Student: I haven’t practiced much at all, but this was like I was born to this and make excuses for people, and that keeps me from being angry with them when sometimes I should be. And now, at my advanced age, I find I’m getting angry too often. My dilemma.
Feelings want to be felt
Ken: If you’re a feeling—and anger is a feeling, but this is true for any other feeling—if you’re a feeling, what do you want above all else?
Student: I think I’ve been a doormat too much in my life. And I’d like people to stop it. That’s what I might want.
Ken: Yeah, I understand that, but we’re not quite there yet. I want to go in a couple of stages. If you’re a feeling: anger, desire, jealousy, pride, love, compassion, guilt, all of these things. If you’re a feeling, what do you want to happen?
Student: I don’t know.
Ken: You don’t know. Anybody? If you’re a feeling, what do you want to happen?
Student: You want to be happy.
Ken: No, the feeling, we’re talking about the feeling. What does the feeling want?
Student: To be recognized.
Ken: Oh, that’s not enough. You want to be felt. Do you know one feeling that doesn’t want to be felt?
Student: I don’t necessarily want to feel these feelings because as you say, anger gets your cortisol up. It’s exhausting. You have to go to sleep afterwards. It can last several days and make you feel physically uncomfortable. I don’t want to feel it. It may want me to feel itself, but I don’t want to feel it.
Ken: Yeah, and that’s true of anger. But, hold on to this. We’re not finished yet. But isn’t that also all true for love?
Student: That’s a pleasanter feeling.
Ken: Yes, but it keeps you up at night, and you can’t eat, and all of that stuff.
Student: In my youth, not now. [Laughter]
Ken: Okay. Now. Here is the dilemma and you phrased it wonderfully. I posed that the idea or the notion that feelings want to be felt, and you said, “I don’t want to feel them.” Okay. What are you going to do? Here you’re having these feelings, they want to be felt. You don’t want to feel them. What are you going to do?
Student: They’re winning out.
Ken: Are they? As you say, they make you horribly uncomfortable, etc., etc. Now, I know it’s summertime here in LA, so this isn’t a good time to ask this question, but if we turn back the clock a few months. Sometimes it’s cloudy here, it was a little cloudy this morning. Sometimes it rains, other parts of the country there’s hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. How does this guy feel about all of that stuff?
Student: I know that analogy.
Ken: Ah. [Laughter] You think this is an analogy?
Student: Shrug.
Ken: What would it be like to be the sky?
Student: Empty.
Ken: Yeah, but for you, what would it be like?
Student: Beautiful. Clear. Not really blue. I know that’s an illusion.
Ken: Yeah, but you’re the sky and there’s a hurricane raging. How do you feel?
Student: I don’t know how I feel in those circumstances.
Ken: Okay. That would be really interesting for you to explore. A way of exploring this—let me back up a step—right now, anger is your enemy. Anger there wants to be felt, you don’t want to feel it. And one way or another, you guys are at war, right? That’s not much fun. So, a question that I’ve found very helpful in my own work: How can I experience this and be at peace at the same time? Now, this is not a theoretical question. This is a very practical question. So there’s the anger in your case, and there’s you. How can I experience the anger and be at peace at the same time?
What this question does, it invites an exploration of your relationship with the anger. And I very much encourage you to regard it as an exploration, not as an injunction. So there’s the anger. Okay. If I touch it like that, that doesn’t feel good, so we’re not going to do that. Well, maybe if I put it on that cushion over there, I can experience it and not be too churned up. Okay? And so you start exploring it. How could that be possible? And that’s what I invite you to do. How does that sound to you?
Student: It sounds hard to do.
Ken: Well, you do it in little pieces. It’s not something that’s going to happen. And just like I was saying to Somerset, is it? Yeah. It’s not a switch, and suddenly … It’s an exploration, but you’re learning, you’re exploring a different way of relating to your own experience. But it has an intention. How can I experience this and be at peace at the same time? And I’ll be back here, and you can chase me up on it if you want. Okay? Question here.
Relating to Anger
Student: You mentioned the ethics. Is having an ethical commitment always necessarily the best way to live through feelings and have awareness, which is what we’re doing in the vipashyana practice? Are those always in concert, or is it possible that there may be instances where maybe it’s not very helpful to have ethics on your mind? In particular the issue of having a feeling like anger or a lot of negative emotions. I wonder if what they’re calling us to do may be actually to live through them in a way that does involve taking some kind of an action sometimes.
Ken: Please step in and and say something if you feel that I’m not understanding your question. But I think there’s something very important here, and I’m glad you brought it up. When we use the word ethics in the way that I was here, it is not about not having certain feelings. That’s impossible to legislate. Situations are going to come up in our lives where we will feel anger, we will feel jealous, we will feel love, attraction, desire, guilt, pride, you name it. The question is, what happens then? Do those feelings become a source of suffering for ourself and others, which we’ve heard people talking about? Or, is there a way of relating to those feelings so that they don’t become a source of suffering for ourselves or others? But there’s no question here of getting rid of the feelings. That’s the first point.
Now, let’s take a closer look at two or three feelings. And the three I’m going to pick, and we can pick other ones, but the three I’m going to pick—and if there’s one you would like me to pick after this please say so—I’m going to pick anger, desire and jealousy. Are these of interest to anybody? Okay. One way to understand anger—and I think this connects with your experience—anger is the emotion which arises when a boundary has been violated. Anger is the emotion which arises when a boundary has been violated. Now, that may be a very old issue in us. It may be something that’s happening in the present. And we have to be able to discern whether it is something that is relevant to the present, or it is some old baggage that we’re carrying.
Because if it’s some old baggage that we’re carrying, then acting on the anger in the present isn’t exactly appropriate. You follow what I mean? Okay. But let’s say it’s an actual issue. A boundary has been violated. Now we need to stand at that boundary, and maintain it, or restore it, or what have you. This takes us into a very different realm of practice now. How do we actually do that? This is something that I’ve studied actually quite deeply, and I’ve taught quite a lot. So it’s maybe, again, far more than you want to know.
Pacify
Ken: But let’s say there’s a person and they’ve done something inappropriate. They violated a boundary. The first thing is, can we talk it out with them? If we can talk it out with them, communicate it, they get it, it’s settled. That’s a good solution. It’s a really good solution because when that happens, your relationship with that person is actually strengthened. You’ve been able to talk something out and come to a peaceful resolution, a settlement. You’ll usually feel closer together because of that. That’s not always possible.
Enrich
Ken: So, sometimes you have to add something to the mix. Maybe you say, “Well, I understand why you did that, but that doesn’t work for me. So I’m just going to pay you 10, 50, 100 dollars for you never to do that again.” Or, maybe you have to say, “You know, that really wasn’t okay with me, but we’re not getting anywhere trying to sort it out. We need to bring in another person to help us sort this out.” So you bring in a facilitator, or a mediator, or something like that. But you have to add something to the mix, it can be money, it can be education, it can be a facilitator, all kinds of things you can add to the mix. You get to be very creative. Maybe that doesn’t work out.
Compel
Ken: Then the next step is compel. You say, “This is the way it’s going to be.” Now, when you move to that level, things get a little tricky, because the relationship is forever changed. When you use your personal power and say, “This is how it’s going to be.” Or use the force of the situation, and say, “You see, this is how the situation is going to play out. Whatever you do, this is how it’s going to play out.” And if the person is sensible and they see that, then they agree, and the boundaries are restored. I’ve had to do that a few times. But it changes things. Often that’s where most people start. It’s not a good place to start. You’re better starting with talking it out.
Destroy
Ken: But if compelling doesn’t work, then you have no choice. You end that aspect of the relationship in which the conflict arises. It’s done. You take a stand, and that’s it. But this is all something that you have to come in with a great deal of awareness, and no anger, because the anger has now served its purpose. It’s alerted you that the boundary has been violated. And you don’t need the anger anymore. And you have to be free of it if you’re going to be able to progress through those four steps cleanly. That’s probably more than you wanted to know.
Student: Actually, I think it probably skipped a few steps, because what I’m thinking about is that I feel like, a lot of the teaching that we get in vipashyana practice, both texts and books, and so forth, moves to what it would look like in the very ideal case. But there’s not very much emphasis on the really problematic features of, what it feels like to do that.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah.
Student: And especially if the anger is not so much about the present, but if it’s a projection.
Ken: Ah, okay. Thank you. If it’s a projection, I have a mantra for you. And maybe others will find this useful. And this isn’t just for anger, because I still have desire and jealousy to talk about. And the mantra is: That was then, this is now.
Relating to desire and jealousy
Ken: Now, let me talk very briefly, not in the same detail, about desire and jealousy, just to give you a sense of how this works. Desire is the emotion which arises when a connection has been disrupted. There’s this break and, “Oh.” So, how do you restore the connection? What is the appropriate way of restoring the connection? Now, I don’t have a nice four step process there. Maybe I should develop one, but that’s the direction that goes.
Jealousy is the emotion which arises when you feel deficient. Whether you are deficient or not—that’s a very open question—but there’s the feeling of deficiency. And it’s your job to feel that. And then go back to the situation and see what’s appropriate. Because, that business of comparing, it’s all about, I’m not enough. That’s why people compete. They’re trying to prove to somebody that they’re enough.
I do a certain amount of business consulting. And most of the CEO’s and senior executives, with some exceptions, but most of them, they got where they got to because they’re trying to prove to their father, their brother, or somebody, that they’re enough. That’s what gives them the drive and often produces a lot of good results. But they do tend to be a rather jealous group—very, very competitive. You follow?
Then we could look at guilt. We could look at pride. We could look at greed. They’re all similar dynamics operating in everyone. Does this help?
Student: Could you go back to desire and elaborate on what you said, because that makes no intuitive sense to me.
Ken: You want me to elaborate on desire, how desire is the emotion which arises when a connection has been disrupted? Well, is there anything that you want?
Student: I want lunch, eventually, but I haven’t become obsessed with lunch.
Ken: It’s a perfect example. Your connection with food is currently disrupted.
Student: Just temporarily, until I have lunch.
Ken: And then your connection with food is restored and there’s no desire.
Student: How about desire for a person as in romantic love?
Ken: Yes. A connection with someone. Maybe a connection with everyone has been disrupted. And so now there’s desire.
Student: First love.
Ken: Well, at a certain point, we seek connection, don’t we?
Student: But no connection has been broken. No connection has been established.
Ken: Our connection with the world. You remember your first love?
Student: Yes, I guess.
Ken: You guess? [Laughter] Please don’t tell them that.
Student: Well, I came from the South, where we had to start dancing school in sixth grade. And I was sort of continuously infatuated with somebody starting in the sixth grade. So it’s kind of hard to say who.
Ken: Okay, well, so there you are. You’re dancing in the sixth grade and things like that. And if you look at the process, some kind of connection forms, often without our being aware of it. Then it’s disrupted and then we feel desire.
Student: Well, I would think in that case, your childhood has been disrupted by dancing school or possibly by puberty. And that’s your relation to the world that’s been disrupted. And then it just stays disrupted for a long time.
Ken: Until you find someone.
Student: Well, that’s usually not the end of it, is it?
Ken: No, it goes on from there, but you get my point. You understand now?
Student: I see what you mean.
Ken: Okay. We have time for one more.
Hardening and physical sensations
Student: Well, what I wanted to ask, or comment on, was something very similar to what the first person brought up about anger. And as we’ve gone around the room, the question keeps on changing. So give me a second; I’m trying to phrase it. I like the definition of anger as arising out of a situation where a boundary has been broken. One of the difficulties I find in my practice, is not so much recognizing when anger arises situationally in everyday life, or just, when I’m by myself, etc. It’s very much there. And I can think, and I can intellectualize, and I can think back about the past, see where it arose from, what desires were cut off or denied, etc. But the fact remains is day to day, through meditation, through other practices, I try to deal with hardening.
Ken: Didn’t hear that last sentence.
Student: There’s a hardening of feeling.
Ken: A hardening or a—
Student: There’s a point at which you begin to cut off your connection, any kind of open connection. Something that I’ve been trying to find a way of dissolving. I remember reading at one point that—either in some Taoist practices or some Tibetan schools—they talk about dissolving. So, since the issue has come up, I very much sympathize with what the woman spoke about having been a doormat. Because, it sounds to me what’s really going on there is that the anger is a response to something, which I think you were trying to get at, but wasn’t very clear. And the question of what you want, perhaps, what you’re trying to do, that connection has been made. But, intellectually, I can understand. This is stuff I’ve worked with for years. But the hardening is still there and it gets worse. Whatever needs, or whatever are there, they continue to be issues. Or when boundaries were passed in the past, they continue to affect what happens in the present. And I don’t see how one gets around that issue.
Ken: You don’t get around it. You don’t.
Student: Then is it just a method of learning a few skillful means, or tricks, or tactics, to avoid situations where the anger gets—
Ken: No, that’s getting around it.
Student: Okay. Yeah.
Ken: There’s a line from T.S. Eliot that’s relevant here. “Dark, dark dark. They all go into the dark.” Okay. You notice, you’re able to recognize this hardening. How do you experience that hardening in your body?
Student: It’s very much a physical sensation.
Ken: Yes. Describe it to the best of your ability right now.
Student: Hardening is the best word I could find for it. There’s a feeling of concentration or condensation within the skin. Muscles tense.
Ken: Where in your body?
Student: It can be in the lower arms, it can be in the upper back, it can be in the neck in particular. Sometimes it’s a flushing that comes with it.
Ken: Yes. So a way you can work in your meditation, initially, when your mind is settled somewhat, recall a situation which triggers the anger. And you feel the body hardening up. Okay? Now breathe and experience that. Don’t try to get rid of the hardening. Don’t try to get around it, even, don’t try to work through it. Just experience it. This is not much fun. I will tell you. I’ll be very straight with you; it’s not much fun. And you experience it. Maybe you notice that when you breathe, there’s a steel band right there.
So now your practice consists of breathing and feeling the steel band. And you feel it with every breath. Maybe there’s a knot in the stomach. Maybe it’s as if somebody is wringing a towel in your stomach. So the practice consists of feeling that. Now a very important point. Do not focus on those. You keep all of your body in awareness. So these are sensations which arise in the context of your whole body. This is very important. For a very long time I would focus on those sensations and I would find it would just increase them.
Student: It just reinforces them.
Ken: Exactly. And so it’s not a fruitful way of working. Your attention stays with your whole body, from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head, including whatever sensations are there. This way, it’s a bit like the suggestion I was giving earlier. You become a bit like the sky, and these feelings are things that arise in the sky. You follow?
Student: Not entirely.
Ken: Here your whole body is the sky. And these sensations are things that are arising in your body. You’re not focusing on the cloud, or the hurricane, or the tornado. You’re staying open and feeling what is there. Now, when you do this, you feel the band here, or the knot here, or the constriction here, however it is.
Student: You’re not concentrating on this. You’re trying to maintain a whole—
Ken: Yeah. The same time you have this whole frame of your body. You’re aware of the soles of your feet. You’re aware of the crown of the head. You’re aware of all of the skin, everything, all at the same time while you’re feeling this. It’s inclusive attention, not exclusive attention. Okay? And when you do this, not immediately, but somewhere along the line, and it may be five minutes. It may be five days, maybe five weeks, somewhere along the line. Well, let me back up a step first. As you do this, all kinds of stories are going to crop up. Whenever you recognize that you’ve got lost in the story, come back to your whole body, and breathe, and open to the sensations again.
Student: So basically all you’re saying is all we can really do is ride it out, try to maintain the breath count or—
Ken: Yeah. Now, as you do this: stepping out of the stories, back into the body, stepping out of the stories, back into the body, over and over again. It’s just like this process that I did right at the beginning. Gradually you’ll find a way to rest in those sensations. And what I’m really talking about, this is really the Anapanasati Sutra, the full awareness of breathing. You’re learning how to stay present in your experience. And the breathing can be very helpful for staying that way.
At a certain point you’re going to find certain emotions coming up in connection with these sensations. And you may be really quite surprised at how intense and unpredictable they are. They may be very little, or they can be as weird as herding big waves. It’s like, “Oh.” And you may just get a little glimpse of something that seems like a monstrous wave. And you go, “Oh my god,” or something like that. I’m just saying what’s possible here.
So the next phase is, you start including as much of those emotions as you can, and still keep some stability in the attention. And it may only be a small bit in the beginning. You work very gently here, and that’s very important. And eventually you’re able to include more of the emotions. And now you have the emotions and the physical sensations. About this time, things get quite interesting. At the same time, you’ll be accompanied by a whole Greek chorus of stories. Yeah. And they’re the Greek chorus. They stand over here and they have their say. You let them have their say. You don’t follow them. You keep coming back into the body and into the emotions.
Now, over time, something is going to change. It’s very much along the lines I was presenting earlier. This is a way of discovering how to experience that hardness and be at peace at the same time, deeply at peace. And when you discover your own way of doing that, because this is something you’re going to learn how to do, all I can do is give you certain guidelines, but you are going to discover how to do this. You’re going to learn how to do this yourself. When you’re able to experience that hardness, and all the stories, and everything, connect with it and be at peace at the same time. Then your relationship with it changes. And all kinds of changes can come out of that. And I don’t even want to start to predict what they might be. Does this help?
Method and result
Ken: All right. I want to go back to some point here. And, we have to close now. You said that some of the instruction you’ve been receiving is kind of like the ideal, and this is very true. One of the tendencies in a lot of Buddhist teaching is they describe result, not method. And if you try to make the result happen, you get very, very frustrated, because the result comes from the result of a process of evolution. And what I’m trying to convey to you is the effort to make, so that that evolutionary process actually starts to take place. I very much focus on method rather than result. And they’re not wrong. But it’s analogous to me saying to you when you’re very, very tense. “Oh, relax.” And of course, when we’re really tense and uptight about something, somebody says, “Relax,” we just go, “I am relaxed!”
Student: Or you might be saying, “No, I don’t want to relax.”
Ken: Yeah, but if, on the other hand, if I say to you, “Take a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Do that again. Do it once more, just for me. How do you feel?”
“A bit better.” And that’s the difference between the result, which is relaxing, and the method, which is, take a deep breath and let it out slowly a few times. And this applies to everything. So, if I say anything, which you do not understand actually how to do, and if any other teacher says something and you don’t understand how to do it, then ask, because that’s the only way you’re going to learn. Okay. Back here.
Translation problems and resources
Student: I’ll be quick. I know you want to finish up. One of the frustrations I find, in terms of looking at resources, is issues of translation. Are there any particular, when we were talking about this methodology here, which, in many ways sounds like, return to mindfulness. Just try to open up to it, as opposed to saying, “Oh, that’s wrong,” push it aside, or stop because I’m going to the wrong place right now, or whatever. Sit through it, and then return to mindfulness. Return to body awareness. Return to breathing. Can you recommend any sources on methodology in English that addresses some of those states, or does it just go back to the same old return to your breath?
Ken: I agree with you very, very much about the translation problems. They’re huge. And I’m a translator. I translate from Tibetan to English, so this is something I’ve given a little thought to. I hate tooting my own horn, but you may find my book, Wake Up To Your Life, helpful.
Student: And again, the emphasis on methodology or—
Ken: It’s all method.
Student: Method as opposed to, in response to situations you run into, in the practice.
Ken: No. That kind of skill building, there’s some of that in there. But it’s about the practice method. How do you actually do it? And I talk very little about result in the whole book.
Student: Well, that’s enough of that, as promised in the other books.
Ken: Pardon?
Student: Enough of that is promised in the other books.
Ken: It is. Yeah. There are a lot of skill sets out there. I’m thinking of nonviolent communication, and things like that. But, there’s a lot of very, very practical advice. I don’t know of any place that it’s all brought together within the context of Buddhist practice. There are some very good books out there, but it’s bits and pieces here and there, and scattered. A book, which has been around for a very long time, and is worth reading again and again, because it soaks into you rather slowly is Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind.
Now, the first part of it is about posture, because they really emphasize that in the Zen tradition. Yeah, form. So you need to read that. You’re not necessarily going to do their rigid posture thing, but there is a way of working there, which is valuable. The second section, on right attitude, and the third section, on right understanding, they’re just very, very good. Suzuki Roshi was really wonderful. But again, it’s a book that I would encourage you to read and just allow to soak into you. So those are the two recommendations.
Student: Thank you.
Student: I actually have a recommendation, if that’s okay. It’s a book which I recommend to everybody because, I dealt with storms of emotions for the first five years of my practice. It’s called The Feeling Buddha by David Brazier. He’s an English Zen practitioner teacher.
Ken: The Feeling Buddha?
Student: The Feeling Buddha.
Ken: I haven’t heard of this.
Student: By David Brazier, and it really impacted me. And I recommend it to everybody.
Ken: By way of closure, whatever good you feel you might have either generated, or received, or touched here. Just like us to to take a minute or two, just sit with that feeling of good, experience it in yourself, and then form the intention that one way or another, this good that I feel is going to work for the good of the world. Let’s just sit with that idea for a moment.