Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / The Nuance of Self-Compassion - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

Transcript

The Nuance of Self-Compassion - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:25
  Jogen: It is very good to be here with you tonight. Tonight, I am going to talk about self compassion and zen. Last week, I received a helpful reflection from somebody. They said, in your talk and many other Buddhist talks I've listened to lately, there's been no compassion for oneself. You're always talking about being of service to others or being compassionate for other people.
• 0:56
  And you know that could be harmful, or people could hear that in a way that's harmful to them. And actually, in that moment, I had a moment of defensiveness. And I was like, No, we're not. You're wrong. And whenever I have that moment, I know I have to reflect on something, right?
• 1:13
  Because that's the ego digging in and saying, No, I'm right. You're wrong. So this talk in a way is just me thinking about that since this person shared that with me. And it's also a little bit about Zen practice in general and engaging with this tradition. So the first thing I wanna address is that the Buddha's teaching, in my opinion, is not too helpful as just a new set of ideas about your life.
• 1:54
  You know, that can be said about a lot of things. It's not all that helpful just to get the new ideas about how to think or how to see this or that. And particularly with the Zen tradition, we are trying to, or I am at least trying to, always speak from my own experience, and the teachings are spoken from within the experience of doing practice. So what you hear in dharma talks is about the way you can be free and understand yourself if you're doing the practice, If you just hear the teachings and you don't have an ongoing practice, sometimes they'll just go in one ear and out the other, sometimes they won't make sense, and sometimes they actually will not be helpful, and in rare cases they could even be harmful if they're misunderstood. In a way, everything you read of Buddhist teachings, especially core texts, is someone speaking from within the mind.
• 3:08
  They're speaking from the experience of awareness lighting up this body mind, and what that's like and what that could be like for us. They're conveying what it's like for them. And to take this line of thinking even further, none of the teachings are experientially true unless we're practicing. None of it. All of it is just a bunch of words.
• 3:35
  It's just a bunch of words and ideas, which sometimes they're inspiring and elegant and, you know, people write books like Buddhism is True, and it sells a lot of copies. But it's not actually true unless you practice it because it's not a theory. It's not a philosophy. I'm not going to argue with you about whether it's a religion. It's an experience.
• 3:59
  Buddhism is always pointing to an experience. The dharma is an invitation to an experience. Some of the teachings aren't intellectually true for us, or they're not experientially true until our practice reaches a requisite degree of depth and breadth of application. That's something that for some people lands as kind of culty. Does that sound culty?
• 4:27
  Like, no. Okay, good. There's my kind of feedback right here. This person, let me just check-in. Olivia, was that cult y?
• 4:37
  You could call them open secrets. There's a term in tantra, it's called self secret. One of the things that means is you could read, for example, let's take some of the Zen koans. You could read it and go, This is a bunch of nonsense. This is just a bunch of people whacking each other, saying weird things about teacups and mountains and because it's self secret, meaning you have to have a certain depth of mind in order to unpack what's being said.
• 5:07
  And so we have a kind of issue in the teachings that sometimes someone is speaking from a particular point of view from practice, and it's not being heard from the same point of view, and it doesn't quite jive. It's like, What are they talking about? Or it even feels confrontive in a negative way. This practice of zazen is meant to melt deep fibers of our illusion. It's meant to confront us with our own delusion.
• 5:47
  It's not actually really designed to make you calm and feel good. It's not oriented in that way. That's not what the lineage of great teachers, men, women, lay, ordained human and not human. That's not what they were aiming for. They were aiming to invite us into the melting of our delusion.
• 6:11
  That's what zazen is. It confronts one with that. And because of that, it's not the right thing for everyone at every time. There is an ongoing discussion among Zen teachers and Buddhist teachers more generally about whether this practice is universal. Is it for everyone?
• 6:33
  Isn't that the Bodhisattva vow to make this available for everyone? Well, the jury's out about that. It's not the right thing for everyone at every time. For example, it's good to have psychological and physical stability, as in your place of living, you've got security down whatever degree that's possible before engaging this strongly. I wouldn't recommend somebody do Zen practice who is in a mental health crisis or had unhealed trauma.
• 7:10
  It would be up to them to discern that, yes, I do have what could be called unhealed trauma, but still I think this is good medicine. It wouldn't be me telling them they couldn't. And sometimes people start this practice and some of us are like, Oh, not really sure. It's a good time to be going so wholeheartedly into this. And the teachers are a little concerned, paying attention, and it turns out that the rocky beginnings become a foundation for a path of gold.
• 7:47
  Right? That's hard to say. Right? So self compassion. I was thinking that I have met in my life many Zen practitioners who internalized I don't want to say many, actually, probably just a few if I really think about it, who internalized a harsh attitude towards their practice.
• 8:14
  And I think this is true in other traditions too. There's this kind of almost contempt for one's human dimension because you read the teachings as I need to break or shed or purify my human dimension. It's almost as if the old kind of Judeo Christian template of needing to be pure and being a sinner maps onto the Buddhist teachings, and one sits down as a sinner that's going to expiate all that bad stuff, which is not really what's being communicated in the dharma, but it can be heard and it can be practiced like that. So I have met some harsh practitioners, although I don't know what's in their heart. They seemed harsh externally.
• 9:02
  And then I thought for me, was a little bit kind of rigid with myself for a while, but then at some point the practice changed and I began to really love myself. And I didn't expect that. I didn't think I was gonna get there. I didn't even know what that felt like. Before that, I had tasted equanimity, a sense of the dreamlike nature of reality, accepting who I was, accepting the world, but I didn't expect love.
• 9:35
  I didn't expect a kind of I don't have a word for it. True self acceptance and compassion is hard won. Now it might begin with understanding and positive thoughts like, I deserve love, I'm only human. All of those things could be really skillful. But I'm of the belief that just thinking different thoughts does not transform experience.
• 10:05
  Imagine if it were that easy. People are having a difficult someone's depressed and you could just say, Cheer up. See the bright side. That's a hard instinct to let die. Someone in your life has a pretty good life, but they only see what's not so good, and you're just like, Cheer the F up.
• 10:27
  You've got a really good life. Doesn't work. Probably has never helped anybody. Somebody here told me the term brightsiding. Have you heard brightsiding?
• 10:41
  It's when something is crappy and someone's like, Yeah, but at least you're not being bombed. And you're like, Great, amazing. My life is fantastic. My mom used to do that. She would bright side.
• 10:56
  Thinking different thoughts will not lead you to self compassion. And I could be wrong. But were it so easy to transcend a sense of inner meanness or harshness or kind of lime where I get or they get love, but I don't, just to think new thoughts, then everybody would do it because everybody likes to think thoughts. We need some practice of the energy of kindness applied over a long time. All right.
• 11:29
  So I say that I, you know, I have come to a place where I love myself, but I've also done, you know, thousands of hours of loving kindness practice. And even when it was just hundreds of hours, it was already helping. I didn't just think good thoughts, even though loving kindness practice starts with thinking good thoughts, contradiction. So as I was One of my arguments with this person in my mind who said that you're not emphasizing self compassion was that when we are actually doing dharma practice, it's simultaneously compassion for oneself and others. It's actually simultaneous.
• 12:16
  And broader Zen practice is compassion because it's releasing unnecessary fixation, contraction, and pain. It's releasing what's unnecessary. And that's for you to kind of figure out, for you to see yourself and see what is actually unnecessary contraction, fixation, and pain. So the practice is compassion when it's practiced properly. But here's the tricky thing.
• 12:54
  At times to release this unnecessary fixation contraction pain feels like suffering. The very thing that is going to release the very releasing of suffering has the texture of suffering. And so the suffering of releasing suffering sometimes convinces us that releasing our fixation and our contraction, our pain is bad. And then you do the practice and you feel like, Oh no, no, this is actually not kind. You're encouraging people to feel pain.
• 13:36
  That's not kind. It's not so simple. You're encouraging people to self examine in a very honest way. That's not kind. Well, depends.
• 13:52
  The suffering of there's a suffering of releasing suffering that most of us will have to suffer at some point in our practice, sooner, later. So at that time, we're operating with the logic which is fairly pervasive that what is right, good, compassionate, and kind feels good. Does that seem true to you? That's often a way of thinking that what is compassionate and kind will feel good for the recipient and for the person doing it. But compassion is not necessarily a feeling.
• 14:41
  Kindness is not necessarily even a feeling. Have you seen an image of Kali, the goddess? She's stamping on bodies. She's ripping off heads. There's blood gushing.
• 14:52
  That's an emblem of compassion. That's one of compassion's flavors. That is a depiction, you could say, of the inner experience of really doing spiritual practice at times. At times. It's not always that fun.
• 15:10
  At times. We should have those pictures here. This looks so peaceful. It's so put together. What's more put together than a circle?
• 15:25
  We really should have Kali up there. The logic of compassion for myself or others equals feels good, looks kind, will short circuit liberating practice. And that's not a license to be a dick to people. It's not a license to be indifferent to yourself. Another way to say it is feeling good is only one texture of many that comes with unwinding one's illusions.
• 16:04
  This kind of practice is not like heaven. That is also a kind of remnant of Judeo Christian conditioning. Spirituality means you get to go to the good side. And when you get there, you actually get to stay there forever, while those who didn't get on the boat, they just suffer forever. I don't know if you can look from heaven down at hell.
• 16:32
  If you could, it'd be hard to call it heaven. Now, these kind of things sometimes get archetypally into us. We think, I'm doing the practice. It's going to be all fluffy clouds and light and all that stuff. I'm going to beat a dead horse because I don't think this is talked about enough.
• 16:54
  Feeling bad and instinctually desiring to feel good doesn't mean that instinct is wisdom. I went to the dentist today. I feel like the dentist is like modern sanctioned torture. We have robots that can cook you a meal and they still haven't figured out to not have you bite down on a piece of x-ray and cut your gum. It's so primitive.
• 17:21
  It's like a step from bloodletting. If I decided, oh, this thing feels bad for me, therefore it's not helpful, therefore it's not compassionate and I didn't go, well guess what? In ten years my teeth would be rotting. Why do we apply that same logic to spiritual practice? Now, it's also true that staying with discomfort is not automatically good.
• 17:53
  Sometimes where I sat with terrible physical pain or terrible emotional pain, and I probably should have got up and went to my room and let people deal with it. Staying with discomfort is not automatically good. It depends on the person, their intention, the context. Generally, all of us want to immediately get away from discomfort. Our culture is organized around that.
• 18:24
  So we bring that kind of mentality into this practice. We're not saying pain is gain in the Zen tradition either. So self compassion also has this kind of nuance. It's not one thing. Compassion in the dharma is not a cookie cutter way of being.
• 18:52
  It's not niceness. It's not kindness. It's not even being accommodating, though it can be. You could say all we might be able to pin down about compassion is in a moment when I am unfixated on my own agenda, thoughts, and belief about how things should be, I respond from that place to people, places, situations. And maybe the degree of me not being stuck on myself and my fixed view of how things are supposed to go is a degree to which what I do could be compassion.
• 19:40
  That might look and feel very kind. I've shared in this group recently that the first truly kind people I met happened to be first Mormons and then Buddhists. I grew up in Las Vegas, and there's a big Mormon population. And I didn't want to sign up for what they believed, but they were some of the kindest people to me, right? Because they had a kind of spiritual core.
• 20:09
  They put into practice the compassion that I guess is part of their teaching. I don't know otherwise why they'd be like that. And then I met Buddhists and they were First time I really experienced kindness from people for no reason. They weren't trying to sell me anything. So I don't want to be misunderstood on this point.
• 20:33
  I've also been around groups of very mature practitioners, and their response to my state of mind was to ignore me completely. It was more helpful for me not to be affirmed, for me to be like, Hey, we notice you and we think you're great. That was more helpful to me because they had that mature dharma eye. It was more helpful for them to not give the kind of cookie cutter kindness, and we're so glad you're here. It all depends on the person, the timing, the context.
• 21:22
  So self compassion is nuanced. The very light that is using your body right now is self compassion. That which experiences through this, with this mass of flesh. They can now grow meat in labs. If you grew a slab of meat, including eyeballs, ears, and a brain, it's not necessarily alive.
• 22:04
  Self compassion is and can be practiced as acceptance and welcoming of what we experience, and absence of aversion and judgment. And I think when we practice Zazen, we are immediately touching self compassion to let go of judging oneself, which is always biased. We only have so much perspective on this being. That is a practice of self compassion. Cutting off harmful and indulgent behaviors is a kind of compassion.
• 22:42
  I mean, sometimes somebody confronts us with them and we don't feel like that's compassion, but hopefully they're confronting us with that because they have some vision of cause and effect. Like right now it feels good to do what I'm doing, but what if I do this for five years, ten years, twenty years? What if someone else has more vision of the impact of it? And actually, most of us really see ourselves pretty clearly, actually. Our dreams are just these clear readouts of what's going on that we don't want to see every night.
• 23:14
  Here, here, here. You're like, Oh, that was just about my cousin. No, it wasn't just about your cousin, sometimes. Not disregarding real body mind limitations for some ideal. That's self compassion, Right?
• 23:38
  Sometimes we override what we know we should not be overriding. That's up to each person to put into practice. On the other hand, not limiting one's potential because of unexamined ideas as a form of self compassion. Sometimes I call that tough love. Person who triggered me was saying that if someone has a history of being told that their whole life is to take care of others, the teachings of be of service, be a bodhisattva, tend to just map onto that.
• 24:28
  Sometimes I think about that in terms of women who have, for how many generations, been conditioned to take care of the other. Be of service. Put your needs aside. That's something to pay attention to. But the being of service, that compassion in the dharma is not inviting you to be a pleaser or a fawner.
• 24:53
  It's not talking about that. One of the most compassionate things for oneself that could be done is to commit to and be of service to something larger than oneself. Actually, like I love pop culture. I kind of didn't get much pop culture when I was a monk. You just sort of sneak it on the weekends once in a while.
• 25:22
  Now I really like pop culture. But I realize that some people, their life is only pop culture. Like I kind of live for Tuesday when the new Aliens episode comes out, but I kind of don't. I have other things that are meaningful to me. But some people have no core to their life.
• 25:45
  That's more than like, you know, what did Sidney Sweeney say or whatever. Commitment and being of service to something larger than oneself is self compassion. But sometimes that grates against our instincts to self cherish, to preserve our time, our energy. That's an issue in practice. I I still deal with that.
• 26:15
  Right, and I would argue that full self compassion depends on experiencing the translucency of yourself. As long as we take this constructed personality to be the whole of what we are, we're going to have a certain ribbon of pain running through our life, a kind of existential pain. Because taking this personality to be ultimately real and what we are is simply not true. It's a kind of dream. I hope it's a good dream for you.
• 26:57
  One's self image is a kind of dream. To see it like that is very compassionate. I'm just seeing if have anything else to add this topic. No, maybe that's good for now. I'd like to hear if you have anything to say.
• 27:33
  Ma'am Eliza, if you had anything, anybody else cares to share. Jogan, are you enlightened, and if so, what does that mean to you? No. And if I was, I pray to never know that I am. Okay.
• 28:03
  What does it mean to you? What does it mean as a description of somebody? As best as you can formulate in words. And I think if so the contradiction is that if someone is enlightened, that means they know that they don't exist as a separate being. So Yes.
• 28:22
  And they're in touch with what remains. I would say if there's an enlightened person, then they live in that continually. They live in that even when they're hot, tired, sweaty, their girlfriend is telling no, them they're They're what? No, going in and out. They're not going in and out.
• 28:42
  Yeah, if there's a complete transfer to that condition, it would just be that it just never changes. But the real more interesting thing is that that's everybody's reality right now. We just think we're not enlightened because we believe we're kind of so fascinated with our thoughts. We're just disconnected from that basic intimate transparency because we've so long believed we're this and we're this. So all of us are enlightened, but we just don't believe it, basically.
• 29:26
  Jomon: Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendust.org. Your support supports us.