Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Bearing FOMO and Boredom So You Can Do More Practice - Jogen Salzberg, Sensei

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Bearing FOMO and Boredom So You Can Do More Practice - 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.
• 0:24
  Jogen: So who finds meditation boring sometimes? Raise your hand. Do the math. That's like a third. Who finds it boring a lot of the time?
• 0:38
  Thank you. A couple people. Okay. Who's never bored when they meditate? Okay.
• 0:46
  Okay. So my talk title I have written here is Bearing Boredom and FOMO So You Can Do More Practice. Because I think, and this talk is addressed to the person who could be doing more practice and in their heart, we could say wants to do more practice but doesn't do more practice because it doesn't feel good because of boredom and FOMO. So that's basically the gist of what I want to talk about. Probably for a long time, for most people doing more formal practice is better.
• 1:31
  I don't think it's like other things necessarily. There's some things that people could say, Actually doing too much of that is not so good. Or sometimes we have this funny idea of balance, that balance is good. But probably for a long time, meaning like twenty years of practice, doing more is actually better. Okay?
• 1:56
  And I kind of want to talk about what I mean by more and what I mean by better. So again, this is not a talk where I'm trying to leverage something for you to do something more that you don't want to do because how well does that work? Right? But if you have the desire in you, I want to affirm it and maybe you could free it up a little bit because I've learned something about boredom and FOMO over the years. And doing more practice, I didn't decide whether I meant more frequently or longer periods.
• 2:36
  There's benefits to both. I actually think that there is a certain amount of time on the cushion necessary, if there's sustained effort, from a brain point of view for it to shift modes. And I don't know anything about the brain, I've never seen one, but I hear they exist and I believe there's something to this. So a more formal practice is better for what? It's better for deepening concentration.
• 3:13
  It's better for confirming essential realizations. We give various words to in the tradition. Doing more formal practice generally is better for retuning your nervous system. It's not something I think is talked about a lot, but I think some of the conditioning of our nervous systems to be agitated can be undone through enough tranquility through practice. Kind of rewiring can happen.
• 3:50
  More practice is better for cleaning up our drama. It's more better, more practice is better for cleaning up our karma, for working with our personality and its rough edges and it's better for aligning with our purpose. Right? And other way to look at this is clarity of mind is worth desiring. Clarity of mind is possible for you and me and worth desiring.
• 4:29
  By clarity of mind, I don't mean you move aside some thoughts and replace them with others, though that could happen in a beneficial way. I mean the actual pristine clarity of your own consciousness that is outside of the whole system of thoughts and words and impulses. That is worth desiring, I think. It's like a gleaming diamond that's so hidden in the heap of busyness and cogitation and opinions, which are ever more fashionable, it's worth desiring. And the only way to find clarity of mind is to step away from mind.
• 5:23
  I would love to be wrong about this. I would love to be able to say, Yeah, you could go to that medicine ceremony and you'll leave a clarity of mind. Or, Do ten years of therapy and you'll get clarity of mind. Or, I don't know what it could be. I wish I could recommend something else because I know people find meditation boring.
• 5:46
  But I know of no other way. And we just call it meditation because that's what we call it, right? As a contrast to our cogitation, which is what we human beings tend to do all the time frothing at the brain. In contrast to that, we have this thing we call meditation. But we wouldn't have to call it meditation if we didn't froth at the brain.
• 6:11
  It would just be, oh, of mind. That. Yeah. So the more practice we do, it's more, first of all, stopping of busyness. So much is maybe obscured in busyness.
• 6:35
  When you think about your own life, how much do you skim over the surface of things because you're in the propulsion to the next thing? Or how much data of each moment, each moment is like a spread of information, how much of it is missed because you're occupied or preoccupied? Preoccupied, already filled with something. Busy internally, busy externally. The more practice we do, the more we're actually just stopping.
• 7:17
  You're just interrupting that. Hopefully not getting more busy on your meditation cushion. It's not more doing of the habit body. Sometimes some teachers of old people would say, Well, what is the benefit anyway of spending all that time sitting in meditation? And one of the things they would say is when people are wholeheartedly sitting in meditation, they're keeping the precepts.
• 7:51
  They're not lying. They're not criticizing others too much, I hope. They're not buying things they don't need. They're not using intoxicants. They're not killing.
• 8:02
  Right? They're not creating division. It's interrupting the do it doing of the habit body. What interrupts our habit body? Maybe it's sleep and then that can be a habit body.
• 8:22
  What's going on in your dreams? In a way in our dreams, habit body is still going. Or I like to think it's saying, Hi, I'm your habit body. Pay attention to me. I'm a dream.
• 8:38
  Practice is more intimacy with stillness. The more you sit in stillness, the more it can permeate your being. You have to like think of it as something you get exposed to. Like people who hang out in the mountains a lot. They take on mountain kind of qualities.
• 9:02
  People who hang out on the beach a lot take on beach like qualities. If you hang out in stillness, you can start taking on stillness like qualities and you begin to feel it in your body. You mean you feel it in your energy. You mean to feel it as a kind of backbone of the mind almost. So I think there are two main obstacles for folks to doing more practice.
• 9:32
  As I said, boredom and FOMO. And if what I've said about the goodness of doing more rings true from you, then great. Then maybe this can help you do more. And if you don't feel like you want to do more, then no one is saying you should do more. Yeah.
• 9:52
  Even though more would be better. With a lot of things in meditation, what makes these obstacles is not the experiences themself, but that we tend to recoil at them. They strike us as wrong things to be happening. They feel bad. They set off some kind of alarm.
• 10:21
  And then what happens is we distance from them. We react to them. And a lot of times that reaction is, I'm going to get off this cushion or next time I'm only going to do this for twelve minutes or I'm not going to do this at all. Now, to boredom, I, in the past, found boredom a terrible feeling. It was so terrible.
• 10:52
  It's like the nothing from Never Ending Story. Do you remember the Never Ending Story with the big dog dragon? Think that's named Atreyu? No. The boy is Atreyu.
• 11:05
  The dragon needs to be named. Falkor. What? Falkor? Falkor.
• 11:12
  I'm sure that's also an emo band, but that's another talk. So in the Never Ending Story, there's the nothing that eats away at existence. Right? It's this experience of you just don't want nothing to come. And I felt that boredom was like the nothing was going to eat me away.
• 11:32
  And my visceral reaction to it was so strong. Like, can't this is like death. But part of long term Zen training is to get really, really bored. And so I found myself in a Zen monastery and I had to sit with that experience. I had to make intimate that experience.
• 11:56
  I don't know how it is for everybody, but I bet you will hit, you will hit or you are hitting waves of boredom in meditation. It might not be your strongest flavor. You might have restlessness more as a flavor. That's where FOMO comes in. But boredom is something that if we don't front load the intention to stay steady with and really bring full awareness to, it will, even though outwardly it looks like we're doing the practice or even lots of it, it will corrode what we're doing.
• 12:43
  Because we'll start to get bored and instead of meditating, we'll start daydreaming a lot. We'll start fabricating experiences. We'll start fantasizing. We'll start just making it to the bell. How many people have just tried to kind of sweat it out till the bell?
• 13:04
  Yeah. Now that might be fist. See, wow, really enthusiastic faces. That might be pain, might be restlessness, or it might be the pain of boredom. So what is this experience of boredom?
• 13:25
  What do we mean by boredom? It could be that boredom is something that is a consequence of actually going deeper in the practice. It's like something else is lifting and temporarily the lifting of that thing we call boredom. So as we're doing practice, we're releasing fabrications. I heard someone use this word recently, fabrications, and I remembered I really like it.
• 14:01
  That is a thing that dharma trainees are doing is we're releasing fabrications. That is our mind is very often making shit up, very often. And it's doing that in a big way. We totally make stuff up about people we don't know and we believe the stuff that we made up. And on a kind of more subtle level, it's like making little fabrications about even this experience.
• 14:37
  Kind of having thoughts in here and fantasies and little plans about how I'll fix this. It's labeling experience like breath. And then it's relating to the idea of breath rather than the actual breath. So it fabricated a concept called breath or something almost everyone has is a concept called body. And we relate to that mental image even more than the actual whatever this is.
• 15:13
  So we are actually practicing well and we're starting to release those fabrications and we get hit with, we come into just the rawness of being. That's just this vibrating, quivering, fluxing life. And there's no drama to it. There's no excitement. There's also no lack.
• 15:46
  There's also no paucity to it either. It is a vibrant quivering mass but it doesn't have the fabrications that have so long been our friend. We've been entertaining ourself creatively for so long. I was one of those kids in elementary school that ran around the playground with an imaginary friend. Mine was David Hasselhoff.
• 16:17
  So glad there's some Gen Xers in the room. Hasselhoff was awesome and he had this car called Knight Rider that talked to him and it went like and did all kinds of cool stuff. So, had Knight Rider as a friend and David was in the seat. First male role model. Anyways, that's a tendency.
• 16:43
  We start very young entertaining ourselves, making mental companions. I mean, even the voice in your head is a anytime is kind of a fabrication. It's like a mental companion. And so we come to practice and we're doing it well and we're starting to release that and, well, that doesn't And I don't know how long some of us actually encounter the experience of boredom before we're carried off into some strategy to avoid it. It's very popular to go to meditation retreats and fall in love with someone you've never heard speak.
• 17:20
  It's very common to have grand ideas about what you'll do when you're done, etcetera. So that's one thing to check out. What actually goes on for you on a feeling level that is the fruit of your having for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. Release these fabrications. You're encountering yourself as a moment being, a vibrating moment being with no name, no past, no future, no purpose, totally free because of that and then something, some residue says, I got to start making some stuff up or make it exciting here.
• 18:07
  This feeling. And then what I believe is a kind of, if there's steady effort, there's a kind of arc of deepening. Maybe some genius or some AI someday will make a little chart. We get derailed from the arc of deepening because the boredom catches us and we begin fabricating anew. This is just one possibility.
• 18:41
  I'm just presenting this as, check it out, what happens? Another possibility. We have an addiction or an attachment to stimulus. Yeah, for ten minutes, I'm good feeling the breath. This is cool.
• 18:57
  I could tell people I did this spiritual thing. My Fitbit has given me positive feedback about my heart rate. I can tell my wellness coach I meditated, I'm mindful. But then, there's nothing going on. There's not a damn thing going on.
• 19:19
  There's nothing going on. Not very interesting. It's just me here. I'm not that interesting just sitting here. And this was true for people 2,000 ago.
• 19:37
  And I don't know what they did for fun. What did they do? There was like ceremonies and puppet shows and animals would walk across the field and you I don't know. Maybe there'd be a war. People make war because they get bored.
• 19:51
  One of my theories. There'd be wars and that could be exciting and give purpose temporarily, but people were probably pretty like there's nothing going on. They got bored. Well, we are so stimulated. If you could go from 1980 to this moment instantly and you saw that there was television monitors on the back of every damn thing wherever you go, you would be like, oh my god.
• 20:17
  I'm in a sci fi movie. So our attachment when attachment is like tendrils that are reaching for what it normally gets, it will usually feel bad. I never thought of this before but I think this is helpful to note. If you're doing spiritual practice sincerely, you will be interrupting certain kinds of so called attachment. That process will feel bad.
• 20:50
  You will want to end that process. You will want to get what you're used to getting which is stimulus. And so you're sitting there and you're craving for some bloody thing to happen. And that texture of nothing happening, we can call boredom. So the main thing and the solutions to all of these are always utterly simple, utterly simple, is you just stay engaged and let it wave over you.
• 21:29
  It's like being alert to that which sort of knocks you out of your lane when you do this practice. And if it's not boredom or FOMO, it's something else. Be alert to what tends to move you out of your lane and just get back in the lane. Right? Don't fabricate that you have a big problem.
• 21:50
  I think a lot of people are like, Oh yeah, this is boring. I should practice Vajrayana. They've got all these bells and colors and monsters, and it's really interesting. Monsters. They have really cool monsters, enlightened monsters.
• 22:04
  I'm leaving. Yeah. See? See? Often we think this isn't working, and we begin getting derailed.
• 22:15
  We think, I'll find a better practice. Stay engaged. Let it wave over you. Right? I think you could, and in the past practitioners thought kind of mythologically about the path.
• 22:31
  They thought that one is sort of tested by dharma guardians. If you think in that way, like you get tested when you do spiritual practice. Can you not can you hold steady in the midst of this, what they would call Mara? Can you hold steady in the midst of this wave of haunting moving through your heart? Or does it knock you off your seat?
• 23:01
  Right? See what I mean? It's kind of archetypal. Can you stay steady in your vow to do this? Part of the reason we celebrate the Buddha is this was somebody, and we celebrate many teachers who did not budge no matter what arose for them.
• 23:18
  That's why in a way we pay homage to them, Not because they were different from us, but because they were the same as us and they said, I will not budge. So FOMO, everybody knows what FOMO is. Yes? Fear of missing out. A belief feeling that there is a different moment possible and a better moment than the one you're having.
• 23:52
  A moment that has more value, more excitement, a moment that's more profitable. I definitely have had people I've worked with who said, It's really hard for me to meditate because I know I could be making money right now. Honest, honest. That's what they would tell me. That was their experience.
• 24:11
  It's true. They could have been making money. Meditation will not it's not good for your bank account. More subtly than that, a FOMO can show up from us in our practice and have our practice go from a robust hour a day, two hours a day, whittle it down, down, down, down because we fear that we could get more meaning somewhere else. More growth somewhere else, more connection.
• 24:40
  Maybe you could. It's nobody's business but yours. I think the question is and it's like the bigger question of desire in Buddhism that we're invited to examine as well, what is the pattern with desire? I have a fear of missing out and I get to that next moment and does my fear of missing out come with me to that moment? And conjure it, fabricate a new moment that I'm afraid I'm going to miss out on.
• 25:12
  I deleted Instagram from my phone right after the inauguration. I thought this is too much. I can't buy any more coffee. I already have four bags. There's no room for any more records.
• 25:30
  What? It's not true. Actually, not true. There's always room for more records. And I realized I had this diabolical device with me that masqueraded as presenting stimulation and excitement and connection.
• 25:42
  But for me, and I can only speak for me, it mostly fed a kind of FOMO. And we watch, we get the thing, and then it's not long before we're thinking about how to get the thing. It's just as like the object changes. It's just replaced with a new object. So when you sit and you feel the sense that I'd rather be doing something else, you look at that.
• 26:26
  And I know some people feel that and they stay on the cushion even though they're not really engaging. They they're they go into I'd rather be doing something else mode even though they stay put. But you look at that and you see what is this really about? This force that's pulling me away, what it? Is there something underneath it?
• 26:51
  Is it masking something else? Could be. Is it that you would rather not be doing it? Great, don't do it. No one says you have to or even that you should.
• 27:08
  But to really be keen about these states of mind, to really be keen and consider that there will be maras coming your way. And Mara is the word for forces of deception. In a way, it comes down to, I think, faith. There's three kinds of faith. There's a kind of faith that we believe, like maybe what I'm saying resonates with you and you feel like, Yeah, like I want to meet this challenge.
• 27:48
  This does arise for me. I do want to engage more in formal practice. But you're not quite sure it's worth it. That's one kind of faith. Then there's verified faith.
• 28:01
  And verified faith is you have sat enough through these kind of waves that you know that there really is something valuable on the other side. I have someone who recounted to me, they were in a short retreat and they were sitting and they were so restless. They were thinking of getting a plane ticket to go home. And the teacher encouraged them to stay, sit a little longer. And they sat down and they were so restless, they felt like bugs were crawling in their skin.
• 28:39
  And they had to basically kind of grit their teeth and white knuckle it literally just to stay put. But they had faith, yet verified, that that was worth doing. And they did. And this person had a profound kind of opening. Like the essential clarity of their mind just blazed after that because it broke.
• 29:04
  The restlessness was like a wave that crested and broke. I don't believe in fate or supposed to be or things turn out the way they should. I don't Who would say that about this world? That person could have decided to not have done that sit and decided, This is not for me. I'll never do it again.
• 29:26
  And then that thing they tasted that changed their life was not gonna be tasted. So faith verified faith. Right? You sit through that stuff, Look, you look through that stuff. Right?
• 29:50
  And then there's transmitted faith for what it's worth. Somebody like me saying, It would be very good for you to do more practice. It would be very good. I don't know what more looks like. It's your life.
• 30:05
  But really consider doing more practice. And clarity of mind is like a diamond. In a mountain of manure. Oh, I believe that. And I try to practice that.
• 30:34
  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.