Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Making Peace with Your Inner Critic - Zen Teacher Jomon

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Making Peace with Your Inner Critic - Zen Teacher Jomon · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddha Dharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: Good evening, everyone. Thanks so much for being here. It's nice to see a few more people. There were only, I don't know, seven of us or something here. I went up, I was like, well, I was glad everybody was maybe taking care of themselves, maybe not braving the smoke tonight.
• 0:44
  I think about the smoke, I was thinking about this today, breathing the smoke from Spokane and Eastern Oregon, and having done these retreats with wildland firefighters for a few years now, I feel really connected to them when I'm breathing that stuff. So, you know, there's that. We are all together in this. So, let's go ahead and take refuge if you'd like to take refuge with me. I take refuge in the Buddha.
• 1:15
  I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha. And I appreciate the folks on Zoom tonight. We now have a a Zoom Jisha. A Jisha is someone who is kind of the assistant in helping to take care of things, and so I appreciate our Zoom Jisha, really making the experience online a little richer and more personal.
• 1:46
  Alright. So over the weekend, Bancho, who is another Zen teacher at the monastery, and he also happens to be my spouse, he and I were teaching a weekend retreat, really more of a workshop called Transforming the Inner Critic or another way to phrase it was seeing through obstacles. Seeing through obstacles. So I thought I'd share a little bit of that with you today. And I'll just I think you all already know good and well what an inner critic is, you know, probably.
• 2:40
  But when we speak about the inner critic, what we mean is that the habitual patterns that manifest themselves in clutch of thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. They're habitual patterns that often take shape in thoughts that are communicated in our minds internally that are sort of critical and sometimes yelling inside and just only ever seeing what's wrong with this being, with ourselves. Now there's also a similar energy of critical, never enough kind of energy that is directed outward. We call that the outer judge. Same energy, two sides of the same coin, but we kind of focus on the inner critic in our community because when we believe those patterns of thought without question, when we're not holding them in the light of awareness and seeing what they really are, that can really thwart your meditation practice, your whole spiritual practice, and know, fall off the path of of dharma, of awakening.
• 4:16
  We come to believe things like, I guess I'm constitutionally incapable of meditation, or everybody else has got it and I don't got it, or I don't belong here, or nobody here likes me. Those kinds of things. And when this happens, then and we aren't able to stabilize ourselves in any sort of meditation practice or dharma practice together with others, then how else will what's also thwarted is our ability to show up as a Bodhisattva, up to benefit others. So if we do this bring awareness to our inner critic then ultimately it serves to benefit others. It becomes an obstacle we can see through.
• 5:08
  It's illusory. It is often an inheritance of karma, and we've talked about karma in here, but it's always good to clarify that karma is not what it says on the bumper sticker about karma. It's a lot more complicated than that. Our karmic inheritance is, you know, karma is everything everybody's ever done, everything everybody's ever said, everything everybody's ever thought, all of the elements of the world, of the universe has come to bear on this moment. It could only be like this.
• 5:50
  How could it be otherwise? It's cause and effect. It's it's more like physics than getting what you deserve. Right? And given that, what we do matters, and that is more than what we do outwardly.
• 6:09
  It's what we think and what we say and what we say to ourselves that is also both a product of karma and generating karma. So how we talk to ourselves does impact how we show up in the world or how we see even the world. So we bring our practice of awareness to this phenomenon just like any other phenomenon that we would bring the awareness of practice to. And we also gather up some tools of practice to work with it and put it into perspective. So not only do we work with what we call the inner critic, but it's we work with two other voices.
• 7:02
  You can't really have a critical thought or belief unless you have a standard against which you're measuring something that's terrible or no good or not good enough. Because you've gotta compare it to the thing that it should be. The thing that is the right way, is the way it should be. So for that you need a perfectionist, you need an inner perfectionist and maybe some of you can relate to that too. That may be a very familiar voice to some folks.
• 7:39
  So those two work in tandem and so we can then begin to notice this gap of here's how it is or here's how I am and here's how I should be, and this gap is really where suffering lives. This is also where the third voice lives, which is what we call the pusher or the doer, the one that's really trying to get us to achieve whatever this inner critical voice is, you know, to try to avoid basically the inner critical voice and try to achieve these maybe sometimes unrealistic ideals of the inner perfectionist, or more likely the ever changing goalposts of the inner perfectionist. Even if we do get it, there's still more not got it that we can find usually endlessly. So that is how they function. It may sound like IFS, Internal Family Systems Therapy, and this workshop has been going on for over twenty years at Great Vow.
• 8:54
  Hogan and Chozan Roshi developed this and have been offering it for at least that long. They encountered a couple of therapists back in the day who developed a therapy called voice dialogue. And so they used that by a method by which you basically speak for these inner voices and a person facilitates you in that process. And it's quite fun and interesting. And so what Chosen Roshi and Hogan Roshi noticed is that yes, this inner critical voice derails our practice so we've got to really address this at some point in people's practice life.
• 9:31
  So that's what they set about doing and offering this retreat. One of the first times I did the retreat with Hogan Roshi co taught with him, I had a complete inner critic attack, which is what you call it when you just don't have very much distance from that voice at all, and it feels like a swarm of bees or something. It was basically the night before the retreat started and I wasn't living at the monastery then I drove up there and just in my little dorm room bed and went through and just basically did all the tools I was about to teach everybody. But boy, didn't sleep very much and it was painful. But all these tools are very helpful, very useful.
• 10:20
  And just because you, like me, have a PhD in inner critic, that illusion can still feel very real, can still kind of hook us in sometimes. So it's not a one and done. It's in many ways a long process of discovery to look at these dynamics. So one of the ways that we address this, one of the tools that we offered was the tool of mindful self compassion, and that is a tool that's been kind of very specifically offered by a couple of researchers and or therapists, Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer have brought this into the secular world, though its origins are in the Buddha Dharma. So mindful self compassion, so define compassion first.
• 11:21
  Compassion, also I'm sure each one of us is familiar with this, it is the very natural arising when we encounter suffering. We encounter suffering, there's this natural arising of this wish to alleviate suffering. I want to help, I want to stop, I want to soothe. And very often it's elicited when we encounter suffering outside ourselves. If we're open to it, if we allow ourselves to see it and encounter it, to be touched by suffering.
• 11:52
  But compassion is not limited to whatever we would consider outside of ourselves. We can also find compassion for our own suffering. That same wish, that same wish to alleviate suffering can also be applied right here. That may be why you're here to some degree. So you really do have to have a sense of awareness.
• 12:18
  So MSC, Mindful Self Compassion, starts with mindfulness, starts with this awareness of our own thoughts, emotions, and body sensations is one way we can look at that. So taking apart what we would ordinarily kind of clutch together and unquestioningly carry a concept around of I'm no good or I'm not good enough or I screwed that up. That is made up of a thought. It is made up of emotion. It is made up of body sensation.
• 12:52
  It may be a habit of mind, a habit of thought that has gotten hooked or linked like a chain to other experiences that are familiar. And it's almost just like falling off a log or like the ruts that get put into the highway when you drive with your studded tires like you're allowed to do in this state. And then it's all slippery and stuff when the water gets in there. So our minds are a lot like that. They can develop ruts, they develop habits, and then it's just so easy to fall right into those.
• 13:35
  So we become mindful of that process. We also, so the first part is mindfulness. The second part, as we notice that, we may very well encounter our own suffering, which is sometimes what we try to keep at bay. But let's say we open our awareness, we take it in, we recognize our own suffering, and that might feel a little overwhelming. So we then say, oh my gosh, this is what it means to be a human being.
• 14:07
  How many people in the whole world have experienced, if not this exact situation, something very much like this or probably this very same feeling? And not just the people on earth today, but all the people who have ever been throughout history who've experienced something like this. All the people who will in the future have experienced something like this. I'm not alone. I'm not alone.
• 14:31
  This is what it means to be human. And then the third part of mindful self compassion is this bringing forth kindness. The same kindness that you would offer to a friend or that you would say to someone you cared about. That's often so much more readily available for other people, and when we begin to listen to the content of our inner critic, you would never say that kind of stuff to somebody else, ever. You probably wouldn't even stand by if somebody was saying it to someone like on the bus or something.
• 15:04
  You would wanna interrupt it and say, this verbal abuse must stop. This is unacceptable. But yet it goes on and on in our own mind, sometimes unchecked. So we shift that around and say, okay, I'm gonna really talk to myself with kindness like a friend. I saw something on Instagram, it was really funny.
• 15:27
  This woman in a therapist situation, the therapist is like helping her work on her self talk, she's like, I just can't do it, I can't talk to my inner child, I don't like it. And she's like, okay, well, about if you talk to yourself like you talk to your dog? And then it shows her talking to her dog, and she's like, you're just the very best. You've never done anything wrong. You're so good.
• 15:52
  And she's like, yeah, I think I can do that. So we do have this flexibility. We do have this capacity to change once we are aware of what are the links in the chain that we are continuing to habitually go around and around on. So we begin to recognize the voices, the content, the energy. Sometimes our inner critic is not even verbal.
• 16:24
  Sometimes it's just energy, just yuck. Sometimes it's not, it doesn't even have words. We can still recognize it when we feel somehow judged. Somebody pointed out that they project their inner critic onto others. Oh, that person can't stand me.
• 16:43
  Oh, that person thinks what I said was dumb. And it's like, that person's probably not actually thinking about you, you know, generally. It's not something we do, but we can feel judged or feel not enough or feel that shame or wish to hide or isolate or sense of hopelessness. So these things kind of run under the radar or it's like we're a fish swimming in water, don't even realize what water is when we don't notice this stuff or recognize it. When we recognize it, we can then separate from it a little bit.
• 17:18
  We can kind of externalize it a little bit, gain some distance from it. And so in the workshop we talk about our inner critic in the third person and allow the inner critic to talk about us in the third person. So that's kind of the dynamic of voice dialogue. So, Bancho and I did a demo of voice dialogue and so I'm interviewing Bancho Bancho and his inner critic and he's like, ugh, Bancho, his meditation is so terrible. He can't even focus.
• 17:48
  It's so, you know, and it's awful. And just in doing that, and the energy really does get rolling. It's quite remarkable, and everybody's like, I can't imagine Bon Jo even being like that, but there it is. But getting some distance in that third person, we talk about my inner critic says x y z, instead of I'm so x y z, right? One thing we can do is find and turn the dial of critical mind and appreciative mind.
• 18:29
  That is something we actually can possibly feel around for and then shift for ourselves. So let's try it. I'd like to do a little exercise and see if that's true. So go ahead and look at your hand right now. It doesn't matter which one, just have a look at your hand and with the most critical, fault finding, negative, perhaps even disgusted view of that hand, the least charitable view, what do you notice about it?
• 19:06
  Go ahead and shout out some things. Age spots. Age spots.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: Scars. Ugly
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: fingernails. Ugly fingernails. Ugly tattoo. Fatter than it used to be. Fatter than it used to be.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Swollen knuckles.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: Veins. Dry. Veins, dry. Okay, yeah, that is easy to do, isn't it? Like, lah.
• 19:32
  Alright, go ahead and shake it off. Okay, now, maybe notice a appreciative sense, and you might even take a couple breaths into the heart region and open up some space. Just check-in with the heart. Is the heart open or closed, warm or cool? See if you can just generate a little warmth, little kindness, a little appreciation.
• 20:01
  And with soft eyes, the soft eyes of friendship, the soft eyes you might look at your pet or your child with, with an appreciative mind, heart, gaze. Go ahead and look at this hand again. And what do you notice? Go ahead and shout out what you notice.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Still working.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: Still working. Strong. Looks like my family's hands. Skilled. Skilled.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Looks like a turtle's neck.
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: Looks like a turtle's neck. He
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: has connected me to the world.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: Has connected me to the world. Knows how to do all kinds of things that I couldn't really explain. Yeah. Mysteriously knows how to do all kinds of things that we aren't even conscious of. Exactly.
• 20:59
  Can't even explain how. Yeah, so that just happened. That just happened, you did that. You have that capacity to shift, to turn the dial towards appreciation, towards from hard eyes to soft eyes, and we can see ourselves accordingly. With compassion, with these pieces, there can be transformation and a recognition of what that inner critical voice might really be trying to do for us.
• 21:35
  And we would do some journaling with the various questions. What is the inner critic's favorite content? Know and each person has a different constellation of those things. One of the things that you might notice and see if this is true for yourself as you begin to pay attention to this, I find and for many people, the inner critic goes after the things we most care about. So perhaps for parents it's your parenting.
• 22:00
  For maybe it's work or your relationship with family or spiritual practice. You know, if any of these things is our creative capacity, the things that we hold dear very often, that's the content the inner critic will really go for. But when you ask the inner critic, what do you really want from me? Or what are you afraid will happen if you aren't here anymore? It's oh my gosh, I just want you to, from mine it's like I want you to live your life to the fullest.
• 22:37
  I want you to offer yourself completely to this life, to not waste anything. Right, that sounds pretty good, but boy has it gotten neurotic in there, man. So there is a grain of truth in this. There is a little diamond that gets delivered in a truckload of dung basically that we get to with discernment actually figure out what is this really trying to do for me and what can I leave behind? Sometimes it's activated by a sense of or a fear of not belonging and or it's activated by a sense of not being safe and that's a very powerful and compelling survival mechanism.
• 23:27
  We back, you know, even to some degree now, if we become isolated from others, we as human beings die. We need other people and so to not belong, to be cast out feels like life and death because in some sense it is. So some ways to know the inner critic. It's favorite words are to, you are to this, you are to that, so, you are so this, you are always, never, should, shouldn't, and not so much even the words, but the tone. That was a nice thing to do or well that was a nice thing to do.
• 24:13
  Right? It's sarcastic, derisive, angry, hurtful or bitter, that tone. Again, you would probably never use that or if you did, you would probably apologize to someone if you did use those kinds of tones, but that's a way to listen for and think, oh my gosh, I think this is the inner critic talking. The inner critic often speaks with total authority and certainty which is also very convincing especially if we're in a moment of confusion and uncertainty. Well, here's what you really should have done.
• 24:45
  Oh my gosh, it sounds so sure and clear. Must be right. No. Feels a particular way in our body, so it can help us to maybe even come up with a physical representation. What does my inner critic even look like?
• 25:07
  Does it have a gender? Is it a human? Does it have a specific voice? Does it have a name? Can I call it by name?
• 25:15
  Some people have named their inner critic. Mine kind of is like a beleaguered stage manager. For some reason she's got like flyaway hair because she's just so like barely keeping up with just the wreck that is the stage production of the Jomon life. Oh my god. What have you done now?
• 25:44
  Okay. Okay. We're just gonna try to fix this up to maybe a standard of something. Right? It's just that kind of condescending, exhausted, tired, disgusted, you know.
• 25:58
  That's what mine is like. And she just wants everything perfect. I'm gonna work with the perfectionist and get it all perfect. No. That's not right.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: Can I ask
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: a quick question? Can Hang on just a second. Yeah, we'll get you a microphone and get you a question. Almost done. So We realize these voices, we realize that they're not true.
• 26:31
  Whether we can also find within ourselves an inner cheerleader or an inner compassionate voice. The voice that can also come forward and be a balance to this. But in many ways, one wonderful metaphor is that we're really just driving a bus and all these voices are passengers on the bus and the inner critic may be in the front row seat with a bullhorn, but they really can't drive your bus if you don't let them, if you don't do what they say, even though they're saying, you're a terrible driver, you're gonna kill us all. This is so dangerous, don't go there, it's the worst thing you could ever do. It's okay.
• 27:16
  Maybe listen down in the very back there's this very kind, for me, woman with a hair pulled back, and she's just kind of enjoying the ride. Like, this is so wonderful. I wonder where we're going. She's a lot more fun. And there's a doer that's got the map.
• 27:40
  Oh, we could have been much more efficient than this. We could go this way. Right? It's just like a swarm of bees in the sense that there's no true being there. It's just this, or a murmuration of birds, all these voices.
• 27:58
  There's no singular self really to be found in this. So that is also something we get to come to know.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: 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.