Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Shadowboxing the Mind: Interrupting Automatic Thought - Jogen Salzeberg, Sensei

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Shadowboxing the Mind: Interrupting Automatic Thought - Jogen Salzeberg, 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.
• 0:22
  Jogen: To answer your question, Laina, yes, with access concentration, any object will do. Or in other actually, the object that will do is the one that we can enter access concentration with. But that's not my theme for tonight. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here.
• 0:48
  I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma. I take refuge in Sangha. I feel gratitude when I say that. To be awareness is its own fulfillment of meaning.
• 1:07
  And it doesn't need a reason or an explanation or anything outside of that to justify it. And you can think of the fruit of practice in lots of different ways. You can think about it and experience it as being freed from mental anguish, being at peace with your life the way it is. You can think of it as restoring the capacity for direct experience. I had a very, important theater teacher who that was one of his missions in the work he taught was to restore the capacity for direct experience that he felt that modern people had lost.
• 1:51
  You can think of this practice as removing obstacles to joy and generosity. You could think of it as a way of social action that you actually become someone who doesn't have the faults or has the faults in check that we see in others. You can think of it as a means to know the divine. And you don't need to think of it. But all of these fruits necessitate extending the practice beyond the cushion.
• 2:25
  And I am emphasizing this point, not because you've never heard it, but because I think lots of people don't really do it, even though they've heard it. Many people, especially those that have the privilege to do retreat, compartmentalize their practice. They think, Yeah, when I'm in my everyday life, I kind of maintain this little faint thread of what I call practice. And then when I finally get some days to do retreat, I'll do the real thing. And that that state of mind is self reinforcing.
• 3:01
  We don't look at everyday life as having the potential for meaningful or deep practice. We don't view it as having that potential and so then it is for a lot of people, just maintenance. But if we don't really extend practice beyond the meditation chair, it won't, be effective. And that actually, I'm concerned that you'll be discouraged, Because you'll hear all these things spoken about what's possible and then you'll have your direct experience and you'll go, wait, either I'm not doing it right or this is overblown. Or unfortunately, lot of people have strong inner critics.
• 3:46
  They think, I must be doing it wrong because it doesn't look like they said it could or would look. The other thing that happens is people become excessively dependent on retreat. I did years of retreat. I love retreat. I sell valuable retreat.
• 4:04
  But, what was actually more important for me than retreat was how I practiced between retreats. That's true now. And that's true when I was a monastic. A lot of the times that people want to get out of life into retreat is because they're blaming their circumstances for the state of mind they have that's distracted or choppy or reactive. And, you know, circumstances are challenging.
• 4:41
  For some people, they're more challenging than others. If we can compare compare circumstances. In a way, the ability to or even the intention and
• 4:59
  Jomon: the
• 4:59
  Jogen: application to have strong practice in the midst of lay life is more powerful than somebody who lives in a manicured environment. Because you're already proving to yourself that it can be integrated. It's not something that depends on lots of delicate conditions. And there's an old phrase for this kind of practice. This Chinese master Da Hui, wonderful, amazing teacher, called it the lotus in the fire.
• 5:34
  And that's an interesting image, lotus in the flames. One of the things it means is that you sustain that which is pure in the midst of the world of the passions. Fires, the passions, all the all the things that consume our attention, that eat up our energy. That's what fire does. It eats.
• 6:08
  It consumes kindling and wood. What it eats up is our energy, our life force. Right? So what I am recommending to those whom this message resonates, if it doesn't, then that's fine. This thought, this thought, in lay life or in dharma center life, wherever you find yourself, I'm going to practice all the time.
• 6:36
  I'm going to practice all the time. It's not something I do for twenty minutes a day. I'm going to practice all the time continually. I'm going to practice. And then sitting meditation is just a centerpiece to that.
• 6:50
  It's a place where you I like to think of it as turning the burner up. You turn the burner up higher because you can. If you have the health, you can sit in the upright posture which amplifies awareness. It's a centerpiece. But maybe how you carry the practice once you're done is actually where it's really vital.
• 7:20
  So an accompanying thought is this thought. I'm going to work with my illusions, my delusions, my reactivities all the time. I'm going to work with them. When there is illusion, delusion, reactivity, we know that's happening because we're, we start suffering. We start having, friction.
• 7:45
  I'm going to work with that. I'm going to see that as this is actually my practice right here and now. This is this is the time to apply. This is the time. This is the time.
• 7:58
  Another way of saying that is I'm going to let everything teach me. Rather than being in a combative or avoidant stance with so many things in our day, I'm going to let it all teach me. I'm going to let it all reflect to me my stickiness, my inner rigidities, my lack of flexibility. Because I would like to be free of that. I can't be free of that abstractly.
• 8:32
  And then one of the things I think about is think about relationships a lot because I work with people in relationships, and I'm in a relationship, and life in some ways is nothing but relationship. And I think that we can change a relationship when we change our state of mind because at least one half has shifted. So, therefore, something shifts. But a lot of the work of relationship has to happen in the moment of the relationship. Right?
• 9:04
  It has to we have to be applying dharma, continual presence, kindness, the desire for love to be more important than being right all the time. Now, I am definitely not sitting up here saying I'm really, really good at this. I'm not really, really good at it. I do really, really believe in it. I have really, really tried, and I think it's fruitful.
• 9:37
  And so this is I'm trying to impart to you the practicer's lifestyle, how you could think about it. You think I'm continually going to try to be awake and frictionless. Continually. I'm not I'm not, this isn't a metaphor. Right?
• 9:57
  This means in every activity, however mundane, every situation, to have that stance leading. Well, what does that mean? I'm going try to unpack what that means. Probably what it means is is only something that you can know in in in in the discomfort of the koan of how do I actually practice all day. Here are some ideas about it.
• 10:33
  In the beginning of practice, which, you know, probably not pleasant to hear, but the beginning is like the first ten years. That's the beginning. In the beginning, it's important that we are shifting the relationship from my mind to the mind. The heart mind. In other words, you want to be kind of bearing witness to what your mind does as much as possible.
• 11:09
  Until you really know your habit body very deeply. This is one of the, meanings of mindfulness that gets lost when think we about it as just being calm and like moving carefully. More important is a word that they used to use as watchfulness. You have it's like you have the light on in the room of your own interior. And because the light is on continually, you start to see things that lurk in that room that you otherwise don't see.
• 11:55
  Because chitta, chitta, which is translated as shin in Japanese, Chinese, call it core or essence, all actions are flowing forth from this mind. How we behave, our attitudes towards people, places, things, it's flowing forth from what a lot of times are unconscious attitudes. I was talking to somebody earlier today. We were talking about how some at some point in practice, you have to read your body for thoughts because the subconscious level of thoughts is bodily contractions once you once you really have less internal dialogue. We want to be awake to what is moving through us and animating us.
• 12:56
  Now, in the Zen monastery, the basic foundation in that was twofold. It was really have a simple life. Okay? So distractions are pared down. There's a story Hirateroshi told that, there's a beautiful garden outside of this one tea room.
• 13:16
  I mean, stunning. And he told a story of a previous abbot had a cherry tree cut down. In Japan, cherry trees are, so beloved by the people. There's almost an eroticism around them. Well, is an eroticism around the beauty of the cherry blossoms.
• 13:32
  But he said this cherry tree had to be cut down because the abbot thought that the monks were looking at it too often when they walked by on their work. That's funny to us, but think about the degree of concentration they are trying to live with. To not be broken from their concentration even by the beauty of some cherry blossoms. Some part of us might think, that's rigid and ridiculous, but you have to weigh that next to awakening. And if you don't have the reference point, then But for us, the ideas in each situation to be awake to the movement of our heart mind, what is it up to?
• 14:19
  It's like I don't want to be run merely by instinct, cultural conditioning, family reactivity, and desire. I don't want to be run by those. And if I don't want to be run by those, I have to be really awake. What is my mind up to? This is true socially to watch.
• 14:43
  What is my mind up to? Many minds, as soon as they get around other people, they start getting up to something. The main thing they get up to is superiority and inferiority. I mean, we start sizing up. Start thinking where do I where am I on the rank of coolness in this bar right now?
• 15:03
  For me, it's easy. I'm at the bottom. But for some of you, a little more challenging. What intention is animating me? Sometimes I'm, embarrassed when I Like an example would be, we'll be at a restaurant and I'll be so like enwrapped in the menu, I will be ignoring my partner's discomfort.
• 15:32
  Completely oblivious to what she's going through in the moment because I'm just like, Ah, mozzarella sticks or whatever it is. What intention is animating me? We have to really be awake to have our own intentions be transparent to us. Other people can often see them. What am I believing that is animating the way that I'm acting?
• 16:03
  So there's in this off the cushion practice, unlike what we emphasize in Zazen, introspection is important. Right? You don't I don't recommend you spend the time in Zazen introspecting. Right? It's a time when you can get down to I was talking about access concentration earlier.
• 16:23
  You can touch luminous, spacious, intimate qualities of awareness. It's not a time for, thinking about your patterns necessarily. But off the cushion, that's very important. I mean, to make space for self reflection. So, this aspect of off the cushion practice, one of one of the things about it is getting a feel for when we're on automatic.
• 16:55
  Like one, cultural automaticity is being in a being hurried. Being really hurried. There's this great irony in that we have so many conveniences as a culture. So many conveniences that that supposedly shaved time from domestic duties that freed up time for us so that we can have more leisure. But we're as hurried as we've ever been.
• 17:24
  That's one of the ways we go on automatic. We're hurrying. Right? And even witnessing ourselves doing automatic is a start towards not always being that way, and that's good. A lot of practices There I go again.
• 17:46
  It is. It's, Ugh, that. And the distaste is important. We're supposed to have it's good to have distaste for when we see our own automaticity. So, throughout the day we're watching and then further we're interrupting the unhelpful movements of mind.
• 18:13
  One aspect of this is unskillful attention objects. What are they for us? What are they for you? What are the objects, internal or external in your day that when your mind starts going towards them, it's actually leading you down a path that's not helpful? With various addictive kind of things, you know, someone else's partner you're attracted to, a memory that's painful that you have had 500 times this month.
• 18:53
  It's an unskillful attention object. That means you you recognize two things. You recognize one, your mind goes toward it, but it doesn't have to. That's just a habit. Your mind goes towards the boiling water.
• 19:11
  It goes towards the painful thing or the thing that is not helpful for you. That's the first thing you recognize. It doesn't have to do that. Right? And then two, you realize you can you can, pull it back.
• 19:26
  This was, and is in in training monasteries in Zen, but especially in foundational, Buddhism was called custody of the senses. And it was considered a very important part of the practice that as one is going through your life, you don't just let your attention go all over the place all the time. Again, not because things aren't beautiful, but because we want to have, some power over our attention because otherwise, it will take power from us. So, you could think, is this relevant for you in your day to day practice? What does attention go towards that doesn't serve me?
• 20:21
  And then you're practicing, Oh, I'm going to bring it back to something else that actually does serve. Maybe that's the person who's right there in front of you. Maybe that's the tree out the window. Maybe that's your koan or your breath. I wrote down an example here, nitpicky mind.
• 20:41
  Many people have nitpicky mind. Nitpicky mind is they walk in a room and first thing it does, it starts looking for the thing that's wrong. Every room has a wrong thing or a wrong person in it. And nitpicky mind is just reflexive. Crosses the threshold before you do.
• 20:59
  That's unskillful. If you're an interior decorator and someone pays you for their your nitpicky mind or you're a music critic or something, I don't know, or you're a doctor and you're nitpicking for someone's cancer cells, great. But otherwise more on this. So I'm saying through the day we're watching and interrupting the un helpful things about the mind. There's another thing that I was wondering, did we used to do this?
• 21:30
  There's an un there's a cultural pandemic of filling every moment with stimulus. In my neighborhood there are people who are walking down the street, walking their dogs and they're looking at their phone. These people almost run into me. That happens like almost every month. Like a zombie.
• 21:49
  And it's not even young people. There are there are older people who are just you're walking your dog and you does anyone in this room do this? I don't mean to be rude, but what the fuck? That's we're going too far. So, we're filling every moment with stimulus that has to be interrupted as a practitioner.
• 22:15
  We have to be able to bear a little bit of space. We have to be able to drop into that feeling, that, the kind of phone tractor beam. What is that? Now, might just be habit energy, but it might be something deeper. We are working with basically diluted thought patterns as well.
• 22:45
  Okay? And this is also something that is kind of humbling. At first it's humbling or even offensive to have it, to really see it, and then after a while we realize this is just what the human mind is, and that's an even more kind of shocking thing. But we are shadowboxing all the time in our own minds. We are, conjuring ideas and and sculpting images of people that we don't even know.
• 23:19
  We're just filling in blanks all the time. We have false thoughts. We have thoughts that just are not true all the time. There's nobody I know who doesn't have that problem. Only like a really accomplished spiritual master could say they don't do that anymore, that such people exist.
• 23:42
  We our minds generate illusion. We want to catch that in action. Strictly speaking, illusion is if the person is not right there in front of you, what you're thinking about them is not quite true. You might have a memory. So there is a kind of, relentlessness to this.
• 24:06
  We just watch. Oh, my mind is making something up. There it goes. Okay. You don't have to crush it.
• 24:14
  You're just putting it in its proper place. Right? Because you have, watchfulness with wisdom. Is this true? What?
• 24:25
  This picture? I call it I call it shadowboxing because I, my version of it is I'll imagine someone and I'll start arguing with them. I'll have be having a debate. I'll imagine that they're gonna criticize me about something and I'm already, like, planning my argument. It's like the inner lawyer, you know.
• 24:46
  It was silly. And it takes a lot of energy. Right? So that's, watching it. So first I mentioned watching, becoming more aware and hip to what our mind heart intention is is.
• 25:04
  What are the layers of that that are coming up? Then interrupting painful thought patterns. But beyond interrupting, there's another dimension which is simply dissolving it. Simply eliminating excessive chatter in your mind. There's so many times when there is a kind of inner running commentary when we're doing something that is completely and utterly extraneous and not useful to us.
• 25:44
  Like you've got the vacuum in your hand. You don't need to like tell yourself about how you're vacuuming. Or you know that that's an oak tree. You don't have to think oak tree. Or you have the ability to respond to situations very spontaneously.
• 26:01
  That's an aspect of Buddha nature. So, we can practice going through the day with pockets of quiet mind and experience that grace and take it on as a challenge, especially with simple tasks. So, you're doing the dishes, practice doing the dishes without any thought. And it's not going to be perfect. That's not the point.
• 26:30
  The point is that you are practicing just relinquishing this function that separates, that's extraneous. This is a skill you can build. You don't have to be super good at practice. It's just a skill. You have to decide it's valuable.
• 26:51
  And then you have moments where there's a silky flow, a silky flow to experience. There's no friction. It's a kind it's a quality of grace, I think. That life already is, but we can't have total involvement in our heads. Now people don't believe they can do this, and they've tasted it on retreat, so they wanna get back to retreat.
• 27:22
  But you can. It might involve some simplifying of your life. It might. It might. It might serve our meditation practice to spend less time on the internet.
• 27:39
  I mean, Like how much of our life when we are 90, what percentage of our life can we put in our, what's called an epigraph, epitaph? Something like that. What at the very end it could say, and he spent 7% of his life on the internet. And if I got 7%, I would be like in the upper echelon of human beings. 7%?
• 28:05
  Wow. What's 7% of twenty four hours? Somebody knows. Anyway. So you can see where I'm going with this.
• 28:23
  Your life could actually be a continual spiritual training. And you don't lose anything for that. I'm not talking about renunciation of anything, but that which doesn't serve us anyway. Unskillful habits of mind, they don't serve us anyway. You know, six hours on the internet a day doesn't serve us anyway.
• 28:54
  Right? Having a running commentary about every single thing we do, we don't have to have that. If you watch, if you pay attention to your dreams, you will see that there is something in you that is deeply processing everything you experience. And I don't need to bring in my theories of the unconscious and what dreaming is, but if you you look at dreams, you can see that there's a depth to the mind that is taking in everything we've experienced, and it's being metabolized at a much more profound level than what our ordinary thoughts do. So you can see the living, that there's a living nuance of working with mind here, right?
• 29:52
  Sometimes, just to be aware of it. That's the focus. Just to be aware of it. I'm not talking about stopping it or doing anything about it. Just to have that shift where It is an object of awareness.
• 30:14
  Your own mind is an object of awareness more and more continually. That's an important foundational thing. Sometimes, reflection on the intentions that we encounter. Sometimes interrupting the unskillful drift. Right?
• 30:33
  The unskillful drift. There's a certain empowerment and dissolving of a victimized stance by our own minds that we shift into. Right? And at times, not just on the meditation cushion, altogether just dissolving inner chatter. You can do it.
• 31:07
  It's a matter of relaxation more than anything. So healthy practice has both of these. It has being aware of mind and letting go of it. It has using it skillfully. It has seeing what's on the other side of it.
• 31:29
  Healthy practice has both. So this thought is what I am putting out there for resonance. I'm going to practice all the time. All the time. Continually.
• 31:52
  This thought, I'm going to work with my illusions and my reactivities all the time. Why did I get so upset when she said my noodles were al dente? Because they weren't. They were perfectly cooked. Okay.
• 32:19
  Alright, now I'm stepping off my soapbox.
• 32:29
  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.