Good morning, everyone. I'd like to introduce Ryushin, whose name means healing source, dragon heart. She's been practicing here since long before I got here. It was transmitted by Mel Wiseman, Sojin, and has some offerings for us today. Thank you, Ryushin. Thank you very much, Heiko. Good morning, everyone. a minute to take everyone in to welcome you all today particularly to welcome those who are here for the first time relatively new to our practice place welcome as i've said before it's really helpful in practice to have a question And so I'm going to talk about one of the questions I've been working with most recently.

[01:02]

A few months ago, I was involved in responding to the suffering of a number of people who were having a particularly challenging time. Their distress in multiple spheres, physically, emotionally, existentially within their family systems was enormous. And all of them, these three people together, seemed to hit the same trajectory of illness and die around the same time. And I found myself driven to my knees by the amount of suffering that they had. And I wondered, what was that? When I was first working professionally. I couldn't have done this kind of work. I didn't have the kind of fluidity and comfort with my own suffering to be able to address that of others.

[02:10]

But that's not the case now. After more than a quarter of a century of practice, there's a certain equanimity and stability of accepting things as they really are that is genuine in me. But there was something really powerful about this experience. And so I wanted to explore something more about working with difficult emotions and a high degree of suffering. So this is my nascent exploration of this topic. And I will see how it goes. Story number one. Not long ago, I went to make a home visit. The team that I'm a part of, so I'll say we in here a little bit, and I'm generally referring to the team that I'm a part of, our work is to be an extra layer of support for people. This is someone we'd had a difficult time connecting with.

[03:11]

She had been so ill from the very onset of her diagnosis that it was hard to be able to see her and to stabilize her. in and out of appointments and in and out of the hospital many times. Additionally, her high level of need and the communication barriers between her and other staff added an extra layer of distress. So I went to make this home visit. She had just been discharged for the third time from the emergency department or the hospital within a couple of weeks. When I walked in, it was really evident that she was quite different than when we had greeted each other with hugs in the emergency department several days earlier. So I walked into the room and noticed her to be quite different. It took a while to sort through what was going on, but it was really clear that she had come home without the oxygen.

[04:17]

and antibiotics that someone just diagnosed with pneumonia should have. She was in a tremendous amount of pain. Her medications were strewn all over the room, and it was really difficult to know exactly what she was taking. As we were talking, she called out to her daughter, who was her only caregiver, for an extra dose of pain medication. That was well within what she had been prescribed for. But the daughter had a very strong emotional reaction. The daughter began chastising her and berating her for a history that had happened many years ago of the patient's use of medications and drugs that the daughter had found difficult, especially when she was small. And that exchange exploded into a tirade of fury both at the patient and at myself for being a part of what was perceived to be a problem.

[05:29]

The patient was trying to calm her down, was being... very reticent and just saying she'll calm down, it's all right. At which point the patient's daughter was just furious, furious. So in that moment, there was a swirl of emotions going on within me. Distress for the woman who was short of breath, whose feeding tube wasn't working adequately, who didn't have the kind of care and for whom the medical system was not not tending to her. To the daughter, who I didn't know well, not really understanding all of where her reaction was coming from and how volatile she might be or how ungrounded she might be. And briefly, a little concerned about the safety, both for the mother and myself.

[06:35]

All of those emotions were going on and showed up in the room for me. And I thought, What am I going to do with this? What does Buddhism teach about emotion like this? In the Heart Sutra when we chant, the way in which feelings are referenced is really not our emotions per se. When we say, no eyes, no ears, no tongue, no mind. My goodness, I'm... full of emotion here as I'm talking to you anyway. The emotions that we are, the feeling that we talk about, really aren't the usual way that we reference emotions, but it's really the feeling tone or the vedana. Vedana is a kind of outlook of something as being positive, negative, or neutral. It's like putting on a pair of gray sunglasses or rose-colored glasses or perfectly clear lenses.

[07:40]

The way in which we feel our first reaction when we touch sensation is what colors the way we receive any other input. So if we receive it in an aversive way, we respond in an aversive way. When we receive it in an open way, we receive it in a more positive way. It's kind of like getting up on the right or the wrong side of the bed, or just getting up. I think if you take a moment, you can easily relate to this. The day that you've been upset by something, a conversation, or an interaction with a stranger who's driving in the lane next to you, you'll honk or get upset if you're not in an easy mood. And other times, it just passes right by you and you move on with your day. Something that's been said that might have been a bit hurtful or off or just you didn't understand could become something you just notice, or it could become a whole story that you spend the rest of the day ruminating on, depending upon the feeling tone of your interaction with it.

[09:01]

I think this is subtle sometimes, really subtle sometimes. But if you've ever taken the time to quietly observe the causes and conditions of that bare orientation of the mind, you see its impact on how all the other perceptions that unfold after that contact with the experience as positive, negative, or neutral will impact you. So Sheen is a perfect time because we do some interacting, You'll see when we return to the zenda, we do some interacting. The quietness of sitting and the acuity of observation is greater. Thoughts and emotions can come and go, and it's possible to notice these patterns and tendencies in a way that's more difficult in our daily life unless we really slow down and are quiet. One retreat many, many, many years ago was a Vipassana retreat, and so it was entirely silent.

[10:08]

And for 30 days, we basically practiced on our own with very little teacher support, very little contact with other people. So we got very still, and I spent most of my time in my room sitting for hours of quiet meditation. One day, I took it as a practice to practice with this thought. No positive, no negative, only neutral. The whole day was that with whatever came up. That was my response to it. At dinner time, we went down to have a meal. The meals were in a common dining room and you self-served. Walking into that dining room, there was a clanging, a loud commotion and clanging of plates and silverware. and serving spoons and rustling around. It was just overpowering. And I noticed someone who had on a bright orange shirt.

[11:13]

As you know, or you may know, in those kinds of retreats, people are really encouraged to wear some blue colors. And my mind just went, oh my God, this is overwhelming. How can these people be so noisy? And I said to myself in that moment, only neutral. And to my surprise, when I looked again, I saw that the sweatshirt wasn't orange, it was a light peach. And the sounds were actually just the quiet sounds of people eating. So the color of the mind and the color of the point of view have a lot to do with observation and experience. So coming back into the room with this wonderful patient and her daughter. I said to myself, the emotion was so overpowering and I just wasn't sure what was needed. The woman in the bed was in terrible pain and she was reliant on this, the only child who was involved with her at this point, to take care of her.

[12:20]

She had no basic equipment that she needed. I felt the pain of the medical system having failed her. And I felt both the question about this child's past, this woman's past, and also her great pain, her mother's dying. And she was a child who had been wounded. And I said to myself, only neutral, only neutral. And all of that came into view in the room. I was able to relax into my body and just be there. and acknowledge what was happening directly and indirectly, to acknowledge the daughter's worry and concern, and to whisper to the mother in a quiet moment that I would call her and we would make a plan. And so I left, and the daughter was able to calm down, and she went off to what she needed to also.

[13:26]

Emotions, so I want to move on and talk a little bit about emotions. Emotions are us, is the general thought here. They are an important part of the pleasure and pain of a human life. There's nothing wrong with them, just like there's nothing wrong with thoughts. Emotions are as indispensable and necessary to human beings and the way in which we throw around emojis is proof of that. As Uchiyama Roshi said of thoughts, when we stop having thoughts, we're dead. The same is true of emotions. If we were to stop having emotions, we would be dead, at least as far as we know. It's also true that a part of Buddhist teachings is that each person has their own disposition. We're all born with certain tendencies.

[14:34]

Some of us tend to be soft and quiet and spacious, and some of us tend to be like a lightning bolt and other things. The Buddha said, there's nothing wrong with this. This is just how we're made. But then practice is, how do we work with this? How do we live with this? so that how we are does not get in the way of how we live and how we are with people. The question is, who runs the show? Us or the emotions? Like thoughts, emotions are part of the 10,000 things that come toward us, or we go running after them. We're turned by them, or we turn them. The encouragement for my exploration of emotions here and with you is this exploration for how to be freely to freely experience our emotions with awareness and choice.

[15:39]

I believe in my observations of myself and others that emotions are more apt to be under the radar of awareness, more apt to be disrupting perceptions without being noticed. A feeling, actually this is the dictionary definition, and it's interesting that this definition really fits with Buddhist psychology as outlined in the Heart Sutra. It says, a feeling is a sensation experienced through sense, pure and simpler. A feeling is what we receive through our sense doors of eyes, ears, nose, mind consciousness. That's an important pointer to working towards feeling versus mental states. Emotions are mental states. They arise in Buddhist psychology just as thoughts do.

[16:42]

The definition from the dictionary is that an emotion is a mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort. and is often experienced by physiologic changes. So I think that's really important too. Another definition, which I actually didn't know, is that an emotion is an excited or unusual movement, a disturbed motion. Isn't that interesting? So in a motion, in Buddhism, emotions are in the same category as thought formations. They're small d dharmas. Thoughts arise, emotions arise, thoughts beget emotions, and vice versa. Though no thought arises separate from a feeling tone, which has an underlying emotional tone, and vice versa, so it's complicated.

[17:45]

We may be aware of feeling first before we're aware of emotion. I'm sorry, we may be aware of thought first before we're aware of emotion, and thoughts can feel like emotions. They can feel like, oh, and emotions can feel like thoughts. So it's very hard to discern them. I think part of what makes emotions what they are has to do with how we relate to them physiologically, and emotion is often causes some kind of physiologic reaction of tension, of heart rate, of sweating, of tightness, or of openness, or elevation, or levitation, or excitement. We feel that in our body. And because that's so intimate physically, perhaps that's part of why we identify it with ourself more.

[18:49]

I think, than what we tend to with thoughts. When I was preparing for this talk, I looked at the cooking cucumber website, and I looked at Suzuki Roshi's lectures and Sojin's lectures, and I didn't see a whole lot explicitly about emotion, although it's implicit in a lot of what's said about Zen teachings. Here's a quote from Sojin from a Sushin talk. early 90s. During Sashin, little things happen that create emotional reactions in us. Someone does something that causes us to start laughing. Laughter in that way sometimes becomes uncontrollable. It's a way of letting off pressure. There are lots of ways of letting off pressure. How do we keep ourselves contained and watchful? aware of the feelings that can sometimes catch us.

[19:49]

We often take these feelings seriously when they actually are just thoughts that continually are bubbling up into consciousness. They have no real root. They just pop up like weeds. Just like our thoughts sometimes surprise us as they pop into our heads, so do emotions. But somehow, emotions can have a tendency to stick a little bit harder. They run under the radar, just very naturally appearing without our knowledge and without our permission. So more ruminations or thoughts about emotions and identifications. Are they stickier than thoughts or more subtle in our sense of ownership? It seems like a thought, but I think it's an emotion of being a kind of type of person or what holding a kind of belief about ourself means.

[21:02]

That being, when we have a thought of being a certain kind of person, that evokes an emotional response or identification that's stronger. With thoughts, we can more easily, I think, with some practice, open the hand of thought. That is, to experience the coming and goings of thoughts that seem to be true or compelling, boring, puzzling, or just lacking enough juice to get our attention. With time, we see that those are much like clouds that appear on the horizon, coming and going and mercurial. to our circumstances of the moment. Emotions are very similar. They share the same qualities of being compounded. That means brocade by our prior experiences and conditionings. Just like thoughts, they're based on sense contact, feeling tone, excess some form of identification as an object or a perception, and then a personal object that places it in relationship to us.

[22:15]

That's formation, as we chant in the Heart Sutra. But emotions seem more durable. We seem to identify more with them. Maybe there are biological reasons for that, that is far beyond the scope of my knowledge of this talk, but it seems like it may well have something to do with the vocation of the limbic nervous system and our primitive brain and is related to a kind of survival mechanism so that the emotions of anger and anxiety are some of the most primitive feelings we have it's also that emotions are very close to feeling tone so they're less cognitive maybe more physiologic and less noticed in the way that they work with us I think they're more connected with the physical condition that we like or dislike more.

[23:17]

And I'll say just for food for fodder for your own observations, as I was kind of settling into working with this material over the last few weeks and really working with it, I began to notice what seemed like little things to me. I was texting with a colleague recently. back and forth and left a message for her on a text just saying, I left you a long VM voicemail. And as I hit send, Siri decided to change VM to BM. Well, you can imagine how deeply embarrassing that was to send that to a colleague. I noticed it, and I immediately sent a message back going, something like oh no voicemail explanation explanation explanation it was like my finger was hit was stuck on the explanation mark so i'm having this strong emotional reaction to feeling like i had this strong emotional reaction which is just kind of compounded my feeling that that was not a very professional communication that i just had but it was just so immediate right

[24:40]

one of the problems with our lives. They move fast these days and they're very immediate. I think that same week I was sitting in my living room chair and I look out over some water and over the water this small flock of pelicans was gliding and it was just peaceful and beautiful. So they're so graceful, those big gangly birds. And I had this immediate feeling of openness and pleasure, and isn't that beautiful, right? From the reaction to the ideas about it. And then I had an immediate thought that was, oh, but can you imagine 200 years ago, the skies would have been filled with pelicans, and oh, the destitution of global warming. Boom. My mood and my thoughts changed immediately, just like that. So it's subtle, this interplay of thought and emotion, and quick.

[25:45]

It was quite interesting to really be intimate with being blown around so easily. Well, that's what Sojin said. He said that our emotions are just like energy. They're like the wind blowing. Just like the wind blowing. Trump a ricochet. said that emotions are energy like water, like water pure and clear. It just flows like a mountain stream. It just flows pure and untainted. He says dualistic thinking, which personalizes these emotions and separates them as me, mine, and myself are like pigment. Mixed together, they become vivid colors. We may like them. The energy of anger can be actually very seductive and enjoyable. The lust of greed can be exciting and pleasurable.

[26:48]

We can be enchanted or fascinated by our emotions. It's really hard not to get tangled up in them. The immediate experience of them needn't be a problem. It's not a problem unless we invest in them, unless we believe them as something larger than the experience of just this. Now that's a complicated conversation, and this talk is not going to go into all the nuances of emotions. I think that's for many conversations and talks in the future. But the basic point is that there can be freedom even from strong emotions, even for that which is completely human and which we would never want to give up. I wanted to talk a little bit about... Joko Beck has interesting writings.

[27:58]

Joko Beck, who was a teacher at San Diego Zen... Center and a former student of Maizumi Roshi. References being ruled by emotions. She says, at the age of 95, Gimpo Roshi, one of the great Zen masters of modern times, was speaking of the gateless gate. And he pointed out that there truly is no gate through which we must pass in order to realize what our life is. That is, in order to realize the peace and harmony of an awake life. Still, he said, from the standpoint of practice, we must go through a gate, the gate of our own pride. And every one of us here, this is Joko Beck speaking again. And every one of us here, since the time we got up this morning, has been in some way or another met our pride.

[29:01]

Every one of us. to go through this gate that is not a gate, we have to go through the gate of our own pride. He goes on to say that if you want to see your pride, be falsely accused, or at least have anything that calls into question your idea of who you think you are. And so I'm going to tell a story about that that may Story number two. One of those moments that was so powerful for me physically that it's still quite alive. So 30 years ago, I was a young medical director at the walk-in clinic of the emergency department at Highland. And I was responsible for hiring everyone who filled our shifts.

[30:02]

with great pleasure, we were able, I was, we were able to hire in both of the chief residents for that year. The chief residents are people who finish their training who are picked as being the best teachers and the most capable. And they're asked to stay on for another year to do administrative and teaching work for the younger house staff. So both of those women were, were working in our clinic, too, and that felt really great. Both of them were women of color, and at that point in time, we didn't have so many clinicians who were the patient population we served. It was predominantly people of color. And I was so really pleased that they had joined us that I made a point of commenting on it, on the great work that they did too often. So one night I was at home and I got a phone call.

[31:10]

I still remember getting the phone call. I still remember sitting on my bed in my dark bedroom for about an hour while one of these physicians patiently explained to me how demeaning and patronizing I was being. Before me flashed, not then, but as I think back on this time, I think about, I realize everyone was in the room with me there. In my generational history, in my cultural and historical history, my grandfather, who was briefly a member of the KKK in Fort Worth in the 30s, during the Depression, the family's great embarrassment. To my father, who... old Texan that he was, didn't even finish college, but wound up being the regional manager of an American Express in Chicago, would go to the Loop every day in his cowboy hat and his bolero tie and his cowboy boots, and he proudly said that he was the first person to integrate a major branch of American Express in the mid-60s in the Civil Rights Movement.

[32:34]

to our backyard when I was six or seven pool party that we had inviting his office staff and the African-American salesman who did the biggest, most joyous and present cannonball into the water splashing to everyone's delight. All of those people were in the room with me as I sat for that hour really listening as this colleague very patiently helped me understand what was so difficult for me to see. The visceral, physical response was so strong it was difficult. It was really difficult. And I think any time we're asked to see something about ourself that we don't want to see, that we don't see, that we didn't imagine, that isn't the good self, that we see ourselves, the self that means well, the self that didn't mean to do harm in whatever circumstance.

[33:42]

If we took a moment, now all of us, there are probably other smaller instances that you can imagine where the first reaction was, no, that's not me, or I don't do that. What is I talking about? What would it take to be able to stand back and let that emotional reaction quiet, just as somehow I was able to let that emotional reaction quiet in that patient's room, in the midst of the screaming and anger and fear and pain, just to be present. Pride means a deep feeling of pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements, or who one believes themself to be. As if there is a separate and independently separating self.

[34:50]

A sense of who we are, and it can be either too big an idea of who we are, I'm not like that, I'm good, or oh, I'm terrible. Both of those are not who we really are. Sojan Roshi used to call, say, part of the purpose of practice is to find our right or proper place. To be just who we are, not too big, not too small. Not who we want to be or who we, that's not quite right, but just to be who we are. If I see myself as kind, as someone who treats others with fairness and thoughtfulness, hearing that someone has an experience of me that is otherwise can be really unsettling. And if it's dissonant enough, there can be a stronger and stronger reaction.

[35:54]

Labels that we felt given give ourselves that racist or sexist or any of the tribalisms immediately send an emotional reaction? Is it possible to allow the reaction to just be, to not react to it, but to dig a little deeper into the experience, to let the emotion settle into the container of breath and space, and not know the perception from which it was seen? It doesn't change us. It gives us more information. Some years ago, I was at Tassajara for a practice period, and I had been working with my old friend Anger a lot during that practice period. My question to the Shuso during the Shuso ceremony was about that, what to do with these strong emotions when they arose.

[37:00]

And she looked at me and said, with great wisdom, why don't you just keep it for a while why don't you just keep it for a while that powerful emotional reaction that arises in the body just allow it to settle just be with it then what's there it's not easy practice it is a common to be so uncomfortable that that's all you notice. But why not look? Why not allow? Why not just experience the emotions? Let me just move ahead a little bit.

[38:02]

Allowing it to settle allows The question, what else is here? And maybe even a question to the other person. Tell me more about what you're seeing that I don't see. Is it possible to receive that information from a place of neutrality? It's really hard, but it's possible. Possible to settle and just listen with neutral ears. Neutral, sometimes that can seem like that's a pretty high bar to be neutral in the face of this. Perhaps a better or a more helpful way also is to talk about equanimity, one of the Brahma Viharas, one of those heavenly practices of settledness. To focus on, can I receive this as evenly as possible?

[39:07]

I am the owner of the equanimity phrases. There are metaphraises for generating kindness, for generating equanimity. I am the owner of my own karma. My happiness or unhappiness are dependent upon my own intention and practice, not in anyone's wishes for me. With equanimity, let me open to the situation. Dogen says, the self settles the self on the self. There's no way, Uchiyama Roshi says, for this to happen without feeling all of the pain and all of the joy of our lives. Joko Beck quotes Maizumi Roshi. I'm sorry, Joko Beck quotes Menzan Zenji, who was one of the great scholars and Dogen teachers of the 1800s.

[40:13]

And he says, when through practice you know the reality of Zazen thoroughly, the frozen blockage of emotion thought will naturally melt away. He says, however, if you think you have cut off illusory thought instead of clarifying how emotion thought melts, the emotion thought will come up again, as though you have cut the stem of a blade of grass or a trunk of a tree and left the root alive. A lot of people misunderstand practice as cutting off illusionary thoughts. Of course, thoughts are illusionary. But as he says, if you cut them off, instead of clarifying how emotion thought melts, you'll learn little. Many people have little enlightenment experiences, but because they have not clarified how emotion thought melts, the sour fruits of emotion thought will be what they eat in daily life. Menzong writes, emotion thought is the root of delusion, a stubborn attachment of one-sided point of view formed by our own conditioned perceptions.

[41:24]

Sojin Roshi said, be the anger. And he was asked about dealing with angry tendencies by one member in the Zendo. Be the mean person, the irritable person, the lusty, the greedy, the restless. Know them. Just allow the visceral experience of just this. It's not who any one of us is, but it's something that we all experience. The more experience and the more information we receive with curiosity and openness, the more freely we move within them and are not pulled around by them. Powerful emotions are the good things that can help open us in practice. Not turning towards difficult emotions creates problems, as Menzon said.

[42:29]

Sometimes we talk about something called spiritual bypass. It's really easy, or it's not easy, but with time it's possible to sit quietly in Zazen, to be able to be with the pain in the knee and the body, the comings and goings of thoughts, and feel pretty stable. But without opening to all the emotions, practice becomes stagnant, and it cannot deepen our understanding or relationship. Knowing oneself well, the 10,000 emotions are less likely to allow me to be pulled around and I am more apt to navigate and utilize them. The only way to truly be at peace is to accept all of who this person is, which isn't easy, which isn't always fun, which sometimes is pretty uncomfortable, but it's reality, so why not look at it?

[43:36]

Why not be it? It means knowing and accepting the reality, the conditioning that causes pain and anguish for self and for others. that is self-centered, greedy, ignorant, and hurtful. Of course, we don't really talk about all the emotions that bring joy and happiness. But some of those are grounded, and some of those are self-centered. I'm not going to tell a story about my own opening to anger and terror here. I think I've said it before, but I want to just call out in the wake of Thich Nhat Hanh's death a passage from Hossam's remembrance of him, of the time that Thich Nhat Hanh was to speak to a large gathering of a few thousand people in Berkeley. It was at a time when the U.S.

[44:39]

had bombed Iraq and just after the beating of Rodney King. And in his comments, Thich Nhat Hanh spoke of the deep anger over both events, which may have echoed the experiences he had in the young man in the U.S. was involved with bombing Vietnam. He had considered canceling his planned tour of the U.S. as a result, but upon sitting and reflecting on it, he realized that he had to continue because he knew that the victims and the perpetrators of these events were not different from him. He was not a remote, peaceful Buddha. He was a human being with all of his feelings, all of his real emotions. He had real suffering and real human reactions. I admire him even more for asking that question, for not reacting.

[45:41]

or turning towards, and I can't imagine what it took for him to make those transitions. I have to think that his famous poem, Call Me By His True Name, was written well before that in 1978. It was because he had done this deep work. That poem, for those of you who don't know it, Ends with these lines, please call me by my true name so that I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once so I can see that my joy and pain are one. Please call me by my true name so I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. A word about compassion, a word about the other wing. Thich Nhat Hanh's experience in what we've been talking about is about cultivating wisdom.

[46:42]

It's also about cultivating a soft and receptive and kind heart. I'd like to suggest that compassion may not always be the best way of looking at it. Compassion, the dictionary definition is Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings and misfortunes of others. That sympathetic pity and concern can be paternalistic. It can be othering, if you will. It has a subject and an object that might be problematic. Of course, that's not the Buddhist intention at all. But bear with me when I just say, Compassion may be one step ahead, like talking about not focusing on the whys, but the hows of how we do something.

[47:47]

There's something in between, and that's the what. What is this? That's empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. to be able to take in all of what's happening and have some real sense of deep accompaniment with the other. So for me, the untangling the question of meeting the high degree of suffering quotient of the triad of people who were so tragically ill at once was to recognize that an opening with deep empathy to those people, that's a normal human emotion, the breaking of a heart, nothing more than nothing less. I'm still simple, and I'm still a human being, and even after 40 years of being a physician, it's not always simple or easy.

[48:55]

This may be a little redundant, but just to finish a few last thoughts. So human emotions contain both. They contain our small-minded, self-centered experience of emotions and pure emotion. Pure emotion is a term that Sojin Roshi actually seems to have gotten from Suzuki Roshi. Pure emotion is just this, just Buddha's anger, just Buddha's anxiety, just Buddha's loneliness, Buddha's lust, or just lust, just anger, just sadness, just life. It doesn't need an object or something to react to. Suzuki Roshi said, Dogen Zenji's religion is deeply rooted in emotional problems, and his teaching is full of true human sentiment.

[50:09]

Dogen was different from other Japanese and from Chinese Zen masters. Some people say that he wasn't really enlightened because he was too human. Although his teaching is very human, his life was very pure. Recently, A close Dharma sister and friend of mine lost her husband suddenly, although not entirely unexpectedly. She met those circumstances with great openness and equanimity. I admired her practice. But she said to me a few weeks later, every time I sit down, the tears just pour out of me. Is there something wrong? No, you just are feeling all of the experience of a human life. There's nothing wrong. And there's nothing to be done but to fully experience the snowfall in the winter.

[51:18]

So I think that's enough. for one day. And I thank you very much for your attention and your accompaniment of me in this journey. And I look forward to our continued conversations about emotions and practice and our practice together. Thank you so much, Ryushin, for a very moving talk for me and a very deeply reflective talk. We have two questions here. Mark, would you please go ahead? MR. Andrea, thank you. In the patriarchy, we were trained to rise above emotions. The strongman decisions on reason, not their feelings. I had to unlearn that training by integrating feminism. And we're sure vulnerable in our tradition to reinforcing through the legacy of Japanese patriarchy.

[52:24]

RISING ABOVE OUR FEELINGS. AND I REALLY WANT TO APPRECIATE AND UNDERSCORE, YOU KNOW, YOUR WISDOM OF COMING DOWN INTO THE FEELINGS, DESCENDING PAST THEM RATHER THAN RISING ABOVE THEM. THANK YOU. YEAH. THANK YOU FOR THAT LOVELY ARTICULATION. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, MARK. LET'S GO QUICKLY TO GARY AND EVERYONE. PLEASE KEEP IT BRIEF AS YOU CAN. THANK YOU. GOOD MORNING. Hi, Gary. I hope you were able to hear okay. It was okay. If we put thought and emotions under the microscope, so to speak, in some ways, thoughts seem more, you know, we kind of, create them, where emotions are more just happen.

[53:31]

I'm not saying that's true. I'm just saying that's how it seems. From your point of view, I'm sorry. From your point of view, which occurs first, emotion or feeling or vice versa or simultaneously? Yeah, I think that's a really, really great question for really close observation in Sashin. Don't think it's always one or the other first. But I do think if we really slow down and settle, we'll see that often there's a strong feeling tone under our thoughts and there might be an emotion hiding under there. So it looks to you... And I think it looks to me that emotion precedes thought. I don't think that's always the case, but I think they're very, very closely related and hard to untangle.

[54:37]

Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Let's continue to examine that together. Thank you, Gary. Let's go ahead with Joel, please. Hi, thank you, Rioshin. Beautiful, beautiful talk. I was just looking at the derivation of emotion. It's out of moving. And the, I have it right here. There's a lot of about pushing away, which really, in the word itself, which really strikes me that there might be like a pushing away, which adds to the energy. I mean, this idea of needing to push away would exaggerate. You know, some kind of idea that, you know, like the limbic system, I mean, it starts with just a sensation in the limbic system or something. We don't like it, we push away.

[55:38]

Or we're afraid of it, and we push away. And so I just was struck by that, and I haven't thought about it. I wonder, you know, your thoughts about that aspect. I think that's a really interesting piece of information, and it fits with this kind of idea of a disturbed movement as a definition. The emotions that are most problematic, I think, for people, arguably, are anger, which is an aversion, and anxiety or fear. And both of those are very deeply survival-mechanism-based emotions. So that goes along with that, what you're pointing at, as a kind of survival, immediate flight or fright kind of, or fight, fight-flight kind of emotion. Yeah, or freezing is a pushing away to freezing.

[56:41]

Yes, freezing is another way, that kind of hiding. Thank you.

[56:48]

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