Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Birkenstein Center. Today's speaker is Karen Sondheim, whose Dharma name is Nyu-u Ho-sho, which translates as Gentle Rain, Dharma Blossom. Sojo Roshi ordained her many years ago. And Karen has been practicing with us since 1976. She started at our original temple on Dwight Way and has been here ever since. She works at the San Francisco Public Library and has held a number of positions here at Zen Center on the board through practice-related responsibilities. And she is a lifelong partner to Nancy Su, one of the co-chiefs here at our temple. And we welcome her teaching today. Today what I thought I'd talk about are the five hindrances.

[01:06]

Can you hear me in the back? Most likely some of you are familiar with this. The five hindrances are mental states that arise that were talked about a lot in early Buddhism. I'm going to talk about one of them in particular, but I will mention all five of them. Basically, they're mental states that are considered obstacles to awakening. Just to simply say, when I say awakening, I'm thinking the way it was once described by the Buddhas, seeing things as they are, seeing things in their true nature. The mental states that come up which are most easy to discover during meditation practice or zazen are one is desire and craving which is the desire for mostly sense pleasures and the second one is aversion which is hatred or anger, criticism finding things wrong with everything

[02:26]

And the third one is sloth and torpor, which is like falling asleep, not being able to exert enough effort, kind of a dullness of mind. The fourth one is restlessness. And the fifth is doubt. So I'm going to actually talk about restlessness today. The Pali word, the Pali term for restlessness is Udaca Kukacha And I found about ten translations of that and they're all very similar, but I'll just read a couple of them One of them is fear and trembling Another one is restlessness and anxiety Distraction and flurry Anxiety and worry restlessness and remorse, and also boredom.

[03:32]

So, but you can see the theme that's going on. Restlessness is like, sometimes it doesn't seem all that painful, in that, you know, the mind just finds it hard to pay attention to anything in particular, just skirts around all over the place. but it can also be experienced as the inability to calm the mind and it seems like there's an inability to concentrate and that there's anxiety and worry and fear going on all the time and so the early Buddhists thought of ways to kind of counteract these mental states, these hindrances with various techniques. And the one for restlessness was considered, well, concentration was considered kind of an antidote to restlessness.

[04:36]

And by concentration, often techniques that involve very focused work during meditation, like for example, you know, counting breaths and looking at the breath very closely, almost like under a microscope, that that would increase one's concentration in there and be able to help the mind that is unable to settle. During Zazen practice, of course, it does feel like that inability to settle down or to be calm. But out in the world, we experience that in different ways. For example, one's attention moving from one thing to another, not being able to decide what to do because the mind is focused on so many things, not really being able to connect with anything.

[05:43]

not being able to engage. So, as you may have guessed, part of the reason I chose this particular hindrance to talk about is because I've had lifelong experience working with it. So, I'd like to talk a little bit about my own experience of working with fear. For me, it was probably the strongest force in my life at a very young age. And the thing that I felt most terrified of when I was young, as far back as I can remember, was my mother. My mother was prone to very serious rages and my father drank very heavily.

[06:55]

So, you know, there was sort of a partnership going on there and, you know, it's hard to separate out, you know, one parent from the other. But because her behavior was very unpredictable and she didn't drink at all, but you know, the screaming and yelling and violence and things like that, just you never knew when it was going to happen. So my mind was always trained to keep my focus on everything, mostly to, you know, make sure nothing bad was going to happen, you know, check everything out in every corner. But I can't say that it was like real, real attention. It was more vigilance. So anyway, it wasn't just in the home. I mean, my people I knew used to call her the dragon lady.

[07:58]

And, you know, I was told by friends of mine that I had the meanest mother. And so it did validate my experience, but it was painful. And one image that always stands with me was, you know, being woken up one morning. She came into my room to get me up to go to school every day and it was usually, you know, it's like a storm coming into the bedroom, but one day she came up and her arm was soaked. She was in a blood-soaked towel around her arm, getting me out of bed and apparently, you know, she'd gotten angry and put her fist through the window and, you know, cut herself very badly. And, you know, then there was a whole story. She almost died. She almost cut her, you know, the most important vein in here. So anyway, that's kind of an example of what life was like.

[09:03]

But anyway, so my Zazen practice has always been I have found concentration difficult. And I don't tend to fall asleep during Zazen. You know, a lot of people do. That's something I never do. And there's always this feeling that there's a radio on that I am often begging to have turned off, but it doesn't work, believe me. Trying to suppress any kind of mental state that I don't happen to like really doesn't work. So what I've discovered over the years is that my fear kept me from kind of experiencing a certain kind of suffering

[10:10]

And in my struggle with restlessness, for many years I had difficulty with a daily sitting practice. And it wasn't until about 1995 when I met a Vipassana teacher who told me that I wouldn't be able to really sit till I was willing to suffer. Not that I wasn't suffering before, but I kept it at such a distance that Well, let me just go on. You know, it's the month of April, which is my favorite month. And I was born in April. I don't know if that's why I like it, but I've always really been drawn to the springtime. you know, the light is coming back and in December and January, I tend to count the weeks until March and April come around because the light is coming back and the flowers are blooming.

[11:31]

It gives me a sense of hope and I like the warmth and all that thing. But I also find that I find it very sad at the same time. And this whole month, I've been feeling a lot of sadness. I wake up feeling that way and I think about things like, well, first of all, that the springtime doesn't last, that it, you know, the flowers fall and spring goes away. And I think about people I care about and my mother whose story I'm not finished telling yet. She's 82 and I think about her age and I think about losing her. So when I really look at restlessness very carefully and think about what I'm avoiding

[12:38]

I think that it's a kind of sadness and an awareness that things don't last. I think when I started practice, I think everybody wants something. And it took me quite a while to really understand what it was that I was looking for. And I think really what I was looking for and hoping for was to live without fear.

[13:49]

to live life without fear. But I think that looking, when we work with hindrances, we have to look at them very carefully. When I looked into the restlessness and the fear, I think what I saw was really an awareness of things not lasting and the sadness associated with that. I'd like to read something.

[14:53]

This is from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. And he was one of my teachers back in the late 70s. And he says, fear is not a cause for depression or discouragement. Because we possess such fear, we are also potentially entitled to experience fearlessness. True fearlessness is not the reduction of fear, but going beyond fear. Going beyond fear means when we examine our fear, our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If we look into it and we look beneath its veneer, the first thing we find is sadness beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating all the time. When we slow down, when we relax our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. You might think that when you experience fearlessness, you might hear the opening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn't happen that way.

[16:29]

In the Buddhist tradition, discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart. And then Suzuki Roshi, in his chapter from Not Always So, talks about true concentration. Because I was saying earlier that concentration is kind of an antidote to restlessness. True concentration does not mean to be concentrated on only one thing. Although we say do things one by one, what it means is difficult to explain. Without trying to concentrate our mind on anything, we are ready to concentrate on something. For instance, if my eyes are on one person in the zendo, it will be impossible to give my attention to others. So when I practice zazen, I'm not watching anybody.

[17:32]

Then if anyone moves, I can spot them. Avalokiteshvara is the bodhisattva of compassion, sometimes portrayed as a man, also appearing in the form of a woman. Sometimes she has 1,000 hands to help others, but if she concentrates on only one hand, then 999 hands will be of no use. So I wanted to mention what actually happened as I grew up around my relationship with my mother, which is that I avoided her until I was in my, at least my mid-30s. She was not only full of rage, but very intrusive and, you know, calling all the time and that kind of thing.

[18:35]

But later, We became friendly and now I actually call her every day. I've called her every day for 10 years. And what happened was that changed this. I realized at a certain point probably about 10 years ago that the reason she behaved in the way she behaved was because she was afraid. Now I grew up thinking that my mother hated me. I felt very unloved. and kind of, sort of abused and, you know, misunderstood and all that. But actually, I learned that she, first of all, is a lot like me, but also that her behavior came out of her being scared. And once I saw that, I was able to forgive her, which I think is really important.

[19:36]

So, anyway, I just want to say one other thing about Avalokiteshvara, which is, so many of you have seen statues of her or him, and sometimes she has 10 arms, you know, sometimes more, sometimes 11 heads. Supposedly, in some legends, some stories, he had a thousand arms that turned into 84,000 arms. But the legend was that he made a vow not to rest until he had liberated all beings from suffering. but after so much hard work and seeing all the suffering beings he just burst into pieces into a thousand pieces his body just couldn't take it but Amitabha Buddha saw this and put him back together with eleven heads and so then he decided he could save even more beings

[21:06]

so he went down to hell and started saving beings there and came back through all the realms but it was still too much that he discovered there were just too many beings to be saved so and he only had two arms so his arms fell off from all the effort but Amitabha Buddha came back and saw this and gave him a thousand arms to liberate all beings. So, one final story I have to say about my mother. She's 82 and a half, and I'm shocked that she's still alive, actually. I had this fear that she was going to die young, And actually, she told me she was going to.

[22:10]

You know, she would say, I'm not going to be around past 60. So I really believed her and decided she wouldn't be around past 60. But one of the reasons I thought that was because she, in one scene in the house, she stormed out and went into the garage and got in the car. And then we heard a big crash. Well, it turned out she had backed the car out of the house without putting up the garage door. So she did that and we all were very upset thinking that perhaps she would, you know, die of carbon monoxide poisoning and all that. So I talked to her the other day and telling her on her 82nd birthday how happy I was that she was still around. You know, I was saying, well, I didn't think you'd last this long and she wanted to know why. And I said, well, you kept telling me you were going to die.

[23:10]

And then there was that incident. Remember, you backed the car out of the garage with a garage door down. And she said, oh, everybody does that. So. My mother is a great person. I'm not really giving the whole picture. I'm really talking about myself here and my experience. You know, someday I could talk about why my mother is an amazing human being, but I'm not going to do it today. But I've been very fortunate, I think, to have been able to discover that, given how I thought about her 15 years ago. So I know in my own restless manner, moved around a little bit from topic to topic, but I hope there was some logic to this talk.

[24:19]

So we have time for questions or comments. Alan. Well, two things. One is that I'm really happy to hear. Thank you for the talk. I'm really happy to with her arm, and it was, wow, in the midst of all that, she still had you in mind to wake you up for school. I found that very moving. The other thing, you know, we're cautioned not to mix up Buddhism, and so I'm at risk for doing that here. I am not sure, to me personally, as someone who has some of the same hindrances, that Trungpa's description, that his analysis of fear is entirely correct.

[25:20]

That, yes, there is sadness. You got to your sadness. She got to her sadness underneath the fear. But I think there is also trauma. And the trauma of a young child who isn't, you're not feeling, I'm not sure it's sadness, it's like fear for your survival. And I just wonder how one works with that when it's planted very deeply. And I think there are many people in our culture who experience this in different ways. And to, you know, just to put it all in the box of sadness, I'm not sure it's an effective way. There is a much less effective way of working with it. And I'm curious if you've thought about it. Yeah, I've thought about it quite a bit. I don't agree. I don't think it all falls into any particular box.

[26:25]

I think fear could be an avoidance of anger. It could be avoidance of some other emotion. But can't it just be fear? Can't you just feel that your very existence is affected? Yes. How is that? What is that? Well, actually, you're kind of right. I think that There's a sadness about not feeling loved. You know, there's that. And yes, there's one's existence threatened as a child. You know, terror. Linda? Just carrying that on. When it's trauma, as you say, it's certainly trauma from experiences that you're describing that probably some of us

[27:29]

identify with too. When you practice the way Karen has been doing, and you get a little bit of wisdom about that trauma, which is totally out of control, that survival trauma, that threat to your survival, then at another layer, the sadness arises. Once in the 70s in San Francisco Zen Center, I remember this very clearly because I wrote about it. I had a thought, it was soon after my own mother had died, and I had a thought that she's died and I'm glad to be finished with it. In this issue. And then I just started crying at how sad it was to have that feeling that that exists, that it is that way. I was in Sashim. If I was just in unmitigated trauma, I wouldn't have reached the sadness.

[28:34]

Thank you. Ross. When you said, when you were talking about sadness underneath all those feelings, I thought of the First Noble Truth. Even though there may not be a translation of sadness grow up. And my question is, you're able to see the underlying sadness with your mother and then forgive her, and we're products of our parents, and I'm wondering how you're dealing with your own sadness about your own life and the loss and such, and how you're forgiving yourself. If it's easier, harder, still in the process, what do you got with that? You're talking about self-forgiveness?

[29:36]

Yeah. Because it seemed like you were talking about seeing your own sadness underneath all that sense of discontent. And when you saw it in your mother, you were able to forgive her. And we all have our own aspirations and dreams that are broken. And I'm wondering how you deal with your own process of that as a practitioner. Seeing it as it is and fully accepting it. I have to accept that I don't always accept things. You know, it's an ongoing process, self-forgiveness. Sadness is a kind of form of aversion, in a way. At least that's what one of my teachers, Joseph Goldstein, used to say. It's a way of pushing away something which we don't like. So I just think self-forgiveness is something that one has to keep doing over and over again.

[30:41]

Ron? Oh, go ahead. Going back to Trungpa Rinpoche's comment, part of what he said was that when you get beneath the veneer of that particular emotion, or in this case here, then you see such and such. And it's interesting that that phrase, like a veneer is very thin, but when you see it, it looks like it's solid. How it seems to me that. Understanding how it work has a lot to do with seeing. the veneer when it's not so obvious to us. So how do you see practice as working with that veneer?

[31:55]

Do you mean, how do I see working with this kind of a false front of fearlessness? Is that what you mean? Well, you know, I think what he was saying in that comment was that if you feel fear, you just feel fear. Right. And it grabs you. And any of those emotions that are really strong, especially fear, anger, like your mother experienced when she put her fist through the window, it just completely got hold of you. You can't, you're just taken by it. And the veneer is just that feeling. But underneath that, there's something else that's not so evident to us. And it seems to me that practice is very much about getting underneath what seems to be, but actually is composed of something which is actually somewhat different. Well, I think you have to take what you experience first.

[32:56]

say you experience that fear arise or anger arise, you have to pay very close attention to it without judging it and really explore with an open mind what that is. You don't really know what's underneath it until you really look at it. I think that Suzuki Roshi when he talked about beginner's mind often, well, You have an experience and you often don't know really what it means or what's underneath it and it's through mindfulness awareness practice that you come to understand it. Another thing that Joseph Goldstein said was that fear is the membrane between what is known and something that you don't know.

[34:04]

Catherine? I see that in dealing with death and dying and bereavement. I sometimes think that grief, the grieving, the active grieving that people do, which is a certain kind of sadness, is really a cover for fear that has to do with the immense unknowableness of what in the world is going on when somebody dies. One moment, George is here. Five minutes later, well, we can see him, we can touch him, we can feel him, but he's not here. It's not entirely George anymore. It threatens to explode and obliterate anything we're capable of thinking about, and that's terrifying. So you think some of the grief covers up the fear, rather than fear covering up the grief?

[35:13]

The fear is kind of this unimaginable reality that we actually do experience. That's very interesting. Jake. Thank you, Karen. Please tell your mother that I backed her car to the garage. It's quite dented on the inside. The outside is not too bad. But I wanted to say that you were one of the first people I met here. And I remember as sashim director, you really relaxed me. So even though there's this underlying anxiety, restlessness, too. You have a very calming effect, at least with me. I've heard other people say that. And I'm wondering, how do you explain that? You seem very concentrated, too.

[36:14]

You know, I hate to sound too psychological. It might be a defense, possibly. The truth is, I have insomnia. I have a hard time sleeping, so I'm actually kind of not in the best state right now. I think I'm able to... Well, I knew I wanted to be calm at a really young age. That's the answer. When I was... I have a quick temper which I know nobody will believe here because I actually can often keep it under control in public places. But I had a very hard time controlling my temper when I was a child and when I was eight years old and I still have this paper. I wrote a paper on that my goal in life is to control my temper and then

[37:19]

A few years later, I got very interested in Buddhism in whatever capacity, you know, an 11-year-old can do it. I don't know, but I was very drawn to it. I was drawn to Buddha images and that's where I was also very embarrassed that I was such a fearful person. I really wanted to be courageous and I did not want other people to discover me as weak. So I tried to cover that up. But it was a very unconscious kind of thing. I wasn't even aware of how much I wanted to do that until I was older. But to answer your question, being calm is kind of a... Go ahead. Just very quick. I always thought it was because whenever you talked to me, you were fully there. There was no distractions. Well, thank you.

[38:22]

I think that's true. Certainly engaging with other people and members of the Sangha is a big joy to me. So I definitely make that effort. Richard? fear and really feeling the suffering. Yes, yeah. I was wondering if you could talk more about what that was. Well, I thought I might have told this story once here a few years ago, so bear with me if those of you heard it, but I was on a Vipassana retreat and for years and years I had struggled to have a daily sitting practice and I couldn't because I was so restless I found sitting painful.

[39:22]

And this was in Barry, Massachusetts, actually the Center for Buddhist Studies where I was doing a kind of study retreat. So I told him, I said this aloud in a group, feeling slightly proud of myself, thinking I was a little bit courageous for saying it, but I said, I want to want to practice daily. But I can't, but I'm not or whatever. And he looked at me dead serious and said, I don't think you've suffered enough. And of course, you know, I was shocked to hear that. And of course, I could think, oh, how dare you think I haven't suffered. And there was truth to that. And the truth was that I wasn't willing to really feel certain things. I mean, if you're going to sit, you're going to feel things and it's not a day at the beach all the time.

[40:27]

So after that, that is when my practice changed completely after I heard those words. And it finally sunk in, I think, for the first time that you do have to feel, you know, you have to suffer. I don't mean that, you know how I mean that, right? It's just, I know Sojit in his talk a few weeks ago said, you know, we all practice in delusion. You know, we don't really practice with all our problems having gone away. You know, we practice in delusion. Is it time? I think it's time. Thank you for listening.

[41:23]

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