The name of this seminar is Therapist's Mind, Beginner's Mind, is that right? It means we should talk about therapy. So bedeutet das, dass wir über Therapie sprechen sollten. And let me ask how many of you are practicing therapists? Or psychologists? So maybe a third or a half? And how many of you are interested in therapy or are in therapy? So, rather by chance we, in fact, Quite by chance, we're going to look at a koan during this weekend, a famous koan called Baizhang's Fox.

[01:33]

Mm-hmm, fox. And last year, every seminar I did was on a koan. And this is the eighth seminar I've done on a koan, so we're on the eighth koan. In this book called The Book of Serenity. Now, what's the... advantage of looking at a koan for those of you who are therapists and not necessarily wanting to practice Zen Buddhism.

[02:36]

That's a question I have to ask myself all the time. And this, again, this seminar is called Therapist Mind, Beginner's Mind. So I want to start, as I always do anyway, with a beginner's mind. And look at this whole process of practice and practicing with a koan as if it were for the first time. Now, For those of you who don't know what a koan is, it's a Zen teaching story developed in the 6th to 12th century in China.

[04:07]

And it was an attempt of the Chinese to make Indian Buddhism their own. And... Can you hear in the back okay? I'm translating. I'm translating. But we both share the same anxieties. Now, China was a much more practical culture than India. And the Chinese emphasize that everyday life is the scene of everything that happens.

[05:29]

There's no symbolic world outside the actual everyday situation. So India had the sense that there were many worlds and the individual and the many worlds were versions of each other. And China took this in a way a step further. They had the feeling that there are many worlds, but they're all compressed in, folded into the present that you see right in front of you. So the sense of everyday life in China was, I don't think what we mean by everyday life.

[06:40]

Unter täglichem Leben verstand man jedoch in China etwas anderes als wir heute. It was because this, for the Chinese, this everyday life was also a life of deities and energies moving in larger identities than the person. Denn dieses tägliche Leben war eben auch die Welt von Gottheiten und Energien und verschiedenen Identitäten und Entitäten. Ulrike and myself and Ruth, who's here somewhere, who was out at the door at the beginning of the seminar. We went to a place in Japan together. visiting nearby where I have a little house. Called Amanohashidate.

[08:02]

Which means the bridge of the gods. And there's a strip of land off that there's a kind of beach and then there's a long strip of sand with some thin trees on it that connect, sort of tie the bay together. And the idea is that heaven, or where the gods live, is right there, and the bridge is right there, but you have to look between your legs to see it. So there's lots of postcards showing people.

[09:03]

It would be rather rude for me to do it in front of you, but it's sort of like... But the idea is that if you just change the way you look a little bit, another world is right in front of you in the very world you see. So with this sense, the Chinese took Indian Buddhism and rather disguised it, not just embedded it in the everyday, but disguised it in the everyday. So the stories in these koans pretty much look like possible events.

[10:16]

This one we're going to look at this weekend is stranger than most. And some of you, I see, have the English or German. Has the German been passed out already? But Christian, we have the translation, is that right? Oh, good. Okay. So I'm glad you don't have it yet, for the most part. Because I always have a feeling if you just read it and thought, we're going to study this, you would have left already. So we're going to look at this story and tomorrow I'll try to look at the issues involved. Yeah. Reading a koan is a bit like trying to understand or read a dream.

[12:02]

But for the most part, koans aren't a symbolic language. They're a way of looking at the issues involved in the details. And I would think that for a therapist, this is actually quite similar because you're not just looking at the client's dreams. Well, I assume you do that sometimes, most often. but you're looking at the situation of their life and trying to see the issues involved. Now, this is not just important for therapists and clients. All of us need to find some way to read our life and also to not read it but immerse ourselves in the details and let our life well as you can say writing writes writing your life

[13:42]

lives itself. So the question here that Collins raised is how do you let your life live itself? And I suppose again talking about the therapeutic situation, how do you let the therapeutic situation do its own therapy? Now, for those of you who are not therapists, I still want to stick to the issue during this two and a half days. I want to stick to the process question of the therapeutic relationship.

[14:52]

Of course, partly because we're always in a therapeutic relationship with ourself and our friends, in fact, professionally or unprofessionally. But what interests me to discuss in this seminar is the degree to which Buddhism and the ways in which Buddhism and meditation and therapy are interacting these days. And it's changing all the time and the dialogue is getting more complex all the time. Now, let me stop for a moment and ask, has anyone here have very little experience with meditation?

[16:15]

Yeah. Two, three, four, five, six, seven. OK. So you're sitting pretty well, though. No, it's unusual, but for me, it's for the moment the right thing. Are these lights on any kind of timber? No. So it's just bright, huh? No. Are we there? It's a chocolate bottle. Yeah. What? It's a chocolate bottle. Part of it. Okay, why don't you do that? Yes? Yeah. I think the thing to do is we'll do some sitting and I'll say something about sitting that probably will be good enough for those of you who have no experience.

[17:59]

And if you'd like specific instructions, I think you might speak to Ulrike, and she can either give you some, or she can suggest somebody who's here who has experienced and can give you meditation instructions. And if you need special instructions, you can either speak to Ulrike, who can maybe help you further, or call someone from the people who can give you some instructions. One of the issues in contemporary psychotherapy and in relationship to Dharma practice is, is Buddhism a cure-all? And there's an article in the recent Tricycle magazine, which is the kind of most sophisticated Buddhist magazine United States.

[19:08]

About whether somebody who's suffering should take tranquilizers or just meditate or can you do both and things like that. And are you a failure in Dharma practice if you take a tranquilizer? Yes. Yes. But what's wrong with being a failure? No, I actually don't think... I think it's okay. But this is sort of the issue in this koan because can one remark enlighten you?

[20:13]

Or can one remark, turning word, destroy you? Or suddenly, because you took a tranquilizer, are you a failure as a Dharma practitioner? Anyway, it's... We can go into this in more detail if we want to, but I don't think there's any conflict really between combining therapeutic practice or even taking medicine, tranquilizers with... with meditation or dharma practice? But at this stage it's very difficult to compare dharma practice and therapy.

[21:55]

Let's just take any one of you who's a therapist. You've probably had quite a lot of training. You've been generally well educated about psychology and so forth. You had to go through some process of being approved or tested by others in order to get your license or whatever. You have grown up in a culture where the ideas of Freud, Jung, Adler and so forth are pretty familiar to everyone. The basic paradigm, process and so forth, you've grown up with. This is not true of Buddhism for you at all.

[23:13]

Unless some of you are a child of a Chinese missionary. And you've had no rigorous training or somebody really testing your understanding and so forth. And you, of course, have not grown up in a culture where this is familiar. So no matter how much you studied or practiced Zen or meditation, there can't be any real comparison between how thoroughly you know something about psychotherapy. So maybe we have the beginner's mind of Buddhism versus the educated mind of the therapist. I'm bringing this up just to put it in perspective, really how little we know in a basic way about Buddhism and therapy, compared, Buddhism and meditation, compared to what we know about this discipline that's part of our own culture.

[24:50]

So I would say at this point that Buddhism and therapy, very little understood in the West, is having a very deep impact on how therapy is thought about and how we think about ourselves. But we're only at the beginning. And looking at this koan, I think we can see a little bit into the beginning. Now, maybe I should tell you the koan.

[25:52]

Bai Zhang, who was one of the most famous of the early formative Zen masters, who had a disciple named Wang Bo, who also was an extraordinary Zen teacher, the most classic Zen teacher in a way, Is the book, The Zen Teaching of Wang Bo, in German, translated into German? No? Is it? I don't know. No? I don't think so. It is? It's one of the best books. John Blofeld translated it into English. And if you can read English, if it's not in German, I would say if there's two or three books on Buddhism you want to read, this is one of the books, The Zen Teaching of Wang Bo.

[26:59]

So Wang Bo's teacher, Bai Zhang, is giving a lecture. And every lecture, there's somebody from the village or a local person who's come and sitting in the back. He's not one of the monks. Hmm. And often the Zen teachers' talks on certain days, like 3, 8, and 6, that would be the 3rd, the 8th, the 18th, the 16th. They had a system for giving lectures. Local people could come in.

[28:01]

So this guy was in the back and Baicheng presumably noticed him but didn't say anything. So one day at the end of the lecture, this man stayed behind after everybody left. And he came up and he said, could I speak to you a moment? He said, I lived on this mountain 500 lifetimes ago. And I myself was a Zen teacher, Zen master. And someone asked me, does a fully realized person fall into karma or not?

[29:28]

And I answered, such a person does not fall into karma. And for this deluded remark, I was reborn as a fox for 500 lifetimes. Now, those of you who are therapists, have you ever had a client say this to you? You'd say, whoa. Here's a tranquilizer. Prozac? Is that what people think these days? Prozac. Maybe a little ecstasy. And... He said, and I live here as a fox on this mountain.

[30:54]

And he said, can you help me? And Bai Zhang said, ask me the question. Does a fully, and this man said, does a fully realized person fall into cause and effect or not? Now, Bajang said it almost the same thing, slightly different. He said he is not blind to cause and effect. So supposedly in this story, the man was enlightened and said, good, I don't have to be a fox anymore and blah, blah, blah. Now, this may be a foxy answer, so be careful.

[32:13]

So afterwards, Bajang said to his assemblage that this had happened and that they were going to hold a funeral for a dead monk the next day. And then Bai Zhang reported about his monk meeting and said that the next day he would hold a funeral ceremony for a deceased monk. So Bai Zhang... took everyone out the next day and they went up to a fox den and poked a dead fox out of the lair and they did a whole monk's ceremony for this fox and buried it. And the next day? They made it, I suppose. It might be the same as if those of you were therapists. In Kessel here, it went up the mountain here toward the castle, and Doug found a little fox, or around where we live you'd find a coyote. and did a ceremony with your group.

[33:39]

It might be quite interesting. You might become very popular and famous as a therapist. Everyone would want to be in your group. Now, we live in Crestone, Colorado, where I have a small temple monastery We live in Creston, in the mountains of Colorado, where I have a small mountain monastery. And last summer and autumn we had a huge harvest of these pine nuts.

[34:48]

And it produced a very large mouse population. And we're expecting a very large coyote population next spring. And the mice are everywhere. I mean, they're inside the air conditioners of your car. And you turn on the blower and mouse nests blow into it. And they're under my computer and my printer and I'm trying to work. But we figure we live in their territory. They don't live in ours. I mean, we're living in their territory. And we've also recently had quite a few bears. And we have a black bear that's bigger than Norbert. And he wanders around the place, and at night, on the way to Zazen, sometimes you hear... You wonder how you got inside the cage.

[36:29]

There must be some mistake here. And he particularly likes, of course, our compost. And some guy recently, about 50 miles from us, made the mistake of throwing his garbage outside his trailer. He lived rather eccentrically by himself in a trailer up in the mountains. And this bear, you know, kept coming around and eating and finally decided to go in the trailer and eat something. And the Tibetan Buddhist center, which is a few miles from us, a bear came in the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and got some food and went out.

[37:33]

But this guy wasn't so lucky. He went in, he tried to shoo the bear out by shooting it, only wounded it, and the bear ate him. So this makes us very alert at our meditation center. There aren't many places left on the planet where we are lower on the food chain. I mean, there's people who might rob you, but how many places is there something out there that could eat you? I'm bringing this up because these monasteries in China were very much like our place, where there was a sense of animal life very present.

[39:03]

So I think to feel this koan, you'd have to bring yourself into the feeling that this is not just a symbolic thing about this fox, that there was a sense that each person was a fox, a bear, a coyote, that these natures were overlapping and interchangeable. Okay. So what I'd like to do now is have a few minutes, a one minute stretch. We'll sit for just a few minutes. And then I'll say a couple of things about the koan.

[40:11]

And we will end by 9.30. Now for those of you who are new to sitting.

[42:38]

The basic idea is to sit in a way that your back can be straight and yet relaxed. Lifting, feeling through your back. And the heat of your body folded together. And a relaxed feeling coming down through your body. Now, breath practice, the word for it is prana. Which literally means first breath.

[43:59]

So the whole practice is there. Can each breath be your first breath? Can jeder Atemzug der erste Atemzug sein? Your beginner's mind. Euer Anfängergeist. If it can be, it will also be your therapeutic mind. Und wenn es so ist, kann das auch euer Therapeutengeist sein. This first breath mind will heal you each moment. So the first practice in this koan, the first issue in this koan is First breath, mind.

[45:20]

You can even say these words to yourself on your inhale or exhale. The feeling of it, first breath, mind. A mind in which each breath is your first breath. Now I'd like to make just a few remarks that constitute a practice for you if you like between now and tomorrow morning.

[46:25]

And does it work if we meet at, say, 10? Does that give people travel time to get here? And that we'll break for lunch at some point. And we'll maybe go till five in the afternoon or something like that. Is that all right with people? And I'm, this is Herr, no, Frau Dr. Ulrike Greenway. And this is Dickie, I mean, I'm Richard Baker. And I'd like to meet those of you who I don't know.

[47:28]

I wish during this weekend you'll introduce yourself to me and to Ulrike. And I also hope that we can have some sort of interchange, discussion together, so that it's not just me talking at you. I do have to introduce the koan if we're going to do it, but really I'm not a therapist and I'd like to learn as much as I can from you because this is central to my life, what we're talking about. Let me say something about the koan. One very briefly. One of the issues here in this koan is what is an act? Now there's an Indian idea that's carried forth in Buddhism that each act either puts the cosmos out of harmony or in harmony.

[48:53]

Each act is a pivot. Now, the question here, and that's where karma comes in. Each act is a pivot, a moment of karma, a moment of consequence. The other side is emptiness, dharma, to act in a way that is free of consequence. Now, these are not necessarily opposing views. They may be interpenetrating views. And when we talk about something like this, we're not just talking about is the world like this and would a physicist think so or a moralist.

[50:01]

But rather we're also talking about like first mind first breath mind. What is the state of mind where each moment is a pivot? You know you've had those moments in your own life. Where you can look back in your memory and there's a kind of bright spot where you became somebody at that moment. You became a little older, a little different. And there's even a study in Buddhism of that kind of memory where certain memories have light around it or something like that, a brightness around it, and some don't.

[51:11]

And when you know that, can you act now so there's a brightness around each of your acts? Not just in your memory, but in the present. One of the sayings in Zen is one moment, one meeting. So each moment isn't just a moment, a sort of time bubble, but each moment is a meeting. Now there's a variation on that which is each meeting occurs only once a lifetime. Now sometimes that's of course not true.

[52:14]

But sometimes it is. And what state of mind characterizes each meeting occurs only once a lifetime? Now a koan like this is asking you to practice with this feeling each meeting occurs only once a lifetime. This meeting we're having right now, whether you're an old friend or a new friend, whether I'll ever see you again or see you many times, This meeting will occur only once in each of our lifetime. And can you see the fox in me?

[53:36]

And can you see someone who's lived here on this mountain 500 lifetimes? Can you see, just this evening, when you look at people, bus driver, your friend, whatever, can you see someone in terms of, see a face of 500 lifetimes? These are some of the practice issues that a story like this is bringing up in a Buddhist context. So if you're a therapist or you're a client, You look at the therapist, you look at the client, do you see 500 lifetimes?

[54:43]

This way of being able to look through your legs for a moment and see the world differently is fundamental, built into the ordinary life of daily life practice of Zen. So I'll see you 500 lifetimes from now, tomorrow at 10. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here with you. Norbert and Angela have been suggesting for some time that I might come to Kassel. And I said, well, Kassel. And I was very glad to be here.

[55:43]

And Rika and I have a picture of ourselves that we show to people every now and then of the two of us walking up that pipe in front of the museum. Ulrike und ich haben ein Bild hier aus Kassel, wo wir also bei dieser Skulptur Skywalker, wo wir also diese schräge Säule hochlaufen. Und das zeigen wir also gelegentlich. Everybody was laughing at us. I was climbing and they had this painting fixed up so you could have a fake photograph. But I like it. It's good. So I'll see you tomorrow. Bis morgen. Please sit comfortably and stretch if you want. Hello. Hello. Good morning.

[57:13]

I almost didn't make it this morning. I've been sleeping since I arrived the other day in three-hour stretches, but last night we slept to almost before we were supposed to leave for here. So I'm waking up and you're like an apparition of another continent that's appeared before me. I don't think you've had a chance to read the koan, is that right? Most of you got it this morning. Mm-hmm. So I think, I don't know whether I should say anything about it till you have a chance to read it.

[58:36]

The main part of the case only takes a few minutes to read. And maybe we can read it when we take a break. Is there anything that any of you would like me, us, to discuss either from what came up last night or in just your general interest in Buddhism and psychotherapy? Yes. I have a German or English question. Egypt? German. I have a general question about emotions.

[59:55]

How Buddhism helps in painless emotions. There is a lot of consciousness, there is also body awareness, which I find once in a while, but emotions somehow you don't know where to put them. So what about the expression? Because in therapy you stress a lot of expression of emotions and it will just affect more the containment of emotions. So, yeah, I would like to know more about that. Okay. Okay, in German, I would like to know Yes, how does Buddhism deal with feelings? In psychotherapy, a lot of work is done with the expression of feelings, and I think that Buddhism deals more with feelings. The old feeling, yes.

[61:02]

There I would go further. And emotions, how would you define an emotion? You mean like anger or something? Yeah. Okay. I think when you practice, first of all, if you just practice meditation,

[62:18]

as a physical exercise. It's calming and integrating in various ways. And in that sense, meditation may have a atmosphere of Buddhism about it, but I wouldn't say it's Buddhist meditation. And I, you know, it's actually a little hard for me to answer, respond to your question Because we have to respond to it in terms of Buddhist meditation, we have to look at the whole package that Buddhism is.

[63:28]

And The problem, I think, is that we're doing a kind of... We're attempting to practice meditation much more seriously than lay people have practiced it in the past. And we're practicing it... Sort of like we might go into a monastery or something, but we're not doing that. Or at least we have ideas that make sense in the context of a monastery. We don't express our emotions or something like that. And I would say it's not correct in Zen practice you don't express emotions, but if you're living in a monastery and you're sitting, say, seven 40-minute periods a day, plus you're eating your meals in meditation posture, the way you function is different than in ordinary life.

[65:04]

And what you do is you begin to create a different territory and dynamic of how you function. Hmm. So, I mean, it's a very common idea around that what do you do with emotions. And it's actually an issue sometimes in discussion between Ulrike and myself. Because in a funny way my experience is I express my emotions fully but

[66:08]

Ulrike might say, I don't express them. And for some reason, she just stuck her tongue out of him. Anybody else want to stick their tongue out? Can I add a question? Yes, please. Well, in some sense, as well in Buddhism as in psychotherapy, a kind of healing or creating a whole kind of person is the attempt or goal. expressing or overcoming or resolving whatever we're stuck in.

[67:22]

I think it's an issue in both traditions. So maybe we should phrase the question a little bit different. How do we get unstuck in a Buddhist emphasis and how do we get unstuck in psychotherapy? Maybe... Okay. German. I think that both Buddhism and psychotherapy have to do with healing people, to bring people to life. And we have heard that the areas within us where we are stuck, whether it is emotionally, physically or in our development, that we make ourselves free there. Okay, I'll try to... Maybe the whole seminar could be answering your question. Okay. What shall I say?

[68:39]

I want to say something in relationship to this koan too. Let me try to give you a picture of someone who meditates a lot. When you start to practice so that you release yourself into sitting, um, The image, I'm sorry to pass this to child.

[69:45]

This image, I used to wash dishes as a kid and I always took the glass and I would look through the soap suds at the silverware. And my parents would say, aren't you through with the dishes yet? Still looking at the silverware. And I don't know, this image must, I've mentioned it before, but this image must come up because it was one of the first images I had of what it's like to practice when I first started. I suddenly found, Zazen gave me this glass and I started looking inside myself and I found, I mean, a million pounds of silverware. Yet to be washed.

[70:49]

Used over 500 lifetimes. Hmm. So what I discovered very soon, and I think what a person who practices a lot discovers, is there are so many emotions you couldn't begin to express them. Layers and depths of feeling that just are immense. And I remember Sukhira, she said One of the experiences he had in America was that we didn't have enough shadow.

[71:59]

Now, he didn't mean... He didn't know anything about Jung's idea of shadow or something like that. He just meant there's a quality that we have of trying to be too clear or too simple. I mean, to take the opposite point of view as if you could express emotions. So you show, I suppose, Okay, so let me go on with this image of, description of somebody who practices a lot. The effort in the first years would be to keep opening up this interior space. Until there's a kind of equanimity or balance in your interior space, no one thing is taking over.

[73:26]

Now, you're also distinguishing, which is essential in practice, between feeling and emotion. Now, whether this is I mean, I think this can be useful to you as practitioners. Whether it could be useful to you in a therapeutic situation, I don't know. You might through meditation become proficient in certain yogic skills, but you couldn't expect your client to. However, these aren't just yogic skills. They're also just the way we work, the way, the dynamic of a human being.

[74:39]

In fact a kind of craziness might be yogic experience without yogic skills. In other words the person may be moving in a variety of interior spaces without any control over the movement. So then your ability to move in those same spaces but with control would be therapeutic perhaps for the client. In fact, in a sense, this koan is a therapeutic type situation because you have the teacher and the person who is also a fox spirit and so forth. And there's an interaction where this person feels better supposedly afterwards.

[76:09]

So one of the... assumptions of the interaction in the mentorship relationship in Buddhism. If you can enter the spaces or interior realities of the other person, And by your ability to enter them and then come out of them, you allow the other person to come out of them by sort of osmotic resonance. So one of the basic distinctions again is between feeling and emotion.

[77:12]

And then between feeling and non-graspable feeling. And I'm sorry, for those of you familiar with me, I have to find some way to define feeling and non-graspable feeling. So now in the skandhas, and somebody, you asked me to do something about the skandhas again, but I don't know if I will. One of the basic territories Anybody who's going to practice should be aware of is the five skandhas. Roughly, form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness.

[79:13]

And this is something close to signal. Okay. Now, in terms of... of emotions. Emotions fall in perceptions. Because there's something you can grasp. They have, this section means to grasp. They have something, you're not always angry. Denn Emotionen sind etwas Fassbares, etwas Greifbares, denn man ist ja nicht immer ärgerlich. Aber solange man am Leben ist, gibt es immer Gefühle. Und wenn Gefühle jetzt eine bestimmte Form annehmen, wie zum Beispiel Ärger, dann überquert man diese Linie.

[80:15]

And I'm resisting unless you really ask a lot to teach this, because I've taught it so many times. But very simply, if you say somebody's walking by and you hear something or you feel something, you don't know what it is, and somebody's walking by, say, with a radio, At the first level of that, we could call form. You haven't identified it, but something is in your field. Now, at some point, you begin to notice you have a certain feeling, but you couldn't identify the feeling. And then you notice that you feel a little sad. And so you've gone from a non-graspable feeling to sadness, still a feeling, it's not really exactly an emotion yet.

[81:30]

And then you begin to notice that you feel actually quite sad. And then out of that, perhaps you think of your mother. And you remember your mother listening to such a song when your father left her. And then you have an impulse to shut the window. So you've acted on it or you might start sobbing or whatever. And this goes together to make your consciousness of this particular moment.

[82:54]

Now, one of the practices in Zen is you get so that you're always folding yourself back and forth across this. At any one moment you have a feeling that this consciousness that I live in, that's where I live in this particular consciousness, It's made up, it's a kind of soup. And one of the ingredients is Ulrike's voice. And another is, there's a number of you wearing green right here, and I can feel a certain pressure or ingredient in my consciousness from green, from blue here, and from black there.

[84:04]

And I can feel those as a presence in my consciousness and how it's made. In a way, I can follow them back to their source. Okay. These are called the skandhas or the heeks. Because each one is a kind of its own pile, and they pile up to make consciousness. Now another basic territory of practice is recognizing that when I see you, one of you, I'm seeing my own perceptions.

[85:39]

Now, I'm trying to give you the way an adept practitioner, what kind of world he or she lives in. Now I know that at least on one level you are outside me, you're out there somewhere. But what I see of you is in my own perceptual field. So if a fox heard Ulrika's voice, it would probably hear something quite different from what I hear.

[86:44]

So the fox is hearing its own perceptual shape of Ulrika's voice. So there's no particular Ulrike's voice. Even if we put it in a recording machine of some sort, then it's the recording machine's voice. So when I see you, I'm seeing you and putting together the image of you from my own past, which is coming up in the present, which allows me to organize the experience of you. Now, I'm over-analyzing this a bit, but the fact is I see my experience of seeing you

[87:47]

And I know that. It's just the way I see now. I know that you're participating in creating what I see. So I know that I'm also participating in seeing what I see. So if I get angry at you, it's not just a simple anger, it's I'm aware that I'm participating in creating the anger that I'm feeling. And it's like things are happening in slow motion. I'm also then participating in whether I should express my anger or not. It's like you're playing tennis and the ball is coming very slowly, do you think? Shall I hit it?

[89:27]

Oh, it's too much trouble to hit it. I'll let it go by and then I lose the game and then I can take a walk along the lake. And maybe my opponent and I could talk about something. So your opponent says, well, why didn't you hit the ball? I was hanging with you and you didn't hit me. And you'd say, oh, I've been looking forward to taking a walk along the lake with you. And your friend says, but you're not expressing your emotions. Well, you're actually in quite a different territory than the other person. But what's interesting about this kind of experience is that

[90:29]

this kind of way of being is you can also act very fast. If you decide that this is all happening, like I said, slow motion, it's all happening like that. If you decide, hey, I better be angry. You can release your entire energy like a projectile. And the person goes... Then you stop and you talk and say, let's have a cup of tea. And then the person says, that's not genuine anger, you were acting. Well, it may not have been general, but you probably could have killed the person.

[91:52]

It may not have been... It may have been acting, but it could have ended up in certain situations in killing someone. So... Answering a question, do you express your emotions? Actually, the dynamic of how you function is different if you practice a lot. Maybe we shouldn't always use the example of an emotion as anger.

[92:59]

There are so many other emotions. And I'm just reminded of this video we saw the other night of this group of women with metastasized breast cancer. and that all of them are dead within a two-year time. But if you do group therapy with them and they express feelings, emotions, then this doctor who did the study could double their survival rate. And it's the very length of their survival rate. I mean, they couldn't get cured, but they were able to survive almost twice as long. And I think that's a very significant, I think, case where expressing something in a certain way, I assume, is healthy or releases something. So how do we integrate that into Buddhist practice? I want to say...

[93:59]

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