Good morning, nice to see you all. Last night, I gave a talk at the Vietnamese temple in San Jose, and I was just thinking if anybody thinks this is a gaudy array, you need to go to San Jose, right? It's great. All the way home, Bill talked about one of the offerings, which was some big green thing. I think it was probably some kind of an Asian melon, but he's quite keen to figure out. Now, is this thing working? And if it is, it certainly doesn't give any indications of it. Well, I guess we'll just see. Anyway, we took some flowers from the garden, and just before we left, one of the young nuns

[01:04]

at the temple brought us a flower arrangement. So we brought home some of the flowers that we took, plus some of theirs. But she had, of course, arranged them very beautifully, so that's what's up on the mantle. As I think some of you know, in the last couple of months, I've been paying quite a bit of attention and encouraging everybody I can get my hands on to pay a lot of attention to noticing turning away, noticing when we turn away, and how we turn away, and what we turn away from. And the more I pay attention to this pattern in the mind, the more clear it seems to me that this is a very useful focus, if we can bear it.

[02:07]

Because, of course, what we turn away from in most instances is what we wish wasn't so. Or we turn away from what we want and don't want it to stop. That wonderful line that we work between aversion and attraction. I don't want the mark of impermanence to be an evidence with what I want. And I can't wait for impermanence to come quick, quick, quick, quick with what I don't want. Someone who's been working with staying present with what everything in her doesn't want to stay present with brought up recently what she was describing as the cultivation of impartial awareness. A few months ago, in one of our retreats, we were talking about what it means to have a bias,

[03:17]

or to not be biased. And I think this word impartial is another word we can use for this awareness that isn't informed by what I want or what I don't want. I think that the Buddha's teachings are quite radical. This notion that we not only might come to see the benefit in staying present with what we don't want to stay present with, that that's a possibility, but that we might go for it in time. This is, of course, the path for liberation from our suffering, because our suffering clearly arises when we try to insist on things as we want them to be

[04:20]

and don't find a way to turn toward, to be with what is so. I think one of the big misunderstandings with this particular territory is that we may misunderstand that we need to stay with what is so if it's something we can do something about, and particularly if the what is so is something we can do something about and that it's also something unwholesome, some habit of the mind, for example. Some of you have been around when I've been talking about the Transformation Meditation, but I want to bring it up again because I think it's an extremely useful practice and is an example of one of a number of practices that have as a focal point or anchor

[05:28]

or a beaming point the cultivation of this capacity to be present with what we want to turn away from. Specifically, the meditation is described as being for working with afflictive or negative emotional states, that particular aspect of our range of responses. And the meditation is about the cultivation of our ability to turn towards what everything in us says turn away from. But it's also a meditation that is about the cultivation of loving-kindness. It's a meditation that is about developing a capacity for tenderness and care with what we turn away from and what we have usually a great deal of aversion toward.

[06:31]

Anger, or fear, or grief, or sadness, or anxiousness, or whatever is the particular description and emotional state that is what you're working with that you find challenging and problematic. It's interesting to me how initially, often, when I teach this meditation to people, there's a kind of little shuffling around, a little discomfort, a little embarrassment. And my recommendation is just close your eyes and then nobody will be seeing what you're doing. Mostly you. There's a way in which this particular meditation goes best

[07:33]

if we let ourselves be as attentive to what's going on within us as we possibly can be. And so the first thing that we do is to settle ourselves and get stable and grounded, either with sitting or with walking. And then my suggestion is, after you see the gesture, this gesture of very relaxed hands cupped at the heart chakra, from here on close your eyes. Don't peek at each other. To take this gesture of tender holding, of being with, described as the tenderness of a mother with her only newborn child, holding whatever the emotional state is in one's hands at one's heart chakra, the location that is said to be the location of subtle mind.

[08:36]

To hold whatever the emotion is that you're working with at any given time with that quality of tenderness and care, including not only the emotional state, but also whatever physical sensations you're aware of that accompany the emotion. So of course the first thing you have to do, and this is exquisitely turning towards, is notice what those sensations might be. We get so caught up in the emotional state itself that we don't notice something like, oh, when fear comes up there are also certain body sensations that seem pretty consistently to accompany fear, like some tightness at the throat or in the stomach, some sense of constriction somewhere in the body. So as I hold the emotion that I'm going to work with,

[09:43]

for example, the emotion of fear or great sadness and grief, at the heart in this way, I also include in my gesture of being with the body sensations that accompany the emotion. And I then say to myself, breathing in, I note fear within me. And I only ask myself to be with the emotion for the space of that inhalation. And if I'm able to do that, then I can ask myself to be with the emotion for the exhalation. In other words, I walk my way into the practice, an inhalation and an exhalation at a time. I don't even ask myself to be with what I'm staying with for a whole breath. Because, of course, these intense emotions that we want to turn away from

[10:45]

are often the emotions that we respond to with, I feel overwhelmed. But my experience is that there is not an emotional state that you cannot stay with at least for the briefness of an inhalation or an exhalation. You can always do that much. Breathing in, I note grief within me. Breathing out, I note grief within me. And so on. There may be times when you feel like doing this while you're sitting still is just too difficult, but you could imagine doing it as you were walking. And if you could find a quiet place, a room or somewhere outside, it doesn't matter, where you could do the practice while you're walking,

[11:46]

that may go a little bit more easily. I think that's particularly true with very intense emotional states. And it's especially true with fear and anxiety. That if you're moving, somehow staying with what you're experiencing is much easier. And you can do the meditation as briefly or as long as you're able to. And what is extremely important is that you stay present with what you're experiencing and you don't get into a kind of groove where you just assume that you're going to be noticing grief. When in one or two or three breaths, it may be a different emotion. So you want to stay very current with what you're observing and the labeling. Don't assume that it's going to continue to be grief or sadness or anger or fear.

[12:49]

Very often, particularly working with anger, what people discover is after a few moments, the emotional state that arises is not any longer anger but fear. There's a way in which in the turning towards the emotional state, we're able to drop to a deeper level of our experience of being with what is so. Meditation Practice People who don't have their own experience of meditation practice and particularly people who don't have any experience of retreats sometimes think that meditators are somewhat masochistic. What on earth are you doing signing up for what looks like a lot of pain and misery? One of the things we do is we give ourselves a chance to notice what we do

[13:53]

when we hit some difficulty like a pain in my knee. There's a kind of turning away when I have some pain in my knee and immediately I want to get rid of it. I want to move. I want to change my position. All I want is for that to go away. Now it may be that it will be skillful for me to move but first can I look into what am I actually experiencing? There's a book that someone I've been practicing with for a long time just recently lent to me by a woman named Lucy Greeley, Anatomy of a Face. The story, it's the autobiography of her face. It's Lucy Greeley's own story of what happened to her

[14:57]

when at age nine she was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and had an operation and lost the lower, I don't know, third of her face. She by the time she's written the book has had something like 30 operations but she's really talking about what it was like growing up and having the world turn away from her because of her physical appearance and her own turning away from herself. But in the context of what we're talking about this morning another reason for reading the book is that she describes how she comes to have some relationship with pain such that she can be present with in some cases extraordinary pain and what she discovered was the difference between turning away and turning towards.

[16:00]

Examining, being interested in, being present with, allowing and how in that turning towards at certain times extraordinary amounts of pain when the pain maybe changed or maybe it didn't change but her responses changed and consequently her experience of what she was going through began to change. If I reach for the aspirin bottle too quickly I miss out on the opportunity to find out exactly where the pain or in more neutral language the discomfort that I'm experiencing, exactly where is it. I have for a lot of my life had pretty chronic headaches.

[17:03]

At a certain point I stopped having them but through high school and my 20s maybe into my early 30s I had headaches often. And it was only after I began practicing meditation that I began to have some interest in exactly where is this discomfort located that I'm calling a headache. And over the years what I've discovered is that there are lots of different headaches and there are many, many, many causes for headaches. And what I've discovered is that as I know more about different kinds of discomfort in the head

[18:05]

I'm able to take better care of myself. There's a kind of discomfort that if I pay attention to it I realize very quickly is located behind my right eye and goes with congestion in the sinuses. And if I recognize that pretty quickly there are things I can do to take care of my sinuses to take care of that congestion. I could never and didn't have any access to that kind of information if I just went for the aspirin bottle, quick get rid of it. I also think that when we voluntarily sit down and cross our legs and take this posture that is so revealing but also take on some willingness to be still for a little while

[19:09]

we are allowing ourselves the experience of cultivating some different ways of being with whatever arises and has been true just getting up in the morning and letting our life live us. That this is one of the ways we can begin to develop some capacity not always to turn away but to begin to discover the benefits of turning towards and being with. And in that process to begin to discover enormous capacity that many of us don't know we have. I think most of us have much more range and capacity to work with difficulty to be present in our lives with the ups and downs far beyond anything we recognize or know.

[20:16]

We have little mantras about what we can and can't stand what we can and can't do I was struck Friday morning I went to a meditation group at the Congregational Church in Tiburon and someone was talking about her recent meeting with her son very painful because she hadn't seen him for five years and he is addicted to drugs and alcohol and has been in and out of jail at one point she had said to him some while ago I won't see you until you have been clean and sober for six months and the consequence of that is that she hasn't seen him for five years and what he told her the other day was that will never happen

[21:21]

the minute she said that I heard a kind of vow in his statement the kind of vow that I imagine he is not aware of making but I wonder how often each of us make that kind of vow again a kind of turning away of the capacity that we don't yet know we have so different to say well up until now that's not been something I've been able to do just that shift in that way of speaking leaves some door open for some surprise I remember some years ago after I was in a car accident and I had chronic muscle spasms where in some parts of the back where muscles have been torn in this accident

[22:29]

and I became quite convinced that I would never be able to sit long retreats again and in fact for over a year I practiced meditation I practiced sitting meditation lying down I didn't even understand at that point that lying down meditation is its own true and viable practice not one that one needs to apologize for there are as Bill pointed out last night in the sutras four noble postures not just one and I can remember saying to myself and sometimes out loud I have a bad back it took me a while to realize that there was a kind of vow in that statement and that I was regenerating the bad back every time I said it anyway one time I was over in Walnut Creek doing a one day workshop with a group of people there

[23:35]

and we were talking about this kind of thing and I said at some point in the afternoon I have a bad back and the group nailed me they said ah isn't that a vow isn't that what you were just talking to us about it was great we need that kind of help from each other it was very helpful because of course having them gang up on me like that got my attention and as some of you know I'll never be able to sit long retreats which is something that I was convinced of for a long time has proven to be untrue much to my delight and amazement doing long retreats with the soft backed moving llamas helped you know if you've ever been with Tibetan llamas you know when they're practicing they often

[24:39]

they actually move quite a lot there is a kind of strictness and pickiness about posture that there is in them and having that more relaxed stance about posture was very wholesome for me so that afternoon in Walnut Creek assuming you experienced some genuine dorsal discomfort what could you have said? this afternoon I noticed some discomfort and consequently limitation with my back that process of describing what is so right now without projecting it as the fact into the future it was just that edge up until now since this car accident up until now these past two years seven months and two weeks and three days

[25:41]

I have been limited in how much I can sit upright it's a very long winded description much easier to say I have a bad back conventionally speaking but if I conventionally speak that way I convince myself about what my back will be like tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon or three years from now and I hold myself with a certain kind of care that keeps regenerating constriction and fear I'm cautious even when I may not on any given day need to be it's a way to not be present with what is so it's a way to not be present with not only what is so but with my potential capacities you know the wonderful quote that I like that is in Tom Cleary's translation of the Dhammapada

[26:43]

where he talks about delusion as arising from our listening to what he calls the lull of words that mental talking that so influences our thinking and perception the thinking and perceiving mind so I could say that that statement about I have a bad back is an example of words that lull me into believing that what I'm saying is an accurate statement and it is exactly that believing what I think and say as true that in some instances in many instances is the opportunity for turning away from noticing more exactly what is so so I want to encourage you all to at least entertain the possibility of being interested in noticing turning away

[28:03]

and I'm not suggesting that you even interrupt your process just notice it it's very interesting some of us in the beginning of December spent nine days closeted so to speak in this room focusing on turning away how on earth could we spend nine days doing that it was very rich very very rich what showed up for a number of people was turning away from regret and shame and grief about past actions lugging it along unconsciously

[29:05]

I always think of this I always, I often up until now I have often remembered the image in the Andalusian Dog where the protagonist is pulling with a toe line a baby grand piano with his dead donkey draped over it kind of like a Spanish shawl and that's the stuff that surfaced in our individual and collective focusing on turning away it's very interesting because of course as things began to surface as people began to pay attention to some old grief and pain and shame and regret what then began to surface along with that recognition that awareness, that impartial awareness was the possibility in turning towards whatever it might be to confess, express regret

[30:08]

and set some intention as a kind of antidote so that that experience became a teacher for how one wants to act today and so at the end of the retreat we did a confession ceremony where instead of doing the formulaic confession we did that, we started out with all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate and delusion born of body, speech and mind I now fully avow all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate and delusion born of body, speech and mind I now fully avow and we then each as we were able and ready to spoke of whatever it was that we wanted to confess

[31:10]

and express regret for with each other as witness when you first hear that formulaic verse it's very easy to say well that seems a little overstated just hang out with it for 10 or 20 years and you'll begin to uncover the old and moldy stuff I was very moved by our practice of confession and regret and renewal of intention and my sense was that the practice was very powerful for everyone allowing ourselves the possibility of

[32:13]

interning towards what is so having a kind of cleansing, a clean plate and I've heard from a few people since then who have actually done that practice of confession and regret as it was appropriate to do with one person or another in their lives and in every instance there has been that then opening and possibility of proceeding in some way that one can pick up wholeheartedly without reservation such a relief to let go of that toe line and just let the green piano and the dead donkey stay there, keep walking leave it on the movie set my experience is that

[33:14]

we have much more capacity to turn towards what we don't want to turn towards than any of us knows and we can only start with something small we can only start with the very small turning away habits and we have to do it with that tenderness that is so exemplified with this quality of holding in the transformation meditation this turning towards must be practiced with patience and with kindness and with particularity if we pounce on ourselves with our big flashlight and stick ah, I knew you were a jerk knew it all along crap there is a part of the mind that just

[34:15]

scuttles away then we distract ourselves or we numb ourselves or we dissociate or we do whatever we have to do to bear that kind of pain that we inflict on ourselves I think one of the situations in which this practice of cultivating our ability to turn towards rather than turn away is very interesting is in those situations where we don't know how we're going to stay with what is difficult, what is challenging I remember one time a number of years ago when I was leading a workshop at Green Gulch and we had a work period and we were going to clean all the windows in the meditation hall and we were going to do them

[35:16]

at a third our usual pace so I picked a set of windows in the back of the meditation hall that are awning style windows and that on the outside of the building there was a two story drop so I had to figure out how am I going to wash not just the inside but the outside of the window and they were up high enough so that I had to also figure out how to get up to them there was a very tippy rack that held cushions under the window and I stood there for quite a while trying to figure out how am I going to do this I don't know how I'm going to do this well it was clear the first thing I needed to do was to figure out how to get myself up on top of this sort of bookcase event now once I got up there now what am I going to do I couldn't figure out

[36:17]

how to wash the windows standing away from the project I could only discover how to get, how to wash this part of the window oh if I move the window open I could get my arm in this way but what about that corner over there on the outside it took finding out it took discovering what was possible one section of the window at a time discovering my capacity for being a contortionist much aided by the fact that I wasn't trying to do what I was trying to do quickly and I was quite surprised that at the end of an hour or whatever I had figured out how to wash the windows on both sides in the beginning and for some time into the process I didn't have any idea how I was going to do it I could only discover

[37:20]

each little step one step at a time but the step I took then led to the next step that I was able to take I said to Bill a few days ago I don't quite know what I'm going to talk about on Sunday because what I want to talk about I've been talking about a lot now for the last couple months but it's still what's up I thought about it for a while and I thought well if that's still what's up that's what's up we may be with this for a year who knows heaven forbid it takes as long as it takes but what I know is that the longer I dig in

[38:21]

to this territory I'm still uncovering pay dirt at New Years when we were getting ready to set our intention for the year and what came up for me immediately was that I didn't feel finished with the intention that I've taken each New Years for the last I think maybe four years the intention to speak to myself and to others as kindly as I can and had all kinds of thoughts that were completely habitual how can you stay with that again you're just being lazy can't you think of something else I know my mind well enough to know that there's a particular tone of voice that doesn't need to be listened to and in fact

[39:21]

what I realized was it was time to dig deeper and focus in particular on kind thinking and the minute I said that to myself I felt in my body a kind of dropping a little deeper not a lot but a little deeper oh this is the way to enter into this practice a little more deeply really bore into thought I think many of us have some idea about the pace at which our spiritual life should be occurring we have all these agendas and time frames one of the great benefits in accepting the teachings about past and future lives is that you can be a little more gracious about how slow the process is

[40:24]

and for some of us we're going to be doing what we're doing for quite a while probably so that's that's what I have to offer for the morning so what's up with you? Martha? Someone had offered to do something for me and it would involve other people and it was a particular skill that I didn't think this woman had and so she would be offering to these other people sort of in my honor this particular thing that I didn't feel that she had a lot of experience in or could do a good job and I was angry about it and I wanted I offered to do it for her

[41:29]

and I was suggesting that she get other people involved and you know all of a sudden I was finding myself suffering a lot and I found myself then turning towards what was really going on and what was really going on, what I found which was very difficult to look at was that I was afraid that I was going to be judged for what she was going to offer these people and that if I could control it then I could come up with something that I thought was really going to be terrific, so therefore I would be judged and then I just thought golly I guess I'm just going to have to do more loving kindness practice that was what I thought of was the antidote to that feeling because it must be that if I felt good enough about myself

[42:30]

I wouldn't matter I would just be very grateful that she had offered and I would accept her generosity with just great joy but I couldn't because of fear I think what you're describing happens very, very often with parents and their children and with spouses somehow what the other person does or doesn't do is going to be about me, not about them and that kind of fear if I turn away from it I don't have any access then to what's actually going on if I stay focused on all this

[43:30]

racket in my mind about what crummy job this person is going to do and get completely riveted on that I can be totally distracted from turning away from attention to what's really going on at some deeper level so that sounds like a useful but not necessarily thrilling process and it gets more thrilling I mean I think that at a certain point we begin to understand a kind of well, I guess for want of a better word, liberation from old traps when we begin to turn more deeply in the way that you're describing well I was blown away by the noticing it was like, whoa you know what I mean, so

[44:32]

in all of its kind of yuck, there was this gift, you know and this like, I'm noticing right so what you're really describing is the your experience of the kind of penetrating consequences of this kind of noticing which is a noticing of whatever is so even if I'm not thrilled with what I'm seeing the impartial awareness if you will because if my awareness has a partiality then I'm actually not by definition able to see what's actually going on so the noticing practices all the different practices that allow us to notice what's going on are enormous gifts enormous gifts and as you said recently

[45:33]

sometimes what we're left with is laughter or maybe laughter and tears but you know, that's alright yeah a very slight twist on that I was reading in some book on Tibetan Buddhism that one of the most valuable emotions you can notice is that of injured innocence and I'm great on injured innocence how could they accuse me wrongly I really meant this and I was misperceived and I have found it instructive to look at that and it helped to read it in the book because now when that happens to me what's going on here well and to have that language that's very useful I think it's one of the great benefits of studying Dharma texts is that we begin to get some pointers and guidance about what to look for but also

[46:36]

some language which helps us describe what we begin to notice injured innocence it's a form of self clinging if we dig deep into his students of things he knew they couldn't possibly have done to help them have some direct experience of this injured innocence you know, in case they thought they were really evolved, really enlightened this was a way of looking in some neglected corners I think Betty likes it when I tell this because she's sure I'm about to inflict it on her which I haven't gotten to that yet I've always found it pretty interesting a tough teacher yes I noticed being really glad to be here today until you started talking about turning away and then I noticed my mind just

[47:37]

dripped off it would be gone again and people hear me right now one piece of it has to do with being able for me to be able to notice the feeling even if I don't know where it comes from I find that pretty scary actually I want to leap into understanding it I don't know I have a lot of experiences where I'm feeling stuff and I don't know why well what's interesting about the transformation meditation is that step 5 is the looking into the where did this come from, looking into the causes and conditions and you do a whole lot of work with these 4 steps before that that actually they sponsor insight about

[48:39]

causes and conditions not going after the insight but allowing it to bloop up when you're ready so what you're describing I think is very common I know when I've done workshops on anger and we've done this particular meditation primarily with anger and as a consequence also fear consistently virtually everyone wants to go to thinking about what this is about because it's of course a way not to be feeling the feelings who wants to be feeling what I'm feeling right now? certainly not me so that's why I think this practice is helpful because it gives me permission to be present with, to be feeling the feelings for such a short period of time, for one inhalation I may be freaked out completely if I insist on doing it

[49:39]

for a whole breath but I could certainly stay with myself and what I'm experiencing emotionally for an inhalation or an exhalation baby steps good old baby steps again so you see, and I think that it's classic this is benign double binding to practice turning towards what I want to turn away from that's challenging super challenging so for you to notice oh I want to turn away from even thinking about turning away well, you're right there on that wonderful edge yes

[50:39]

is the goal to turn toward a long period of time? um, the goal you know this is a sort of dirty word but I think that's what we're working with anyway, the goal is to stay, develop my capacity to stay with what I'm experiencing long enough to have direct experience of the impermanence of that feeling and in the process of staying with what is so I begin to have some insight about the ground the causes and conditions that are spawning this emotional state without having to go for it or figure it out in a kind of conscious thinking way so it's really the goal is about discovering the consequences of awareness, nothing else

[51:40]

just showing up experientially so in, you know the meditation actually has five parts but about 90 to 95% of the transformation process actually happens in the first step the second step is reminding myself that that the causes and conditions for this emotion that's arising are within me in other words, stuff happens and the way I respond to whatever happens has to do with my state of mind is arising as a result of the causes and conditions in my lifetime, etc. so it's a kind of reminder about I'm not out there trying to get the world to change I'm focusing on my response

[52:41]

and then steps three and four are focusing on calming the emotional state and step four is easing, easing as in letting it begin to fade fall away, dissolve well that calming and easing actually starts to happen maybe not so obviously, but does begin in step one, and this is a way of having that process be a little bit more intentional and focused so once I've gone through those four steps to then in a more intellectual and analytical way, look into the causes and conditions that have led to my having this response of fear or anger or whatever it is becomes possible from a very different ground I'm likely to already have some insights that kind of bloop up and there's a difference in insights that I allow

[53:44]

to arise in their own sweet time and the insights I beat the bushes for they tend to hide a little longer when I'm beating the bushes too much so another aspect another way of understanding the meditation is that it's about cultivating a mind capable of allowing for any of us who are more comfortable trying to control everything that may initially feel a little unsettling yes it's it's completely derails what the practice is about and what

[54:44]

interests me is how regularly with very few exceptions, people want to go to step five right away, that's the pull Robin when I was meditating earlier I can't tell what's turning away from and turning towards, there's such a fine line when I was meditating earlier I was having a lot of body sensation that was of the sort of jangly variety and I found that I could dissipate it by focusing on having energy run through me then I started getting into this debate and then I'd say debating debating and the debate was is that distracting myself from the jangly from what is am I turning away from or what what am I doing here well I think that's a very sound question because what you're really asking yourself is what's my motivation here, am I shifting

[55:46]

to this generating and moving energy as a way as an antidote because I really don't want to look into or experience the jangling jangling and there are times when that's skillful because I'm not, I haven't got enough stability or groundedness to be able to turn towards the in this case jangling and if that keeps happening at a certain point then I begin to feel some readiness to get a little bit interested be the archaeologist on a dig now what's with this jangling business, what do I mean jangling is that really the closest I can come to really describing labeling what I'm experiencing where is this jangling located, is it moving or located in one particular

[56:46]

part of the body, is it constant or intermittent well when I moved into the energy flow the body sensations actually dissipated and they since I still don't know if that's because I had if it's still there and I just moved away from it and focused on something else well then you check back in it came back it came back to that I guess it was still there then so then it's a process of just weaving back and forth between these and at a certain point having a sense about oh my going to focusing on energy is a way of distracting myself from this cluster of sensations that I'm finding uncomfortable and would rather get rid of you know what we're paying attention to is

[57:47]

what's the mind up to and the minute there's discomfort of one sort or another we have very clear responses we have strong tendencies and they're not the same from one person to another but we certainly have a certain amount of conditioning in our culture let me out of here, get me an aspirin I want to change this and get rid of it if I don't like it have a beer we're just change the channel exactly so that conditioning we bring with ourselves onto the cushion and the more we know about our conditioning both as individuals and in terms of our culture that's very useful of awareness yeah I want to ask about antidepressants

[58:49]

because I've had a very tumultuous year and was on antidepressants on Prozac for about 8 months and then I went off in July and then after that I wanted to sit with what was and what was was so frightening just felt so emotionally up and down and not being able to control it and also that up and down was not acceptable, it wasn't acceptable to be that way with myself or with other people and so my mind was just spinning and also I had a great fear of going crazy so then I just started taking antidepressants again and I feel a sense of normalcy so I wanted to ask you about that in terms of reaching for the aspirin bottle because I had a tremendous resistance to going back on and a lot of judgment about well I should be able to do this myself and maybe it's not a chemical imbalance and so there was just

[59:50]

that added a layer on top of the emotional turmoil the minute the word should shows up beware you can almost count on that kind of beating yourself up it just travels right behind before it should if you're on enough of a roller coaster so that that's what dominates everything else there's a certain kind of work you can't do you just can't do it there's too much chaos and up and down well that's what I finally came to for myself because I just couldn't I can still feel there's some color about depending on a drug or medicating myself it feels like oh some judgment about it well that's not helpful that's true most people don't recognize that

[60:51]

the only time we can do real work is when the weather is fairly calm if we're in the middle of a storm all we can do is ride the storm out if I'm in the middle of crisis all I can do is just hang on and hope I surface at the end of the crisis certain kinds of work just doesn't happen in the midst of a lot of crisis and chaos just doesn't I think that's true in spiritual practice as much as it is in very practical kind of logistically and in terms of the process of one's daily life, working out how do I make my life work I don't know anybody who really works on how do I make my life work in the midst of a lot of chaos and crisis so I think that there are

[61:53]

times when particularly when we don't know what the basis for the roller coaster is and because of the kinds of very sophisticated psychotropic drugs that are available now it takes a very long time it's a complicated process to find out what's going on and what can be helpful and I think that historically for a lot of people there have been so many attitudes about whether it's a good thing or not to use medication and in some cases it's absolutely appropriate it's the way to allow yourself calmer waters so that you can actually begin to put your life together in a way that allows you to do a certain kind of inner work I don't think we can generalize about you should never

[62:55]

take antidepressants it's just not a useful frame it's too simplistic also too idealistic somebody recently came to me because he's pretty depressed and he didn't want to go the medication road and after he told me his story I agreed with him I thought he was right because there were a series of events in his life which he had never really turned toward that it made sense that he had shut down in the way he had that he was as depressed as he was and his willingness to begin to look at how he was living his life and the details of his own process and what he was continually

[63:56]

turning away from and covering in fact he began to make some changes where he felt better within a very short period of time so in his case I thought his conclusion made sense so I think it just varies enormously from one person to another and I think always what we have to look at no matter what it is we are thinking about doing or not doing we have to look at our motivation motivation that's what is very important that little cranky voice that's giving you a constant barrage of what you should and shouldn't do needs to be put in a corner with a chocolate milkshake or something you know just sit down you don't have to leave the room but I'm not going to pay attention to you right now

[64:57]

that cranky judging voice on your case about whatever it is you're doing there's a book by a man named Richard Carson called teaming your gremlin a series of exercises they're quite effective exercises especially the drawing the pictures part one time I was doing a workshop on the judge and we all did pictures and there was one woman who did her pictures like this she turned like this and then when it came to do show and tell she's like this she wouldn't show us the picture because of course she doesn't draw very well and what would we all think about it but she was able to describe what the picture looked like and the description was fantastic I still don't know what the picture looked like but her description I got it right away

[65:59]

someone else who was in this particular workshop had been doing this exercise for a couple of months so she was quite good at drawing pictures of her gremlin and they were all pictures of her mother as an opera star singing arias so it also becomes a way to begin to change your relationship to that voice so that you can begin to be a little bit playful which is very helpful anyway good luck so I hope you all are sailing into the new year well if possible I hope I have a kind of uneasiness it's interesting

[67:02]

I feel a little dis-ease because here it is what the 6th, 7th of January and it feels like early April this beautiful sunny weather and balmy days and everything is beginning to act like it's spring the garden is completely confused our azaleas don't know whether it's still fall or spring yet so they just kept blooming all along there's a kind of confusion about the natural world which is registering so we can enjoy the days we have yes Bill there's one last thing I wanted to mention in the turning away department particularly for any of you who noticed the condition of the kitchen

[68:04]

we've been entertaining ants now for some few weeks and it's been very interesting for me having this ant invasion I've been trying to figure out what is the what is the motivation to get rid of them what are we afraid of with the ants I think for a lot of us ants are troublesome because we don't quite know what to do with them and there are so many of them they're so persistent when I opened the freezer the other day and I discovered that in the kind of membrane between the freezer door and the refrigerator door there's this kind of rubbery thing and there's this absolutely solid column of ants marching right up down the middle and then I opened the freezer

[69:06]

and I looked in and there's a bunch of frozen ants in there every time we do the dishwasher we have to say Om Mani Padme Hum before we turn the thing on because there's all sorts of ants who are going to quickly be reborn antibodies exactly it's very challenging to rescue an ant have you tried because you squash it so easily what I've taken to doing is dusting them from one surface to another light dusting how do you get them out of a bag? well the inside of the garbage bag under the sink is very lively laughter anyway recently I went to do a funeral for a young man that I've been practicing with for quite some time and the place where we did the funeral

[70:06]

is a Buddhist center and I was preparing the ceremony in the office of the abbot and it's a no shoes environment so at the door into the office I took my shoes off and right there outside the door is one of those ant poison things and I thought what's that doing here? I kept looking at it you know I had to go in and out from the room several times and every time I put my shoes on and shoes off I'd see this trap and I thought well it really brought up for me some engagement with the ants here because I had clearly not done anything to get rid of them but I hadn't put it right in front of me as a clear decision I'm not doing anything to get rid of the ants the ants and I are coexisting here we'll see how it goes but I've been surprised at how enlivening

[71:07]

this ant invasion has been from the standpoint of paying attention to where my mind goes how much it has to do with some idea of perfection a perfect clean kitchen isn't invaded by ants maybe it's what you were talking about you'll all think I'm a terrible housekeeper with all these ants anyway it's interesting what our responses are to ants, flies, spiders ticks gophers moles fleas what are the boundaries and limits of our Bodhisattva vow because of course it says all sentient beings anyway the jury is still out challenging, very challenging I tried earnestly to kill a dust fuzzy once it was a sock fuzzy

[72:08]

but I had murder in my heart it's instructive it doesn't matter whether it's sentient or not you're still doing the same thing well I noticed what's been particularly informative for me is that the turning point some of you know this about me the turning point for me was the garden snails when I stopped killing garden snails I noticed a significant improvement in my state of mind there was a kind of feeding or sponsoring a violence habit that came with stomping on them that I was relieved to give up actually and that's been informative about what to do with the ants flies are much more challenging they bring certain challenges that ants don't this is a buddhist version

[73:11]

of how many angels exist I think so how many of you are going to stay for lunch so we know how many tables to put out is anybody staying for lunch yes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ok so maybe 3 tables take good care of yourselves nice to see you

[73:37]

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