This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video A Freer Response ~ Kim Allen. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

A freer response - Kim Allen

The following talk was given by Kim Allen at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 16, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

A freer response

I want to talk tonight about our affective responses to experience. As life flows along from morning to evening, from day to day, we are impacted—we feel things. I hope I am not saying anything radically new with a statement like that. But I also want to suggest that we carry at least some identification, and maybe a lot, with our particular emotions.

We can see this in the way that we say things like, "The sunrise makes me happy," or, "I always cry during romantic movies." We subconsciously think that part of who we are is our emotional landscape, which we view as relatively constant and fixed. "This is how I am."

Let's explore this realm and see how it relates to Dharma practice and to what Buddhism says about training our minds. I hope we will start off in territory that is pretty familiar, and then wander forward to see what some of the implications are and how that emerges in our practice.

The Subjectivity of Response

First of all, let’s consider: how uniform are people's responses to a given event?

I am remembering back to a time long ago when I was working. The founder of the company was getting ready to retire, and he sent out an email to all of his colleagues and business associates to let them know that in five or six months he would be retiring. He wanted to say how nice it was to work with them.

He got back a lot of responses from the people who knew him well. He noticed that his American friends tended to write back and say, "Congratulations! Fantastic! What are you going to be doing next?" However, this was an international company, and almost all the responses he got from his Japanese colleagues said, "I'm so sorry." At that time, the understanding in that culture was that if you were retiring, you would lose your meaningful life connections to the working world. They said, "I'm sorry you need to be doing that. I hope it's going to be okay for you."

Clearly, in some cases, there can be quite a wide variation by culture, and we can imagine many other circumstances that would affect someone's response. The event itself does not determine how we feel about it.

What about the person? Does a given person tend to respond in a predictable way to certain kinds of experience? People do have what is called "temperament." This is even recognized in the Buddhist commentaries. We say the same kind of thing; we know that certain people are generally warm, anxious, hot-tempered, or hesitant. This is real. We do see some stability.

In fact, that stability is exactly why we can identify with our emotional habits. It allows us to think, "I am like this," or, "That person is like that." But for the Buddha, these habits are just that—conditioned habits. Some of them are deeply conditioned and may not change in the course of our life, and some of them are less so.

Changing the Stream

It is expected that Dharma training will shift our emotional responses over time. It has to, because we are moving in the direction of less suffering. This means that as we practice, we will less often experience a reaction that comes from greed, hatred, or delusion.

This might sound clear theoretically, but what does it imply? It means that we are going to have to give up our subconscious idea that we are always angry, anxious, or envious in certain situations. Sometimes that is a real barrier on our path—getting past our own expectations of how we should feel.

To be clear, we have whatever emotional response that we have; that is a lawful arising. I am not talking about experience needing to be a certain way or certain responses not being the "right" response. The emotional realm can be an area of a lot of suffering, not just for the emotions themselves, but because of the ideas we have about them: "I have too many emotions," "I have too few emotions," "I have the wrong emotion." We add extra judgment. I am not making any judgments like that. What arises is what arises.

But I am saying that over time, we do expect shifts. Ajahn Chah¹, a Thai teacher from the last century, said that one measure of our practice is that as we move along the path, fewer and fewer things cause us to suffer, and more and more things bring us happiness.

That is a very broad-brush statement, but doesn't it make sense? If we are moving away from suffering, there would generally be that average trend. Greed, hatred, and delusion are unwholesome or unskillful; they are ethically detrimental. Whereas skillful or wholesome qualities like patience, care, compassion, metta², and honesty actually bring happiness. Ethical conduct is the root of a deeper kind of happiness, and we uncover more and more of that on our path.

Sometimes this development of how we respond can go in surprising directions. I want to relate a story I heard recently from a teacher who used to have a lot of anger earlier in his life. He has practiced for a long time now. He says that when he goes walking, he likes to pick up bottles and trash that he finds along the walkway. Sometimes when he is walking with someone, the other person will express anger that people have been littering. But he says that he feels nothing but happiness because it is a chance to pick up trash and make the place look more beautiful than before he got there.

He noted that sometimes the person who is expressing anger is not picking up any bottles; they are just expressing the anger. Do we always need to have the conventional emotional response? Who is happy about finding bottles along the road? This guy who has practiced for a long time. We can be genuinely happy about trash sometimes.

Against the Stream

This path goes "against the stream." This is actually noted in the Sutta Nipata³:

"What others speak of as happiness, that the noble ones speak of as suffering. What others speak of as suffering, that the noble ones have known as happiness."

Do not take it too literally—of course, it is not talking about war or disease. I understand this to mean that the more commonly accepted ideas of happiness, such as material possessions or worldly success, tend to become less appealing to people who have done a lot of Dharma practice. Those people find a different and more satisfying kind of happiness in things like simplicity or living a Dharma-oriented life.

Like the person who is happy about seeing trash because they get to make the world more beautiful, wholesome qualities provide the foundation for a deeper kind of happiness. What others speak of as suffering—having to wait, or being with people who are in distress—maybe that becomes a form of happiness if your heart is very compassionate. It becomes a wonderful opportunity to connect and serve.

The same text says that some of the insights one has along the path of letting go run counter to the entire world. Even 2,500 years ago, people who were doing longtime practice started to feel different, to the point where they felt like they had different values.

We see this even with new practitioners. I hear fairly often from people who have started to practice regularly that they aren't as interested in hanging out with some of their friends now that they are meditating. The activities they do with those friends just don't seem as interesting or enjoyable. This is normal. I don't tell people to get rid of those friends immediately; I tend to say, "Just add some Dharma friends. Add some people who also meditate or understand what you are getting into, and let things evolve."

The Courage to Change

One implication of all of this is that we need to develop a certain kind of confidence—the confidence to have the actual response that we do, and not require it to be what is expected by society, by other people, or even by ourselves. Can we acknowledge that our emotional responses are changing? Of course they are. This is the path that transforms our way of seeing the world.

We have to allow ourselves to change. In Zen, there is a process called tangaryo⁴, where a practitioner has to wait outside of the monastery gates for anywhere from hours to days before being led inside to join the monastery. It is supposed to demonstrate your dedication, but it is also a chance to watch your mind under stress.

Gil Fronsdal went through this process during his Zen training. When it was finally over after a couple of days, his response was not relief or joy. What was most prominent was that he cried, because he thought that he would never be that intimate with himself again. That was his response after being locked in a room for a couple of days. I think he was surprised that that was what he felt.

Can we allow ourselves this kind of freedom of response? Practice moves us toward a deep inner honesty where we really open up to how things feel in a complete way, rather than in a conventional or habitual way. We accept that part of us might feel happy at a funeral or saddened at a wedding. We allow ourselves the full range of feelings to flow and to change as the path changes us.

We wouldn't act on just any of our inner experiences. We still have discernment about what would be appropriate for the people we are with. But part of this training is not to suppress our inner response, but instead to be clearly mindful of it and to have the confidence that if we keep seeing honestly, our inner world will harmonize and move toward more inner joy.

Practice Instructions

How do we practice with including more inner emotions and responses?

The first way is to create an atmosphere of safety. Sometimes I note to myself at the beginning of a sit: "It's okay for anything to arise, and it's okay for anything to cease." Sometimes I add that I won't dismiss any responses that come, I won't laugh at them, and I won't make them into anything that they are not.

You might try it. We can be our own barrier in terms of feeling our inner response—What am I supposed to be feeling now? What is the way I've always felt about this? When I say, "It's okay for anything to arise or cease," something in my heart relaxes, and I am more likely to be able to sense a wider field of my emotional landscape.

Of course, it is also important to have the capacity of mindfulness to be able to handle anything that comes up. If anything feels overwhelming, it is fine to back off.

The Buddha also gave specific recommendations for how to train our perception. Probably the most important is to notice the quality of anicca⁵ (impermanence). We can notice that particularly in the realm of feeling tone—whether experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. Our emotional responses go into that realm. If we start watching, we see that they change all the time.

When we allow ourselves to see change with continuity for a long time, the heart begins to understand at a deeper level that clinging doesn't really make sense. Things just keep changing. When we are clinging less, the mind naturally becomes more flexible and responsive—freer.

Dharma practice is a way of corralling the mind to pay attention in a certain way. If we wisely contain the mind, we stop it from dissipating its energy through clinging. Then it gets freed up to be more creative and flexible.

The fruit of practice is that we become freer. We begin to let other people have their responses also. There comes to be less judgment and policing of others' ways of being. This reduces conflict. We don't become lax in ethical conduct, but we soften the unnecessary holding on to fixed ways of seeing things.

The Sweeping Monks

I want to end by reading a story from The Monastery Within, Gil Fronsdal's book. Listen to it in light of allowing our emotional landscape to change.

The Abbess of the monastery was a most exceptional person. She seemed to always have a smile in her eyes when she looked at you. It seemed as if she knew you better than you knew yourself. She once told the following story of how she first came to the monastery.

"When I was 13, my family would send me up to the mountains around the monastery to collect edible plants for our evening meal. These foraging trips were the only work I enjoyed doing. Otherwise, I tried every trick I could to avoid work on my family's farm. I was still in school, but school had no interest for me. My anger was a welcome barrier to learning anything the teacher was teaching.

"On one of my foraging trips, I would pass by the monastery while the monks and nuns were out sweeping the leaves from the pathways. The first time I saw them working, I was mesmerized watching them go about their work. For many months after, I would often stop a while to watch them sweep. They worked silently and with an efficiency that seemed effortless.

"Then one day a monk walked up to me and asked what I was doing in the mountains. The question frightened me, and I became defensive. I resented anyone who tried to get to know me. So instead of answering the question, I countered by asking what he was doing. The monk smiled and answered that he was told to sweep, and that he was just killing time until he could return to his room for a nap.

"As I walked home later that day, I thought about his answer and was glad that he did not seem any different from me. When I was required to do anything, my heart was never in it, and my attitude was that I was just passing time until I could be excused. Taking a nap was certainly preferable.

"The next time I passed by the monastery on one of my foraging trips, a nun stopped her sweeping and also asked what I was doing. Again, I resented the question; it felt like an intrusion. However, this time I did not feel as scared. Again, I deflected the question by asking what she was doing. She answered that she was doing extra work in hope of being assigned to the kitchen, which was warm in the winter and always seemed to have one or two extra sweet rice cakes in the cupboard to nibble on. Without saying anything, I nodded and left to continue my foraging. The nun's answer resonated with me, since I too liked to be warm, and eating sweet cakes was one of my favorite activities, second only to sleeping.

"The next time I passed the monastery, another monk asked me the same question. This time I was surprised; I was not defensive or resentful of being asked. However, again I deflected the question back to him. He explained that he was sweeping as a spiritual discipline to help him overcome his anger. Later, as I walked the mountain trail with my bag of plants, I felt a kinship with this monk. Like me, he had anger. But I was perplexed that he would want to overcome it. For me, my anger protected me.

"A week later I was again outside the monastery watching the monastics sweep. Yet another monk came up to me. When he asked what I was doing, I mumbled something about collecting plants. I doubt he could hear me, my voice was so faint. But I did muster up enough strength to ask him what he was doing. He replied that he was beautifying the monastery so that others could be inspired in their work of spiritual transformation. Before I left him, I glanced down the well-swept paths and realized that part of the reason I was compelled to watch the monks sweep was that they seemed to be transforming the paths into something that made me feel peaceful.

"The next time I stood outside the monastery watching the monastics, I was drawn to walk over to yet another nun, and before she could ask me what I was doing, I asked her. She looked at me with kind eyes, and after what seemed like a long but soft silence, she explained that she was sweeping to be of service to all who used the monastery, and in practicing this way she hoped to find ultimate peace. As I left the monastery that day, I thought her answer strange, as I didn't know what she meant by 'service' and by 'peace.' I certainly couldn't see how these had much value for me.

"The next time I visited the monastery was the last time. I had an unfamiliar feeling as I walked up into the mountains. It was a warm glow of gladness in anticipation of what I would find when I arrived at the monastery. I walked up to an old monk who seemed to be absorbed in his sweeping. I inquired what he was doing. As he answered, each of his words washed over me like cleansing water.

"'Me? I am not doing anything. My self-consciousness was swept away long ago. There is no 'I' that does anything.'

"Before I could respond, he handed me the broom and walked away. I have been here ever since."

So, why are you sweeping your path?

Q&A

Question: It seems you are pointing at the idea that if we impose some constraints on our thinking—specifically trying to diminish hatred, greed, and delusion—it leads us to freedom. Is that a reasonable summary?

Kim: That is certainly a thread that was in there. Channeling our attention in certain specific ways feels like it might be a constraint, but if we do it in the particular way prescribed through these practices, it has the effect of opening the mind, making it more flexible and free.

If we keep living life just following the whims of our mind, we begin to feel like it may not be going anywhere in particular. If we can "tweak" it, we actually reduce the constraints in the long run. That is what is represented by the story of sweeping the path. We are channeling our attention to notice body, feelings, and mind states. As we do that, we discover all the ways in which we are limiting our own mind through habit and conventional responses. As we let go of those limitations, we become both happier and more flexible.

Question: I am a special education teacher, and today I acted unskillfully and was judgmental. Your talk helped me reflect on that. I try to stay non-judgmental and retain "unconditional positive regard." Is there a term in Buddhism that would match that?

Kim: I suppose that is an aspect of metta, or having a mind of goodwill toward whoever we are interacting with. We don't need to constrain ourselves to the specific term "unconditional positive regard"; let's just call it part of metta.

Question: I was struck by the story of the monks and nuns. It started from a very self-oriented place—sweeping to kill time, to get sweet cakes—then moved to overcoming anger, then to helping others, and finally to service. It seems like at first it is about "me," but at its best, it is about service to others.

Kim: Certainly, there is a shift to including a bigger perspective. And the last fellow says, "There is no one who does any sweeping anyway." This particular path goes all the way back.

Reflections

It can be helpful at times on our path to just reflect internally: Why is it that I am practicing?

I don't recommend doing this every sit or every week, but maybe every year. The reason is that it refines over time. We have to renew that. Maybe we will discover that something new has emerged. When the space opens in your practice, if there has been some kind of a release, we have to step into that space and occupy it in order to take the next step.