This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video How to Overcome Fear: The Buddha’s Exposure Therapy with Sean Feit Oakes, PhD. It likely contains inaccuracies.

How to Overcome Fear: The Buddha’s Exposure Therapy with Sean Feit Oakes, PhD

The following talk was given by Sean Feit Oakes at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on September 21, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good morning, everybody. Good to see you, wherever you are coming in from. You are warmly welcome here. If you'd like to drop a hello in the chat, I would love to see where folks are calling in from and anything about how you're doing this morning. It's lovely to be doing this class with Sati. I have been a longtime friend with the Sati center and with Insight Meditation Center. Gil Fronsdal, who founded both, is one of my mentors, and it's just a delight to be here with you.

We are doing this class on working with fear and working with one of my favorite discourses in the Pāli Canon¹ dealing with strong emotion: Majjhima Nikāya 4, the Bhayabherava Sutta²—Fear and Dread. Don't let that scare you away. We're doing this partly as an intro to a class that we'll do a little bit later in the fall, starting in a month or so, looking at some of the foundations of Buddhist psychology. That's with the Sati center and New York Insight co-producing. Today's class will be included in that course. The recordings from my part of the recording—nothing that you say gets preserved in those courses for privacy—but the material from this course will be included in that one. So, this is kind of a prequel or a teaser for that course on Buddhist psychology.

It's lovely to see some names that I know and some folks that I don't. I'll say a little bit about the flow of the day as we get going. We'll start with a short meditation, about 15-20 minutes. I'll open some of the themes that we will work with today around mindfulness of state and emotion. Then we'll dive in, looking at some of the basics of nervous system physiology. We'll look at the Buddha's personality typology system as a way of opening a question around what our primary psychological or protective strategies are in the world. Then we'll do some inquiry into that together in small groups.

After that, we'll come back to look formally at the text itself, looking at Majjhima Nikāya 4. I'll talk us through aspects of the text, and then we'll go into another meditation looking at the Buddha's technique or practice that he did with himself. This is a text that describes the Buddha before he was enlightened, trying to deal with fear and set himself up to process it in a way that was healthy and would lead to the subsiding of that fear. And he does so. This is actually one of the alternate stories of how he practiced before his enlightenment because in this text, you'll see him dealing with difficult states, overcoming them, and then entering a standard series of practices that lead into awakening.

So I hope you enjoy that. We'll talk through that text, we'll meditate on his method, and then we'll come back for some discussion at the end. We'll alternate between practice and discussion and some lecture. Wherever you are, I'll just encourage you to get comfortable and settle in for a morning of practice and study together.

We'll start with a short meditation and we'll go from there. For folks just joining, I'm Sean Oakes. I use he and they pronouns. I'm in Northern California on the ancestral lands of the Southern Pomo people. I'm about an hour north of Spirit Rock and a couple of hours north of IMC and Sati in the physical world. And settling in on the first day of fall. So, blessings of the fall equinox to all those in the Northern Hemisphere, and blessings of the spring equinox to all those down in the deep south. And wherever you are, whatever season it is, settling into your space, we'll bring the faculties together for an opening meditation.

Guided Meditation

First, just set up the posture for ease in stillness. If you're on a cushion or bench, let the lower body relax, grounded. Feel the base of support that you have. Knees supported, sit bones supported. Low back supported to rest into its natural curve, soft belly, and the heart balanced over the hips, head balanced over the heart. If you're in a chair, it's nice to have feet flat on the floor, knees wide, and enough support under the sit bones and tailbone so that the bowl of the hips can tip slightly forward, softening the low back, softening the belly, and again allowing an easeful, upright posture. Heart over hips, head over heart. Everything balanced on a grounded lower body, upper body light and soft. Relaxing through the shoulders, the neck, the jaw, around the eyes, temples.

As the posture comes into stability, often the breath naturally deepens. Or you can draw in a full, deep breath intentionally, maybe a few of those. Breathing in deep, breathing out long, ideally through the nose. With the in-breath, drawing in fresh energy—prana,³ breath energy in Pāli. And breathing out long, relaxing, dropping any tensions we can.

As you feel the breath moving through the body, you can allow the whole body to be present in awareness, present in attention, and allow the breath to move through the whole body, or invite the breath to be felt through the whole body.

In the Buddha's instructions for mindful awareness, he invokes three qualities at the beginning of the instructions to bring forward. We bring forward an energy of engagement and interest, a kind of wanting to understand our experience. So there's an energy we uplift. This is called ātāpī,⁴ ardency, passionate engagement. So you get interested.

Then there's the energy of mindfulness itself, sati.⁵ Mindfulness is connected with memory, connected with the ability to remember. We can only remember that which we notice. And so mindfulness has the quality of knowing what's happening. So right now as you breathe, as you listen, as you sit, is there mindfulness of the body sitting, mindfulness of sounds coming in? You know that you're listening. Mindfulness of sensations and energies, the movement of the breath. So we know what's happening.

And then there's the quality of understanding, sampajañña,⁶ fully understanding or comprehending what's happening. So that mindfulness and full awareness or deep comprehension is not just knowing what's happening, but understanding what's happening. We bring forward these basic qualities. So we bring forward interest in what we're doing, attention to what we're doing, and the understanding aspect of the mind.

There's body and there's feeling, there's energy all present. So as you're becoming aware of the body and its posture and the energies of the breath moving, bring into the field of mindfulness your state. This might begin with your mood. Is the tone of your experience overall right now pleasant or unpleasant? That's the second foundation, vedanā.⁷ Is this an enjoyable moment? Is it not so enjoyable?

And then you add to pleasant and unpleasant the specific tones that you find. Are you present with painful emotions or energies related to whatever else is happening in your life? Is there regret or grief or heartbreak of some kind, longing of some kind? Is there anxiety or nervousness or dullness? All of these are aspects of energy or mood, and it's helpful just to name them. Just to give it a name. "Oh, I'm a little dull," or "a little anxious," or "a little restless," or "there's grief." Not all of these are bad or negative; they're just energies that are here.

Or are you on the pleasant side of the emotional, energetic spectrum? Is there curiosity or gratitude or contentment, joy? You're happy about something happening in your life, or just happy to be able to give a Saturday morning to practice and study of the Dharma, this beautiful tradition that we've inherited as a gift from the ancestors, spiritual ancestors. If there are pleasant qualities present in your state, name them. Of course, you can have a mix. You can be grieving and grateful at the same time. You can be restless but also delighted.

So, take a moment and name a couple of the energies that you find present. We try to do this without thinking too much about them in words. Just one or two words is usually enough. And then you want to just meet that mood or that energy with the breath. We don't forget the body and the breath. Mood and emotion are very much physical, somatic experiences. You feel heartbreak in the body. You feel joy in the body. So we let the breath and the energy of the stable posture really meet, come into contact with the mood, the state. This is really a way of saying, however you're feeling, really feel it. See if you can really taste your mood.

As you have a sense of your state, your mood, the energies that are present, allow awareness of them to be stable and steady. Give most of your awareness just to the body, to the breath, so that the breath and the energy of presence doesn't push away the mood or the state, but also doesn't get lost in it. We just stay with mindfulness, interest, understanding. Understanding is really the naming, the knowing what this is in your life. "Oh, this is grief." "Oh, this is contentment or joy."

If your sense of your mood and your state is stable, then just give most of your attention to the breath. And we'll continue in meditation in silence for a bit here, just landing together, all parts of ourselves. Welcome.

We'll seal this opening practice with the homage to the Buddha. The words of the chant are in the chat, and many of you will know this, honoring the qualities of the Buddha as blessed, perfected, and fully awakened. I'll sing the homage three times, and if you're in a space where you can make some sound, I encourage you to chant it along.

Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsambuddhassa (x3)

How to Overcome Fear: The Buddha’s Exposure Therapy (link)

We'll talk a little bit about state and the qualities that we find in meditation coming forward—some of these pleasant, some of these unpleasant. I'll frame a bit what's going to be our conversation about emotions and energies going forward, and I'll weave between the Buddhist framework and some contemporary information around the nervous system.

When the Buddha describes emotion, he doesn't use a word that easily translates to "emotion," first of all. One of the things that's sometimes difficult for folks not coming from South Asian or Southeast Asian cultures is that in European and post-European cultures, we have these words—"thoughts" and "emotions," or "heart" and "mind"—and think of these almost as different faculties of our being. We have a kind of mental life or experience and an emotional life and experience, and of course a bodily life and experience. The mind produces thoughts, the heart produces emotions, the body produces sensations, something like that. This is a map of human experience that is not universal.

In the European context, this can be traced back to long Christian and even before that, Greek and Roman philosophical ideas about how we might understand internal and external experience. In South Asian philosophy and spiritual practice, as we find in the Buddha, these are not separate categories at all. The Buddha doesn't have lists of emotions per se. What the Buddha has is lists of qualities that flow between what we might call cognitive or thought or mental qualities and things that we might call emotional or even energetic qualities. You see this in common lists like the list of the hindrances, where these five energies or experiences get in the way of deepening in meditation and concentration.

It has some qualities in it that feel very emotional to us, like the opening one, sensual desire, and ill will or hatred. But then we get these hindrances that weave between the physical, somatic, and the emotional and mental: restlessness and worry. Restlessness has a kind of physical quality—can't sit still—but it also traditionally defines a mental habit of the mind jumping from one thing to the next. Worry is also mental, but as anyone who has it knows, it's often a very somatic feeling. Likewise, its partner hindrance, sloth and torpor. Torpor is the physical heaviness and sluggishness, and sloth is the old Victorian translation for laziness.

The last hindrance, doubt, again feels very mental to many of us. But when you engage with it—and this is the punchline of this whole part of the talk—anytime you engage with any of these things, you're going to find that they have a narrative aspect that we could call mental, and they're going to have a somatic aspect. You can feel them in the body. The combination of those two—a sort of energy that comes out of how narrative or meaning has a bodily impact or expresses itself bodily—it's those intense combinations of qualities that in the West we're going to call an emotion.

All of the Buddha's lists of qualities are going to weave between what we call thoughts and emotions. Generally, I will call these, and many Dharma teachers will call these, "qualities." That's just a translation of the word dhamma itself. The fourth foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of dhammas, which we could say qualities or aspects of practice. What the Buddha is doing is not trying to analyze human experience into categories like "this is a sensation" and "this is a thought," but to analyze experience into categories that are more like, "here's the hindrances, these are to be dealt with skillfully," and "here are the awakening factors, these are wholesome or skillful states to be invoked, cultivated, uplifted, preserved."

Let's take as our core example a list that is sometimes called the three fires or the three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. That's the common translation of lobha (or rāga), dosa, and moha.⁸ Rāga is like passion, the sensual passions—not just sexual lust, but a strong desire for the experiences of the senses, whatever they are. Lobha is a variation of the same thing, but it's really greed for experiences, possessions, wanting to own or control. Dosa is hatred or ill will. It's important here to distinguish hatred and ill will from anger, which I think is a different nervous system experience. Anger is more like the emotional side of a fundamental aversion. Hatred and ill will is more like a narrative that wants to destroy something. Moha is one of the words for delusion; it's sort of like the symptom form of the fundamental error, which is ignorance or avijjā.⁹

One of the things the early Buddhist system did, which gets fleshed out in the commentaries, is there was a recognition that these three basic challenges can be used as a kind of personality typology. Personality is just a way of saying, "what's the most common way that you get caught in the world in your experiences?"

Here's a place where I want to do a little bit of speculative, cross-tradition comparison between the early Buddhist system and a contemporary somatic analysis of experience using language to describe what our nervous system does. The autonomic nervous system is the aspect of our neurobiological system that controls many aspects of our body. One of the core things it does in relation to the external world is that, through the senses, it tracks the environment around us with the goal of keeping us safe.

At a very basic level, we have an approach-avoidance system. Some experiences, we get a message that we want to get closer to them. The avoid, of course, is that something looks dangerous or unfriendly, and I want to get away from it. These translate into the two action-oriented nervous system responses in relation to the perception of danger, which is fight and flight. Fight is the "make contact," flight is the "make distance." We have a third primary defensive strategy, which is to freeze. This is what the neurobiology does when neither fight nor flight seem possible to attain safety.

I'm proposing that these are the physiological parallel to greed, hatred, and delusion. Lust or greed is an approach response. In terms of protective responses, it's fight that wants to make contact. Dosa, hatred or ill will, and flight, which often has the energy of fear in it, wants to make distance; this is an avoid strategy. Then we have the third, which physiologically is freeze. Emotionally, it can often show up as a kind of overwhelm or fogginess. In the Buddhist language, we see delusion, moha. Delusion is characterized by not being able to think clearly.

So, what's your go-to? Imagine you've been invited to a party. You walk in. What's the first thing you do instinctually? Is your type that you're looking around the room for the things you like? You're entering a complex sensory situation and you're looking for the pleasant. Where's the attractive people? Where's the good food? Are you a greed type? The greed type wants contact, wants to move toward the pleasant.

Type number two, are you what we would call an aversive type? You walk into the room and you're like, "Oh god, we're at a party again. I don't want to be with these people." Your attention is drawn first to the unpleasant.

Or third type, the deluded type. You walk in and maybe you're lost in thought. You didn't really connect with what was happening. You didn't really go toward the pleasant or the unpleasant. You kind of floated, and often you were in an internal space.

Often, we have a surface reactivity, but it's covering up a second or deeper reactivity. For myself, on the surface, I'm quite critical often because I'm disappointed a lot. I actually want contact, but I've been disappointed. And so, because I've been disappointed, I have this kind of protective mechanism of disliking things.

Q&A

(The following is a summary of the Q&A session, edited for clarity and brevity.)

Participant: I thought I was an aversive type, but as we got into the conversation, I realized it's situational. If I'm feeling good, I get greedy; otherwise, I become aversive. I came in knowing I was aversive, and I'm leaving knowing I'm all three.

Sean: That's common. They are situational by nature because they're all reactivities. They are protective strategies. So, it's, "what's my first go-to when I'm perceiving something as dangerous or difficult?" I might have different instinctive responses to situations that feel fundamentally safe versus situations that feel unsafe.

Participant: Our group was universally aversive. I'm also wondering about the connection to memory. When fear arises, it's connected to memory, a recognition of something. Maybe instead of exposure therapy, it's more like memory updating.

Sean: All of our protective strategies are connected with memory. That's how I know that a certain thing is dangerous. Mindfulness itself, the word sati, means memory in a literal sense. Part of what mindfulness is doing is comparing present-moment experience to learned situations in order to know whether this is wholesome or unwholesome. Part of what I'm doing when I expose myself to the story of something distressing is I'm coming into contact with my somaticized memory of a difficult experience in the past, and I'm trying to process that in the present. This is trauma therapy. The Buddha puts himself in a scary situation and says, "I'm going to stay present somatically until that activation has passed." You can't do that if you're in actual physical danger. He's afraid of something immaterial. There's always going to be that dual awareness of, "I'm objectively safe in this moment, but I don't feel safe." That's partly how I know that it's a trauma, that it's the past talking and not the present.

Participant: I don't know what the breaking twig means right now in life. I don't know what information I can trust. I don't know how bad it is. I don't know what I should be doing.

Sean: I have no doubt that you're not alone in this feeling. Classically, the practice we would do in response to this kind of pervasive vigilance is to bring to mindfulness compassion and patience, but also sampajañña, really understanding. If I'm not clear what is a threat, somehow I haven't learned how to sort the information coming in. Structurally in practice, I want to first set myself up in circumstances that are physically and emotionally safe. Then, with that as the foundation, I want to be present to the incoming sensory material. I can ask, "Am I in danger?" Maybe it's a thought of something truly dangerous, like climate change. You can understand, yes, that is a real danger, and in this moment, here I am, I'm okay. You want to be able to discern what's a concrete danger and what's a more conceptual worry. How do we teach our nervous systems to be more at ease in the world, even though the world is patently dangerous in part? The beginning of this is, with a lot of compassion and patience, getting to know your own nervous system and beginning to investigate those moments when the fear comes in.

(End of Q&A summary)

The Buddha's Practice with Fear

This is Majjhima Nikāya number four, the Fear and Dread discourse, Bhayabherava Sutta. This is a story in which the Buddha is in conversation with a Brahman named Jāṇussoṇi. Jāṇussoṇi starts off by saying that people who follow the Buddha's path also do what the Buddha did; they practice in the way that he did. He says, "But remote lodgings in the wilderness and the forest are challenging. It's hard to maintain seclusion and hard to find joy in solitude. The forests seem to rob the mind of a mendicant who isn't immersed in samādhi."¹⁰

The Buddha says that's true and tells a story saying that happened to him too. "Before my awakening, when I was still unawakened but intent on awakening—a bodhisatta¹¹—I too thought remote lodgings are challenging."

Then he thinks, "There are ascetics and brahmins with unpurified conduct of body, speech, and mind who frequent remote lodgings. Those ascetics and brahmins summon unskillful fear and dread because of these defects in their conduct." The proposal here is that there's a direct connection between ethics and emotion. You're feeling fear and dread because you've acted unethically. He then goes through a sequence that comes to be called the gradual path, reflecting on his own purity. "My conduct is purified. Seeing my own purity of conduct, I felt more unruffled about staying in the forest."

He goes through a list of qualities: he is not full of desire, has a heart full of love, is free of dullness and drowsiness, is not restless, has gone beyond doubt, doesn't glorify himself or put others down, doesn't get startled, has few wishes, is energetic, is mindful, is accomplished in immersion, and is accomplished in wisdom.

Then he thinks, "There are certain nights that are recognized as specially portentous: the 14th, 15th, and 8th of the fortnight." These are the four lunar quarters, the uposatha days. "On such nights, I might see fear and dread if I stayed in awe-inspiring and hair-raising shrines." He's talking about fear of spirits. He decides to trigger that fear so he can deal with it.

"Sometime later, that's what I did. I went to an awe-inspiring and hair-raising shrine in a park in a forest. As I was staying there, a deer came by, or a peacock snapped a twig, or the wind rustled the leaves. And then I thought, 'Is this that fear and dread coming?'"

Then he thinks, "Why do I always meditate expecting that fear to come? Why don't I get rid of that fear and dread just as it comes, while remaining just as I am?" Here's the core of the practice:

"Fear and dread came upon me as I was walking. I didn't stand still or sit down or lie down until I had got rid of that fear and dread while walking." He does the same for each of the four postures: standing, sitting, and lying down. He stays in that posture, doing that activity, until he achieves deactivation.

When an energy like fear or dread comes upon us, the nervous system has turned on a self-protective response. The Buddha's practice is to not change posture or activity until he can get the fear to dissolve. He's resisting the urge to change what he's doing. He's staying with it. This is not him saying, "When a hindrance arises, diminish it." This is him saying, "The hindrance has arisen. Just stay." You stay in a way that allows it to go through its cycle and process through. "Process" just means to feel and understand. Feel with mindfulness, understand with sampajañña, and come through to some deactivation.

Closing

Just to seal our day together, you can set down whatever else you're doing for a moment. Come to the end of our time and come back into our posture, externally and internally.

In a world of trouble and complexity, of relationships both safe and dangerous, loving and confused and hateful, may our practice be a light in the world. May we be a light and an island for ourselves and others. In a sea of misinformation and confusing stories about who we are and who each other are, may our practice be supportive of our own well-being, the well-being of those we love and come into contact with, and radiating out from us to all the beings of the world. May all the wars end, and may the wheel of the Dharma roll through all the lands. May all the forces of goodness that support generosity, service, care, compassion, and wise action strengthen more and more. May our practice be for our own benefit and the benefit of all beings everywhere. May the merit of our gathering together today radiate through the earth and the heavens to touch all beings.

May all beings be free. May we be free.

Gratitude for the Buddha, Dharma, and Saṅgha¹² that guides our way. Thank you so much for being here. It was a real joy to join you today and flesh out some of these teachings. Many, many blessings. Enjoy your weekend. Take good care.