This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Matthew Brensilver - Lightly Guided Sit; Dharma and Social Anxiety. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: Question on Social Anxiety - Matthew Brensilver

The following talk was given by Matthew Brensilver at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on February 26, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation

We're just settling in, maybe taking some fuller breaths. Just signaling to something in the mind that we can relax with some brightness. Any kind of bracing or gripping, see if you can soften.

We really need to kind of soothe our system, develop some tranquility in order to signal to the deep mind that it's okay to let go. We can't really let go amidst a sense of agitation. Just gently cultivate settledness, groundedness, a sense of being on the earth.

And for right now, we're really not taking care of our life, but just this moment. That's the extent of our effort. If there's something from your life that's pulling, don't ignore it, but fold in that sensory experience to awareness now.

We treat the moment as if it's good enough. Just this prayer. Letting your mind take its cues from this gentle rhythm. Just letting the breath come to you. And to the extent that you're genuinely curious to open to something, just give a kind of radical permission for it all to be exactly as it is.

Dharmette: Question on Social Anxiety

Okay. Yeah, it was interesting. I was dealing with some kind of Zoom bombers on this end here, and I couldn't see them because I'm spotlighted. And yeah, what's so interesting is just how different it felt to actually guide the meditation today than almost ever, you know. Because yeah, I was like, "Okay, I'm actually trying to land even as I have to be kind of vigilant," you know, and it was just not compatible.

And so I don't know if you could hear it, but it's like, "Okay, I'm trying to give myself instructions and navigate it and stay awake. Okay, I had to close the meeting and put the waiting room up and all this." And it just is like, "Oh yeah, normally there's none of that. It's just in some stillness and practice together." So, it was kind of instructive for me just to see the distinction between my mind... anyway, for finding our way here. Okay.

Q&A: Social Anxiety

So what I wanted to talk about—a question came in. The person wrote, "How can I be more confident and self-loving, and what does meditation have to do with that? My social anxiety extends even to Zoom meetings, and I feel so tired of this lifelong affliction."

So we begin with acceptance and change. Marsha Linehan¹ famously said acceptance can transform, but if you accept in order to transform, it is not acceptance. It's like loving. Love seeks no reward, but when given freely comes back a hundredfold. She who loses her life finds it. She who accepts, changes.

So to whoever asked that, my first thought is to have a moment of love with your symptoms. Just complete non-resistance. A kind of zero pressure to change, to grow, to improve, any of it. Just non-resistance, and begin there. Return there as you change, as the journey involves change.

And then have a moment of undefended pain with the confinement of your symptoms, right? Just undefended. And that is very different than hating your mind. It's very different than flailing or self-pity. It's actually feeling the suffering in an unadulterated way. Something is just like, "Okay, this just doesn't work for my heart anymore." And let it burn in. Feel the burn and the kind of pain and let that actually leave a mark.

You know, it's important suffering to feel. In other words, don't wiggle out of it or don't blunt the impact. If you quickly then say, "Okay, now I must change," you're not really feeling it. Stay longer, linger, let it kind of break you down open. We suffer, but we tend not to suffer vividly. We tend not to experience our suffering with vivid clarity. And that's part of what's called for.

So social anxiety... you know, it's like whether one's socially anxious or not, other people are a big deal. We act like they're not, but they are. There's a developmental pediatrician who noted that there are generally only two pairs of beings that gaze effortlessly into the eyes of the other: lovers, and a baby and their parent or caretaker.

And so for like three seconds it's okay. I have to be careful, meditation has not been good. You know, I kind of want the Costco cashier's eyes. I just want to have a moment! But we're like four seconds away from disaster. Three seconds, no problem, that's kind of sweet, poignant. Four seconds... [Laughter] That's how we live. You know, with very elaborate rules about the nature of connection, intimacy, intrusiveness, boundaries, all of it. It's a big deal.

A colleague, Jazelle Jones, defined intimacy as the willingness and the ability to see and be seen. And if we are to be delighted and enriched and healed by others, we must risk being seen in our desperation. And if we're to be delighted, enriched, and healed by others, we also must risk being seen in our goodness.

Social anxiety is centered around the fear of negative social judgment: "You may have a judgment of me." But more recently, it's been appreciated that in social anxiety, there's a fear of positive judgment too. And in a way, maybe you could say that social anxiety involves the fear of being an object in the mind of the other. A fear of being objectified in the mind of the other.

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre² said shame is something like the experience of being a pure object, a kind of subjectivity flattened, a pure object in the mind of another.

And we can ask, "Okay, what does it feel like? What does it feel like in this moment to have this theory of mind, this mentalization process whereby I'm imagining the way you're modeling me?" And so we investigate the way social anxiety is a fear of negative evaluation, but also just the more basic sense of maybe the shame of being objectified. I don't mean objectified in a sexual sense or something like that, but just being an object in the mind of another. And all of this is playing out in the land of thought and projection. And so we can kind of believe the most dangerous things.

People with social anxiety tend to be poor mentalizers, meaning that they mistake the internal states of others. Some of the work is actually better calibrating the views that others have, how they're perceiving you, what is in their mind. Some of it is about that, but some of it has to be independent. You know, like, who cares what they take me to be? Even if your worst fears were right—they thought all the worst things, the most devastating things—you're being asked to acclimatize to the pain of that, to habituate to it, and to disconfirm that there are any catastrophic effects from it.

You have to imagine your exile in order to know your true belonging. And so we investigate: "Okay, what's the most tragic thought a person could have of me?" And then we just kind of bathe and luxuriate in that thought until it's boring. It might be a long time till it's boring, but when it's boring, you know you've drained the kind of affective charge through mindfulness and equanimity.

And I know this is asking a lot. I don't know who it is who asked the question. No idea. But from the tone of the question... it's time. It's time. And you'll never feel totally ready. You actually have to jump. The body has to move some ways ahead of the mind and the sense of readiness.

When you look into someone's eyes, are you aware of seeing or being seen? Socially anxious folks are all seen. They lose their center, their belly, they lose the ground. In a dharma training thing I've mentioned before, I got paired up with somebody and it was like 15 minutes of silent eye gazing. I was with a friend and somebody I felt very warmly about, and there would be these flashes of self-consciousness, this congealing of the self where all of a sudden I became an object. I became an object in her mind. I became an object in my mind, and it dulls the connection and the openness, right? And then that would actually dissolve, and I would forget myself and abide in space, and I could not tell if I was behind my eyes or behind hers or nowhere.

So social anxiety illuminates the kind of unbearable fragility of egoic life. The world becomes a kind of stage and everyone a critic. We're not here for that. We weren't born for that. You know, we all die too soon. Shame... I often say shame is the underbelly of self. Wherever there's self, there can be shame. Everything you take to be "me," to be or to own, that needs to be loved to death.

Self-acceptance is one thing, but anatta³ is the only true form of self-esteem. It's the deepest form of self-acceptance. And understanding anatta creates this simultaneous sense of being totally seen and being, in some sense, invisible. You know, Wonder Woman, as I recall from childhood TV, had an invisible plane—although it was drawn with outlines, kind of like whitish-gray outlines, if memory serves me. Anyway, I digress. Like Wonder Woman's plane, but with a self. Yeah. Right.

And so you study the experience of being an object. What is that like? Where is the pain? How is your own self-judgment being projected into the mind of others? And we investigate where is that tension, that congealing. What kind of life would we have to live in order to sense that you cannot be found out? So there's a way in which, okay, no secrets. No shame, no secrets. The first step is you can't be found out. The second step is you cannot be found. Cannot be found. There's nothing to see here. And I honestly don't think I'd be able to teach if I felt like my "self" was exposed all the time. Yeah. I feel both actually very deeply known and also invisible. Cannot be found.

I offer this for your consideration. And to the questioner, if they're here, or if they ever hear this, I'm sending my love. Okay, thank you all.

Conclusion

Okay, folks. I wish you all well. Thanks for your patience with me and with the modern-day equivalent of prank callers. You know, kids got to make a ruckus somehow, I suppose. Anyway, we'll see you next time. Okay, take care.