Classroom Talk
Winter 2002 Archive
Once the brick has hit your foot . . . Posted by John on March 01, 2002 at 21:21:47:
I've talked with a Zen master, about his books, who didn't have a clue, when it came to "processing feelings." This learned man came across to me as
rather cold and unfeeling. His books are great! I've talked with a Tibetan master, right-hand-man to one of the greatest Buddhist teachers of them
all, who insisted that the only true path is the path with no anger. I saw him once, with my own eyes, being in an angry argument with a colleague.
That didn't cut any ice with him, because he didn't know it. Word got around that he had a lot of angry arguments with his colleagues. He was
always blowing off steam. His work, too, was great!
I could tell many stories like these. I was pussy-footing around about getting into discussing false equanimity yesterday because, as some of you may
remember, that gets into the "bitter" political issue in your old coach's life. And I'm sick and tired of contributing any more in this lifetime to my
reputation as "a nasty ranch-hand in Tucson who is out picketing and protesting against some of the sweetest Masters in the world." I'm putting my
protest sign down, Kiddees. I don't wish to fight any more with the majority of spiritual leaders around the world who are saying that the right path
is the path with no anger.
But here in the privacy of Classroom Talk, I can make my stand on this issue with those of you who are in this class. I feel it is my duty to do so.
Again, as always, let me *emphasize* that if processing feelings doesn't seem to fit for you as a person, if you don't feel at home with it, don't include it
in with the other exercises that you do in your daily practice. The awareness game is a mix-and-match kind of approach. Practice the exercises that do
appeal to you. Put together a favorite bunch of them to do every day, and that will bring its own kind of progress into your life.
When the way opened up for me, in my 30's, to be able to become aware for the first time of bits and pieces of spiritual or esoteric knowledge, I
lucked out, in Hawaii, and fell in with a Buddhist-Jewish-Christian teacher, Mitsuo Aoki, who was ahead of his time. He was a dean of the University
of Hawaii College of Religion then, and is still teaching and practicing on the North Shore of Oahu to this day.
He had learned about working with emotional feelings by going to Esalen in California and studying with Fritz Perls. And I had learned about
working with emotional feelings by living in the Hunnewell House and practicing with Sacha and the family of gestalt and primal practitioners living
there near the UH campus. The timing was right for me to show up in Mits's class. I was a ringer for understanding what Mits was teaching about
when I met him that first semester, a ringer to become his assistant, just at a point where he had decided to change over the labs in his class from
intellectual discussion groups into experiential practice groups including the experiencing of feelings.
Mits taught more about feelings, perhaps, than any of his other favorite topics. Addressing this very question for a student in Hawaii that we are
looking at here in Classroom Talk now—Is it possible to live without anger?—Mits said: "Once the brick has hit your foot, it's too late to vote on it."
Things, bodies, and words (sounds) enter our space and have impact. And our bodies *react* with emotional feelings . . . thinking . . . wanting what
we want of it . . . and aggressive or passive ego-driven knee-jerk personality behavior.
Take the experience of opening up Douglas's posting of "Tintern Abbey." Notice first, that Douglas didn't add any of his own personal words to that
post. So it is a thing, a poem, that enters our space, and Douglas's body comes into our space along with it, too, as we open up his post. And the
thing with impact that his body is bringing to us in this case is a long bunch of words. And this bunch of words—like so many bags of potatoes—does
have heft, and impact.
The first thing that happened for me when I opened this post was I reacted by getting angry, and in a matter of moments I wanted to be rid of it. But
I didn't go that far, heh-heh. Whew! Here now, Sally, too, we see, opened up that post and became angry. We can feel the anger in her post like
shock waves coming through. Was she "spring-loaded" (with pent-up unprocessed anger over "unfinished business") to "whack 'im a good one again
this time?" Or, what? Stimulus/effect. (Now the shock waves of this one, in its turn, go reverberating around the room. We've got to learn
somehow to stop these cycles of stingers, Kiddees, if we are ever to have peace and harmony.)
Once we had opened up Douglas's post, it was too late to vote on it. It's mere existence there, merely being what it was, had powerful impact *at
once*! And some of us, at least, reacted with emotional feelings, probably anger. Some of us might have lashed out, as Sally did here. Some of us
were probably *outa there* in moments, escaping without staying for any more such pounding. That was me, reading eight or ten lines of it,
scratching my head, getting angry, getting rejective, and clicking "Quit." Oh yes, and I laughed. Douglas's sense of humor is not to be denied.
Oh, Jerusalem! I cry for you! When shall we *all* have learned that stinging only brings another stinger back?
At a later time, I went back and scrolled through "Tintern Abbey" very quickly to see if anything jumped out at me that seemed to be tied-in with
anything, or find out if Douglas had said anything at all in his own words to explain what the point of it was supposed to be. And then I clicked
"Quit." It was over-my-head, and I faded away from it, rather quickly.
But the anger had gotten hold of my musculature, and the bitter rejection, too. It was too late for me to vote on it. So I had to either go on carrying
those tensions around with me in the muscles of my body, or do what I did do: awarely process those negative feelings right on through.
Hermeneutically speaking, even without saying any of his own words to the rest of us, there was the "How?" of it, how did Douglas do what he did?
The first thing that struck me in that regard was how much energy he had put in, typing that all out there. Like a painter, unconcerned with how
many brush strokes it takes to complete the whole painting, he had painstakingly painted the whole thing out there, a matter taking quite some time
and work on his part.
He is not "having a conversation" with us there, but it is, however, a kind of a work of art that he has executed. The content of the poem doesn't
really seem to matter. It could have been any long classical poem. It's not the poem itself, but the context in which it is done that is the significant thing
here. The posting is not really a poem then—although at first it seemed to be—but rather a kind of a painting.
Like any piece of art, it has its points to make. And here is where I saw the personality coming in. I saw the Rebel rejecting in this painting: "Fuck
you! Don't make a 'good boy' out of me!" The gesture of it seemed like typical Rebel "testing." — I saw the Judge in it: "I'm right, per se, as you can
see here and now by this posting. You're wrong again." — On the other hand, in addition to Artist art in the essence of it, I sensed a spectacular
sense of Player humor in it, too. Yet, I felt, "Ha, ha! The joke's on me again, in attempting to relate with Douglas in coaching this class. Ouch." —
And I also saw Con Artist painted all over the canvas in the over-all context of classical intellectualism, the "medium" of the painting if you will. It's an
impressive piece of work, frankly, well-designed, but a paste-together piece when looked at closely, with a bit of "art for art's sake" in the mix, it seems
to me. And it didn't do much good for being relaxed together for awhile as humans together, the fundamental quality of companionship. It lost me,
and I slipped away.
But I did have it coming after all! I admit that!!! I had to go and say, "Count on Douglas for doing the right thing." Hee-hee. The Devil made me do
it! ;-)
If we factored all this out to emotional feelings on the wheel, we might hypothesize that Douglas might have had some bitter rejection to process
(Rebel), some growling anger (Judge), in an over-all medium of loneliness (Con Artist)—all that to just feel, if he wished to, experientially, and let it
pass on through. That would be the hypothetical suggested "work on emotional feelings" cut out for a mindful warrior, in not "having to" post a
posting like that *that way*.
And just as hypothetically, in a body divested of the tensions of those negative emotional feelings, and thus not "having to do" *anything* except
communicate candidly, that mindful warrior might then have simply expressed some sincere, person to person, real experience sharing about the
issue—*directly*, instead of the indirect, roundabout way he went about it, i.e. sharing someone else's poem without even a few words of his own . . .
a few words like:
"I'm hurting, Coach. I feel rejected in being the bad boy that I am. I feel angry to be judged the good boy, which I'm not. I feel lonely for company
with *me*!"
What could an old coach have said in such a case, except: "I hear ya', Bruddah. I'm with ya'! And I love ya'."
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>John told us that Perk referred to the show of false equanimity.. that is what I have seen in the readings I have perused. As if you could change anger to non-anger by pretending it was never anger to begin with.
Exactly, Deirdre! Exactly!
And to be frank, I was also pussyfooting yesterday because I didn't wish to step on your toes. I figured you might have been exposed to a lot of
otherwise terrific teachings that didn't take into account processing negative emotional feelings.
For instance, at the time you studied with Dr. Charles Tart, I don't think he had much of a take on this. He was a true pioneer in the mindfulness
training field. He had been the first writer, to my knowledge, to present pages and pages of a real mindfulness exercise workshop (like we have in
our Kindergarten) that could actually be done interactively by the readers of a published book.
Some years ago, several Tucson students of mine flew off to workshops with "Charley," and came back telling me, "John, John, he teaches mindfulness
in ways that are just like your own!" But he hadn't apparently added in experiencing feelings to his repertoire at that time.
And when he came to Tucson a few years ago, to present a day-long mindfulness training workshop for Consciousness Scientists attending their
biggest world seminar at the University of Arizona, Charley was very modest about his experience in working with feelings. Perk and I were there
together. And Deirdre, I understand that you were there, too, but we didn't know each other at the time. Funny to think.
Dr. Tart said that he had become a student of Shinzen Young, of the Los Angeles Buddhist Center, and that Shinzen was teaching him some new
things about working with feelings. And then, to my wonderment, as both Perk and I were taking extensive notes as news reporters (for MAM
magazine) I was astonished to find myself writing down a complex and verbatim teaching of my own, that I . . . . . . I'm embarrased as heck to share
this with you; I don't mean to be showing off! I found myself taking down a verbatim teaching of my own about processing anger that I had
expressed to Shinzen, word for word, when Shinzen had been visiting here in Tucson some years before Charley's training.
Shinzen comes to Tucson every year and has a large and devoted following of really cool people here who do workshops with him when he's in town.
He is one of the softest and coolest dudes I ever met. Quite a few years back, several of my own students were also students of Shinzen. They
adored him. A few times they brought me tape recordings of him teaching, to show me how much we sounded like each other in our ways of
teaching a class. At times in these tapes, you would swear you were listening to me. Of course, this is Shinzen being Shinzen with his many years of
monastic training in the East, and me just being me, coming from a whole other set of training backgrounds.
The students of Shinzen in my class sometimes begged me to go on over there when he was in town, and introduce myself to him. But I always felt
too shy, somehow. That he was a fine mindfulness teacher there was no question. And I usually would go over and meet such teachers when they
were passing through Tucson. Often Perk and I would go to meet these together, playing our "two-samurai game," and checking out what and how
they were teaching, hoping to pick up whatever we could.
But I felt awkward about meeting a man who sounded so much like me on a tape-recorder. It's silly, I know. It was my Doormat. I felt somehow
ashamed to go over to meet him as if—as we shared students—I was his equal in some way. I had some kind of resistance to that. (Typical Doormat
bullshit to be head-tripping about, by the way. — I get it now. I couldn't let myself believe that I was simply another good teacher, too, without
having to feel any need for there being any comparison between us.)
But anyway, my opportunity came. I was told that Shinzen had expressed an interest in his class in getting to know more about gestalt therapy. And
this came up in discussions of feeling negative emotional feelings and the gestalt idea of processing feelings, like anger. Somehow this freed me up from
my Doormat neurosis to feel "equal" enough, so to speak, to go there and meet with him. "I had something to share with him that he didn't know
about already," if you get what I mean. And I didn't feel "small" as Doormats are sometimes spring-loaded to feel.
And, in addition to expressing my sincere admiration for his work, I spent perhaps an hour telling him what I knew about the methods and bases of
practice in a gestalt approach to working with feelings. And that was how I passed along to Shinzen a few of my pet analogies for processing anger
that Charley passed back to me verbatim that day, years later, from a stage at my old Alma Mater. It's a small world. It's especially a small world of
mindfulness teachers.
Was it the accidental similarities between us from the beginning that had Shinzen speaking precisely like that? Or did I share something with him that
he already knew in exactly the same form? Or did he remember the things I said that day and blend them in with his own teachings? It doesn't
matter. The only thing that matters to me is that this idea is starting to get around among meditators and mindfulness teachers at last—the idea that
there is a healthy place for anger in the spectrum of spiritual work, and a place for working with anger, and processing anger, as well as the other
negative emotional feelings, on through.
And the Dalai Lama! His beautiful Holiness . . . . . for those of you who remember the story of the angry engagement I had with one of his talented
teachers over this very same question of whether there is a healthy place in life for anger, or not . . . . . Not so very long after that encounter (which
cost me "thousands of kalpas in Hell," so to speak) I happened to see His Holiness on television in Washington, D.C. under the dome of the Capitol
rotunda, surrounded by a small group of Congressmen and Congresswomen, and the press.
Sometimes things go wrong, even in the lives of such great world spiritual figures as this. And no, they don't cuss about it!
The Dalai Lama had gone to Washington to speak for the rights of the people of Tibet and express some of their grievances against the Chinese.
President Clinton had denied his request to have a visit with him at the White House. The news reporters had it that Clinton didn't want to aggravate
the Red Chinese leaders in Peking, with whom he was seeking improved trade and diplomatic relations.
Standing among the Representatives of Congress and news reporters there, "exiled" under the Capitol rotunda, His Holiness was asked how he felt
about President Clinton's rejection.
"I feel angry," the Dalai Lama said, laughing a little laugh, as if he knew we might all be quite surprised to hear him saying that.
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>Perhaps the best way to make a place for anger is to understand it qualities.. anger can get us out of an intolerable situation (recently I walked away from a job I had been at for 7 year because of anger). I had needed to leave for years,.but it took anger for me to be able to put one foot in front of the other.
I think you mean we need to understand the *good* qualities of anger, such as motivating us to get out of a bad situation. Yes, I agree. Anger is a
warning that may tell us, finally, to dive for the space. In what you describe, you may have let the tensions of anger build up in you, build up in you,
build up in you over the years of your employment there.
Then, being a person who grew up having a hard time accepting that you could *have* anger build up within you, you let this go on for a long, long
time. The flag of anger was waving, but you didn't do anything about it. Eventually, the presence of anger motivated you to get the hell out of there.
And that's good, in my book. With all your talents, any one of those years, you could surely have found another place where you would have had a
happier time spending your working days. And now, as you are free, you might contemplate finding a dream job. You know, where you say, "Wow,
and they're even paying me for being happy here!"
I think this story shows how it can be *so valuable* to become aware of the anger within us, as early as possible, so it can be accepted and given its
place in our understanding of our lives . . . . . so that we do get the warning, and know that it is a warning, and deal with the warning as soon as we
can, by making free choices for peace and harmony in our lives. We need to learn to recognize anger more easily, more quickly, so we can dive for the
space more often . . . . . and come up with the discoveries that make us more whole, carrying on being productive, *and* happy, living on the front
edges of our lives in the here and now.
I remember you asked about "forgiveness" some time ago, Deirdre. Obviously forgiveness must begin with you. You would have to find a way to
forgive yourself for being angry . . . . . allow anger to have a healthy place in the experiential side of your life, and so you could start getting the
messages of anger more promptly from here on out, and be able to include that knowledge more comfortably into the contemplations that bring the
big decisions in your life.
And please don't trouble yourself that you want to have this understanding back then when you were in Kindergarten the first time around, so you
wouldn't have had to go through what you've been through by avoiding anger during your life. After all, with Charley, Shinzen, and the Dalai Lama,
you're in pretty good company on this one in our times, and you seem to be keeping up! And, all that matters—I would say—is where you go from
here.
>Since I had spent about 2 years suppressing the anger in this environment I was really sick - literally! My blood pressure had skyrocketted.
Yes, suppressing any of the emotional feelings makes our physical body sick, and contributes unnecessary trauma to the well-known diseases. Fighting
against our feelings only adds to the inward tensions. And suppressed anger is well known to raise the blood pressure. Doing this may be an
important contributing cause to some of the most serious diseases that humans have. — Feel it and let it off, I say—without sitting around stewing
about it over and over again, and without acting it out. There are some physicians, as well, these days who acknowledge that processing anger is
therapeutic. And . . . . . . . . laughter *is* "the best medicine."
>This is an example where anger was helpful and I didn't really reach out to hurt anyone.
Yes, and that's good, too. And having learned this much about it, I encourage you to pick up on anger promptly when it comes up in you the next
time. Mits said our negative emotional feelings are simply messages—an alternative form of information to the thinking mind with its intellectual
concepts—another way that we have at our mindful disposition for awarely guiding our lives. Feel it with awareness and let it out! And, get the
message of it, too!
Also, consider the fact that the thinking mind is so imprecise, and so hard to understand. And like Sally said, "{intellectualization} was ....DENIAL that
went to college." The emotional feelings—once one has learned to recognize them and can *feel* them, are actually very precise in their nature, and—
absent our avoiding them—undeniably what they simply *are* outfront! In other words, once a mindful warrior has "learned to read" like this, it's
quite easier to read your own emotions, which are obvious and apparent, than it is to read your own thinking mind . . . . . which some might say takes
a Ph.D. ;-) Hee-hee.
The thinking mind *is* the path of denial. There's no getting around that. And the emotional body *is* the beginning of the direct path of aware
integration of it All. The choice is up to you.
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I seem to have spent too much of my life harrassing wonderful teachers about two things: 1) not enough emphasis on teaching people to be mindful in
everyday life, and 2) not a clear understanding of how to deal with negative emotional feelings in the midst of everyday life. I've been an unwelcome
proselytizer for these things so many times, and a pain in the ass to many of them. I'm sorry about that. I regret it now.
Vipassana meditation and some of the other meditational approaches do a fine job in dealing with negative emotional feelings, anger included! These
are well-designed for the healing service of monks and nuns. But it is out among ordinary people in the world—having relationships and
entanglements with each other—that these damned bricks keep smashing our toes.
Outside the monasteries—for those of us not seemingly cut out to be living in them—a whole lot of stinging is still going on. And it is to address this
special problem in ordinary everyday life that the techniques of the awareness game, and processing feelings are designed.
See y'all next week,
Coach
Pauline has been keeping me in stitches laughing these days with jokes she has been shipping to me! ;-) Good deeds abound around here!
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