Home Unbound (Safety & Anxiety) w/ Samm

Hello everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you for being here and joining in and today we've got a real treat for you. Maybe I'm biased, maybe I'm just bragging, but we have some real ringers around here giving these talks. Like today we've got Sam on here, a fantastic and accomplished poet, writer and artist when she's not on the cushion, and today she's going to put all that into a fantastic talk on feeling at home wherever you are, well talking relationship between Zazen and Paulie Vagle theory, aka fight, flight, freeze, or calm and present. And I hope you enjoy. And if you do and want to help keep us secure on our own groundless foundations over here, you can go over to aczc.org/donate, make a one time donation, or even better, become a recurring member at whatever level you can afford. We are 100% small donor funded and operate everything we do on a pay what you can, no one turned away system, which means we need your help to keep all that goodwill flowing. So as always, if you cannot afford to donate, please do not. Thank you for being a part of this little sangha and making us who we are. But if you can donate, please do, that's the only way we can keep this open for everybody. And thank you for everything you do is always the real point. And okay, that's enough out of me. Here you go on with the show. Here is Sam with Home Unbound. Thanks, everybody. I wanted to start by saying Sarah asked what my talk was about, and I mentioned there might be fog, but heads up, I cut out all the fog. There's no fog. So if you came for the fog, my apologies, there's no fog in this talk. So this is a talk about finding your way home, and Cliff notes the answer to finding your way home is Zazen. Yay! But yeah, a few weeks back at the retreat, I took Jukai with a few people who are here, and the name that I got is Biowan, which means boundless refuge or vast hermitage. And that's important to me because at times I haven't felt like home. So Sarah and Dave explained to me that it's about finding a home in myself or being at home wherever I am. Sometimes I felt really uncertain. For example, there was this time, and I lived in Highland Park, and there was this tree out in front. It was called a lima tree, and no one really knew what a lima tree was. I don't know if you know what it was, but I looked it up and people would talk about like is it an orange tree? Is it a lime tree? We couldn't figure it out, and it's kind of hard to feel at home when you don't know what kind of tree is in your front yard. It's kind of weird. Like can you still eat it? Can you turn it into a juice? What are you supposed to do with it? So this talk is about recognizing that I can be at home even in uncertainty. Uncertainty, in fact, is something that you can eat. You can eat a lima fruit, and you can make a juice from it and sell it on the street. Disclaimer! I am not a Buddhist teacher. In fact, I'm less a Buddhist teacher every day as life perpetually befuddles me, and I realize I don't know much. I'm also not an expert in psychology either, and not in polyvagal theory. But I am an associate therapist, so that's exciting. Define home! For the sake of this talk, what I mean by home is actual nature or the clarified mind ground, non-duality, non-distinctions, easy stuff like that. Zen symbolizes that at times is the full moon, the luminosity of the mind. This is from Kezon. It is the door of luminosity which opens out onto the realization of the Buddha born through the practice of the Great Ease. This goes beyond the patterns of holy and profane, goes beyond confusion and wisdom. There's also a way to think about the concept of home from a nervous system perspective, which is how this talk began. I was talking with Dave about something called polyvagal theory, and then Dave told me that Nisha Jima had this essay called The Relation Between the Autonomic Nervous System in Buddhism. He kind of is talking about polyvagal theory, which is this hip theory now by a guy, a psychologist, Stephen Porchis. It's actually a theory that people dispute. There isn't, some people are like, there isn't enough scientific proof. Nevertheless, there's a ton of trainings that you can get in therapy. I had my teachers in school talk about polyvagal theory, but it's something to keep in mind. Anyways, Nisha Jima's theory in the essay that he talks about, he basically is talking about this except he has just two parts of the nervous system, rather than three. This ventral vagal part of the nervous system, this is like your optimal zone. You can relate to people outside of yourself and things. You can perceive threats and react appropriately. As well as the stuff that's going on inside of you, you're really responding in the present to reality. It's associated with good health, chillness, prosody, and voice. Your breath is moving smoothly. These other states are when you're kind of out of that optimal zone and you enter into fight or flight. Basically Nisha Jima talks about what Freud talks about, which is when you're younger. As a child, you can get conditioned to feel like a basic need of yours isn't appropriate. Then we start to have these responses based in the past, not rooted in the present of fight or flight, when actually in the present we might be safe. This is how you leave reality, leave the present in terms of the nervous system. Leave home and enter into these fabrications. There's these two different ones. There's fight or flight, which everybody has heard of, I think, and that's the sympathetic nervous system. Then there's the dorsal vagal part of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the freeze and tiredness shutdown collapse. That's another part as well. What was my point there? When you aren't in the ventral vagal complex, you're operating off fabrications of reality from the past. You aren't present, so you can't get home. You can't see through the mirage your nervous system is generating. Further defined, not home. Not being home is the opposite of the other things that I said, obviously. It's duality, distinction, conflict which presupposes distinct entities warring with each other. Not being home, according to Quezon, is when the mind-ground gets muddied with distinctions. Here's a quote from Quezon. By the way, what I'm drawing from is Quezon wrote about Zazen, all these rules for how to set Zazen. Body arises in mind, and when the body arises, they appear to be distinguished. When one wave arises, a thousand waves follow. The moment a single mental fabrication arises, numberless things appear. So the four elements and five aggregates mesh, four limbs and five senses appear, and on and on until the 36 body parts and the 12-fold chain of interdependent emergence arises. Once fabrication arises, it develops continuity, but it still only exists through the piling up of myriad dharmas. The one delusion comes up, and then it leads to another and another and another and another until you don't even know where the ground is. So this is what not being home feels like, like living in delusion, believing all these fabrications are real, clinging to them, slurting them all out, obsessing over them, it might lead to madness. It's a good place to have a sip of tea if you're having it, okay. Speaking of madness. Let me tell you about a time that I went a little mad, in fact. So the context is I had moved back home after my first semester in college, but it didn't feel like home anymore, or maybe I realized that actually it had never felt like home at all. So that summer, my mom was out a lot, and my dad had just started dating someone who was my age, which I was trying to be like super cool about, and that summer I was babysitting a little girl. And I think it was kind of weird, I realized for the first time I was like doing things for her that no one had done for me, and I felt like super alone, it was like really bewildering. But I also loved it. I would dress her all up in black and take her to the farmer's park and sing her lullabies. So that was fun, but I was bewildered, and I didn't know what I was doing at first. I didn't think I was doing anything extraordinary. Maybe I thought I was being a little mischievous, but eventually I realized that the exercise tips from Cosmo had led me down a dark path. No, but honestly, I was starting stealing diet pills from the lady that I was babysitting for, and there was this bathroom I was never supposed to touch, and I was like vomiting in the bathroom. And I started keeping secrets from everybody and totally isolating myself, which is really not something that I tend to do, I'm a very social person and I love my friends. I was in this really frantic mode, fight or flight, most of the time, and when I wasn't, I went into total shutdown mode, eating the decades old frozen Halloween candy that my mom like recycled year after year to the portrait retreaters. I was really resisting feeling like what home actually was. I had an idea of what my home was supposed to be, and it wasn't that, and I just couldn't face it. I was experiencing this duality, and I was experiencing conflict, yeah, with my conception and the reality, and this whole web of thinking I realized was just like totally distorted, and I was harming myself. I thought that I could get home, I think, by getting rid of something in myself, and then it would feel like home, but it just, it didn't work, obviously. Even nowadays when I'm home, sometimes I don't feel home because I feel anxious. I want to be balanced for my kids. I have two little girls, by the way, if you don't know. Kids, I want to be in this perfect ventral vagal zone because they say if I can be that, then like my kids have that. We were talking about sitting zazen at the retreat and how we all co-regulate each other. Obviously, that's great. It's good for them, plus they'll be easier kids for me to deal with if I can do that, so like what motivation would I have to not do that? But it just doesn't feel like that sometimes. I'm cooking dinner. I'm probably cooking something I've never cooked before because I like to do that even though it's hard. I mean, while my kids are fighting about how old the pretend baby is in their pretend game, they're like practically murdering each other, and my dog is like going out of the house, coming into the house. It's crazy. I'm not feeling grounded. Have I ever felt grounded? Kazon offers me this wisdom. Don't be concerned with how wow or how poorly you think you are doing. Just understand that time is as precious as if you were putting out a fire on your head. And I think this is unconditional love right now, whether I'm grounded or whether I've ever been, whether my children are going to grab to hate me or not, cooking dinner and my kids and my dog, no matter what's happened before or what will be in the future. But even if I manage to unconditional love myself for a moment, that feeling of not home isn't just about my personal conflict and karma, not just about my parents being annoying and their parents, not just me being a ping-pong ball between opposing forces and the duality. There's conflict in ourselves, yes, between each other, and there's generally conflict in the world of humans. And there's conflict in nature, natural disasters, animals attacking each other, plants strangling each other, and even cells with their catabolism and anabolism, and electrons and protons repelling and attracting at a basic level. Nisha G. Ma quotes this book called Man Against Himself, and I looked up the book because I was curious about it by Carl Menenger from 1938, and there's a quote in it that I think describes why sometimes we feel anxious or not at home. Try as we may. It is difficult to conceive of our universe in terms of concord. Instead, we are faced everywhere with the evidences of conflict, love and hate, production and consumption, creation and destruction, the constant war of opposing tendencies. Would appear to be the dynamic heart of the world. Man runs the entire gamut of his life through hazards of sickness and accidents, beasts and bacteria, the malignant power of the forces of nature and the vengeful hands of his fellow men. Men fly above ancient and beautiful cities, dropping explosive bombs upon museums and churches, upon great buildings and little children. They are encouraged by the official representatives of 200 million other people, all of whom contribute daily in taxes to the frantic manufacture of instruments designed for the tearing and ripping and mangling of human beings similar to themselves, possessed of the same instincts and sensations and pleasures, bickering, hatreds, fighting, useless waste and petty destructiveness. To create and to destroy, to build up and to tear down, these are the anabolism and catabolism of the personality, no less than of the cells and core puzzles, the two directions in which the same energies exert themselves. So no wonder it's hard to balance the autonomic nervous system. No wonder it's so frightening to leave the fabrications of home that I had, it's like taking off this blanket, a quilt that's protecting me, and I take it off and it's freaky out there, it's terrifying, it's confusing. Kazan writes, listening and thinking are like being outside of the gate, zazen is returning home and sitting in peace, but when it comes to conflict, personal or world conflict, so deep that kind of pain and suffering, it seems impossible to sit zazen in peace, it doesn't feel fair to ask that. The world is a blaze, I am a blaze, and yet as from earlier, there is no other way to sit zazen except knowing that time is precious and there's a fire on your head. There's no other way for me to cook my children dinner, this is unconditional love, this is zazen, what is that fruit in my front yard, eat the unknown fruit, how to get home, discipline. Did I ever tell you about a time I moved in with my boyfriend into a house in the outer sunset of San Francisco? The backyard was covered in dirt and cigarette butts, but when I cleaned it up, I unearthed an entire succulent garden. When I was out there working, I met a neighbor through the fence, an older Chinese woman, and I could see her through the pink rock roses tending her lemon tree. She didn't speak any English, I mean no Chinese, but she would hand me lemons and I would flip up my shirt and carry them inside. It was a sour time for me. My boyfriend paved over some of the gardens so he could practice martial arts. He was very disciplined. Whenever we were together, he was doing something else, disciplined too, and often when he was there, he wasn't even there, and often he wasn't there at all. I started to kind of feel like there was a ghost in the house and I wrote poems to converse with the ghost and I went to therapy secretly dyed my hair black and eventually he broke up with me at two a.m. in the morning and after that I starved myself for ten days and after that I had never seen brighter stars or felt the moonlight on my face more clearly. I biked through the city at night under street lamps and ocean mist. Case on rights. If you wish to clarify the mind-ground, you should relinquish your various types of limited knowledge and understanding, throw away both worldly affairs and buddhadharma, eliminate all delusive emotions. When the true mind of the sole reality is manifest, the clouds of delusion will clear away and the moon will shine brightly. So how do you get home to the mind-ground? Actual nature. A soothed, balanced, nervous system state. What control do we have over it, if any? Do you chase after the elusive full moon, starve yourself, pray for spiritual interruption to guide you? Actually, a great way to do it is Zazen. Yay. So Zazen is a discipline and it's one that Nisha Jima, Kezon, and the Steven Porjus guy of the Polyvagal theory, is a good way to get you into this nervous system place. And Zazen has this magic role. It can get you to this place of non-duality, of indistinction, that people both crave and fear. And there's all these rules about it. It made me think of pregnancy, actually, because there's all these rules for when you're pregnant. Eat this, don't eat that, lay on this side, not that side. Even giving birth. There's all these rules. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know about parenting as well. Kezon says, "To practice sitting, find a quiet place, and lay down a thick mat. Don't let wind, smoke, rain, or dew come in." Although in ancient times, there were those who sat on diamond seats or on large stones for their cushions, the place where you sit should not be too bright in the daytime or too dark at night. It should be warm in winter and cool in summer. That's the key. I just really like all the specific directions about sitting Zazen. They're not ones that we say here, but there's something adorable to me that people have thought so much about what the perfect conditions are to do it, and then we try for it. This is another passage that I wanted to read to you that's like that one. "Do not sit where there are fires, floods, high winds, thieves, by the ocean near bars, brothels, where widows or virgins live, or near places where courtesans play music. Do not live near kings, ministers, rich and powerful families, or people who have many desires who seek after fame or who like to argue meaninglessly." I don't think we have any luck sitting anywhere in Los Angeles. Also, "Do not sit where it is too bright, too dark, too cold, too hot, nor should you sit where idle pleasure seekers and harlots live." They're really stressing that one. "Stay in a monastery where you have a good teacher and fellow practitioners, or reside in the deep mountains or glens." There's this Japanese, Chinese phrase that describes the state of Zen. It's "jijuyu zanmai." This phrase also came up in some of the articles that I was reading about Pali Vagal theory, and "juyu" means to accept the self, and "jyu" means to utilize the self, and "zanmai" is the state of zazen, so it represents not being too sleepy, which is the dorsal vagal, and not being too active, and anxious, and stressed out, which is the sympathetic nervous system. So you're wanting this balance of receptivity and activity, bi-directionality, which Nisha Jima mentions, by the way, is the middle way, and you can get there through zazen, apparently. I also wanted to mention that I think discipline can be a distraction from getting home. I have a lot of clients, and sometimes they come in, and they're really pumped up about these new routines. They have for, like, meal prepping, and exercise, and I'm always like, "Oh god, when's the other shoe going to drop?" Because sometimes too much discipline can be a distraction. That's what happens to me, with the eating disorder. Too much discipline can keep you from feeling something that maybe is uncomfortable, but part of what home, in all its complexity, actually really is. And yeah, so I was just thinking about that in terms of zazen. Sometimes people can be really disciplined with zazen, and I was thinking about it with pregnancy. Actually, anxiety affects the baby, right? So if I'm not having any coffee, and I'm freaking out, like maybe I need to have some coffee. Maybe that's better for my future child than not having any coffee. And if you think about zazen, like it's an incubator, or pregnancy, what are you putting into it? What you're going to get out, maybe, is one way to think about it. So yeah, getting home. For example, speaking of unconditional love and discipline, Kazan has a prescription for sleepiness and zazen, so that I thought this was super adorable, the way Kazan talks about what if you're sleepy during zazen. I guess we're not really supposed to be sleepy. We're supposed to be this, like, perfect mix of, like, active and inactive, but clearly a lot of us are sleepy, which is why so many people have written about how to handle it in zazen, but it's so cute. First, he says move your body a little bit, widen your eyes, focus on your hairline, and if that doesn't work, rub your eyes, rub your body a little bit. If that doesn't work, get up, walk clockwise, always clockwise. If that doesn't work, wash your face, chant, pray to not be sleepy, do something, anything. I just think it's really unconditional love because it's accepting, it's, like, look, you're sleepy, okay? We can try all these things, but, like, at the end of the day, you're doing your best. We're here together and we're going to think creatively about how to solve the problem, so I thought that was really sweet. So there are all these rules and disciplines for how to achieve this balance of jijuyu-zanmai, but the prescribed way is not always what works, and sometimes you have to make your own rules to clear the clouds and see the moon. Maybe the way for you to sit zazen when sleepy is to fall asleep and bang your head against the wall. Maybe you need to cry or eat a snack, only you can know for certain, and it's hard to know when there are so many rules, and knowing that you're knowing, sometimes, I don't know if you guys feel like this, but sometimes your own personal knowing, it feels really small in comparison to what everybody else is saying, even though really it is as big as a full moon reflecting everywhere. Learning balance in home isn't just about following a regimen or prescription, it's about recognizing where you are through the fabrications that pervade life and culture as we know it, stepping into a bit of uncertainty, tasting it, and finding that, even there in the midst of non-duality, zazen brings, everything to rest, and flowing freely reaches everywhere, so zazen is like returning home and sitting in peace to practice zazen is to throw light on yourself. Zazen also says you can really find refuge anywhere and in anything, arising from stillness, carry out activities without hesitation, this moment is the koan. When practice and realization are without complexity, then the koan is this present moment. That which is before any trace arises, the scenery on the other side of time's destruction, the activity of all buddhas and patriarchs is just this one thing, you should just rest and cease, be cooled, past numberless years is this moment, the cold ashes, a withered tree, an incense burner, and an abandoned temple, a piece of unstained silk, this is my earnest wish. The other day, I was actually crying in the backyard of the house that I'm having to move away from currently, and I was sitting under the lemon and lime and orange trees that have merged with one another, so now it's hard to know which fruit is which, and I was feeling like one of those fruits that doesn't know what it is either, and then something snapped, and I really just was this not knowing. Then I came back down to my house and everything was the same, but it was a little different to you. I don't know if anything happened at all, or maybe it did. Another time I lived in a home with a lima tree in front, maybe I mentioned it before. People don't know, like I said, if the limas are limes or oranges, the tree is still there, and even though I don't live there anymore, and the family that planted it who used to rent me the house is gone, it's across from the library in Highland Park where I go with my kids. I didn't have kids when I moved there yet. You really don't know where life is going to take you sometimes, but sometimes when you sit under a tree, even if you don't know what the fruit is you're growing, it feels important. Alright, thanks for listening. I took a nice walk around the reservoir in Silver Lake yesterday, and I found that it was the perfect weather where it was nice and cool and a little sunny, and it's been so hot for me that I'm like, "Oh, so nice." I found that at the end of the walk, I was feeling similar effects as I do when Zazen goes well, where I was just like, "Oh my God, I'm just at a very balanced state right now. This is amazing." And I'm not saying that that always happens, but it made me think about how do you convince someone to do Zazen when that can happen from a walk, or that can happen from feeling like you're on some cool new diet thing, whatever it is, and that, "Oh, well, walking is also good for XYZ and a million other things." Like, Zazen is like, "Why would I just sit there to try to get that? That seems like a waste of time when it might not happen for me anyway." I love that you said that. I mostly would never convince anyone to do Zazen. I think it's interesting because where I'm working doing therapy now, my boss supervisor is really into doing mindfulness interventions with clients, and I haven't found it to be that intuitive or something that I want to do, but there is one client where I kind of say, "Do you want to do it?" And it's because I think for this person, intellectualization has been a substitute for true intimacy, and so I wouldn't generally. I think you can, and if you're fine, why not? But you're here, yeah, what drew you here if you can get it elsewhere? I mean, even for you personally. I think the fact that it's never a guarantee, but some people are on an exercise regime for example, where it's like, "No, I get these results every time, and I feel this way every time, and that's why I keep doing it all the time." I'm not like that with exercise. I know people are, and it actually freaks me out because I'm like, "That's just a lot," but for some people that works for them and it benefits them. So I guess you could see Zazen in the same way of if I keep doing it consistently, here's what sort of happens for me or how I generally feel, which applies to me too, about just thinking through the regime focus versus why. And it's cool to have both. You can have a regime and question at the same time, and sometimes you can take a break and come back. I mean, that's my relationship to writing. I used to write every day, most of my life, and then I would take these long breaks and come back to it, and it was really exciting. Something had changed. So I think Zazen maybe can be like that too, at times, but also never stop, dude, every day. You were trying to help people and provide them therapy and healing. How has your experience with Zazen informed your practice there? To what extent are you tempted to talk about it or try to lead them in that path, or to what extent are you like, "Okay, if you think that doing this very result-oriented practice or just like the opposite of what we're doing here, do you indulge them for that?" Tell me about that. I really haven't felt tempted to push people to sit Zazen at all, in fact, kind of the opposite, which I'm like, "Maybe there's a fear there. What's that about? Maybe I need to try it a little bit more to share it with people." But I think it's like, I don't think of myself as a teacher. I didn't go through these trainings that they went through. So maybe that's part of the hesitance also. Even from a personal level, if you see them doing this thing that's like very result-oriented, do you trust that? No. Honestly, not at all. And I sometimes worry because I'm new. Sometimes I worry I'm too critical because sometimes people could just come out of something really painful, a suicide attempt maybe. Who knows? And they need that, and it's this energy, and they have to go over to that other side of life force. So I do feel like I need to be tender about it and not just be like, "That's bullshit." Because people need it and it's not bullshit. They're creating a sense of safety, like a net for themselves that's external. And then maybe when they feel safe and strong enough through that, they can come back and face some of the more nuanced things. But yeah, I don't really like it. I don't trust it. But I don't know, it's kind of fun to play around with it. I remember early on in my ACZC tenure coming across Nishijima's writings about what Zazen does to the parasympathetic nervous system. So I'm really happy to see you exploring this topic in the way these things intersect. But it is really interesting to me when I come across a lot of things that people in modern scientific context will talk about as therapeutic, and I'm just like, "That's just Zazen. That's literally just Zazen." And it's really funny because human nature is looking at progress and development and what's happening. And we need it in the language. We need it in order for it to head home. It's like, you might not want to go to the Dusty Olds and center in your neighborhood or whatever. Because what's that got for you? So I just really appreciated that about your talk. And also just this idea of coming home to yourself. I guess I wonder, what's your attitude towards Zazen these days? Honestly, I'm really glad I did this talk because I've kind of been flippant about Zazen. But then this month, honestly, it's been really hard for me with moving and other things. And then I did the retreat with y'all. And I had done another day along somewhere else. And so I don't know, my attitude right now is I fucking need Zazen so bad. I was really drawn to this on my own. I can't really explain why I did it so low and wanted to do more with the group. I've also been a runner on and off since the 90's. Not very far, not very fast. That's not what I'm saying. It was clearly more something that I was drawn to and I couldn't really explain why, but I did stick with it and would go for a jog every day. And it must have been making me feel better in some way. But unlike what I do for work, I never gathered any data around it. I don't track how fast I run it. And I will kind of fall off the wagon. Because for years I have come back to it as well, which is great. You guys actually have helped me with that. You don't know that, but you have. Anyway, how does that jive, because I'm guessing all of this is things that I'm drawn to passively, like not consciously, but I stick with and I like that must be kind of re-centering me in some way. But how does that jive with the goblessness of it? Is that achieving them? Because even if I'm doing it unconsciously, I must be doing it because I'm getting something out of it. In which case, should I keep it unconscious, because then it's not cheating? Because then I'm not doing it on purpose? Is that better than doing it for a goal, or are they just two different things completely? My thought is that it's always a moving target anyways. Whatever the goal is, even if you feel like you achieve it in one moment, it's already shifting. That's the absurdity of it. And I think that's what I like about Zen, where every time we sit, it's like, let's end all suffering for all time, for everyone everywhere, and in the future, you know what I mean? It's like, that is the goal, that's the goal, and it's impossible. And so that's the unconditional love and the compassion, maybe, also is that it's impossible, and yet it's already happening. Thank you. Also, I really like your comment about the tree. Honestly, that was very profound. I'm like, I do have a tree in the front yard, and I don't know what it is. Fantastic talk. Thank you. Let's talk about the fog part. What were you going to say about the fog? I was going to talk about the feeling of leaving one home, leaving a set of fabrications, and you know, you're inevitably headed to another set of fabrications, let's just be real. But for me, I was going to describe that experience and describe how Zazen is like a good way to weather that storm. For me personally, it feels like walking through fog, thick fog, in a frightening way. It feels like walking against sand blowing in my face, and I've literally had these experiences times in my life where there's a big transition, and I've been on a train in the middle of nowhere, and in the middle of America, driving in a car. I find myself at all these intersections with strangers, and so that was the fog part. Was that? Money, if you can donate, please donate. That's how this place stays afloat. We recommend what, 20 to 25 million dollars? But if you can't pay, that's fine, that's how the system works. I don't feel all the pressure. We just love that you're here. Keep coming back. You're awesome. Thank you, Sam. Thank you. Oh, there's like a Venmo code and stuff over here if you don't have cash. Thank you, Sam. Thanks, Sam. Thank you. Bye.