The Dharma Gates of Strong Emotions
Spirit of Life Church, St. Cloud, Mn.
Jan. 9, 2011 MHS

“Hokusai Says” by Roger Keyes

Introduction:
Our topic today is “strong emotions”. This may mean emotions that really get our attention, the ones that may suddenly overwhelm us with their intensity, or the ones that return again and again, that are causing us trouble. And perhaps, are causing others trouble with us.

Well, I guess I could say about myself that “Strong Emotions are US”. Maybe I could open up a shop? Whatever the causes and conditions that allow my access to these emotional states, I seem to have had a lot of experience with them. So I am fully invested in finding the wisest way to work with them myself.

One of my challenges is that my husband of 30 years had a stroke twenty-two months ago. He is doing much better, but there is much that is wholly changed. Birth and death are constantly happening, but sometimes they make themselves known more strongly-as is true in my life now. How to live into and with these challenges is my “living the question” right now, as the poet Rilke has advised us to do.

I can see the subtle pull of what Vipassana teacher Tara Brach calls “the trance of unworthiness” that moves me to extra effort and endless subtle strategies to avoid the pain and unease deep below the surface. Turning the light around to face the parts of ourselves we have abandoned is the radical practice of complete acceptance. This is True Love.

I. Our Four Vows
Zen sits in the Mahayana path of Buddhist practice, and our intentions are framed by the four Bodhisattva Vows:
Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.
Dharma Gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
The Buddha’s Way is unsurpassable, I vow to realize it.

We could spend a life- time studying these vows, but today I want to use them to frame our process of studying and practicing with our intense emotional reactivity.

The first vow, “Beings are numberless, I vow to free them”, could be about all the inner beings that arise moment to moment. Our thoughts, our feelings, our creations of self and other; we might say that this vow is about touching each being and setting it free from the trap of self-identification. It’s also a compassionate acceptance and containment of all these beings. Before they can be freed, we need to see them! They must be known.

The second vow, “Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them” is also about radical acceptance. It’s the first Noble Truth, the truth of the arising of suffering or dissatisfaction. It points to that constant rub of life and death, the truth of impermanence that perhaps can lead to anxiety, depression, or confusion. This vow supports us in naming the truth of our experience. It also points to a way through: “I vow to end the delusion of a separate self that lives in the hell of ignorance.”

It’s the third vow that I particularly want to look into: “Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.” Unlike delusions, which seem endless, dharma gates are boundless, as in boundless love, world without end amen.
What if each moment, each tone of each emotion is a gate beckoning us to enter into a taste of freedom? Seeing the nature of what is actually going on, we might also see that we are not defined by what we think, or how we conceptualize about what we are experiencing, but instead, we are always free. We might say that the non-dual, or grace, or “the holy”, was functioning throughout.

[Once, on a vipassana retreat, I had menstral cramps and was in a lot of discomfort. I was sitting on a couch holding a pillow. I was attending to the the sensations: unpleasant, tight, unpleasant etc etc. Then I was suddenly able to look a little more deeply and I saw/experienced the resistance to the experience I was having, and to my amazement, all the pain dissolved. I heard in my mind Martin Luther King saying, “Free at last, free at last, God Almighty, free at last!”]

This was a helpful experience, never repeated, of course! I wonder if in your own experience, you have seen the resistance to what you may be feeling? Have you taken the resistance as the object of your attention, and if you have, what did you notice? [Ask sangha.]

II. Entering the Gate
In Dogen’s faciscle from the Shobogenzo, Inmo, or “Such” or “It”, he says, ”Already we possess the real features of a ‘person who is it’; we should not worry about the already-present ‘matter that is it’. Even worry itself is just ‘the matter that is it,’ and so it is beyond worry.”

Dogen invites us to attend to exactly what is happening, even to attend to the resistance to what is happening, because, that is what is happening too. Easier said than done, perhaps, but our practice give us the means to make this possible and fully alive. So rather than cutting off our afflictions, or managing them with other afflictions, such as alcohol, or blaming, or gossiping, we are invited to open to the flow of experience fully.

There is a Zen story in which the Zen master gets up in the morning and addresses himself: “Reverend, are you there?”- “Hai!”; “Better sober up!”- “Hai!”; “Don’t be cheated!” –No, I won’t!”. He wakes himself up, not with a cup of coffee, but with the three-fold teaching of first, Samadhi, or collected wakefulness, next, Sila, or the sober reckoning of his behavior, and finally, Prajna-wisdom. “Don’t be cheated of the fullness of your life” is what he tells himself each morning.

How do we enter the Dharma gate right in front of us? Perhaps we enter through the body, or through the mind, through the experience of what is pouring through those gates just now. “Boundless’ is used to describe the gates- this opportunity is always present and is without limit.

What do we need in order to enter the boundless gates? How is it done?

Dogen mentions “the sincere mind”. This is the mind that is open, that allows exposure to what is arising in it without evaluation, but also without acting in response to it. Then what is arising becomes known and in being known it is no longer abandoned. In being no longer abandoned, it may be healed from its agony of separation, and it may become an ally for love, ease and relief.

When I feel afraid, and I have experienced fear and anxiety in ways I had not previously known the last year and a half, my quest has been how to open to this strong emotion in a balanced way. Tara Brach speaks of the two wings of practice for this purpose: One wing is that of mindfulness. This is unconditional and open attention to what is arising. It is supported by patience and by faith that the present moment contains within it the seeds of awakening. The second wing is compassion. Holding our experience with tenderness, relating to it with sympathy.

Mindfulness shows me the experience as it arises in the body and in the mind with clarity. Compassion helps me bear it, stay near to it. As Rumi says, “Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters.”

The Hassids from the Jewish tradition teach, “The palace of the heart opens to tears”, and Pema Chodron teaches often about the “soft spot”.

I experience the unfolding of a pattern as an unwrapping of the package of the formation that’s kept my heart protected. I ask myself, “What’s under this, and what’s under this etc etc. Eventually I may see what is tangling everything up, and as it is seen, the charge that is holding it together softens, and spaciousness arrives, along with possibility and relaxation.

Thus we enter the dharma gate and as we stay with what is unfolding with compassion, it shows us many things, and it leaves us with something softer, more connected, less abandoned, more received and more at peace.

III. Radical Acceptance
Buddha’s radical acceptance practice under the Bodhi tree that resulted in his enlightenment had its roots in a childhood experience.

[Tell the story of the Rose Apple tree and the first plowing in spring by his father, Suddhodana.]

Instead of continuing to struggle, as he had been taught by his many instructors, in order to purify his mind, Buddha chose to open his mind to whomever came. And in opening and naming clearly whatever came, he was no longer held hostage by any of these myriad beings. Here in his famous poem, “The Guest House”, Rumi shows us Buddha’s practice:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

 
 
IV. How to Go Along
What the Buddha did was to completely pause. He stopped running after accomplishment, he stopped beating up his body by depriving it of nourishment, he stopped trying to control his mind. In that pause, he opened his mind and heart and thus conquered fear. We chant in the Heart Sutra, “When the mind is no hindrance, there is no fear”. If there is no object or feeling that is outside of us, there is no separation and there is no fear.

In the pause, he met all the residents of the Guest House. In the story of Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bo Tree we call these residents, Mara. Buddha met Mara in all his glory. Mara threw the book at Buddha. It’s not so different for us I think. When we are getting close to seeing some part of ourselves that has been split off, it’s quite usual to meet demons of all sorts on that road.

Changing our habitual ways of holding onto our “self” is heavy lifting, it is warrior practice. Thus we need enormous compassion to meet all of these demons.

I notice in myself when my imperfections arise, immediately I experience shame, and sometimes fear as well. But Dogen teaches me to make these too the objects of my compassionate attention. Thus nothing is outside the circle of love.

Huang Po, great Chinese Zen master taught, “Don’t let the least movement of your mind disturb you.” He didn’t say that your mind should not move.

Dogen teaches in “Inmo” , “There is something that, in the limitlessness establishes the bodhi-mind. Once this mind is established, abandoning our former playthings we hope to hear what we have not heard before, and we seek to experience what we have not experienced before; this is not solely of our own doing. Remember, it happens like this because we are ‘people who are it’”. We know that we are ‘people who are it’ just from the fact that we want to attain ‘the matter that is it’”.

I find this very encouraging for us. As we enter the dharma gates, all of them, we are already met with the boundlessness of how it is. It is not apart from us. This is what the great masters tell us.

Conclusion:
Rumi gives us our instructions in this poem:

We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute
of eternity. We are pain
and what cures pain both. We are
the sweet, cold water and jar that pours.