Yes. I very often experience in my work with my clients that there are some negative Kind of phase. Phases? Not like in belief. Something... Waves? Phrases. Negative phrases that they're basically saying to themselves directly or indirectly. Like, I'm not worth anything. Yeah. And they have a long history and have deep roots. So they remind me of turning words, but as like a negative... They're turning them in the wrong direction.

[01:17]

And I keep them in their grasp. And how can one work with that? Well, you could ask them to add, is this really true, the end? I mean, I'm kind of joking, but I'm also serious. I think if you can, because if they take it, say, I'm not worth anything as an absolute, Maybe they have to turn it into a conversation. It depends on the person. I mean, what kind of mind, attitude, etc. they have. I mean, If I had the feeling, let's say, I'm not worth anything.

[02:38]

I might say, in fact, I'm worth even less than that. Or, when am I really worthless? Or sometimes I'm worth a little bit. Isn't that true? I don't know. With some people you can get them to start an internal conversation. And my experience with this kind of thing is that people also secretly believe the opposite. And because they don't get reinforcement for the extreme opposite, they think they're worthless. And that secret belief is sometimes more deeply embedded and hidden than the more conscious belief.

[04:01]

And also they may be mimicking a conversation that they think their parents said to them at some time or somebody. But in this abstract context I can't say much. But I think if you do have a turning word happening, even if it's a negative one, The kind of process is already in the person, embedded in the person. So maybe one can start playing with the permutations. Yeah. Yeah, someone else? Anyone else?

[05:18]

Through your answer to my first question, I realized something. Through your answer to my first question this morning, something became clear to me. And I think now that the difference is between that it helped me, but not with my client, It's the intention that I have and that my clients have, maybe in a different way. And maybe this also is true for what Caroline just said. that I have an inkling that maybe it's good to give up my self-reference.

[06:29]

But most people are very much identified and live rather with the negative self or self-image rather than giving up self-reference. It's such a stupid decision. I would rather have a negative opinion of myself than give up self-referencing. I mean, it's not simply stupid, but anyway, go ahead. So I've been reflecting during the break and now I would like to pose my second question, which I didn't ask this morning. Okay. So this turning word, like for example, starting to say yes.

[08:02]

It includes saying yes to no. Yeah, yeah. So it seems to me that that is the point where we start to doubt our self-reference and to be always identifying with the self. So it's maybe like a koan. So can you say this again so I can get a grasp on what you said?

[09:02]

So by practicing to say yes and with this also saying yes to now. Saying yes to the negative image or something as well you mean? Also, auch ja sagt... So what are you saying yes... What no are you saying yes to? Okay, welches nein meinst du, zu dem man da auch ja sagt? Das Beispiel, ins Kino zu gehen in Kirsten. Your example, going to the movies in Kirsten. Das ja, ich gehe ins Kino, obwohl es verrückt ist. So yes, I'm going, although it's crazy, but I go. Ja... It also means, yes, I'm not going to the movies. And so this kind of melts this very solid conviction I have that there is only one true standpoint, or one right standpoint. My real question now is, how do I get the motivation and intention to work with patients?

[10:23]

So now my question is, how in my work with clients can I get to this intention? I mean, to get through to the real thing, to the real question. Well, it's, you know, out of the context of the therapeutic situation and the person, etc., I really don't think I can say anything with much relevance. I mean, if... One thing you always can do is take the very question you've asked yourself you're asking now and make it a turning word.

[11:36]

So you ask yourself How can I reach my clients? Or something like that. So you just turn that in your own liminal and subliminal consciousness. And trust your own intuition. Because really I've found that when you can really feel a question, you probably also know the answer. You know what to do. In my early days of practicing, I always imagined that every question I asked of myself, etc., was like a pencil.

[12:52]

And one end of the pencil wrote the question, and the other end of the pencil erased it. So I had this sort of image and I'd say, oh, here's another pencil. Now, what is it writing? How am I going to erase it? Or answer it? Now, if Carolina, that's your name? Caroline. Caroline. I like Carolina. I like all the rhythm of the syllables. If we were speaking about a practitioner, not a client, I would say that maybe you can practice with welcome.

[13:53]

And then in zazen, No, we're talking about a practitioner. In the spacious mind of Zazen, in the sense of the physical and mental location that happens through Zazen, I would welcome this negative view. I'd walk, oh, I'm not worth anything, really. And I would just let it be there, welcome it, and say, jeez, where the hell did you come from? Why are you here? The basic... One of the basic dynamics of, you know, very classic and simple Zen practice, Buddhist practice, and the initial structure of mindfulness practice, is you observe, for instance, if you're angry,

[15:11]

you observe that you're angry. And you don't interfere with the anger. I mean, unless you're going to be violent or something. You just notice that you're angry. And you just observe. And you notice, oh, now I'm more angry. No, look, I'm really angry. No, I'm less angry. And when you get in the habit of that observation process, you can, after a while, you find you've created a space around the anger. there's the anger and then there's the observing it.

[16:28]

And the observing it starts creating a mental space which is not the anger. And if you do that regularly and often enough, Suddenly you find your sense of what you identify with is the space around the anger and not the anger. And then the next practice from that I would say is that when you are angry and you can feel but you can also feel the space around the anger instead of getting angry at the person you simply tell them you're angry so you say you know what you just did or what you've been doing the last week or so throwing my clothes out the window and I'm your roommate

[17:45]

really makes me angry plus it's a nuisance to go five stories down to get my clothes so anyway this actually is quite effective So if you could get the person to observe their negative comments about themselves or churning words. Okay. I was also talking with Gerald and Ralph today.

[18:50]

We happened to walk to the same restaurant. I said that one of the things I would suggest to a therapist, who suggests a practice to a client, Let's take, I don't know, to pause for the particular, already connected. Is that you as the therapist also practice that in the intervening time between the next session? So I would think it's extremely likely, for example, if you suggested a client pause for the particular, Yeah, maybe in certain, not all the time, but only in certain queued circumstances.

[20:03]

Like at breakfast time, say. Pause for each thing on the breakfast table. Yeah, something like that. Now, then the client, when they come, they've only done it twice in the preceding week. And they're feeling a little guilty. Which they shouldn't be. So in the waiting room, they're pausing for various particulars. to lessen their guilt and if you've been pausing for the particular during the intervening week and much more successfully of course and thoroughly if when they come into the room they can feel that you have this been practicing this

[21:30]

It will be demonstrated in the way you're sitting or move your hand or something like that and they'll feel it. Because whatever practice we do accumulates in the micro movements of our behavior. And those micro movements are how we establish connectedness outside of consciousness. And surprisingly, those micro movements are often The stage director of those micro-movements is often mental formations. Okay, so someone else. Have you had Zen practice experience with children and young adults?

[22:53]

Well, Suzuki Roshi, my teacher, used to, you know, it's very common in Japanese village temples to have a kindergarten in the village temple. So he would sometimes be invited to come to the kindergarten. And he would get them all to sit for a few minutes, like two. But basically, Zen practice is an adult decision. And I don't think you kind of try to get children to do it. And it might actually be problematic.

[24:23]

Because you're in a... I don't know. When you're still forming your body, your brain, your personality, I don't know if you want to put Zen practice in there. And I have seen quite a few, I would say, casualties of transcendental meditations. of persons whose parents were transcendental meditation teachers. and got their kids from an early age to practice transcendental meditation. By the time the kids were 20, they'd transcended any idea of meditation.

[25:30]

They just had enough of it. They didn't want to hear about it. And sometimes My daughter would come in and sit with me. She's now 46, 47. When I sat at home. And she'd come in and she'd sit in front of me, beside me, sometimes on my lap. That was rather cute. But it would last three or four minutes or five, you know. Under five, usually. And once they came, she and her best friend, when they were about 11 or 12, came to a 40-minute period of meditation. And they both said to me, you know, I thought of everything I could possibly think of in the first five minutes, and after that I just sat there with nothing to think about.

[26:54]

They didn't think it was too nice. But I have had experience with teenagers, and generally I don't want people who are You know, if somebody comes and wants to practice with me who's under 18, I really discourage them. I mean, they can come as part of their family or, you know, that's fine. We've had quite a few three-generation units practice with us. The parents start. And then their kids are around and they come to visit and around 18 or something they start to practice.

[28:11]

And then they meet somebody at a Zen Center party that they like and then they have a baby. And now then the baby's four or five now and hangs out around, you know. And we've had the other is that somebody starts to practice and then their mother and father start to practice. And that process seems okay. But generally I think it's an adult decision. You remember Nicole, who translated last year, some of you? She came to me sort of through a lottery when she was 18. You know the story? No. She was a good student in gymnasium and wanted to be a scientist and so forth.

[29:33]

She was quite unhappy with her life and wanted to do something else. And so her father, who's a banker and quite, you know, fairly conservative, nice guy though, And knowing his daughter felt this way, he had a liberal moment. And he asked a kind of new age friend of his, Do you know anything about seminars, groups, yoga, things like that? So this guy got for the father a whole bunch of brochures of various groups all over Germany. So Nicole started looking through them. And they all said how wonderful they were.

[30:47]

And she didn't know what to do. She put her hand over her eyes and reached in and pulled out Johanneshausen. She had absolutely no information. She probably never heard the word Buddhism. But her father, with a certain amount of reluctance, drove her to Johanneshof. And she stayed a week or so, I don't remember. I think you were in Frankfurt when she first came. Actually, I remember meeting her, picking strawberries with her during work period. At Johanneshof? At Johanneshof, when I visited from Creston, I think. Oh, okay. Anyway, she started at 18 and she'd come and visit and I encouraged her, you know, please finish college and so forth.

[31:51]

And her interest in Buddhism changed her interest in science to psychology. And she completed her studies in Oldenburg. And her professors had an academic career all planned for her. But she just found Zen practice more satisfying and more interesting problems, more complex problems than she faced with studying psychology. And the complexity of the problems was actually important to her.

[32:52]

So she decided to move to Crestone. So since I'm doing a quick bio, I'll finish it. And she's over some years now has been asking me to be ordained, not just as a lay person, but as a monkette like us. Are we monkettes? So I kept saying, no, no, I know you want to get married and you want to have a family and maybe you eventually want to have an academic career. And after two or three years, and she listened to all the things I said were difficult about it,

[34:01]

She may have to make her basic decision through the Sangha and so forth. She loses a certain degree of freedom. But she kept wanting to do it. And I really made the decision to say yes. When I realized that if a male was this persistent, I would say yes. I guess I ought to say it for a female, too. Now she's ordained and she's the head monk and she seems to be quite happy and she has a rather nice head shaved. And of course, being ordained in Buddhism is not the same as, say, Catholicism.

[35:28]

At least in Zen, you can always decide, oh, you know, I'd rather put my robes in a drawer and now be a lawyer or something. And Norbert. Hi. Why did you ask the question, where do intentions come from? Where did your intention to ask this question come from? For a long time I've had this question, where do intentions arise from? How do they come into being?

[36:29]

And I don't mean this intention, yeah, Rashi said I should pay attention to my breath, so I do it. Oh well, I hope you take that seriously. For me, intention is something that seems to come up from nowhere. There is nothing that I could grasp or where I could find a reason. But where does it come from? Why do you care? It's one of the interesting problems that come up in Zaza. Really? I mean, do you wonder why you have a nose?

[37:54]

I wonder why I have such a big nose. Yeah, well, I mean, basically, I don't know. We have intentions. That's the way it is. Like lots of other things that come with our genetic endowment. Now I experimented with this once. I got a backpack. And I walked 150 miles over some weeks, sleeping sometimes in motels if there was one and sometimes sleeping just in the bushes somewhere or on the beach or something.

[39:00]

And I was asking myself, what do I want to do? And I took everything away. As much as I could. So, for instance, do I want to wash my face in the morning? Well, I don't know. Well, so I didn't wash my face for four or five days. And then I kind of wanted to wash my face. And I really experimented like this. Do I want to go to the toilet? Well, yes, at some point, whether I wanted to or not, you know, something happened. Do I want to stay in bed all day?

[40:01]

Well, at some point, I just get up. And in those days I was unable to sleep more than six or seven hours. My back would start to hurt and I'd just have to get up and do something. So after several months of this, I guess it was three or four months, four months maybe, Where I kind of lived out of my backpack on the road, walking. I did form three basic things I kind of wanted to do. Which took the form of intentions. One was I wanted to continue practicing. The other is I wanted to practice with others.

[41:06]

And the third, I guess I really wanted to do no harm. So here I am trying to do no harm. So I mean, I've discovered this impulse, we call it intention, by trying to take them all away. And for me, the more sophisticated intentions like to practice compassion and things like that, Really came out of the basic things of wanting to be alive, wanting to continue being alive and so forth. I mean, I decided to About wanting to be alive or not, I don't know.

[42:20]

I decided to let aliveness take its course. I decided to live as long as I'm alive. Okay, so, yeah, Annetta. Yes, Annetta. Such a nice name. Go ahead. Yes, I would like to ask about what you said earlier and maybe also about your question, namely, how do I get the patients to get an injection? Because maybe this is the answer to that. Oh, I see. So in relation to what you just said, and maybe what Jens said before, in the psychotherapeutic work, how can I get the client to form an intention?

[43:22]

Okay, so one possible way might be that the therapist asks the client Will I or will you continue in the suffering? Do you want to continue in the suffering? So like you experimented with it, that the client experiments with this. So it seems to be difficult to come to practice just through practicing for people who had not been convinced that practice is useful or good or practicable or whatever.

[44:35]

So are you talking about a client or a potential practitioner? Actually about both. Really about both. Well, I mean, there must be experience among the experienced therapists here and in the literature. About, you know, simple things which I think are basic and creative, which is to ask, do you want to continue this suffering? And not so pronouncedly as that, but I come into the same situation with new practitioners, which is basically The two sides.

[45:46]

One is, do you want to continue this problem? And how do you benefit from this problem? Because usually people have problems because it also serves them in some way. So I ask somebody to really look at what they benefit. Why is this beneficial somehow? It's not all negative. And then more, I have an advantage that the therapist doesn't have. I thought that was an appropriate place to pause.

[46:49]

My advantage is that I don't have to speak directly to the clients. Say that I know you have this problem. From observation and from doxan and so forth. So I can, in the midst of a group like this, I can start talking about the decision to stay alive. And I don't direct it at you, I'm talking to someone else. So I can speak to you indirectly if you want to pick up on it. So I can suggest, for instance, that many people haven't really made a clear decision to stay alive. They've only made a decision to stay alive if people love them or if they're successful or something.

[48:05]

It's a conditioned aliveness. And that conditioned decision is kind of a... root the kind of unstable base of a lot of problems. So I might urge the whole group to really make an unconditioned decision to stay alive. No matter what, you're going to stay alive. No matter how bad it gets, you're going to stay alive. If a person makes that decision, then a lot of other things fall into place. And then they can also explore what Sakyurashi always called your innermost request.

[49:07]

Which is really to ask yourself, what do I really want to do? What would really satisfy me? And what kind of world do I want to live in? And can I participate in making the world the kind of world I want to live in? Those interrelated questions often draw out what I'd call your inner request. Anyway, I appreciate the discussion we've had and having and it makes it much easier for me to speak about things.

[50:32]

And before we end, not too far off from the present moment, I hope one or two of you who haven't said anything might... Find the inner request. Or you might say something. Because I just like to hear your voice. It's important. It's part of the soup. But let's have a break now.

[51:22]

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