Deep Dark Fears

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These are fantastic. Mr. Krause seems to be more worried than most people about being stabbed in the eye.

… Oh, god, what if I’m not worried enough about getting stabbed in the eye?!

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These are LOL awesome :slight_smile:

I have worried about 3 of those on the first page.

Then I stopped looking.

Forty Five

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Ah, OCD.

Awesome. Except the noses.

i see 45 in the right circle as well.

the comics on that site are hilarious though…too bad that none of them are my fear.
All they’d have to say is “public speaking”. aggghghhh…

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1 full year of zazen cures public speaking issues.
The first time you realise that you are speaking in front of a bunch of people, who are all paying you attention, and you don’t have the tightening, fixated stress reaction, it’s kind of mind blowing.

unfortunately, that hasn’t cured me, even after numerous month long, 4am to 9pm every day mostly silent retreats, and daily practice, I at best get a gap of separation between the observer and the panicked meat suit.

Month long retreats into silence!? You’re probably flooded with Kundalini or some other terrible and unstoppable force!
That’s not nervousness at public speaking, you’re just terrified for your audience that you accidentally melt them with your laser-beam eyes.

Srsly tho, if you are that practised at calming yourself, at working through the layers and knots of tension and you still can’t… uh… still yourself whilst speaking, perhaps try a different form of meditation?

Out of curiosity, what form did the mediation take? I’m not familiar with a zen style that accentuates an ‘un-stitched’ observer effect.

I’m not sure specifically what you are asking, but hopefully the following information will be helpful.

I practice both Rinzai and Soto zen, zazen, although I’ve done a number of tibetan buddhist retreats as well. The month long retreats are just a drop in the bucket compared to the official 3 and 5 year retreats required to take robes, not to mention the 10-15 year retreats.

It is a common misconception that having a meditation practice will eliminate your karmic entanglements. While Enlightenment is the freedom from those karmic entanglements, until that is actually reached, the path that is a meditation practice is not free from those. Your karmic entanglements are there for an important reason and working with them is a very important part of the path. The hubris of thinking that the practice of meditation will dissolve those is actually one of the classic traps that the masters warn against specifically.

All forms of Buddhist meditation, focus on cultivation of the observer mind, which is why you observe your outbreath, or the flame of a candle, or your thoughts as they arise. The purpose of this is to create a gap between the observing mind and the meat monkey suit of reaction and instinct that we inhabit so you aren’t carried away and can be the observer of the moment as it is, existing in the moment. That is not possible without separation of observer mind from reactionary mind/body. Separate in this case doesn’t mean not a part of, as observer mind still experiences all that goes through the reactionary mind/body, it means there is a gap that allows you to stay present and not be swept away in the latter. Hopefully that makes sense these are complicated concepts to relay in a comment thread.

zazen consists of: susokukan, bompu, gedo, shojo, daijo, and saijojo/shikantaza.

The majority of the practice of most zazen practitioners consists of seated meditation where you start with susokukan (observation of the outbreath/not the counting variety) and then progress to shikantaza (being in the moment, observing thought and stimuli without reacting to them), and returning to susokukan the breath whenever you realize that skikantaza has been interrupted and you were carried away with a though or external stimuli.

Susokukan: counting or observing the outbreath.
Shikantaza: practitioners remain as much as possible in the present moment, aware of and observing what passes through their minds and around them. Dogen says, in his Shobogenzo, “Sitting fixedly, think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Nonthinking. This is the art of zazen.”

Hope that helps answer your questions. All the best wishes to you.

PS. I wish i had laser beam eyes. Not sure of a practical application, but that sounds neat. :slight_smile:

PPS. I have been doing some Kundalini yoga lately and very much enjoying it, most my yoga experience up until recently has been Sivananda, which I also love.

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I’ve read that there are similar traditions in Bonpo, so it may not be totally out of left field but have you considered some form of active imagination as a method for interrogating the fear/complex?

Jung developed it(/copied it from a bunch of traditional sources) and swore by it and incidentally, was quite impressed with the concept of Kundalini.
I could really drive a spike in for the crazy train rail-road here and start talking about Reich’s techniques for breaking up ‘emotional armouring’ but I think that stuff is for any potential reader to discover on their own.

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i’ll look into it, thanks for the tips.

most people suggest picturing the audience naked, while entertaining that doesn’t help. :slight_smile:

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