Zen at the Sharp End – Details, episodes & analysis

Claralynn Nunamaker grew up in Chicago. She first encountered Chinese philosophy when at university and particularly resonated with the Dao De Jing. She studied Chinese and spent some time in China before moving to moving to Ukiah, California, home of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas Chan Buddhist monastery. It’s there that she became a practising Buddhist. Soon she became involved in the Theravada Forest sangha in northern California and her interest moved her to learn the Pali language in order to read the early Buddhist sutras in their original language. Over the years she has extensively studied and taught Marshall Rosenberg’s system of non-violent communication, which she sees as the embodied practice of right speech. Today she aligns with early Buddhist teachings and is deeply influenced by Ayya Khema and her main teacher, Leigh Brasington. Claralynn serves as Director for the Scottish charity Friends of Early Buddhist Teachings and chair of Sakyadhita UK. Her website is crnunamaker.com.

In this interview, Claralynn insightfully explains the practice of non-violent communication (NVC) and its foundation in the universal attitudes of kindness, compassion, and empathy. Her view is that NVC gives us the tools to transform the aspiration of right speech into reality through clear learnable techniques and principles. Something we all need I’d say! The concept of a troublesome buddha finds its equivalent in the ‘enemy image’ in NVC. Through various personal examples, she explores the power of avoiding falling into the trap of simply describing the enemy image (ahh wasn’t that a big scary dog?) - thus giving it power - to identifying and describing our feelings and needs (I can see you’re scared and want to feel safe). This shift into connecting to the need that’s not being met, she says, allows us to draw alongside the difficult people we meet and see their Buddha nature.

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This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
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Steve grew up in a Christian family on the Shetland Islands (off the northern coast of Scotland) and was very involved in church growing up. This provided the foundation for a life-long interest in spiritual investigation, philosophy, world mysticism, and body-awareness realms of practice. He has an interest in extreme outdoor survival, and works closely with the well-known therapist Michaela Boehm. Steve teaches a wide range of movement and meditation practices and works with leading figures to develop their performance and interpersonal skills. He also presents the popular Guru Viking Podcast, specialising in in-depth interviews with leaders and teachers in the world of meditation, spirituality, and self development.

In this interview touching on Steve’s broad experience and wisdom for dealing with difficult people, he highlights the Buddha’s teaching on the ‘Eight Worldly Winds’ (pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute). The Buddha taught that we suffer because we cling to the positive ‘winds’ (pleasure, gain, etc) and resist the negative ones. In dealing with challenging situations, Steve has found these to serve as a very helpful antidote to sense of shock or injustice of a difficult encounter. He has observed that wise people don’t celebrate a given situation, but instead take a more equanimous attitude. One such example is a story relating to the famous Zen master Hakuin that Steve has often meditated on and draws deep inspiration from:

Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life. A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child. This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin. In great anger the parent went to the master. "Is that so?" was all he would say.

After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else he needed.

A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth – the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fishmarket.
The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back. Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: "Is that so?"

– “Is that so?”, from “Zen Flesh Zen Bones” translated by Paul Reps

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DEALING WITH DIFFICULT PEOPLE RETREAT
11-14 July 2024, Derbyshire, UK
https://zenways.org/event/dealing-with-difficult-people-retreat/
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Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

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Zenways sangha member Frank Cook has worked in finance as a stock broker until his retirement a few years ago. He first got into meditation in the 1990s as a way of helping him deal with the stresses of work and having a young family, and has, over the years, primarily practised mindfulness of breathing and metta (loving kindness).

In our interview, Frank describes how he’s found the breath-focused meditation of more immediate benefit - helping him to “dial down the noise”and step back from the busyness of daily life. But in more recent years, he’s begun to realise the - perhaps more subtle – but deep, long-term benefits of loving kindness practice. He’s come to realise how much loving kindness practice has benefitted his interactions in work and family by helping him love and forgive himself, see others more kindly, and understand why he finds certain people so difficult.

He talks about having a healthy disrespect for authority, which has helped him deal with certain spiritual teachers over the years as well as difficult bosses at work. He honestly discusses how he himself has often been his own troublesome person when, for example, his conviction in his own opinions has become too strong, or when he’s felt envious of other people’s good fortunes. In dealing with envy in particular, he describes how important letting go is - recognising that the pain of holding on is greater than pain of letting go.

As an accompaniment to this episode, I’ve recorded a Zen-style loving kindness meditation. I wanted to offer this because I totally agree with Frank that this kind of practice can be of great benefit in helping us deal with our difficult people (ourselves included!).

Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

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Sandy Rinko-an Chubb is the guiding teacher at the Oxford Zen Centre, UK, in the Sanbo Zen lineage. She began Zen practice with Master Yamata Hogen in 1987, then continued her study with Sister Elaine MacInnes (founder of the Oxford Zen Centre) and John Eiun-ken Gaynor, and was appointed Zen Teacher in 2013. For ten years, Sandy was director of the Prison Phoenix Trust, an organisation that offers meditation and yoga to prisoners and prison officers in the UK and Ireland.

In our interview, she shares her delightful warmth and illuminating wisdom on dealing with troublesome buddhas, gleaned from years of working with prisoners and zen students of every shape and size. She emphasises the Buddha’s first noble truth that everyone suffers, and that, in the end, “if you let it bother you, you’ll go mad!” She makes the parallel between prison inmates and those who may be on the outside but put themselves in prisons of our own making by desperately wanting things to be different (i.e. the Buddha’s 2nd noble truth that we suffer because we cling). She describes the wisdom of just sitting, facing yourself, coming to know yourself (even like yourself!), and tasting the sweet and bitter equally. This acceptance, she says, is the key to finding the stillness and peace beneath the noisy, busy, uncomfortable, difficult environments and interactions we face every day. Not only that, but it shows us how to find the utter perfection of every moment, just as it is.

Towards the end of the interview she cites part of the great Zen master Torei’s Bodhisattva Vow, which I commented was an excellent summary of the essence of a troublesome buddha:
“Who can be ungrateful or not respectful to each and every thing, as well as to human beings!
Even though someone may be a fool,
be warm and compassionate.
If by any chance such a person should turn against us,
become a sworn enemy and abuse and persecute us,
we should sincerely bow down with humble language, 
in reverent belief that he or she is the merciful avatar of Buddha,
who uses devices to emancipate us from sinful karma
that has been produced and accumulated upon ourselves
by our own egoistic delusion and attachment
through countless cycles of kalpas.”

Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

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Shelley Albrich is a high school art teacher based in Eugene, Oregon and a member of the Blue Cliff Zen group led by Shinkai Roshi (who I interviewed a few episodes back). She encountered Zen and Buddhism via a yoga class that Shinkai was teaching, when he invited the class to come on Zen retreat with him.

In this interview, we talk about how her Buddhist practice influences her creativity - both in her personal work and teaching. She describes how she sees part of her practice as fostering a safe space in her art classes for the kids, many of which have difficulties in their lives, to explore their emotions and express them creatively. She also discusses the ripples of difficult feelings and thoughts that arose when she was ‘involuntarily transferred’ from one school to another. Her meditation practice helped her to recognise this as a gift that highlighted her natural tendency to maintain the status quo and an opportunity to practice being less reactive. Towards the end of the episode we explore how sitting with difficult feelings is an act of deep self-love. Furthermore, she describes how the feelings of safety and being held when sitting in the presence of a caring community has helped her touch into painful emotions that might otherwise have felt too overwhelming by herself.

Shelley mentions going on a ‘Breakthrough to Zen Retreat’. For more information on these retreats, see here zenways.org/breakthrough-to-zen-retreats/
I also mention Zen brushwork classes with Noriko Yamasaki. You can find out more about her and her work here https://www.instagram.com/pianopianolife/

Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

If you liked this podcast, consider:

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www.markwestmoquette.co.uk

Bradley Jinaiyo Nussbaum is a Lay Minister with the Bright Dawn Center of Oneness and is based in New Jersey, USA. He is a social worker with a background in addiction and substance abuse and currently works in a hospice. His journey into Buddhism began when a colleague brought up the role of spirituality in mental health treatment and addiction recovery, and it occurred to him he had never included this important dimension in his own work, or indeed in his own life. After searching around and doing a lot of reading, he came across the Bright Dawn Center and it’s unique blend of Zen and Pureland Buddhism

In this interview, Bradley talks about his father’s illness with Alzheimers Disease and eventual death, and how, through the period of his illness, his mother became one of his most important troublesome buddhas. We discuss how working through difficult times such as this is often not pretty, and how making mistakes and messing up is part and parcel of the learning process. He also talks about dealing with difficulty within his marriage and also in his professional life as a social worker.

Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

If you liked this podcast, consider:

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www.markwestmoquette.co.uk

My podcast has been going now for a year! Thank you so much to everyone who has listened over this time. I’ve had the amazing opportunity to share with you interviews with some very inspiring people, which I hope you’ve enjoyed and got a lot out of. And we’ve got some great people lined up for next year…

In this episode I thought it would be nice to do a Christmas special and talk, myself, about a particularly thorny area of practice: spending time with family – which for many of us sums up the Christmas period quite succinctly! Or for some it's not spending time with family, which can be equally troublesome.

It comes as no surprise that certain family members can be our biggest troublesome Buddhas. And since Christmas is often a time when we see a lot of family (or perhaps avoid seeing family), there may be many potentially wonderful opportunities to learn and grow from those encounters. While it may be difficult to keep our regular practices going over the Christmas period, when things are busy and our normal routines go out the window, that is by no means a reason to think our spiritual work must come to a dead stop. Working with difficult people, challenging relationships and troublesome encounters ought to be as much part of our practice as silent meditation. 

In this discussion, I talk about my own experience of family Christmasses growing up and how I've reflected on how I habitually cut myself off from feeling, and struggled with accepting the limitations of my mother's disability. Then, after talking more generally, I offer six things that might help – or at least might be worth bearing in mind – before plunging into our family festivities. Then I finish with describing a couple of the Buddha's troublesome family members and how he dealt with them.

Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

If you liked this podcast, consider:

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www.markwestmoquette.co.uk

Birgitte Dosanjh is a physiotherapist and pilates teacher, and mother of two: Iona, 5 and Oskar, 2. Although it’s a slight departure for this podcast to speak to someone who doesn’t identify as a Buddhist or have a regular meditation practice, Birgitte has resonated a great deal with my book “Zen and the Art of Dealing with Difficult People” and wanted to share some of her own amazing insights here around dealing with her children. (Full disclosure: Birgitte is one of my wife’s oldest friends).

In this interview, Birgitte describes the difficult backdrop into which her second child was born and how, as a result, she ended up with post-natal depression and having to seek professional help. She talks about how her journey through this has taught her many things about what it is to be a parent, including the importance of letting go, honesty and acceptance. As she says, she’s realised the truth of the phrase “smooth seas never make a good sailor,” and has come to value those rougher seas. She also talks about dealing with meltdowns and the value of understanding what happens when we “flip our lid” (referencing the analogy of what happens in the brain when we lose emotional regulation as described by Professor of Psychiatry Daniel Siegel and in my book). Of interest to many parents will be how she describes the importance she’s found in allowing her children to feel what they feel without dismissing or overreacting to those feelings.

Credit for phrase “magnetising to another’s emotional state” goes to “Why Mutual Face Watching Matters” by Keena Cummins.

Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

If you liked this podcast, consider:

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www.markwestmoquette.co.uk

Satya Robyn is a Pure Land Buddhist teacher and co-runs the Bright Earth Pure Land temple in Malvern, UK with her husband. She’s also a a psychotherapist and author – her latest books are 'Dear Earth: Love Grief and Activism' and 'Coming Home: Refuge in Pureland Buddhism'.

In this interview Satya talks about her involvement in climate activism and her acts of civil disobedience taken in conjunction with XR Buddhists and other inter-faith groups. She tenderly describes how her practice creates the ground that supports her and allows her to follow through on the actions she intuitively feels are important. She also explores the thorny issue of how to deal with difficult politics and politicians when choices are made that you don’t agree with. Within the discussion, she lists a highly pragmatic set of action points to take if you don’t agree with a political direction.

Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

If you liked this podcast, consider:

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www.markwestmoquette.co.uk

Matt Shinkai Kane Roshi is head of the Blue Cliff Zen Centre in Eugene, Oregon, USA. Before that he spent 7 years as a monk in Japan under Zen master Shinzan Miyamae in Gyokuryiji, becoming a teacher in 2012 and given transmission in 2017. He’s also a Zen Yoga teacher and is on the faculty in the University of Oregon’s PE mind-body department.

In this interview, Shinkai talks about his time as a young monk in Japan training under Shinzan Roshi. He describes how Shinzan had a special knack of creating a temple environment full of difficult people and situations and discusses how he dealt with that. In particular he talks very honestly how he got caught up in perceiving these difficulties as “distracting from his important spiritual practice” and how long it took for him to realise how trapped he had got in that mindset. Also goes on to discuss how he works to bring some of Shinzan Roshi’s teachings about dealing with difficult people into his own sangha and teaching.

Support the show

This podcast is sponsored by Zen Minded – an online lifestyle store offering you the very best of Japanese craft, incense & other Zen-inspired home-goods. Check it out at www.zenminded.uk
We’re also sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers convenient and affordable therapy online, helping match you with the right therapist from their network. They’ve extended an offer of 10% off your first month of therapy if you sign up via https://betterhelp.com/zenatthesharpend

If you liked this podcast, consider:

• Sharing it via social media
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www.markwestmoquette.co.uk