What is Confidence?

My teacher often says, "Have great confidence."  He might as well be saying "Be six feet tall."  Is confidence something one can get or have?  Or not-have?  The dictionary says it's a feeling or belief, and those are quite unstable.  

confidence

 [kon-fi-duhns]   

- n
1.	a feeling of trust in a person or thing: I have confidence in his abilities
2.	belief in one's own abilities; self-assurance
3.	trust or a trustful relationship: take me into your confidence
4.	something confided or entrusted; secret
5.	in confidence  as a secret

 confidence 

c.1430, from L. confidentia, from confidentem, prp. of confidere"to have full trust or reliance," from con-, intensive prefix, +fidere "to trust" (see faith).

Can a person have great confidence in the midst of fear or doubt or self-consciousness?  Snippets from Marge Piercy's poem "For Strong Women" come to mind:

A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling...

...Strength is not in her, but she

enacts it as the wind fills a sail.


Where is the line between confidence and arrogance?  Arrogance, it seems, is a special brand of foolishness.  I thought I had embraced my inner fool, become willing to not-know, to make mistakes with gusto.  But I continue to deeply fear exhibiting arrogance, thanks in large part to well-indoctrinated gender training.  It seems like a state of thinking-I-know-but-really-I-don't; an even bigger fool.  And it can be harmful to others.    

ar·ro·gance

   [ar-uh-guhns] 

noun

offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearingpride.

Origin: 
1275–1325; Middle English  < Middle French  < Latin arrogantia presumption.


Interesting internet find: What would Genpo have to say about arrogance? 


Then there's humility.  And careful: False humility.  

hu·mil·i·ty

   [hyoo-mil-i-tee or, often, yoo-] 

noun

the quality or condition of being humble;  modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance, rank, etc.

Origin: 1275–1325; Middle English humilite  < Latin humilitās.

This Latin root, hum, connects us as humans, our ability to be humane, the earth (humus), and with this low-to-the-ground submissiveness, humility.  I first heard this joke pointing to false humility from Jon Kabat-Zinn:

A rabbi is kneeling in front of the altar.
“God, I am nothing and you are everything”, he says.
The cantor sees him and he kneels down and says,
“God, I am nothing and you are everything”.
The assistant rabbi sees them and he too does the same thing.
The janitor sees them and is so moved that he too kneels down and says,
“God, you are everything and I am nothing”.
The assistant rabbi nudges the cantor and says, "Look who thinks he’s nothing”.

Surrender is not the same as submission.  Self-loathing is a small, selfish world.  Much like the selfishness of arrogance.  True humility makes us larger, connects us to others rather than sets us apart.

So what is confidence?  

Nightswimming

It seems there are dozens of things to talk about.  I get to my blog and feel such hesitation.  Here it is, Autumn, after a brief but welcome late appearance of summer heat.   My 40th birthday is next week.  The cherry tomatoes are like candy or jewels.      

This song always reminds me of a hot Southern Illinois Summer night in the late 90's.  I was vehemently single, working in a bookstore in the mall.  Had to do inventory late into the night, and the air conditioning was off for most of it.  Afterwards meeting with some friends and acquaintances and leading them sweaty and sticky down the half-mile or so wooded trail through spider webs and stray branches, risking encounters with snakes and other crawly things to cool off at Cedar Lake.  I remember the moon, the perfect relief of the water, the squishy mud underfoot, the vulnerability of being naked, and the intimate energy of a small group of people in their 20's nightswimming.   

Myriad Jizos

Grasses, Trees and the Great Earth Sesshin.  This sesshin is also focused on Jizo Bodhisattva.  It's a kinder, gentler sesshin, in that there is a great deal of outdoor meditation.  There is a large meadow, and a generous woods, and everyone grabs a little 3'x3' section of tarp and heads out with their cushion to a spot for most of the meditation periods.

Except for the one block of meditation after the lunch break when we were making ceramic Jizo statues for the Jizo garden.

The taller ones are the main molded ceramic Jizos made at the Monastery.  Articles of clothing are made for them during Jizo ceremonies to honor children who have died.  

One of the amazing Japanese Jizos at the entrance of the Jizo Garden

There are many kinds of Jizos all along the trails and tucked away in the Jizo Garden.  

Chozen Roshi would talk about Jizo in her Dharma talks, and then we'd go make them.  I had no idea we would be doing crafts at sesshin.

She spoke about Jizo's "division bodies" or "transformation bodies".  Whenever there is a need, and a person calls out for Jizo to help them,  Jizo comes to their aid in whatever form is needed for that person.

"...When someone is suffering and cries out even silently for help, a transformation body is born because of that request.  How many transformation bodies are there?  As many beings as there are right now who are in distress and asking for help, that is, right now, the number of transformation bodies.  

This has important implications... If we are in need of spiritual help, we should ask for it.  Our asking is the causefor the arising of division bodies.  If we don't ask, not only are we stuck in our own pride, but we are blocking the arising of bodhisattvas like Jizo.  

We all have had the experience of being transformed by becoming aware of someone's vulnerability and suffering.  We are often not aware of their plight until they ask for help." 

So our ceramic Jizos are little division bodies, being made for the garden and everyone who comes through there.  Each day, more little "division bodies" would be created.  I loved to go and visit them on the breaks as they dried in the sun.  Some of them were bisque fired, glazed and completed by the end of the week.  Some were left from last year, and other people glazed those and put them out in the Jizo garden, dedicating them to someone or something.

This is my overwhelming favorite.  Clearly a division body -- a Jizo called into being by and for parents with tantruming children.    The person who made this later shared that her whole sesshin was spent struggling with her own tantruming child mind.

I don't know who made the Kitty Jizo with Mice.  But wow.  

Some pieces from last year that were bisque fired but did not get to be glazed.  

Some Jizos from a previous retreat in which people carved Jizos from stone.  

The Path.  It is like an Easter egg hunt out there in the Jizo garden.

 Here are some of the ones that got finished during the week and placed in the garden:

Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple Open

Some last minute preparations.  Fluffy newly-sewn Zabutons.

Jizo greets us at the Zendo entrance.

Cakes and fruit, light, incense, and flowers for the Buddhas.

Enso by Shodo Harada Roshi.  Hogen points out that this enso reveals Roshi's state of mind, and encourages us to imagine the state of mind that could create such a piece.  

Please sign the guest book!

The teachers.

The Zendo was already full!  

Sitting in our new Temple for the first time, listening to the "new" sounds.  We are now in a neighborhood filled with the sounds of children!  At the seats nearest the walls, as the natural light fades, the lights in the ceiling gradually reveal our own shadows on the wall.  There is a faint smell of floor varnish and paint.  There is a lightheartedness, and a getting-to-know-you feeling in this place.  There is a sense of stunned joy that this is actually happening.  

Our first night, we did a Five Precepts ceremony.  Rooting the Temple in ethics from the start.

   

Living Bodhisattva

I want to share something significant.  It's another post about a therapist-teacher in my "lineage": Marsha Linehan.  I don't use the term Bodhisattva lightly.  Marsha Linehan is responsible for decreasing suffering on a grand scale, people.  The occasion for this post is that she has now "come out" about her own history of severe mental illness.

Courageous

I have been in the field of mental health long enough to have seen how things were before her therapy, DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) was widely used.  And it was ugly.    

Marsha Linehan developed DBT in the early 1990's for people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).   Prior to DBT, people with this diagnosis were pretty much the lepers of mental health.  Mostly women, usually trauma survivors, some broad-brush features of BPD are:  Extreme emotional sensitivity -- like having no skin -- and the concomitant extreme ups and downs in mood, a tendency to see things in a very polarized way, engaging in self-injurious behavior and / or frequent suicide attempts.  Therapists in the past did not have effective tools to think about or deal with this high-risk, high-suffering population for whom traditional therapies often did not work.  So therapists -- in the face of this tremendous, excruciating pain, ostensibly with the responsibility to relieve that pain, and an inability to do so -- would become frustrated.  Sometimes even experiencing rage at the patient.  Unable to tolerate or even admit their own helplessness and rage, they would often blame the patient for "manipulation,"  not wanting or not trying to get well.  And reduce their behaviors to "trying to get attention."

This is probably why she couldn't have "come out" a minute sooner.

This article reveals Linehan's account of her own 2-year(!) psychiatric hospitalization in the 1960's, which included electroconvulsive therapy, hard core antipsychotic and sedative medications, Freudian therapy and isolation.  Truly the dark ages*.  Things maybe got a little better in that by the 80's and 90's they stopped keeping people with BPD in the hospital for long durations.  Though that didn't stop therapists from dealing with their own helplessness by turning people with BPD into caricatures, or worse.

I have heard colleagues on the crisis phone line I used to work for verbally demean clients, and after hanging up, feel justified and bemoan how the caller was "such a Borderline."  Also have heard of clinical supervisors end all discussion of cases because they were "just a Borderline."  Therapists in general were so hostile to people with Borderline that it became a pejorative term in the field.  Early in my career I witnessed a woman with this diagnosis in a hospital being strapped to a gurney.  There are some situations in which this might be appropriate to protect someone from self-injuring. It was the extra words that the hospital employees used, getting close to her face and saying, "There, now you made us tie you down.  Now you got what you wanted.  Are you happy now?  Huh?"  Remember, many (not all) of these people are survivors of violence, including childhood sexual abuse.  It makes my guts churn just thinking about it.

So here comes DBT treatment:  It's a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy / Zen fusion.  Marsha Linehan, a clinical psychologist and researcher had also been practicing contemplative prayer in the Catholic tradition for decades.  She had also become a serious Zen student.  She took on this patient population that others wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, and figured out how to operationalize and teach the skills of mindfulness, step by step.

The dialectic in dialectical behavior therapy is an ongoing search for synthesis of polarities.  The primary dialectic in this treatment is Acceptance and Change.  The revolutionary part of this treatment, in my mind, was the acceptance part.  Half of the treatment is about expressing compassion, and validating the patient's experience, sometimes called "seeing the function in the dysfunction."  But this is only half.  Acknowledging and validating someone's feelings is indeed powerful but in some cases, there's an urgency and a sense in the client coming in with REAL life-or-death problems that need SOMETHING.  NOW!!!  DBT includes many many practical skills to place in clients' hands.  Oh that didn't work?  Here's ten, twenty, fifty more things you can try.

This is another primary dialectic

Mostly, though, DBT is for therapists.  It gives therapists a structure within which to work.  It requires that this work be done by team.  That there be a classroom component for teaching skills in addition to the individual therapy component.  And it requires that team to practice the skills themselves, and on each other in a regular meeting.  Marsha Linehan wrote a textbook (dense as hell), and a skills training manual.  The training manual details out step-by-step, session-by-session how to run a DBT class.  The textbook guides the creation and maintenance of a DBT program.  A handful of colleagues and I followed these to the letter in the rural county mental health agency I worked in, and no shit, it worked!  Sometimes I felt like I was emergency-landing a plane with Marsha in my headphones talking me through the steps.   

While I was practicing DBT in this agency, it didn't take me long to realize I needed to deepen my own mindfulness practice somehow.  Then this Zen monastery opened up in the county I worked in, and well, one thing led to another.

Marsha has some serious fans, of course, and I'm unashamedly one of them.  I often joke that I'll make a bundle off my "WWMD" bracelet line.  When she gave a training here, I was able to personally give her one of the singed-robe Jizo Bodhisattva statues made by the monastery.

I have always seen her as a manifestation of  Jizo Bodhisattva going into the hell realms to get others out.

Marsha Linehan, again, with optimism and fearlessness, has done the therapeutic community and the clients we see a tremendous service.  Thank you.


*These meds continue to have their useful place for certain diagnoses and situations, and ECT, now apparently much more refined, is reportedly making a comeback as more of a scalpel rather than the chainsaw it once was.