（2017 年 7 月 21 日下午于文殊阁）

This is a very special moment for me. I have visited Bailinchansi for several times now. I visited this temple in winter time, with sun, snow and WuMai, and I was here during the winds of spring and autumn. But this is the first time that I have rain in Bailinchansi, and I am very grateful for this experience. This is a very special moment for me talking to you, may it be helpful for you, may it be helpful for the world.

I would like to introduce myself first. You all already known that I am from Germany and work as a psychotherapist. Last year in January I was able to join winter Chanqi here in Bailinchansi,and when I returned in September I had my Guiyi and my Fahao is YaoYong. Then, in the same year 2017 I became a member of the teacher' s class of Zhongdeban. In Zhongdeban Chinese and German teachers come together in several places in China to teach young psychiatrists and psychologists in how to do psychotherapy.

It is my deep aspiration to help sentient beings and Buddha is teaching us how. On this globe, in this one world where we live in, there is no east and no west, but every culture with its own history requires own methods of learning. I believe that many people in —— what we called —— the West could learn from you, could learn from your faith, and could learn from Buddha Dharma and from Chan. It is my deep honor to talk to you today and give you impression of "how" people can learn that.

First, I would like to give you a short introduction about psycho-therapy and what I do as a psycho-therapist. Second, I would like to describe how mindfulness became an important intervention in psycho-therapy over the last thirty years. And third I would like to talk a little bit about three waves Chan could help clients and could help me also.

1. So, let' s start with psycho-therapy.

When I come home after a long day of work with my clients, I sit on my lounge chair looking outside of the window with an empty glance. Sometimes I can observe a fly bumping again and again against the window' s glass, then a thought rises in me: you silly fly, couldn' t you see there is a window? And while thinking this thought another one pops up immediately: Against which glass do I fly all the time, getting headache by head banging? Finally, I will end the fly' s suffering and it' s up to you to think about how I will do that.

Against which glass are you flying all the time? What are the barriers in your life? Sometimes it' s difficult to recognize. The first of the Four Noble Truths tells us it' s all about suffering. People are suffering, life contains suffering and barriers can become a cause of suffering.

There are different kinds of barriers. Some barriers are obvious， everybody can see them. Borders like the Wall in German' s capital Berlin separated people living in one city, separated people living in one country and separated people living in one world. The Wall became a fatal barrier cutting in everybody' s life deeply. And even when the Berlin Wall was overcome, it' s still remaining in many ways as painful traces. Some borders most of us wouldn' t identify as borders if not mentioned. They could be overcome easily by most people; for some they are barriers separating them from community' s life. Some barriers like the barrier between man and wife may have biological reasons, but not only. As barriers they are socially constructed, rooted in our culture and tradition. For example: In Germany very often women earn less money for the same job they are doing compared with men.

But these are only one kind of barriers. In psycho-therapy I like to use a coin to illustrate different aspects, for example the two sides of barriers. If you take a coin, there is always one side up that you can see. At the same time we know there is another side which we can' t see. So, we have to turn the coin to see the invisible side. And it' s similar with barriers. We have obvious barriers which we can see but there are also barriers we can' t see easily. So, let' s turn the coin and look at the non-visible barriers.

It is human that seek for happiness. It' s our desire to be happy. Perhaps we all know moments in our lives when we look for happiness in the outside world. Perhaps we think we may earn a lot of money to become happy, or drive quick cars. All of us may look for messages in our smartphones, hoping that they can make us happy, or we are looking for love in the outside world - these are only some favorites of people who want to be happy and I am pretty sure there is much more in the outside world connected with happiness we are seeking for - just look at advertisements.

But we all know that the outside world is changing continuously, and all we have could be lost easily and will be gone finally. So please turn the coin again and let us have a look at the other side: Which barriers do we find in the inside world? The opposite of being happy is avoiding unhappiness. When we seriously look inside we will find pain, not happiness. We all know dark moments of deep pain, when there is only one wish: To have another reality as it is in that moment. We struggle with unhappiness and while we try to avoid this unhappiness the more and more we will loose our ability to deal with this unhappiness. The more we try to avoid pain, the more we will suffer at the end. As a result of avoiding pain, we protect ourselves and change our personality into defence-mode.

But everything protecting us will limit us at the same time. While we are in defence-mode we are less flexible, less open but more distant to the world, to others and to ourselves. There is another illustration I like to use with my patients to explain this protection-mode: The umbrella.

The illustration starts with our ego. The ego is a construction of our mind and part of our consciousness. When the ego is threatened in any ways，or thinks it is threatened, it protects itself by a psychological umbrella comparable with the umbrella we we use when it is raining. But this psychological umbrella is a mental process we probably were able to observe in ourselves: For example, you are openly joining a professional meeting with colleagues, someone is making an inappropriate remark about your work and immediately you will see the whole situation more distant, in a more dark light, especially when your teacher or boss is present. This process of mental protection is flexible and we can fold down the psychological umbrella if it is not necessary anymore, e.g. when you come home or meet your friends. But the more threats there are in our life, the more we live in defence-mode and the more we get used to this umbrella. Then we probably loose the ability to fold down the umbrella and the joints rust up，the umbrella will become more and more inflexible and ends as an unpervadable layer -- separating us from the rest of the world. And unfortunately, living under the umbrella makes it impossible for us to see the world as it is, we remain seeing only threats. The problem of this process of psychological protection is: We behave, think and feel on the surface of the layer in a way, preventing our ego from fulfilling its needs. For example, our ego might have the need of attachment, but on the surface we behave in a very distant way, feeling too anxious to talk with others, or feeling anger about others and behave rude. It is my belief that people behaving in a bad way are not bad persons, but they have learned to protect themselves in a less helpful way. As you can see, the causes and effects of this psychological protection might be a reason for doing a psycho-therapy. How does the psycho-therapy looks like?

Here you can see Freuds couch. Freud was the founder of psycho-analysis more than a hundred years ago. Patients had to lie down and talk and talk and talk - sometimes Freud fell asleep. Hopefully you won  t do during this talk. In Germany only very little colleagues still offer psycho-analysis to their patients for many reasons. I myself do CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy), which is based on learning theory. From this point of view all behavior, wanted and unwanted behavior is learned, and something learned could be relearned again.

Here you can see my practice. All visitors come freely, the treatment is paid by public or private insurance, and a therapy lasts one to two years with ten to eighty sessions of fifty minutes each. All of my clients are suffering, some are depressed and want to kill themselves; some are anxious, avoid visiting public places, driving cars or talking with others; some have addictions or eating disorders; some had to experience traumatic life events, for example, the death of a child, or being raped, or they are suffering from a severe illness; some cut themselves with knives to reduce their emotional pressure; some have angry outbursts and hit their children; and some have intense difficulties in their relationships. Most of them don' t like themselves.

As you can see there are many reasons for suffering, and the goal now is to reduce this suffering. This means to oil the joints of the protecting umbrella, increase psychological flexibility, reinforce healthy behaviors and flourish a stable ego.

Doing psycho-theray is like a journey cruising to different islands. These islands are all connected but clients often present their problems on one of these islands，some come to work on their relationship problems; some suffer form problems with their body; some suffer form their self-devaluing thoughts and some suffer form some intense emotions. In psycho-therapy we have treatments to reduce suffering for all of these islands. Usually we start the process of psycho-therapy on the island on which the clients present his or her problem. But sometimes we can' t solve the problem on the island it is presented,and then it is important to be flexible and look for other possibilities. Just to give you an example: You can treat pain on the island of body by medicine, by taking any pain relief. If this might not be enough or helpful，you can change the island and have a look at others: How is the pain linked to unhealthy behaviors, or to conflicts in relationships, or to unrealistic expectations increasing pressure, or to painful emotions like unexpressed sadness.

This journey of psycho-therapy from one island to the other is sometime a long and challenging journey: There are no simple recipes how to solve difficult problems, there is no easy and simple way to recover.

Psycho-therapy is more a kind of discovery in which the client and me, we together are looking out for the middle path，we together try to balance the opposite. The first opposite we work on in psycho-therapy is to balance acceptance and change. Sometimes, if we focus too much on acceptance, nothing changes; and sometimes, if we focus too much on change without accepting the facts first, nothing will happen again. Many problems clients are facing are not easy to change; the more it' s important to balance acceptance and change during the process of psycho-therapy.

The second opposite to work on is the opposite of safety and freedom. Usually clients would like to have both: being in a safe and free situation at the same time, but safety and freedom are different conditions and you can' t mix them up together. For some clients, it is more important to focus on safety and increase safety, and for some it is more important to focus on freedom and increase freedom. How do we balance in psycho-therapy?

The third opposite to work on is the opposite of relationship and structures. Both aspects of life are important, both might help to increase safety or to increase freedom. Let' s have a look on this summer camp: During these days we will try to balance good relationship with each other on one side, but we also need structures on the other side like a timetable and rules everybody keeps.

Another question is: Who do I focus on? In psycho-therapy I have the possibility to focus more on myself as a psycho-therapist and to focus more on the client on the other side. Both views are important and in daily life it is important to balance“me and you”as well. Some friends who I know are very good at caring for others but they are not good at caring for themselves. Finally, there is something else to balance: How can we balance by focusing on cognitions and emotions in psycho-therapy? I personally like very much working with emotions and I would like to come back to the coin you might remember. As a coin has two sides which are very comparable with the way we express our emotions. There is a visible and an invisible side of the coin, it' s like our emotions we share with other people, and there is – at the same time – an invisible side of our emotions we do not share with others. So, combined with the umbrella we can say that one side of the emotional coin is on the surface and the other one is below.

From a psycho-therapist' s view, it could be difficult when both sides are very different. I had a client who was expressing very good friendliness. He was very friendly, but he could also be very angry to other people. During our work, we were able to see that underneath of  this umbrella, there were a lot of sadness and anxiety, too, which he was not able to express to other people.

So quite often we avoid painful emotions, quite often we don' t want to feel or to show emotions. Who likes to be angry? I am sure nobody. But we are sometimes angry whether we want or not. And it is important not to avoid this emotion but to find a way to express it in a helpful way. In between of expressing anger by avoiding on one side and hitting somebody on the other side, there is a big gap we might fill – the best way is to verbalize our emotions and share them to others. To do this, we have to observe our emotions and arrive in that emotion before we can leave this emotion. Therefore, we can say that you have to feel it in order to heal it. It is also similar with our ego. First, we have to arrive at our ego in order to let go our ego. As long as we live in the defense mode against the world, others or ourselves, it will be difficult to overcome the inner barriers, to free ourselves and to realize happiness by letting go our ego.

2. What about mindfulness as a treatment in psycho-therapy?

There is a long history of exchange between East and West going

back to ancient times，the trade of goods was always joined with culture exchange. In the West, psycho-therapy became very famous fifty years ago during the 1960s. In this time psycho-therapists started to travel around the world and especially to Asia bringing back lots of experiences of how to help people. Mindfulness became a treatment in psycho-therapy. More from a scientific perspective, mindfulness was adopted during the 1980s. A huge amount of studies now show the effectiveness of mindfulness training. So, we have an increase of well-being by doing mindfulness, an increase of healthy behavior, coping, concentration, compassion and connection. In our body mindfulness is decreasing blood pressure and other stress-related With health problems. Today we can show that doing a mindfulness training of one hour a day for one month can change important areas of our brain. This study was done by Harvard University, a famous university in the United States.

But please don' t forget these effects are not the goal of mindfulness， the goal of mindfulness is mindfulness. There were two scientific approaches to mindfulness: One approach was described by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a medical doctor who developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)，a structured program including sitting meditation, observing the reactions of the body, and yoga. The other one was described by Marsha Linehan. Her leading question was who is suffering most. She started working with clients who want to kill themselves as they are probably the most suffering people. She developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which became the most effective treatment in the world for clients with borderline personality disorder.

What does this has to do with you? A lot, as you can see here. Marsha is a teacher of Zen herself, but she developed her treatment in cooperation with Willigis Jager.

Willigis Jager practiced Zen for many years and in 2009 he became tansmission as Master of Chan by Master Jing Hui.

So, as you can see the wisdom of all Buddhas, the wisdom of all patriarchs of Zen, the wisdom of Zhao Zhou, the wisdom of Master Jing Hui and the wisdom of Master Ming Hai, they are all part of psycho-therapy treatment, helping people all around the world, reducing suffering and saving life.

The DBT treatment includes many components like group training and individual therapy. Mindfulness is part of all components, but it is trained as an element of the skills training together with the others elements distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness.

But learning mindfulness is not very easy for people from the West, Marsha herself likes to tell a story about her experiences:

When she started to do meditation with her clients, she introduced the sitting meditation and mindful walking. But no one followed her.

She tried to train her clients to breathe mindfully, but one of her clients just sat there and said: “I am not breathing.”

So, you can imagine how difficult it might be to bring meditation to Western people.

Together with Willigis, she developed a structured approach to mindfulness, and split it into different aspects: The “What”-skills: What are we doing while practicing mindfulness? The “How”-skills: How do we do it? And finally, how to find your inner wisdom and radical acceptance?

The “What”-skills are observing, describing, and participating. Frist, observing means to bring attention to the sensations you have

in that one moment.

You can focus on the sound, the smell and all the senses but also on your thoughts and emotions.

You can try to concentrate on your observations and you can try to open your mind and be aware of different aspects of the world.

Second, you can try to describe your observations and put them into words. For example, describing patterns of clouds or describing the face of a person and his or her feelings.

Third, participating means to throw yourself into the activities you are doing in this one moment. You can practice participating with every activity of your daily life.

The"How"-skills teach how to practice observing, describing and participating. They are nonjudgmental, one-mindful and effective.

Nonjudgmental means to see and observe the world without judging or evaluating it as bad or good, e.g. we can look at a picture of ourselves and describe what we can see without judging thoughts. Well, whenever you practice being nonjudgmental in this world you will see it' s very very difficult.

One-mindful means to do one thing at one moment and concentrate your mind. We can practice being one-mindful by making tea, washing dishes or practice meditation.

Effective means to be aware of your own doing and how this is helping to reach your goals.

The training of mindfulness is part of every psycho-therapy I do， but it is combined with all of other interventions I have learned before.

Some clients can profit very easily from mindfulness. And for some this is difficult.

Just to give you an example I would like talk about Mrs. M.: Mindfulness was helping her very much to observe her children' s behavior without judging their behavior immediately. Before she was easily stressed by her children and whatever they did she was shouting at them, judging them as bad. For her it was an important step to stop these automatic reactions by observing the children' s behaviors without reacting immediately.

Another client, Mr. V., he had difficulties in changing from work life to private life. He always drove back home thinking about his work. He had difficulties in stopping his work. So, at home, he was in his mind still at work. For him it was an important step to implement an mindfulness exercise during his ride home. He drove to a parking lot, stopped the car and did mindful breathing for some minutes. This helped him to let go the thoughts about the work and to open up himself for his family.

Mrs. R. was raped in her childhood. She was abused and as one effect she had difficult relationships to other people and a difficult relationship to her own body. She was punishing herself for everything she did wrong and in her believes on herself she did everything wrong. Sometimes she cut her arms.

Doing mindful breathing was too intense for her, she became scared by her own body-reactions, but she was able to focus on the sensations of her left toe. Developing mindfulness for her left toe was her first step to be mindful of her own body.

Last but not least, I would like to talk about Mr. A. ·Mr. A. was a depressed, quite old man. He was very unhappy and lost his job and his family. His major thought on himself was: "I am a looser!" This thought closed his mind, so whatever he did, he thought: "I am a looser!" For him it was important to get a little bit distance between himself and his thoughts. He learned to observe the thought "I am a looser!" Because it makes difference if you say "I am a looser!" or "I can observe a thought in my mind telling me I am a looser.

Observing a painful or difficult thought creates distance, brings back more freedom to look around.

I don' t talk to my clients about Buddha Dharma, and I do not try to convince them to follow Buddha' s path. I' m not allowed to do so. German law is prohibiting religious oriented psycho-therapy. But by reducing suffering and by bringing wisdom to my clients, I try to open the door to spirituality, and some of my clients go through this door. For example, they join a retreat at the center of Willigis Jger, where we were very proud to welcome Master Ming Hai this year.

3. What can psycho-therapy learn from Chan? Mindfulness, compassionand wisdom.

I would like to start with what I was able to learn from Chan. When I was joining a Chanqi in this temple right here where we are all together now, I can tell you, this was probably the most intensive experience of my life. It transformed my views on the world, others and myself. I am very grateful for Xin Ding Shifu, who allowed me to learn so much. Without understanding his words, he allowed me to learn by observing and understanding without words. And I am very grateful for the people I was honored to practice together with. I learned so much from all of them, from all of you.

During the Chanqi, in the temple were we are right now, at the beginning of each period of sitting meditation, someone was switching off the lights, and the sound of the switch and its rhythm were in totally harmony with the rhythm of the bell. Realizing this harmony was my personal awakening, and I learned in that moment to become one with what are you doing. Whatever you do, wherever you do it, become one with what you are doing. Or in the words of Marsha Linehan, throw yourself into an activity, throw yourself into harmony with the world around you. This is not a thought, it is an experience.

More than this I was honored to learn and realize the practice of Chan is the practice of kindness and compassion. Joining a Chanqi was for me a training in improving social capabilities. Wherever I practiced Zen before, in the United States or in Germany, the focus of the meditation was usually on improving the ego, for example: I had much pain or I had less pain, I had a deep experience or I was distracted by many things. During the Chanqi, I was honored to realize that it was not about my ego. Allowing others to find stillness is more important than finding my own stillness — and more and more there is no I and You anymore. To be kind and compassionate to others helps to find inner peace. Perhaps the most important sentence I heard during the Chanqi was: "Bring peace to your heart!"

I realized in that moment that it is in my hands and in my mind. It' s up to me how I react in this world, and it is up to me to bring peace in my mind. By concentrating my mind, by bringing peace to my heart, by opening my heart to others, last but not least, I throw myself into the question: "Who am I?" After joining the Chanqi, I have to answer: "I don' t know!" And today I know that this answer "I don' t know" is more the truth than any answer I gave in my life before. I deeply trust in not-knowing is more truthful than wrong knowing. This is from my experience of joining a Chanqi and I deeply wish all of you to have the chance to take part in a Chanqi.

The journey - in between West and East - started in Germany, heading to the United States for learning from Marsha Linehan, and heading to China to learn from you, is not at the end. Buddha Dharma is endlessly. Once I thought about Buddha Dharma as an iceberg, floating in the sea of emptiness, with only a little part is over the water and most of it is invisible. In the field of psychotherapy, we have just started to scratch a little bit at the top of this iceberg. In this ongoing process of how we can learn in psycho-therapy from Chan there are different waves of progress. The first wave is mindfulness. Mindfulness has become very famous in Western countries， many people practice mindfulness, international companies offer trainings of mindfulness to prevent employees from depression. Mindfulness in our day is wellness, people use mindfulness to relax from all day' s life. For example in Germany you can buy a Buddha statue in super stores for decoration in the garden， but most people having a statue of Buddha in their garden have not taken refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Shanga, they probably are not very spiritual at all. Buddha, for them, is more a symbol for peace and relaxing. With showing these pictures from the super store I don' t want to hurt your feelings, but to show reality in the way people in the West use and practice mindfulness. So, the first wave of mindfulness is obviously only a first step opening people' s heart for spirituality.

We all know that mindfulness alone is not enough，we can mindfully do wrong things and hurt others. Therefore, the second wave how to bring Buddha Dharma to psycho-therapy is to train compassion.Mindfulness and compassion are the two wings let a bird fly. Compassion is the “oil” to increase the umbrella' s flexibility when the joints rusted up. Compassion includes being able to open up, not to stick to the own ego, willing to care for others, open-hearted, being grateful , with loving kindness, full of good wishes.

So, what might be the next wave?

As in all difficult moments, don' t forget to drink tea. I am grateful for Master Ming Hai who introduced me to practice mindfulness by doing Chayi （茶艺）with my clients. More and more I discover the power of this exercise and I love doing the tea ceremony with my clients. Preparing tea itself is a very nice mindful exercise: You can learn to be one with what you are doing. You can smell and taste, and feel the warmness of the tea. You can focus and concentrate your mind on what you are doing. So, altogether it is a lovely mindfulness exercise. And it also helps to discover wisdom in yourself, for example, the wisdom of connection - the wisdom of interconnection, everything is connected with each other. Sometimes I ask my clients to imagine all the people who were connected with this tea we are drinking in that moment. Who picked the tea leaves? Who dried them? Who packed them and shipped them to Germany? Who made the tea bowl? Who was necessary to get warm water? And by imagine all these people who are connected with one cup of tea, it' s quite easy to imagine that we hold the whole world in one cup of tea.

Another exercise of how to bring wisdom to my clients is to experience the difference between me and the tea. So generally, it is very easy to differenciate this is the tea in the cup – and this is "me".So, tea on one side and me on the other side, but what happens when I drink the tea? Where is tea now? It is in my stomach, okay, but only for a while, because it will come out of my body again sometime. But what is coming out of my body is not the same tea I was drinking before, the tea changed by going through my body. And not only the tea changed, "me" has changed as well, the "me" is not the same one before it drunk the tea. So, by drinking a cup of tea I can experience a change of me and the world. And this experience of an ongoing flow of change is very important for inviting people to accept the world as it is. This ongoing change allows us to remember even in the darkest moments of our life, there will be a change at one time, nothing remains as it appears. And we can hold this experience in one single cup of tea.

Another aspect of wisdom is peace. Peace is perhaps the most difficult challenge in life. I am full of deepest respect for people who were able to bring peace to themselves and to others. I know many of my clients are living in circumstance of an inner and sometimes outer war, they are fighting against the world, others and themselves. But a war only knows winning or losing. But that' s not peace. Peace is not winning, not losing, peace is something totally new. Peace is like entering an unknown room, in which you have to let go all of your expectations, your wishes and your thoughts about life how it should be – therefore acceptance is nothing else than peace. To accept difficult or even terrible experiences, for example, if your child has died, means to bring peace to these experiences. Finding this kind of peace is the most difficult job to do. Finding this kind of peace requires the most deepest wisdom.

The last aspect of wisdom I would like to mention is emptiness. What does it mean? Do you remember the coin? As you know already I really like to use a coin to demonstrate and illustrate that there are different sides. Especially if people are suffering and stucking in the world they only see one side. The coin might help them to see that everything has two sides. But the coin' s two sides lead us to a dualistic view in the world, where we only see black and white, me and you, this or that. More important than to see the both sides each is to see both sides in the same moment. How can we do that? There is only one point from where we can see both sides of the coin, it' s the edge. Seeing both sides of the coin in one moment means to balance on the edge of the coin, seeing both sides without being on one of this sides. This balancing of the edge of the coin is a kind of tide rope act. I like this picture from a French photographer: It shows life as a difficult way, not straight. It shows that balancing requires help in this picture by using the rod. It shows a man balancing who is aged – it takes a long time to get wisdom. And it shows the man balancing in an upright posture with an upright stance, remembering us how important it is to have an inner stance especially when we struggle in difficult moments of our life.

With this picture I would like to end up my talk, wishing all of us to find and trust in the right view we can learn from all Buddhas.

With my best wishes to you!