Japanese Psychology in Times of Uncertainty: A Talk with Gregg Krech

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What Is Important In Our Lives?

Amidst the uncertainties that the global pandemic has caused us, it also opens up opportunities for people to reflect on what really is essential in our lives. What are some of your realizations during those trying times? Gregg discusses how people can get clarity of what's vital in their lives during times of uncertainty.

A time for reflection

Gregg: I think that because so many of us are in isolation and a number of us have found that we now have extra time on our head. We can control in many cases how we use that time.

So we can use that time binge-watching on Netflix but we can also use that time doing some quiet self-reflection on exactly the kinds of questions and the issues that you're raising, which is to try to really get in touch with what is important in our lives. 

I think you're right in many cases people do immediately start thinking of the people that they're close to: their loved ones, their family, their good friends, their teachers, those suddenly rise in importance as we're faced with a situation and we really can think about the relative value of different aspects of our life.

So I think that's one of the things that can come out of this. 

I had an online meeting with people who've been in a course that I just finished called the “Art of Taking Action.” We were talking about the circumstances and this one gentleman who's probably in his 60s or early 70s was saying that he has three daughters.

So they set up a way to kind of connect online but one of them has been estranged from him for many years now, and so he was connecting with his other two children and one of his other daughters said do you want me to ask the third daughter if she wants to be part of this family connection.

He said you can ask her out, I'm guessing that she's going to have no interest, but she did have an interest. She actually reconnected with her family, particularly her father, which hasn't happened for years. 

So I'm not trying to paint a picture of the Coronavirus as being full of blessings. But in this case, one of the outcomes of people's reflection on what's important is that we think about some of the estrangement that we may have from other people in our lives, particularly family members.

We realised that if something happens to them, or something happens to me, we don't want things to end with that kind of unfinished business. So in this case, the threat of this virus may move us in the direction of reconnecting more compassionately or kindly, with people that we've been disconnected from.

Find Something To Be Thankful For

When faced with difficult situations, we tend to think of ways to escape those instances. However, doing so restrains us from addressing our real problems. Instead of trying to change our situation, we must learn to accept that challenges are part of life and that there are still things that we can be grateful for despite all those trials.

Gregg shares the importance of acknowledging our difficult situations and realizing that those situations are more than just suffering.

There’s always something to appreciate around us

Gregg: Naikan actually has a structure to it. The core structure is these three questions:

The first question is, what have I received from others? Or if you're doing Naikan on a person, if you were doing Naikan on your wife, Nick, it would be what I received from my wife? The second question is what have I given? The third question is, what troubles and difficulties have I caused others?

It's a very simple framework which can be used and I've worked with children as young as five years old who can easily understand those questions and work with that type of reflective process.

But to kind of jump into the particular application to our situation right now I recently wrote a poem. I think to me there are two directions we can go in that area that are somewhat off track.

One direction is the direction of looking at our circumstances and just seeing only the problems and the suffering and the difficulties. That's a very seductive path right now because we're challenged by a lot of difficulties and problems and potential things that might come up as this unfolds.

The other path that I think I see is people kind of putting a sugar coating on this, it's creating these wonderful opportunities. It's opening up a chance to remove the pollution from the atmosphere.

I'm not saying that there aren't opportunities or that the atmosphere isn't incurring less pollution. But I think that can be a more pollyannaish type of path where we don't see that there are real problems that we're facing. 

So I tried to use this Naikan process to think about this idea, which originally comes from a Benedictine Monk by the name of David Steindl Rast who's based I think in Austria, he writes a lot about gratitude.

He said something once that stayed with me, he said that “We can't be thankful for everything. But we can in any moment, we can find something to be thankful for.”

And I think he said that in response to somebody asking him, Well, can you be thankful for war? Can you be thankful for violence? So today he might be asked can you be thankful for a pandemic? Because that was his response. 

And I think it's a wonderful response because we can't be thankful for all these people getting sick and being quarantined and suffering from illness, and in some cases dying. We can't be thankful for that.

But we can be thankful for all of the healthcare workers, the doctors and the nurses and the nurse’s aides and people who are working on the front lines under very difficult conditions. Without in many cases the kind of equipment they need, the kind of medical technology they need, there's no real treatment for this virus at this point.

So we can be thankful that there are people out there who are making great sacrifices and taking great risks to try to ultimately protect us and take care of other people but also protect those of us who are isolated from this disease. So that is something we can be thankful for.

As I wrote this poem I went through that list, we can't be thankful for the United States economy crashing. But we can be thankful that there is a safety net that there's unemployment insurance and that the government is trying to provide people with, financial support that we, most of us,  have connections with people in our community, or church or family, who wouldn't let us starve to death as a homeless person on the street.

So we can be thankful for those things even though we can't be thankful for what's happening economically around the world.

Even in my situation, I can be thankful that I live in a comfortable place, I'm surrounded by woods, so I can go out the woods each day, I have internet access, which is how we're talking right now, I have electricity, I happen to be living with two women who are great cooks, I'm eating quite well.

I'm a baker, so I come from a line of bakers in our family so I baked sourdough bread. So I have a lot to be thankful for, even though my life has changed dramatically, and I have my losses and things that I miss, I can find things to be thankful for.

I think that path is in Buddhism, what they call the middle way, but it's the idea that we acknowledge the suffering of the situation. But we see that the situation is more than just suffering.

That there are also things that we can appreciate and be thankful for, within the context of the suffering and the challenges that are going on right now.

Accept The Feeling of Anxiety

Western psychology encourages people to find ways to get rid of their unpleasant feelings. Contrary to Japanese psychology like Morita therapy, which gives people the idea that feelings are uncontrollable. People can live with those unpleasant emotions and still function well; it is all about learning to coexist with those emotions.

Have you ever experienced coexisting with unpleasant sensations? Gregg shares an experience where he was able to coexist with his anxiety.

Our feelings are primarily uncontrollable

Nick: You're touching on an area I wanted to ask you about and that's our feelings so many of us are now going through probably negative or very frustrating feelings. You write: 

"Feelings are sensations and the ability to tolerate sensations we'd rather not have is supremely important. Without such tolerance, our lives remain needlessly honourable to our wild and fickle feelings, and our plans get needlessly derailed."

Now we're dealing with an extreme situation and we have all these feelings of frustration, uncertainty, perhaps even anger. So do you want to touch on that Gregg, how we can cope with these feelings that you described as a sensation?

I think that's a really good way to describe it, sensations, because I think sensation perhaps gives us the idea that it's something that can pass quickly or we can handle them. But when we talk about feelings, they can come across as things that we can't control.

Gregg: I think one of the distinctive features of Japanese psychology, in this case, particularly Morita therapy, is a view that is very contrary to most Western psychology. It’s this idea that our feelings are primarily uncontrollable.

So in a traditional meaning Western kind of psychotherapeutic environment, if somebody comes in and they say, the problem I'm having is my feelings. I feel depressed or I feel anxious or I feel lonely then the work that's done therapeutically is trying to help that person to change their feelings.

So they don't feel depressed, and they don't feel anxious, they feel confident. So we start with what I consider to be just a more realistic perspective that we really can't control our feelings, that we can't control feeling anxious, and most of us are finding that out right now.

If you come aware that you're feeling anxious it's not like you can just hit a button and turn it off. So there are lots of methods in Western psychology that attempt to in one way or another get you to the endpoint which is to not be feeling anxious.

In Morita therapy, the endpoint is to accept your feeling of anxiety,  not to change it, but to accept it. That may sound like it's not as optimal of an endpoint as just getting rid of it altogether.

I'm going to suggest to you that it's a much more realistic endpoint which is to accept that you're feeling anxious because you really can't control it. Once you accept it, what you open up is the possibility that you can live your life coexisting with your unpleasant feelings.

In this case, we're talking about anxiety as an example, you could live your life coexisting with anxiety, rather than every time you feel anxious you have to kind of stop what you're doing and work on getting rid of your anxiety. 

The story that I tell, which is a story that just occurred a few years ago, because I had been a living room musician for much of my life.

A few years ago, I decided that I was going to go out and play in public. The music that I play is mostly blues. I'm a blues pianist. I remember I used to go to these blues jams, blues jams were where musicians would go, and then musicians would just get up on stage, they would be called up and there would be a rotation.

It's very spontaneous. You might be a harmonica player or guitar player and you'd be called up and you would just get together and you just start playing with whoever else was on stage to finish the song and then maybe one of the guitar players would get off stage and another one would come up.

I had decided that that year was going to be the year that I got up on stage and played the piano in front of an audience. I waited until the last blues jam of the Year in December because the idea of playing on stage in public at a club was so terrifying to me.

I remember the moment where I was at this blues jam and I had signed up to go up and play, and the person who was running the jam said, Gregg, can you come up here and play the keyboards for us in the next couple of songs.

I remember just the huge adrenaline rush of fear and anxiety, and the tightening up of all my muscles, and just this incredible anxious response. I also remembered that there was nothing I could control about my anxiety, but to accept it.

So while I was feeling that level of fear and anxiety I was putting one foot in front of the other, walking towards the stage, getting up on the stage and sitting down behind a piano. 

Within about 20 seconds, somebody said we're gonna play this song in the key of A. The next thing I knew, I was playing the piano on stage. But I had no confidence, I had an overwhelming sense of anxiety. But I was able to coexist with anxiety and do the thing that was important for me to do.

That's really what we teach people in this kind of psychology is to be able to coexist with depression, with fear, with anxiety, with shyness, with loneliness, whatever challenging feeling that you're facing, and continue to live your life based on what's important for you to do so that you don't give up your life when you're faced with a difficult or an uncomfortable feeling. 

We're in that situation with our anxiety over the pandemic, over the virus, where we find ourselves in fear of our health, family's health, we find ourselves anxious about our jobs.

There are all kinds of circumstances stimulating, fear and anxiety. So it's a wonderful time to practice this, to learn how to coexist with that. Look at what's important for us to do again, it comes back to this issue of what can we control? We can't control our feelings.

So what do we do? We accept them, but we can control how we conduct ourselves. So what do we do? We go shopping for food, we put some of the food into a food bank box at the door, people who can't afford food, we Skype with our mother or our sister or something to see how they're doing. 

We do our work even though we're constantly feeling distracted. We wash the dishes, we clean the house, we do the things that are important for us to do, feeling anxious, feeling afraid and there's great empowerment that comes from that approach to life.

As opposed to feeling that whenever we're faced with anxiety or fear, we're kind of at its mercy. So it's a very different approach to anxiety and fear. I think it's an approach that is a great fit for the challenges that we're facing in this pandemic.

What Are Inaction Demons?

For most of us, it's easier to neglect things that may cause us anxiety and stress than to get the task done and be productive. Gregg Krech refers to these as inaction demons. 

Empowerment means doing things even when we don’t feel like it

Nick: That leads to what I found appealing in your book was the inaction demons and what I used in the subject lines, the email I sent you because I had uncertainty about contacting you and you know, would you reply?

And will you come on my podcast? So I think I wrote my inaction demons didn't let me stop me from contacting you. I think that's a great way to look at our fears and uncertainty regarding inaction. We could see it as a demon.

So do you want to touch on that?

Gregg: Sure. I think that we have all kinds of ways, all kinds of strategies, some of which we've become very skillful at to keep us from doing the things that we need to do in our life.

So when I talk in my book about the demons of inaction, that's a list of those strategies. You can think of that also like just the resistance that we have to do certain things. We gravitate towards doing pleasurable things, we gravitate towards doing things that are easy to do, gravitate towards doing things that have some clarity involved.

But when we're faced with a situation we need to do that stimulates feelings of discomfort or anxiety, or it's confusing, we're not sure how to do it, like how do I fix my microwave. So there's a sense of confusion or not knowing, we tend to avoid those things.

What happens often when we avoid things that are important for us to do is that we develop a skill that we don't want to have, which is a skill or a habit of essentially going with our feelings.

If I don't feel like working on my taxes, I won't do it. If I don't feel like doing the dishes in the sink, I won't do it. So we do the things we feel like doing and we don't do the things we don't feel like doing. 

For me, I think that's the best definition of procrastination.  Procrastination is an issue of how we're dealing with our emotional or feeling state. It's often that we're doing the things that only make us feel good or we think will make us feel good, and we're avoiding the things that don't.

But empowerment is about being able to do the things that we don't feel like doing because they need to be done in our lives. Our lives often end up being better, more successful, we have fewer problems, when we do things that need to be done when they need to be done. We have to learn how to coexist with feelings like anxiety.

If you do taxes, I assume that in Australia, you have some kind of tax reporting system. If people do that, and they find that confusing and complicated, and therefore they try to avoid it and wait till the last minute, and I speak of this from experience, because I was like this for many years, then what you do is you just create more suffering for yourself.

The least amount of suffering is to just do your tax early, get it filed and be done with it. Otherwise, if you wait months, and months, until the last minute, you have all those months to worry about it and be anxious about it. 

So as we're facing things in our current situation, there's probably going to be several things that we're going to have to deal with. We have to be able to coexist with those feelings, while we take whatever steps are necessary in terms of those kinds of issues.

If we do that we'll manage our lives and we'll manage in this case,  coping with the circumstances much more effectively than if we let our feelings paralyse us or if we're constantly looking for a way to transform them into feeling good. 

So there's an underlying assumption that feeling anxious, fearful, lonely, depressed, is part of the human condition, there is no permanent escape from that, it's just part of the human condition.

Rather than try to find some permanent cure, for those kinds of feelings, we learn to live our lives despite those feelings. By doing that, we get a lot more done in our life. It's not just that we're more productive, but we're also more responsible, and in many cases more successful, we cause less trouble and suffering to other people who are counting on us to do those things when we say we're going to do them. 

So it's a great path for taking care of what we need to do in our life. By again, learning how to accept our feelings. We're not talking about denying our feelings, but learning how to accept them. While we're accepting them to move on.

The metaphor that one of my students years ago developed was, it's like going out for a drive in the car and here you have this feeling of fear, so you just pack up your fear in your backpack or your little suitcase, and you take it with you for a ride and it sits in the backseat, while you do the things you need to do your errands and stuff while you're out.

But for many people, anxiety and fear become the driver. We don't want our feeling state to be driving the car of our life. We want to be able to take that car to where it's important. But we also take those feelings with us because they're part of us so they come along for the ride, but they don't prevent us from doing what we need to do while we're out.

Seeing The Crooked Tree As Straight

We often try to change other people to be the person we expect them to be. Although it might be out of concern for the other person, trying to change them might ruin our relationship with them. Sometimes we are so fixated on changing other people that we forget to check on ourselves instead.

Gregg shares a Zen story about the importance of accepting other people the way they are: seeing the crooked tree as straight.

Stop trying to change people; accept them as they are

Nick: I want to touch on something you mentioned in your course on the website, tricycle.org. That's seeing the crooked tree as straight. It's about how we try and solve our problems by fixing other people.

You have this metaphor or this example of seeing the crooked tree as straight. So would you like to explain that?

Gregg: Yeah, I'll see if I can do the condensed version, it comes from a  Zen story about Zen monk named Ikkyu. He was travelling through a province in Japan and the governor of that province had put up a sign in front of this very gnarly, crooked large tree that was growing.

It's the kind of tree if you've ever seen; trees that are on the coast by the water that has been sculpted by the winds and the rains. It was just an incredibly sculpted and crooked tree.

He put up a sign saying that anybody who can see this tree as straight, will win a prize. All these people would see the sign and they would look at the tree and they walk around it to try to look at it from a different angle, they would think there must be someplace where you can stand where you can see that this tree is straight.

Some people would lay down under the tree, one person actually went home and brought a ladder back to try to climb up to the crown of the tree and look down on it. But when Ikkyu came by, he was a Zen monk, he looked at the tree.

In a moment he left and he went right to the governor's mansion. And he said: "I need to see the governor because I have the answer to the riddle, and I'm here for my prize." The Governor was a little sceptical and he said, "Well , tell me. How did you see the crooked tree as straight?"

 And Ikkyu looked at him and just said "It's crooked." And that's the answer to the riddle. So what does that mean? In the piece that I wrote, I talked about what that means in terms of our human relationships with others.

When we see people, everybody looks crooked in the sense that everybody's got their faults, everybody's got their problems and limitations and there are all these people in our lives and we see how they're living and we think, why don't they just get their act together? Why don't they just, you know, do this or do that? We don't understand why they just can't get their act together and live a good life like I am; like we are.

So we see all these people as crooked, and we put a lot of energy into trying to straighten them out. We do that by talking to them and telling them what they need to do. We counsel them uninvited, we send them emails about it.

So we put a lot of our energy into trying to fix and straighten up other people who we see as crooked. Of course, they're doing the same thing with other people. What we don't realize is that everybody who's in my little forest around me, they see me as crooked.

So we're all trying to straighten each other out. Ikkyu's response of how you see the tree as straight, is by just saying, seeing that it's crooked, is a way of basically just accepting the crookedness of the tree in the sense that there's nothing to be fixed.

This is the nature of the tree. This is how it is, there's nothing to fix about it. It's fine the way it is and as I say fixed, but often we're trying to fix people in a way that we are trying to be compassionate.

We love these people, we want them to have better lives. We want to rescue them from some of the suffering that they're going through, which we feel is unnecessary because they didn't make good decisions.

If we could just stop trying to fix people, stop trying to rescue them from their nature and we could accept them. It would create all of this now freed up space for us to just love them. 

I had this experience with my mother, she passed away about five years ago, but my mother spent a lot of time complaining about everything. I remember being in the car with her once, she lived in Chicago and I was visiting her. We were driving back.

She loved horse races and thoroughbred racing at the racetrack. So I had gone with her when we were driving back, and the whole ride back it was just one complaint after another.

Finally, I looked at her and I said "You know, mom, you complain a lot." And she looked at me, she gave me this look out of her eyes and couldn't put it into words. And she said, "Maybe I like complaining."

I had this little lightbulb go off, this little epiphany that her complaining wasn't a problem for her. It was my problem and I didn't need to fix her complaining. It wasn't my job to get her to be a non-complaining human being.

She was very comfortable being who she was -- so she was a crooked tree, she was very comfortable with her crookedness. The problem was, I needed to be able to be comfortable with her crookedness.

That little moment helped me do that. It helped me drop a lot of my efforts, not all of them, but a lot of my efforts to try to get her to change in the way that I thought would be good for her.

And as a result, when I stopped trying to fix her, we had a much better relationship. It improved significantly, in terms of just being able to concentrate on what I can do to be a loving son towards my mom.

So that was a wonderful gift at that particular moment. It was very much in line with what I think Ikkyu was saying in this story.

For the full podcast conversation, go to: Gregg Krech on Japanese Psychology in Times of Uncertainty