Sunday, October 12, 2025

Good morning, everybody. It's a day with the Dharma is a good day. I am in Berkeley, as you are probably aware, and we had a nice crisp—we have a sunny, beautiful, and a little bite in the air this morning waking up. I deduce that fall is here.

These days, where world events are at, it feels funny not to mention the world. So most of my talk is not focused on that, but I'm going to share one sentence from our founder, Shakyamuni Buddha, about what we're doing here. So he said, "I teach suffering and the end of suffering, period. I have nothing that does not tend toward peace." So that's what we're trying to carry forward in our imperfect way—to understand suffering and the end of suffering, and that everything we think or do or say is tending towards peace.

So as was mentioned, my talk is entitled "Attachment, Non-Attachment, and Secure Attachment." I mean, it seems unfortunate, but perhaps—I was just thinking during zazen—maybe it's auspiciously thought-provoking. Maybe it's not unfortunate. Maybe it's auspiciously thought-provoking that we've ended up with the most important and good thing from the perspective of Western psychology using the same word, "attachment," as what we see as the most problematic thing in Buddhist psychology.

So in order to resolve this, we might think, well, some amount of attachment is okay or is necessary, or maybe it's a different kind of attachment. And that's closer to the approach that I want to present this morning.

First off, the Buddha had an earth-shaking insight, and his earth-shaking insight was not that human beings love each other and, due to impermanence, we lose what we love and then we suffer. We suffer when the people we love, the people we're attached to, suffer or die. Now, there's some Buddhism in and around there because it's truth. It's a definite truth about our lives, and it's something we must keep coming to grips with throughout our whole life. It's not insignificant. And in that sense, it's a dharma, it's truth. And there's some things in Buddha's teaching that make it sound like maybe that is what he's saying. But still, that was not his central insight. And I am going to talk about his central insight.

But first, I wanted to start from the perspective of secure attachment and work my way over to Buddha's insight. So, it's understood these days that for babies and children to develop in a healthy psychological and emotional way, in order for them to feel safe and happy and able to freely express their gifts, they need to have secure attachment with one or more caregivers and have a sense that they can depend on them.

So, what supports this development of secure attachment? And I should say that what I'm going to describe is sort of my own way of talking about secure attachment, based on what I've read about it and also studied in my own experience and through conversations with others and observing other people's experience.

So, first, in order to create secure attachment, parents and caregivers need to be present. They need to be physically close and available a lot of the time—all the time at first, and then a lot of the time throughout a child's development. And they need to be emotionally present, tuned to the baby, their babies and children. So, first thing is being present, physically and emotionally.

Second, unconditional love. The message from the caregiver needs to be that you are loved just as you are. You don't need anything to win love. You don't need to do anything to win love. And love will not be given or withheld based on your behavior in order to control your behavior. There's some bottom line sense of being loved for who you are no matter what.

Third, caregivers need to actively care for babies and children, making sure they have what they need, including food, drink, stimulation, exercise, closeness, language, skilled age-appropriate development. So, parents and caregivers need to study and learn about their child's needs and put their children's needs first most of the time, except perhaps in the famous oxygen mask dropping down situation. Generally, we put our children's needs first. I have two children, by the way—they're 31 and 35.

So, there's probably more about developing secure attachment, but I want to keep it simple with just these three: presence, unconditional love, and active caring, being able to put your child's needs first. And it sounds kind of simple, but it's a tall order. On the one hand, it can be done well enough, and on the other hand, it's not easy for anyone, I don't think.

So, many of us grew up with some sense of deficit in terms of secure attachment. We may have insecure attachment, or we may have what they call avoidant attachment—and I forget the other types, but I'm familiar with those two from my own experience. My husband Alan and I were both avoidant attached. So, when things went wrong, we would sort of go to our corners, retreat to our corners, and then peer out and see if everything was okay, and then we would come out and we would be able to work things out by apology or talking something through or something.

So, our attachment style from childhood plays out in our current relationships. So, it's really helpful to have some sense of what your attachment style is. And each of us can probably recount or have some sense of where or why our parents fell short on one or more of these three things: presence, unconditional love, and active tending.

And so, what gets in the way of a parent being able to offer these three things? So, I'm proposing this morning that what gets in the way is exactly what we call attachment in Buddhism—attachment or self-clinging. And the main thing is not so much that self-clinging is like a morally wrong thing to do, but it's that our understanding of ourself and what we are is based on misperceptions and misconceptions.

It seems like ourself and others and things have this kind of inherent existence, some solid existence from within themselves, when actually, everything is just this huge complex unfolding of causes and conditions. Nothing stays, nothing lasts, there's no one changing core to anything. And this kind of causes us to be confused about what makes us happy, what will make us happy. We see all these things outside that look like they'll make us happy—like money, fame, success—that we need to acquire or achieve. And it's because we're confused about how the self exists. This inherent thing, the solid core, seems like something that could be satisfied or that needs to be shored up or fulfilled.

And our ideas about ourself are somewhat contradictory. We say "self," "ourself"—we mean the part that would continue no matter what, and sometimes we mean the part of us that's most vulnerable. And so sometimes it's the part that has continued since we were born, or even before we were born perhaps, and sometimes it's the part that could be destroyed by humiliation or shame or death.

So the point is that we're confused, mainly about ourselves and about other selves. Others look solid, and it looks like everything other people do is intentional and conscious. You know what I mean? It's so easy to judge and blame when we believe that selves are solid things. It's so easy to judge and blame ourselves, and it's easy to judge and blame others.

So this terribly confused idea of how we exist and how others exist causes us to attach or cling. We're attached to our identity. We're attached to our imagined idea of who we are. And it's largely because it's inaccurate and imaginary that our attachment is a problem. In fact, in Buddhism, it's the main problem.

It may seem like it's really hard to see through our attachments to self. It seems so real, so solid. But it's good to be reminded that we've already seen through some of our attachments from childhood, our misconceptions, over the course of just growing and maturing. You find out that things are empty, whatever it is. Maybe as you get older, you find out how empty being beautiful is, and then you are, you find out you get money and you find out how empty that is to be satisfying. So just by through natural maturity, we let go of some things by seeing that they're empty.

So we actually see emptiness, but we don't necessarily phrase it that way. We don't think of it as Buddhist emptiness, Buddha's emptiness.

So what I'm—so my thesis here this morning is that the thing that gets in the way of children developing what Western psychology calls secure attachment is the thing that prevents parents from being present, from bringing forth unconditional love, and from being able to tend to their children's needs ahead of their own, and that is our own deluded attachments to the confused idea of self and other.

The Buddha never said that parents should not love their children. In fact, he used maternal love as a model for how we should feel towards all living beings. In the Metta Sutta, which is one of the early Pali scriptures, he says, "Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over and protects her only child, so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things, suffusing love over the entire world."

I think for some of us having children was kind of a jump start to our bodhisattva vows. I was not so compassionate before, but I was very moved always through my early years of practice. I was moved and inspired by this passage in the Metta Sutta. But then when I had a baby I was like, "What? This feeling? This very feeling I'm having right now is what I'm supposed to spread and suffuse over the entire world for all living beings. How is that even possible?"

So let's say a parent is able to feel and express unconditional love for their child. Let's hope that at least that baseline is true. However, it's really still conditional because it's for that child, for your own children.

So for me, there's another set of turning points in parenting. When you have to—I believe, supported by many years of practice before my kids were born—you have to decide to let that unconditional love flow out to others. Maybe starting with other children like my kids' friends or their families, my kids' teachers, and then gradually the whole village that you have to engage to raise a family.

And if you don't make that turning, you might fall back on seeing your kid in competition with others and needing your kid to do better than others or get more than others. And suddenly we're fully back then in this confusion of self-clinging and making things that really aren't about us into being about us.

So it's easy to begin to see our kids as something that could maybe bring this ultimate satisfaction we're longing for. If we could just get them to be who we see they could be or we want them to be, to succeed in the way that we think success is. And that makes our love conditional. And that makes our focus be somewhat off-kilter from being fully present. It makes us unable to tune into and understand what our loved one needs.

So, secure attachment applies beyond childhood, really, to all our love relationships. We feel safe in relationships when there's open communication and we can rely on each other. So what I'm bringing up holds true for all our loving relationships—what helps us feel secure and open and close, what supports our secure attachment to each other.

Well, when the other person is present emotionally and physically, when they love us unconditionally, and they can connect and support us in practical ways. And how do we offer space and safety to others, to the loved ones in our lives? By being present for them, loving them unconditionally, and offering active support and connection.

So last night I had a dream about this tub. I guess it was about my talk. In my dream, my neighbor downstairs was thinking of moving. So, his name is Yoni and a few years ago, right in the middle of the pandemic, at the residency—I live at the Berkeley Zen Center, I'm a resident and there's nine residents here—and in the middle of the pandemic, we had a turnover of residents where we had all these younger people moving in. They're basically the same age as my kids.

And so they're kind of like surrogate children. Not surrogate children from childhood, but like surrogate adult children. My relationships with them are sort of an echo of my relationships with my adult children. And whether this has anything to do with it or not, my actual son, my biological son, did move out and moved to Oregon from Berkeley about a month ago.

In my dream, Yoni's thinking about moving out. And the question arises—and I can't remember whether it's in my mind that it arises or someone actually asks it in the dream—but like, so which is it? If I have a feeling of sadness about Yoni moving out, which is it? Is it secure attachment, consequence of secure attachment? Or is it clinging, attachment like in Buddhism?

So I don't exactly know the answer, but I think it's probably some of both. And it's probably more about what I do about it and how I frame it to myself. So if I frame it that I'm losing—and this is true of my relationship with my own son—if I frame it that I lost one of the people who supported me during these past two years, I feel lost or sad. There's no other word for it.

But if I think about, as I've learned to do as a parent—as I think you need to learn to do as a parent—I kind of live by carelessly. So if he's stepping into a new stage of his life, he's opening up into something new and exciting. I have that. I'm turning toward something new and exciting. So that's more the open-hearted way.

So I think both are true. I have a secure attachment, which is my unconditional love for him. And I also have some clinging. I have some self-involved... So I have, in my notes, I say, "End or go on." End here or go on. Because I have one more point to make. And I was going to look at the clock and see it's only 11:30. So I'm going to go ahead and make my other point. And hopefully we'll still have a little bit of time for questions and answers.

And this is a whole other spin. So I hope you're with me so far. So what about our relationship with our self? How do we feel towards our own self-clinging? How do we feel towards different experiences that we have that someone might consider, or that we might consider, self-clinging or bad or wrong or something? Can we—is there a way to have secure attachment with our self?

And so I think this is related to what Suzuki Roshi calls big mind or true self or Buddha nature. Big mind holds everything. Big mind relates to all of our small minds, all of our confusion, our attachments, and all of our confused ideas of our self.

So "self"—there's another word that can mean two opposite things. I've studied this Western psychological model you may or may not have heard of called Internal Family Systems. And their word for what we in Soto Zen, at least, or in Suzuki Roshi's way, call big mind or Buddha nature, they call "Self" with a capital S. And their word for what we might call self or small mind or attachments is "parts." We have all these parts.

And when the parts are not in relationship to capital-S Self or big mind, they are extremely confused and unhappy.

So how do we develop this secure attachment within ourselves? So I'm proposing the same three things: learning how to be present for ourselves. And that means moment by moment with the incredible flux of our lives—our physical experience, our emotional experience, how we think about things, and our spiritual experience. Which is basically zazen. Zazen is making a sincere effort to be fully present with ourselves. And ourselves in the sense of our so-called parts inside, you could say. And ourselves in the bigger sense of everything.

So then being present and then unconditional love towards ourselves. Big mind, what Dogen referred to as grandmotherly mind towards ourselves. Big mind towards our confusion.

How do you feel about—when I was talking about self-clinging and attachment, if you look at what came up for you about yourself, how do you feel towards that part of yourself? If we're in big mind, we feel unconditional love towards those parts of ourselves.

And then taking care of ourselves, acting on our own behalf—not on behalf of our limited, confused, delusional, static, anxious, controlling selves, parts, but our own true self. And we take care of our own true self, which is actually everything, everything that's happening moment by moment.

So that's what I prepared and I'd love to hear your thoughts about these ideas.

Thank you, Laurie. We're going to take a deep breath here and think about what you said. And then we'll turn the floor over to our folks for some dialogue with you. Thank you.

Question: Laurie, I'm Erin. Hi. I'm thinking about this in relationship to not exactly people right now, but to myself and place, because I've recently moved. And the move was a welcome move. But it's interesting. I think I've returned enough now because I've moved throughout my life to different places, probably more than most people. I'm relating with it differently this time, each time actually.

And being okay when I feel my resistance to the energies—that's how I would describe it, the bigger energies that arise. Really what it is is fear. Because when you start to feel yourself letting go of something that either you knew you were attached to or didn't, and particularly when you didn't know you were attached to—

So it's, wait a minute. And not judge them and know that it's just a process. That happens every time I leave a place because I personally—I think most people do, I was talking about this with someone earlier here in our group—I think everyone is permeated by place. I do. I intentionally develop intimate relationships, particularly with my natural surroundings and place.

And so I'm very aware when I leave my natural surroundings in particular, there'll be a grieving period, whatever I've become intimate with. So I'm just noticing how I have a different relationship with that. And then I don't avoid it as much. And then therefore go into resistive strategies in order to not feel. Just to come to the resistance of just—

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. And it's so—I mean, it reminds me of what we chanted, the "Merging of Difference and Unity"—had a different title the way we chanted it. The two sides are always going to be in a conversation with each other. That's why you don't want to leave that fear. That's the part, you know, you don't want to leave that out on its own. You want to always be in relationship to it. So your true self or big mind or whatever, you call it, always holding that close and being present with it and accepting like, of course you feel that way.

And humans, culturally we're much less place-based than humans have been for... We have a sense of place and home and all that. And also if your move is kind of an intuitive, "This is the next step for me," that's also coming more from the unconditioned side, that intuitive sense. And there's always going to be that this other side, the human side, which is always going to—you know, go for what's dangerous about this? Well, that's our first thought because of the negativity bias of our natural selection of human beings over thousands of years. What is dangerous about this?

So that's going to be natural. So it sounds like through—you've done it enough times that you have a maturity around what comes up, you know?

Question: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You could help other people with that because you've learned a lot about it.

Laurie Senauke: Thank you.

Question: I'm also—I'm going to say something else also. Sorry, lost my train of thought. This noted, "Wherever you go, there you are," it's kind of a phrase I use a lot. Because I've noticed the same particular thought pattern, one in particular from childhood. When I uproot, which is a deep sense of aloneness in the world. I don't like to use this phrase that much just because I think it's been a bit overused, but in this case, it feels appropriate, which is to befriend that. Doesn't feel like this big scary monster when it—

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. Yeah. And that's getting back to—and I won't carry on about this, but the attachment style I developed as a child then and carry that forward. As well as, I think, you know, attachment styles aren't just clear-cut. They're integrated into a fabric of who we are that, on one hand, is a mystery, and on the other, we can parse apart sometimes and point to, I guess, more fractally.

I'm noticing that I'm getting—I should say I'm maturing in that relationship too, to when that rears its head like, "Oh, there you are. Yes, of course, you come with me everywhere I go."

Laurie Senauke: My husband used to say it resolves to a subtler level. Yeah, that's nice. It's always going to be with you. You're spiraling around this set of—you're not going to suddenly become a completely different kind of person. You're just feeling completely differently about everything. Like that's not in the cards, you know.

It's not a button that gets pushed.

Yeah. Yes, yeah.

Hi. I don't know what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. Somehow an insight that just created two new words in my vocabulary is—one word in our language seems to encapsulate the clinging, and the word is "the boy, the girl." And here's the new words: the nounification of our existence, "self."

And so that when there is "the," then there is immediately "other." It's how we make objects so we can talk about things. And so the second new word is "verbification." Where I as self within and part of and indistinct from the flow of—and within that on an experiential level, as of late, I am only existing in this moment, which is itself passing.

So whether I'm clinging or detached, whether I'm fearful or joyful, it's part of the verbification now. Whether I'm silly or wise, and then a moment still calling that verbification. And because I don't—again, using this new word—verbify alone. And I am also within the fluid or non-fluid harmonization or disharmonization.

You're sillying or—you said, "I'm silly," or what—playful. You're sillying or playing, you know. The verb means you're doing it, not that it's a thing. It's a happening or something. It's more enjoyable being in a harmonious relationship—

Laurie Senauke: Yeah.

Question: The field.

Laurie Senauke: So harmonizing.

Question: Yeah, we're harmonizing. Internal and external are only conveniences. There's the field. And that which is engaging in the field. And it's pretty fluid.

Laurie Senauke: It's not even like the field is inside, too, as we know from zazen. Sometimes what's happening inside of us feels like "other," you know. But—

Question: I just had to say—

Laurie Senauke: Yeah.

Question: Thank you for awakening that.

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. I will not cling to what I just said. Thanks.

Thank you. Inside and outside are just—are not two. As we say, which is different from saying it's one. I like this. And we're not two. We're not saying we're one. But we're not two. And we're not more than two.

Question: Those—some of us empower. I think there are. What he had to say, and he said it anyway, I have nothing to say, and I'm going to say it anyway. What your talk triggered for me was not so much the Buddhist attitude toward, but the words. And what happens when we don't get that secure attachment.

My story is my daughter's 34 years old, special needs daughter that still lives with us.

Laurie Senauke: And I honor you for that work. Caregiving is really intense and indescribable work.

Question: Yeah. We're from China, and this is not a racial thing. This is what happened to infants and what happened there. We thought if we bring her over and we love her, that everything will work out, but she did not get that secure attachment in the orphanage. She got physical attachment. They fed her occasionally, but no one held these children. They had no secure attachment. They banged themselves against their crib walls. And when you skip—what we've learned is when you skip certain parts of your brain development, you can't go back.

And so there's gaps in there. And if you talk to her for an hour, you would think she's a lovely woman and perfectly fine. And the second hour, you'd have doubts. And by the third time you meet her, you say, "There's some problems here," because she had those gaps. And so we've adopted to those, but could you say anything more about when you miss these attachments?

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. I think that, well, I believe that there can be healing and not absolute, but that's part of what Western psychology is trying to do. And part of what Internal Family Systems is trying to do is to heal the missing attachment, the wounds, to heal the attachment wounds.

Certainly, I think you should know that what you've been doing for 34 years or 32 years or however long it's been has brought about healing for her. And it's not absolute and forever and complete, but just—we have to have faith, I think, that we can heal. And in relationship is how you heal. You redo it, you know. You redo it.

So my husband and I both had insecure, avoidant attachment because that's how we got through—we went away, and then we didn't come back, we just went away. But what we learned to do with each other is—well, we still went away, but we came back and worked things out, you know.

So sometimes you can't and sometimes—then I don't always go away, but I still—it's still an option, a default option in trouble, you know. But I've also got other tools that I've developed. And I honor you. I hope she continues to develop other tools and develop. We're all impaired. I mean, that's—it's okay to be impaired. It's not a problem to be impaired. Yeah, we're all impaired. So, just good work, good work.

We all live somewhere on the spectrum. That's why they call it a spectrum, right? I often say to myself, "Hint of—" I hope—hint of Asperger's, you know, if I look back on my childhood. So yeah, hint of Asperger's. They didn't have it, they didn't have the diagnosis then, but—

Thank you.

Question: Laurie, I'm Chodo Dave here. I'm a little off-screen. I'm not sure you can—I can hear you. I was thinking of your letting us know that your son has moved from Berkeley to Oregon and that one of the things you spoke about with secure attachment is physical presence, co-presence.

And I was wondering if you could just share with us how you're thinking about that and how you, or can you replace that physical closeness, that co-presence that you have with a different way of being present with him? Because I suspect that you are always going to be his mom, he's always going to be your son, that secure attachment. So it's kind of a practical question of how do you navigate that sort of no longer physically being present to see the person?

Laurie Senauke: Yeah, it's a good question. Well, they're not the verbals, all of that that comes with being physically present. Well, because—because he had relatively secure attachment, I think—not that we didn't make mistakes, but we're in pretty close contact. Fortunately, I try not to initiate too much, try again, because of—I don't want it to be my needs exactly, you know. We're not equals like if we were here, that would be different. He's always going to be my kid, and I'm going to be the mom until I'm feeble and he has to take care of me—hopefully not right away.

I mean, actually, both my kids really stepped forward to take care of me during the last two years. So we had a little role reversal there. And of course, we were all grieving, but I think that the secure attachment is much more—can be much more elastic if you have it there, if you've established it. Right? We established it, and now we can go far away and still a word or a text or a joke will bring us back, especially a joke—my son is very funny. Will bring us back together, and it feels like closeness, you know.

I do, I am—now that I'm—I wandered from my family, I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and I wandered to San Francisco. And now I very much understand why people didn't wander. Now that my daughter's going to have a baby, she's in Chicago, like, "Oh, now I understand why you had the family compound with the kids building another house for the kid in the back and staying close."

So I think it is kind of—it's not—what's the word? It might not be so good the way we've set things up as having this wanderlust or this something. We think about people who established this country and they came, they wandered. And we're just sort of, we still are wandering in a way. We keep wandering. It's in our DNA somehow.

So maybe some of us more than others. I think some people have established a home somewhere and the kids will keep staying generation after generation—that can happen too. But so I'm guessing I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. On the one hand I'm saying with secure attachment, you can be far apart physically and still have a way to run the energy between you somehow. And on the other hand, closeness is good and being close, especially with the next generation coming along, which—when those babies need, they need to establish secure attachment. And I want my grandchild to have a secure attachment with their grandmother. Like, how am I going to do that, you know?

So, both are true, I guess, yeah.

Question: Thank you for that. It sounds like that money in the bank you have with him from—

Laurie Senauke: Right. Yeah.

Question: You can keep drawing on.

Laurie Senauke: Thank you, Laurie.

Thank you.

Question: Other comments. Just real quick, another word for secure attachment would be connection.

Laurie Senauke: Yeah.

Question: And then the other—he's going to Portland?

Laurie Senauke: He's going to Corvallis. He's in Corvallis.

Question: I was afraid for him.

Laurie Senauke: Oh, yeah. Poor Portland, my hometown. Yeah.

Question: It's funny. You should say that. I had a friend that just visited her best friend for a week in Portland. I said, "How was it?" because I'm reading about ICE. And she said, "We never saw them."

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. It's pretty localized. Yeah.

Question: It is. Reports make it sound like it's just all over, and she said, kind of the place where it's happening and it's a small—it's not overwhelming the city. It's just—you have to read the news with a little bit of a skeptical eye.

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. And the same is—I mean, and that cuts both ways too. Like I know in Berkeley, I don't see—I've friends of mine are doing various kinds of accompaniment and I don't see. But I found out that a woman who runs this store that I—that's on University Avenue. This sari store—she came from India and started this store that sells saris. And she was just deported back to India after being here 20 years, running this store for 20 years. So it hits me, but it's—even though I don't see—I don't see ICE agents, but it's still impacting us.

So, yeah. And, you know, look around where they were. Where's Berkeley on the list? How high is Berkeley on the list, right?

I think we have time for one more question here before we close. And so, Ian and Josephina, you haven't had a chance to speak. I don't know if you want to. The floor is open.

All right. Any parting comments from anyone?

All right, Laurie, we're—you can't see all of us in gassho bowing to you, but we are. And so grateful to you.

Laurie Senauke: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure being here. We'll close here with just a bell and the Four Vows. And then we do some internal announcements so you can stay with us as long as you would like.

Okay. Thank you, Laurie.

Thank you.