How to Overcome Fear: The Buddha’s Exposure Therapy with Sean Feit Oakes, PhD

Online via Zoom

If mindfulness is the heart of Buddhist psychology, what exactly is therapeutic about it? Mindfulness brings us into experiential contact with that which is painful and causes distress, or dukkha. What we are able to do from there depends on having a therapeutically-appropriate container for processing the energies and emotions of distress. Both Western and Buddhist psychology have the same principle at their core: that relief from a painful pattern requires feeling it and then understanding how it interacts with our sense of self and our relationship with others. This means that mindfulness is a kind of exposure therapy.

Drawing on the Bhayabherava Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 4), we will explore a body-based approach to confronting fear through mindful exposure and somatic awareness. In this discourse, the Buddha recounts his own journey of facing terror in wilderness solitude, revealing principles that remarkably parallel modern somatic trauma resolution and nervous system regulation techniques.

We’ll see how the Buddha’s method of deliberately provoking fear in order to process it with mindful awareness offers a template for resolving anxiety and other difficult nervous system patterns through the body. Through meditation, text study, and inquiry we’ll explore the relationship between the Buddha’s solitary, ascetic approach and contemporary understandings of emotional patterns, nervous system physiology, and somatic trauma resolution. You will learn to recognize your own nervous system patterns and develop skills for approaching anxiety, fear, anger, and other distressing patterns with the same courageous mindfulness the Buddha modeled.

About the Instructor:
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD, E-RYT, SEP (he/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English ancestry, living on unceded Pomo land in NorCal), teaches Buddhism and somatic practice focusing on the integration of meditation, trauma resolution, and social justice. He received teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, and wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. He teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and locally.

Dr. Oakes’ primary Buddhist teachers include Jack Kornfield, Sylvia Boorstein, Eugene Cash, Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, Anam Thubten, and Sayadaw U Janaka, with whom he ordained as a bhikkhu for a Rains Retreat in Burma in 2002. He studied Yoga with Alice Joanou, Rachel Shaw, Amanda Moran, and David Moreno, and taught mindfulness-based āsana and prāṇāyāma for 10 years. He trained in Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Organic Intelligence (OI) with Steven Hoskinson, and integrates the complex systems approach from OI in work toward a distinctively Buddhist approach to individual and collective trauma resolution.