This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. It's nice to see so many familiar faces. It's Wednesday night. hump day. I'll try and I'm going to speak briefly because it's Wednesday night and everybody's tired often. So I'll try and make it entertaining enough so you don't fall asleep. But if you do, it's okay. I won't mind. So I just want to take a moment to arrive fully with you. You've been sitting here for a while, but I kind of want to join you a little bit.

[01:04]

And it's just really nice to be here sitting in the Buddha Hall. It's been a long time. It's nice to sit here again. By the way, I'm Marcia Angus. I don't know all of you. Is anybody here for the first time? I can't imagine that could be true. U.S.? Oh, welcome. So... For the last week, I've been in Burlingame at the final module of a three-year training of something called somatic experiencing. Maybe many of you have heard it. Jane Lazar is a priest here that has gone through that training. And the thing that was so amazing to me, this last module had to do with touch. So I thought, you know, Being a regular therapist, touch is sort of taboo. But this kind of touch, it was amazing to me how little it takes for somebody who has trauma to settle.

[02:14]

And I kept thinking the whole time I was there how much this felt like zazen, but with company. Because the first thing you have to do is show up. and show up completely fully in your own body. And ideally, if you're the practitioner, you should be regulated, meaning calm, not in an activated tense state, but pretty centered. And one of the other requirements is that you be a witness in appreciation and compassion for the person in front of you and for whatever arises in them. And this kind of trauma where it could be, it could be like something like a tsunami or it could be something like that happened to you in your early childhood or some bad thoughts you learned about yourself that you came to believe, but that end up having a kind of...

[03:27]

activating, a negative activating effect on your state of mind and on your life. So there we are, sitting with our hearts open, paying attention to whatever arises in excruciating detail. And more and more it was like zazen. So I'm paying attention to my heart rate, and to the heart rate of the person in front of me. And I'm watching various activating and settling cycles, which is what we go through when we sit zazen. You know, we'll sit down and then maybe we'll think some difficult thought or we'll feel some difficult feeling and we'll notice ourself get kind of dysregulated or our heart will start beating or we'll start having a negative thought loop running in our heads. And there'll be a number of physiological, I guess you could call them symptoms or events that occur along with whatever you're running in your head or maybe something's happening in your body that's causing you to think certain kinds of things.

[04:51]

And we just sit there and we try and show up and be present with a compassionate heart and an open mind, without judgment, try and bring our grandmother mind to whatever's arising. And then we watch ourselves hopefully settle a little bit, feeling fully what's happening to us. And as we do that, we develop more tolerance for the full brunt of who we are. And that's, to me, that's zazen, but that's also trauma healing, where you kind of, in a titrated way, allow yourself, develop the capacity, the courage, and the strength to sit still for yourself, no matter what.

[05:58]

no matter what comes up. Because often there's things that come up that we've been trying to avoid forever. Certain feelings, we've decided we just not, you just don't want to feel those anymore, ever again. And we sometimes consciously or unconsciously make a policy about that, and so when that feeling starts to arrive, we kind of constrict or contract. Or maybe we just space out altogether. Or maybe we shut down. Because what I've noticed is these are habit patterns. And they don't go through central. They just, here it is, and when you're going, oh, I'm in a state. Can I stay here with myself? Can I stand myself even? Can I just stand? Being this person with these kinds of feelings and these kinds of thoughts, some of which I got a little brainwashed and I don't know how to stop them.

[07:07]

I want to stop them. That's what I want to do. I want to stop them. And the more I sit still and pay attention, the more I begin to understand how it is I'm doing that. And I start to, at some point, if I keep at it, I'll feel a choice point. But initially, we don't usually feel it. We don't feel a choice point. It's just happening to us. We don't... We think it's so much of what goes on in our body. It's sort of your... Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own. As I was... I had a thing happen during the training and all... Maybe I'll share it with you, because it was so stunning what I found out, and it was not what I thought. And that's the other thing about being open and not thinking you know what's going on, but to actually sit with yourself with an open mind without thinking that you know, oh, this is that, and that means that, and I know why I have it, so never mind.

[08:21]

It doesn't work out like that exactly. I've been going and visiting this man in prison, and it was okay going in. It's kind of like going through the TSA, only with no soft surfaces anywhere, and everybody's grumpy. And you can only bring your license and your car key without the keychain into the prison. So I get in, I talk to this person, and I found... I've only seen him three or four times, but every time I leave, I have a really hard time leaving him there. I just feel like I'm... It's terrible that I'm leaving him there in that awful prison. And it's ludicrous. I mean, there's nothing I can do about it. But I just feel like I'm abandoning him. And so I was... I had a consultation with one of the teaching assistants about this, about, you know, what do I... What is that? And...

[09:22]

So she had me just do a little SE and just start to notice what was happening in my heart. And I just tracked that, and I started to feel really sad, really weepy. And I just felt like it was just the worst thing in the world to leave this man there. And the more I sat with it, and I'm thinking I'm sad about this man, that's what I decided this was about. And because I was adopted, I didn't want to abandon him. And so that's what that was. So I sit there and she goes, well, let's just track this for a little minute, Marsha. And I can feel myself not wanting to go there. I don't want to go down that road. I don't want to feel those feelings. I already know what they are, so there's no point. But I acquiesced. And what arose out of tracking my heart rate and my breath was, and it arose out of nowhere from just sitting there, was feeling unseen when my mother gave me up for adoption.

[10:49]

And having some feeling, that she didn't say goodbye properly. And if that wasn't bad enough, that when I arrived at my new parents' home, they didn't treat me as a grieving baby that had just lost her mother. And that there was something about not being acknowledged as being a sad little baby who lost her mother. that made me feel disconnected. And somehow being able to just sit there and cry about how much that would have meant to me, which is like, sounds so nuts, you know, it's a baby. And yet we know that

[11:53]

Babies pick up those kinds of acknowledgments, not in some intellectual way, but there's something about, and they know it about operation rooms too, that if doctors go, excuse me, Marcia, I'm going to have to cut you now, so I know you can't feel it, but I'm going to be really careful. That kind of attitude... changes the way somebody experiences an operation. And we also know that saying something like, I have to say goodbye to you, I don't want to, but someone's going to take care of you, that there's something about that exchange that makes a difference. Anyway, I sort of have this experience come up, which feels... like the truth, even though as I'm listening to myself, I'm going, oh my God, this is getting a little out there, Marcia.

[12:59]

It resonated so profoundly in me, and I felt such a deep relaxation and settling after that, because what this woman did, so it was enough that I, I thought it was enough I said it, but no, no. She then said to me, what I wished my birth mother would have said and then said to me what I wish my parents would have said and what they would have allowed and that they would have comforted me. And the impact was really amazing to me. And something in me just, or several things in me just felt much better. And I felt much more connected to myself and much more connected to her, and in a way much more connected to this man. And this to me is, this was a circuitous route, but it brought me to the same place I get to in Zazen and doing Buddhist practice, which is the more I am present, completely, profoundly, deeply, in deep and excruciating detail, present,

[14:20]

in my own body and mind, the more connected I am, the more connected I am to everybody else. And it's, there's a profound intimacy that comes with being that intimate with yourself. And it's not personal. So here's this deeply personal and my experience with the person I was consulting with was that it was deeply intimate, but it was not personal. She had gotten out of the way, but I felt profoundly connected and that we were sharing a deeply intimate moment, but it didn't have to do with anything about our personalities. or how cute we were, or witty, or anything else.

[15:28]

So I've been thinking about this because the other thing that is true about this training is that when they train teachers at Spirit Rock, which is the Vipassana school just over in Marin County, part of the training is that all the teachers-to-be take that first module in somatic experiencing. And it's so clear to me why. Because there's two things. One, you learn a more precise way to settle in yourself. But also, if you're in training as a priest, you actually become much, much better at recognizing when somebody is... too overwhelmed to be sitting zazen right now. That it would be like throwing somebody into the deep end before they are ready to fully be present for themselves.

[16:35]

Because you have to be somewhat regulated. And if you start having big trauma things while you're sitting and nobody knows what you're going through and they have no idea how to help you. Anyway, I just started to Think about that as something that would be helpful to do here. So, what else do I have to say? I have all these things I wrote down, but of course I'm not saying any of those. Because you're causing this. We're having a fully dependent co-arising here. There's no doubt about that. Because, let's see, I said that, and then... So I don't need to say that, because I sort of said it already. So, in this... That's the other thing I thought about, that being the practitioner in these...

[17:44]

there'd be a demo, and then we'd break up into triads, and we'd do this particular aspect of the training, whether we were focusing on joints or breath or organ systems. There's all these. It's very complicated but simple. But what I noticed was, in being the observer and in being the practitioner, was the profound effect of having somebody who's regulated be present and just hold space for somebody who isn't, for somebody who's upset, who's having trouble landing in themselves. Just being able to sit there and not turn away and not move in and crowd them, but just kind of hold that space. And I thought, well, gee, that's what a good teacher does, isn't it?

[18:45]

When you get in a soup, in a sashin, you go and talk to your teacher, and they're just there. I remember I was kind of falling apart during a sashin. I went in to see Michael Wenger, and he just looked at me and smiled. He said, keep going. But there was something about just sitting with him that allowed me to remember that. how to settle. I kind of forgot for a minute. I was kind of blown away by something, and I forgot. And just his sitting in front of me, smiling with his big heart open, reminded me, oh, I'm just having a feeling. It's just a thought. That's all. I can do this. So that's what we're trying to be ourselves.

[19:51]

I think when we do zazen, we try and be the witness, the compassionate, kind, loving witness for whatever arises, no matter what, unconditionally. Hi, Vicki. Nice to see your smiling face. So I'm gonna break down and Read a poem. I wasn't going to, but I am, because I like this. I always think it's kind of cheating if you read a poem. But I like it, because this is a Donna Fald's poem, and I think both Blanche and myself, and I can't think of her name. She was the... She co-led the practice period with you. Gutierrez, Baldoquin, Reumann.

[20:52]

So we all read this and lectured on it during the practice period. So it's called The Witness. When I can be the witness, all manner of miracles occur. Old wounds heal. The past reveals itself to be released. Present dramas play themselves out without sinking emotional talons into my soft skin. The witness welcomes truth and dares to meet reality on its own terms. It is the ground in which the seeds of transformation take root and finally flower. When the witness is awake, the lake of mind is still. In that mirrored surface, I see my own true face as spirit smiling back at me. And I think of this as just so much of what it's like when finally the stories drop away and our minds become calm and then we actually can experience our true nature.

[22:12]

And it's nice. I think our true nature is pretty good. So let's see what else I have to say. What time is it? Oh, good. Okay. Oh, that's the other thing was doing this was how little it takes to complete something that you've been habitually avoiding. And that we have that often. There are lots of people who like to avoid confrontation, for example. And we have all kinds. We don't even realize we're doing it. We don't even realize we're avoiding conversations. We're avoiding eye contact. We're avoiding, avoiding, avoiding. And to start to just begin to notice that we're even doing it, to be able to sit still that effectively that you can actually notice that you're doing something that has been like, you know, as automatic as doing that.

[23:39]

Where I didn't decide, you know, when I do that often, I didn't decide to move my hand up to my head. It's just a habit. But what's that about? Well, it's about becoming more comfortable and getting the hair out of my eyes. But reflexive habits like that are not always adaptive. Sometimes they're maladaptive. And starting to notice which ones those are, where those are. It's not so easy because it's all so insidious. They don't even know we're doing it. until somebody either tells us or it seriously stops working. And what I noticed about that was that when you slow somebody down, when somebody's starting to roll into a very activated state, and maybe they are starting to say something like that, or they're starting to do that or that, and you go, well, let's just slow that down,

[24:46]

and you let the person feel into what that gesture's about, usually that expands their experience of whatever it is and gets under the story they were telling themselves. Like I was telling the consultant about the prisoner and what was under that was having a reasonable goodbye And that's the other thing for me also is that to show up without adding anything. I usually really want to make, especially being a shrink, we learn to make a lot of interpretations and to actually show up and not know what this is all about in the person in front of you. But it also works for yourself to show up and notice that you're having an experience and to have a beginner's mind and really...

[25:51]

not add your interpretation too quickly to notice that you're even making one and to allow yourself just to feel what you're feeling without naming it and see what happens. It's a whole other way to go. I highly recommend. So, learning how to show up in detail and hold space in that way. I think encourages a person and encourages oneself in whatever they're trying to do. To get unstuck, to find another way to be present with themselves. That's the kind of thing that promotes more and more stability and more self-confidence. Just that intention. And that's the other thing.

[26:54]

You'll start to see as you get more stability, and I'm sure all of you know this anyway, that as you stabilize, you're able to tolerate more of your own intensity without getting swept away in it. That you can say, wow, there's somebody in there that's stable that can say, ooh, I'm really feeling this very strongly. I'm really upset. But there's some part of you that isn't upset that... is able to hold space for yourself that actually has seen this before. And you don't have to believe. Believe it. You can find out and just see what it is. See where it goes. So, let's see what else I have here. So we do this a little bit by a little bit.

[27:54]

And then we can tolerate more and more of our own experience. If we do, if we try and shove ourselves into experiencing and going diving into the deep end, it often backfires and then we kind of have a strong reaction. But just gently allowing yourself to be more present a little bit at a time. around these more charged or difficult issues that come up in us that have to do with our identity or our sense of self-worth or our posture. We can get into all kinds of... I spent struggling with our posture and what we think about it and what we should do about it. Can we sit still? Am I hurting myself? Am I not hurting myself? I don't know. So we see more and more about these habitual body-mind responses don't go through central.

[28:57]

And they're often a result of old conditioning. It's no longer adaptive. And just being able to interrupt it is already enough. I think it was Yvonne Rand told me when she first gave me Zazen instruction, she said, the first thing that's the most important thing, Marsha, is just stop. If you can do that, that's really good. Just stop every day at the same time in the same place. She said, then sit down. That's also the next most important thing. Stop and sit down. Then she said, the next level of expertise is to sit still. Can you sit really still? still for yourself so that you can feel the stillness in the middle of your heartbeat. And you can feel the still through line in the middle of your breath so that your breath, your heartbeat, the expansion of your rib cage doesn't disturb the inherent stillness that's always there.

[30:20]

And the last thing, once you get that down, is to sit long, see what happens. So what I've been learning is how to sit still for myself and how to sit still for somebody else in a compassionate way that involves my also paying attention to their nervous system and their heart rate and their eyeballs and all kinds of little details that are going on as I'm sitting here watching you and feeling your stillness right now. So I also kept finding that when people have enough support and stability to stay with whatever is arising, we end up in the same place.

[31:31]

This is where I felt like Buddhism and this trauma healing stuff really converged. Because over and over again, we kept ending up, and this is with people that, you know, we're practicing with people who've been doing this for three years, so everybody's really good at settling. So it was sort of not a regular crowd. but we kept ending up in this incredible, intimate, open-hearted, vast place together, which made me, it just felt like the seventh day of Sashin. It was just the most amazing thing that I could end up in such an intimate, connected place with so many people doing that. And I thought, and so I felt like we were all We were all in Zen Center together, with a strong sense of common intention, kindness, compassion.

[32:34]

There was such a sense of open-hearted love that had nothing to do with anybody's personality or who they were, where they were from, or anything about them. It was just, we were all just in a big love bucket. So this thing, this open-hearted love that's beyond personality that I keep repeating, I feel like this is essentially the essential human beingness. And this is what touches that ground of being that gives us a fresh moment. without any preconceptions. That, once you're that present and not in the way and the stories drop away, then we're in grave danger of having a fresh moment that is just gonna arise right now.

[33:45]

We've never seen it before and we can feel the freshness of it. And it's interesting. So that's what I think. It's the only thing to do, learn how to sit still for ourselves and still enough that we can see what we're doing. You've got to know what you're doing. So patience, compassion, open mind, open heart. I think that's the way of transformation. And it's almost too simple. We just want to complicate it. So now I have my second cheat thing, which is I wanted to read... There's this... Christina lectured on this brutal essay by Durkheim.

[34:46]

I don't know if you... Some of you have heard it. You know about it, The Way of Transformation? And he talks about it in a brutal way, about... the person who's being really on the way, falls upon hard times in the world, will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive, but rather will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it. And that's what I think is this training I've been doing, and this is zazen. This is Buddhist practice. This is how we show up for each other and encourage each other, even when it's not pleasant. And the trainer was saying that she goes through many times with clients where they'll feel something.

[35:49]

They go, I don't like feeling this. I really, I don't like feeling this. She goes, I know. I know. But this is the way through this to the other end so that this doesn't run you anymore. But while we're going through it, it's often, ooh, I don't like feeling this. I just don't like it. I don't like feeling how greedy I am. I don't like feeling how angry I can get. But if we can't, sit with ourselves through to the end, we can't see how to locate ourselves with what's arising, because we think we have to stop it, otherwise it's going to take hold of everything. And then, ironically, that's how it actually is taking hold of everything, because you're on the run from it forever, and it's defining everything you do, because you can't stand to feel that thing.

[36:50]

It's not about acting on anything. This is about seeing who you are, seeing how human we all are and that we're all capable of everything all the time. Just right causes and conditions have to arise and we can be anything. And the more we can recognize that, the more we don't have to do, do, do something about it. We don't have to do anything about the fact that we're so pissed off. We can just go, wow. I think I won't do anything until I've settled myself and I actually can think a couple of thoughts with my head screwed on straight. Because I'm now on to my reactive mind. It's very, very fast. And it can build a case to go to court in two seconds. When I get that mind going, I know...

[37:53]

I'm nuts. Or if I start sounding like a relative of mine where everything, you know, everything's rotten and it's all going to hell in a handbasket and there's no point and never mind, I'm taking my batten ball and go home. I know that one too. I know that one is, I'm still nuts. Until that subsides, I'm not going to make any decisions and I'm not going to act from that. zone. It's not balanced. It's not centered. And it's not my true nature. So maybe that's all. I was going to read some more of this, but it's so brutal. It's just, it's not the last thought I want to leave you with. It's just, he just talks about going through zones of annihilation. I just feel it.

[38:56]

It's too late in the evening for that. I'll just say, I won't go into all the details, I'll just read the last part. Only if we venture, he says, repeatedly through zones of annihilation. So we just, I mean, getting involved with your ego. Can our contact with divine being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable? So that no-self-self, you know what I mean. That one can arise when we can just get over it. But it's we don't get over it, we get through it. And we complete it. And then it's over. And then it's something that happened then. It's not happening now. What's happening now is your own true nature's coming to the surface. It's a whole other world. So the more we learn to wholeheartedly to confront the world that threatens us with a lie, the more we can face into whatever's arising, the less isolated we become from ourselves and from each other.

[40:09]

And the more the depths of that ground of being are revealed and the possibilities of that new life or a fresh moment become opened. So that's the thought I want to leave you with. And thank you for your... Nobody seemed to fall asleep. Or if you did, you fooled me. If you want, you can ask a question if any of you have any questions about this. Yeah. with your discussion, which is really a further time for me. I feel like we cast, I encountered traumatic events through sitting, and it finally really reached a place where it was, like you said, it was still difficult at times, but it was something that happened.

[41:17]

Currently, There, I don't know if you've followed a bit of the years, but there was a man that was murdered in Bosa Park. And he was a very soft friend. Sorry. And in some talking in my sitting, once again, it's manifesting this pain in my body, like my shoulder. Well, I think you have to have

[42:26]

I'm not worried about you having too much compassion for yourself. I don't think we're talking about indulging. I think if you pay attention, you can tell when you're getting into a jag and when you're simply recognizing the depth of your loss. and whatever else so that you can allow yourself to breathe and have it without it's I guess I'm doing something more than that without in this setting but I think I think it's a good question to ask yourself as well And you just see what comes up as an answer.

[43:27]

Yeah. Thank you. Well, it's time for that. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[44:09]

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