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. Good morning. I used to live here a long time ago for 10 years. And it's one of the... best memories in my life to have lived here. And I see some familiar faces from that time and ongoing, Suki and Sonia and Maya, which is really lovely, and all your new faces. My name is Kiku Christina Rehnherr. And I live in Mill Valley now, not at Zen Center anymore. I go once a week to to the city center. That was the last place I lived as a resident for several years with interruptions.

[01:04]

And so it's more than three years that I'm sitting actually in a room with people like you, human beings, and speak to you because the last three years, everything has been on Zoom. I have met this year, started to see individual students again in person, but that was just one-on-one. But with a group of people, that's my first time since three years. So that's also quite touching to me. I also want to welcome everybody who is online because we are now in a hybrid state. And everybody who is new or here for the first time, is anybody in here here for the first time? No. Yes, you are, and you are very much welcome.

[02:06]

And anybody online that's for the first time, I think just listen with your body. And also, that's true for everybody, just listen. Pay attention to your body and move when it tells you to move because that helps you be present rather than thinking I have to sit still and start tightening up because something hurts. So feel free to change your legs or your sitting posture and listen to your body. There might be things I'm saying that don't resonate with you, so don't pay attention. Leave them. Don't think, oh, I have to understand everything and be in your head. If anything I say is relevant to you, your body will pick it up, you'll remember it later, and the rest you can just let go.

[03:09]

I want to thank the Tanto for inviting me, Chiriu. He's now on a sabbatical. And Kokyo, who is replacing him, is with his father, who is, I think, about to die. He died. Okay, just died. So I thank them for the invitation to meet with you today. And maybe you look around a little bit and see who is here. Particularly for the new people, just look a little bit to see. with whom we're sharing this space, and for the people online, if you could also look through your pages, and if you're online, could you for a moment let yourself, make yourself visible so there's not just a name plaque on the screen, so you can look around and see who's sharing that space with you right now.

[04:18]

So in this hemisphere, in the northern hemisphere, it's only three days till we go through the longest night and the shortest day of the year. So the balance between dark and light is on the dark side. And it's going to start changing in three days, next Wednesday. And we're only two weeks away from this year coming to its end and the new year beginning. And it's interesting. I have a sister who lives in New Zealand. They have the longest day and the shortest night in two days. Or whenever it's their day.

[05:30]

And they're celebrating Christmas in the middle of summer, but they do Christmas trees and Christmas lights in the towns, but they go to the beach and they have summer holidays. But here, in our hemisphere, nature has been turning inward since the fall. And that's its way to regenerate itself, to cleanse itself, to detoxify, to get ready for when spring comes to have energy to start growing again. And it invites us to do the same. You know, before we had electricity people, days changed. The work they did changed with the daylight. They did more inward things, more things in the house when it was winter.

[06:32]

because there was nothing to do outside so much. And so in our culture, we can live like there are no seasons. And I come from Switzerland where the seasons are very pronounced or have been very pronounced. It's also changing now. I don't quite know how, but it's not the same as when I grew up. But there were very distinct seasons. When I moved here, I couldn't feel the seasons for a long time. It took me a while to see they're much more subtle. So we can live like there are no seasons if we want to, and a lot of modern life is behaving like there are no natural rhythms or seasons. It's the invitation to slow down, gather with family and friends.

[07:38]

Here it starts with Thanksgiving in this culture and then moves to Christmas or Hanukkah or Diwali or whatever culture you're growing in up. And there's a lot of family gathering and being with friends and lighting candles in the house. or outside, and it is often used as a time of reflections, also the coming of the end of the year, like looking back about what was it this year that kind of influenced my life, and what intentions do I bring to the coming year? And we are living in times of big, big changes.

[08:40]

And that's one of the Buddhist tenets. It's that it said the nature of reality is impermanent, that everything is changing, keeps changing continuously, is subject to change. And it's easy to see When we have children around, we see the change very much. And we also see it when we get older. We see the changes very much. We look in the mirror and some say, well, that wasn't here before. And wow, I thought I wouldn't get it. You know, I haven't gotten it till now and now I'm getting it. So the changes become more obvious. When in young, they're a little less obvious in between. And then when we grow older, they become more obvious again. But in the last several years, particularly in the last three years, changes have become absolutely and undeniable obvious and big changes.

[09:48]

The pandemic, which its effects we still feel through today and next year, I'm sure, with still health problems, still having to protect ourselves in new ways, in the supply chains that are not working like they did before and never maybe will get back to exactly how it was, which is usually also true. We can't go back. We might try, but we can't. In politics, in a... in the economy, in the climate. It's becoming very much clear and has become very much clear in the last few years that we have less and less a shared reality.

[10:57]

There are different realities that are very powerful and very strong and we have less and less capacity to communicate between those realities. So we're in the middle of this and of these movements, of these changes and of the structures that we have been used to for a long time falling apart and creating a sense of uncertainty, which Buddhist teaching keeps telling us that's where we always live. We don't know if we live tomorrow. We assume we live tomorrow. I assume I'm alive tomorrow, but I can be, something can fall on my head or I can have a stroke and be dead. And that happens to people.

[11:59]

And a lot of us have experienced that through the pandemic. People that were totally healthy got sick and died, and we couldn't even say goodbye. And there's a lot of... And they couldn't have a funeral. I mean, I keep thinking about that. It's so easy to not remember that. Besides, if it happened to you, you can't forget it. But if it didn't happen to you, it's so easy. to forget and to forget the amount of grief and sorrow that is still waiting or still being processed or waiting to be processed. And so this is a very good time to give space for those things. So when things fall apart like they do,

[13:03]

They're threatening our views, they're challenging or threatening our views, our understanding, and in many cases, really our life, our survival. And how do we respond to that? So physiologically, when there is fear or threat, our nervous system has three ways to respond. It's fight, flight, fight, or freeze. And in some ways, we probably all have a tendency, what we did that's influenced by our childhood and what we experienced there, we might fight or we might run away, try to run away, or we might freeze. And so we can do this in our bodies, we can do this with our minds, we can do this with our speech.

[14:14]

And we have the repentancies where we say every morning, I assume you still say them here, all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind. These are the three elements that... So, light could be manifesting in distractions. We go and distract ourselves with gaming or with partying or with watching movies or dissociating, daydreaming. or numbing ourselves. Fight could be, we blame, we look for assigning blame, so we can fight physically, but if we don't, if we do that with our mind, we can, and our speech, we can blame, we find the fault of these people, or the fault of this situation, anger, and violence, and freeze,

[15:34]

could be immobility, feeling paralyzed, feeling overwhelmed, waiting, just waiting until it gets better, kind of in a waiting stance. And Pema Chodron says something really beautiful because also we are trying to find solutions and resolutions for situations in our relationships, in the work situation, in politics. And she says, actually she has a book out that's called When Things Fall Apart, Hard Advice for Difficult Times. So she wrote that many years ago, but I think it's very pertinent to our situation. She says, as human beings, Not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution.

[16:43]

However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution. We deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way. An open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. So, an open mind that can relax with paradox, because life is always full of paradox. personal life, even in each person, there's lots of paradox and contradictory things all happening under the roof of this one body.

[17:49]

We deserve our birthright, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. So how do we get there? How do we get to have an open mind. So a lot of the things that is generated when there is uncertainty is a level of anxiety or fear. And there she also has in the same book a wonderful instruction how to deal with fear. And it goes like this. Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with fear. She didn't want to do it. It seemed too aggressive. It was scary. It seemed unfriendly.

[18:51]

All good reasons not to do it, right? I don't want to be aggressive. I want to be friendly. And it's too scary. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her the instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side and fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small and fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. A young warrior roused herself and went toward fear. Prostrated three times and asked, may I have permission to go into battle with you?

[19:54]

Fear said, thank you. for showing me so much respect that you ask permission. Then the young warrior said, how can I defeat you? Fear replied, my weapons are that I talk fast and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved and you do whatever I say. If you don't do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me.

[21:01]

But if you do not what I say, I have no power. In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear. And that's one way of cultivating open mind, that kind of open mind that allows us to be relaxed. with paradox, with confusion, with fear, with ambiguity, is to be respectful, to pay attention, to ask permission, in terms of fear to not do what you're told to do by fear.

[22:12]

It's cultivating. How do we get to this open mind? It's by cultivating Abiding, capacity to abide, to stay with, to bear the feeling, to be interested, because the young warrior had to be... Interested enough to prostrate, to say, can I have permission to do battle with you? And how can I defeat you? Something we would never think we would ask an enemy, right? Because we think we have to know ahead of time how we're going to defeat this thing. So it's to get to know it. Being interested how it works and fear response and tells exactly how it's working.

[23:25]

And then also tells how it has power or how it doesn't have power. If you do what I say, I have power over you. If you don't do what I say, even if you believe me, but you don't act on it, then I have no power. So, it's tolerance, capacity to abide. It's also... Allowing, making space, giving your attention to what is arising. Take time for the feelings that are there. Be interested in them. And do that with kindness and generosity and gratitude. Because it's really also nice. We're still alive.

[24:26]

And so it's a very complex life that has all different experiences and different feelings and different energies. And if we just learn and train ourselves to pay attention to them, we see that they keep changing, like everything keeps changing. So the truth of... impermanence and uncertainty, we can be also nicely uncertain. We can be certain that no feeling will stay forever unless we keep regenerating it over and over and over. But the time span of a feeling is about 90 seconds, physiological. But if we repeat the same thoughts, we create that feeling to come up and come up and come up. So it feels like it's always there.

[25:29]

So if we ruminate or circle around, that's not an interest. That's giving over like to fear. We give over to sadness or depression or anger. So we keep perpetuating. But by itself, it has a very short lifespan. Of course, if we lose a person, grief, a close person or a friend or an animal we love, grief, the loss stays in your life. You don't get over it. You live with it. You learn to live with it. And grief has its own reason. It comes and goes. empty space that's left in your world by that person, you will be reminded of that here and there by waking up in the morning and realizing, oh, he's still dead.

[26:38]

You know, it's like you wake up and you have to, you wake up to the reality again that the person is not here. And then you're sad. But then the sadness... It gets replaced by other things during the day and then it comes and goes. So it's not your 90 seconds sad and then you're done with it. That's not what I'm trying to say at all. But cultivating these is a practice. A practice to... To really realize, not just knowing in your head that everything is changing, but to realize it to a degree so that you're not surprised so much by changes and are willing to, when things change, to tend to how that affects you.

[27:42]

To turn towards the effects it has on you. And rather be interested in how that helps you grow, rather than be interesting to get the other person to go back to who they were, who you thought they were before, you know, and struggle with that. But how can I make space for this? How can I accommodate this? How can I abide with this? Also, internal changes. I experienced at this point in my life that, you know, when I was younger, I felt like I was initiating changes. Now I feel changes are just happening to me. A lot of physical changes. I didn't even know they were coming. I didn't know that at some point I realized, I didn't know that that was the last time I was going to jump off it.

[28:49]

little wall. Nothing told me this one time is going to be your last time. The next time I stood on a little wall, my body said, no way I'm going to jump down here. Where's that coming from? It just knows it's not safe enough anymore. There's not enough flexibility or enough to do that safely. So I can't even say I can say goodbye afterwards, but I can't, you know. But in truth, every moment is the last moment. So we could be grateful for it, whether we have other jumping downs, which are not exactly the same or none anymore. So, but changes are happening. I can't. My energy is mostly done from four o'clock in the afternoon.

[29:52]

I'm not doing great things anymore. There's no energy. I can't line up all my friends the way I used before and have a great time with one after the other. I'm saturated after a very short amount of time. And it's still full. It's not less full. It's just totally changed how I feel like doing it. My horizon that was full of possibilities in terms of, oh, I will do that later, and I can do that later, is shrinking. And death is sitting right on it, not behind it somewhere. It's right there, saying, Yeah, that's where you're headed. And there's no way. So I say I have entered dead end. I don't know how long it's going and how to what territory, but clearly my journey has entered dead end.

[30:58]

There's not so many, oh, I turn around and no. And it's physical and it's emotional and it's mental and it's obvious. So I'm grateful for this practice because it's also very interesting if I'm not just afraid of it, which I am in between. I have also my thoughts, oh my God, how is it going to end? And of course, I don't know. And who is going first? You know, my partner or I? And these thoughts are here, but it's also the change, even though Energetically and in external activity, it's getting smaller. The circles are getting a little smaller. It also becomes richer. If I'm not stuck with that, it's getting smaller, but pay attention what's there.

[32:03]

It actually gets very rich. And I don't know if you have been with people that were dying, but the people that... have surrendered, not resigned, but surrendered to the fact that their life is coming to an end. When you're around them, you experience that life is absolutely full and that dying is a fully alive process. It's not like, oh, there's less and less and less life. So cultivation of, and these kind of feed each other, they're interrelated, of tolerance and being able to abide in not knowing, which there's a whole koan that talks about not knowing is most intimate.

[33:08]

If we don't know, we have a better chance to actually find out what would be an appropriate response to a situation. If we look at it open-minded and interesting, the information it gives us will tell us how to move forward with an appropriate response. So there is also a beautiful poem by Donna Boldt. bolts that goes. There is no controlling life. Try corralling a lightning bolt containing a tornado. Dam a stream and it will create a new channel. Resist and the tide will sweep you off your feet. Allow and grace will carry you to higher ground.

[34:14]

The only safety lies in letting it all in, the wild and the weak, fear, fantasies, failures, and success. When loss rips off the doors of the heart, or sadness veils your vision with despair, practice becomes simply bearing the truth. In the choice to let go of your known way of being, the whole world is revealed to your new eyes. So if we cultivate these capacities, which takes a practice, which means we have to

[35:19]

Remember to make space, to allow the feeling that's already here, to be here, to acknowledge its presence with kindness, with generosity, with gratitude. That gives you courage. Are you going to the kitchen? Make food for everybody. That's a wonderful practice. Thank you. Thank you for being here. And it gives you courage. And so the time... Times of big changes are also times of great opportunities.

[36:19]

Opportunities to grow personally with your own challenges, to help and foster equality in all realms of existence, political, economical, social, and sustainability. to cultivate an open mind that is relaxed with paradox and ambiguity and let go of finding solutions that we think then the problem is gone. That is helping us to really respond to the challenges we have in these times with more to respond in appropriate, life-affirming and life-supported ways.

[37:23]

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 Domo.

[37:48]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.27