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 evening. So we have been experimenting and investigating and

[01:07]

trying to understand deeper what embodiment means. Because it's what we need to be fully alive. We need to really inhabit the body we have been given. And not another body, but just exactly the one we are having at any given moment. And that's not the body we think we have. What we think about our body is not what our body is most of the time. It's something else. And so how do we get in touch with this body? How do we... live from within the body rather than from our head down to the body, telling it what to do and maybe getting mad if it doesn't do what we want it to do or getting distressed about it or depressed about it.

[02:34]

But how do we live from... How do we allow the life that expresses itself... through this body, express itself fully. That is part of our quest for this 10 weeks together that I decided we will focus on, and some of you have signed up for that, and some of you are here maybe for the very first time. So you hear about this for the very first time, and I really welcome everybody who's here for the first time, and I encourage you to listen with your body, to not try to follow in your head everything I'm saying, every word, try, do I understand what she means, or I agree, or I don't agree, or just let the sounds just touch your body and trust that

[03:41]

If something resonates, then your body will register that. If you don't understand it, don't worry. Then just be in your body and see, can you sit as comfortably as you can in this limited possibilities of making yourself comfortable. You can't just lie down, there's not enough space, or you can't, you know, so, but... In the space that you have where you're sitting, keep checking in and making yourself as comfortable and as supported as you can. That doesn't mean if you fall asleep, it's not a problem. Last time I sat in here listening, or before last time, I fell asleep. It happens to me. It happens to many of us. So I want also to start with a poem by Maya Angelou, and it's called We Unaccustomed to Courage.

[05:02]

We Unaccustomed to Courage. exiles from delight, lives coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life. Love arrives and in its train comes ecstasies, old memories of pleasure, ancient histories of pain, Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity. In the flush of love's light, we dare be brave, and suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free.

[06:08]

So for me, that poem has something to do with our endeavor. It has something to do that trying to move the center of our awareness from our thinking brain into our bodies and engage its knowing, its wisdom, its complete interconnectedness with everything. Our bodies know that everything else, every other body, everything we encounter, the plants, the animals, the stars, the sky, or the mountains, the rivers, the ocean, are our relatives. We are completely interconnected and our bodies know that. So, That interconnectedness and to move our awareness into our body takes courage.

[07:19]

So this afternoon at the practice purity, we were in the Buddha Hall here and we experimented with where do we feel our personal space is today? Where does it end? And we didn't... think about it we try to really feel it with our bodies and it's amazing it tells us where it ends today where that boundary is and so we had the courage to pair up with another person and let them get closer listening to our bodies and say stop there and feel into it and then say oh maybe this is too close and we would gesture and the person would step back and then we would say stop and then you think no maybe now that's a little too far away and they would say come closer feeling till we found that spot that felt like in that place with that distance today I can be in touch with myself and I can be available to be meeting the other person so I can feel both I can feel myself and I can feel the other person

[08:39]

If they get too close, it's not for everybody the same. For some people, they lose connection to themselves and are completely only available to the other person. Or for others, it's the opposite. They lose completely the availability to the other person and are only available to themselves. So we played around that edge. And it takes courage to do that. So somebody, when we sat in a circle at the end and everybody just shared something from what they discovered in the tea, he said, I could feel I was nervous. I always have the question, am I too much for somebody? That's one of my questions that keeps coming up. So it is, when we step into our... and allow it to express itself fully, we are imposing our being.

[09:44]

We take up our space. And that takes courage. But that's an act of love. Because when we allow ourselves to take up our space, then with that we also allow other people to have their space. It's when we contract, when we live coiled in shells of loneliness, in Maya Angelou's words, then we begrudge other people's space, or we envy it, or we fight them if they take up space. It's almost a contradiction that we would feel if I have the freedom to have my space, then actually everybody else has the freedom to have their space too.

[10:45]

And then we are more kind, we are more tolerant, we are more patient, we are more available, and we can see other people and allow them to see them as living beings rather than as objects. if we contract and don't let ourselves take up our life and live our life, we are stingy. And that stinginess goes around. We can't be generous. So, we keep... No, that's fine. It's ready for you. So tonight I wanted also to talk a little bit about forms.

[12:02]

Because there's a lot of forms in... our tradition, which I do love. And I see them and I experience them as invitation for embodiment, for being fully in your body. And step out of our thinking mind that's busy with thinking about something that's not here right now, something that happened at work or will happen tomorrow or might happen tomorrow, into the present moment. So for me, there are all imitations to be fully present and be in the body we're having at that moment. So we, for example, every morning we do many boughs during service, And if we fully step into that somatic and physical movement and are present for it, even though we try to do the bows as we have learned to do them, it will be every single time a different bow.

[13:22]

Because our bodies are not the same from moment to moment. They are... They are different. We have a different balance. We have a different sensation. Sometimes we're stiffer in the morning. Sometimes we're... And they're also mirrors for our mind. Sometimes I can love the vows, and sometimes I find them boring, and sometimes I feel, no, God, do I have to do it again? And sometimes I hate them, and sometimes... And it's because I'm always... doing the same bow, I can see that also not only my body, but my mind and my feelings are changing. I don't notice that if I say, well, today I don't want to bow, and I don't. So if I let myself be following my whims and my preferences, they won't be a mirror for me, because I will avoid that.

[14:27]

I will only bow when I feel like bowing, for example. When I think I can do a really beautiful bow today. So that then I will bow. And today I'm not so sure. I'm stiff this morning, so it won't look so elegant, so I'm not going to bow today. Which I would like, part of me would like to manage my life that way. But to keep stepping into the form of again and again, is mirroring back and getting me into touch with what is here right now. And creating a tolerance for what's here right now. Stepping out of those judgment, a vow has to look this way and otherwise it's a bad vow. Or this is now a good vow. It's just, oh, this is the vow of now and this is the vow of now. And look at that, this is the vow of now. And we can have different vows.

[15:34]

We have greeting vows. Hi, Michael. We have respectful vows. Hello, Michael. We can have struggle with Michael and just think he's really terrible. And if we don't go talk about it, but keep bowing, wishing him that he be happy, that he be free of suffering, while our mind goes yang, [...] something starts changing that is beyond words, that goes from heart to heart. Thank you for being willing to just be the object or the subject of my talk that's another thing the object subject thing we've talked about that we so much have a tendency to make objects of people and things and what happened was subject to subject but my mind still says I'm

[16:51]

where it still comes out as object, and I catch myself often doing that. So it takes attention and it takes application to start changing that. And then we have prostrations, which we bow all the way down to the floor. And last Dharma talk I spoke about that Suzuki Roshi thought we here in the United States need to do three times more bows than anybody else in the world. And I don't know if he ever explained it, why he thought that. But we're the only place where we do nine bows every morning and not three, like... The whole rest of the world does three bows. And in the bowing all the way to the floor, we put the head in touch with the earth on the level of our feet and below our body.

[18:03]

So we kind of bow down and put our thinking mind to the floor. Then we have... Forms like how do we step into the meditation room and step out of the meditation room. So when we learn that, it takes all our attention. Which foot is it now I should step in and which foot should I step out? So we step in with the left foot on the left side of the door with the left foot that's close to the door jamb. We step in and when we go out, we go out also. On the left side also is the left foot. So we have to be present. And so many times we find ourselves in the meditation hall and don't know how we got in. Did I not step in with the left foot or how did I get in?

[19:06]

But it's a reminder to be in our body. Then in the center we bow to our seat. which means we bow, or could mean we bow to our capacity to wake up, to be awake and fully human and fully alive. Then we turn around clockwise and we bow into the space and to all the others that are sitting and their cushions and their capacity to wake up. And by bowing, we put two hands together, so that's also... one mind. Not two minds, not this and that, just one mind and one bow. And then we have this choreography, so we have a head student for the practice period, and there is an entering ceremony where the person basically has to really decide

[20:16]

whether he wants to take up that responsibility to be the head student, which is a training position for the duration of the training period. And when he doesn't leave but stays, or she, they get turned around in their seat 180 degrees. That is a physical somatic body rotation of 180 degrees. 80 degrees. The person is not facing the wall during that time like most of us, but facing into the space. And I don't know what that did to our Shuso. I haven't asked him yet. For me, it was not just only an external rotation. It turned something inside me. And so this is a very physical practice.

[21:19]

We have all these ceremonies where we do things that are expressed through the body that have deep, deep effects on us. So there's also a Japanese sensibility that we observe when it's appropriate. So we didn't observe it this afternoon during the tea, but we did We do it often, other times, that for several reasons we do not step on the black tapes, borders of the tatami mats. And there are several reasons. They get damaged and then the tatami mat starts falling apart. But also they're incredibly hard, so you do not want to... Kind of when you bow and do a prostration, you do not want to get your knees on them because there is wood underneath, not like the tatami, the mats are softer.

[22:25]

And they keep us alert. We don't just walk whichever way over those mats. And then all the positions in the temple, the people that play with the instruments or that make them sound, how do you align your body? How do you make the bell sound? You're not striking the bell. You invite the sound out of it. Or we place objects on the altar. So it's the... incense bowl, really centered or not centered, all those things have to do with alignment. And we have to use our body to center them.

[23:27]

And then the chanting. For the chanting, we... have to engage our body, our breath, and can we do that and hear our own voice and at the same time also hear the voices of other people? Or are we just in our own little world? So that's very much a community and sangha practice to hear your voice and not hear it or hear only it. That's also a form of embodiment. So maybe you

[24:38]

take a little moment and just see how your bodies are feeling right now. Did this all put you to sleep? Was anything of that relevant to you or resonates with you? The guide is in you, is in each of us. There's nobody else who can say something really about you. another person's life. And our minds are always full of stories about other people's lives, but they're just stories. There's a wonderful poem by Jane Hirshfield where she says, it was like this, and I'm just paraphrasing, but she says, you know, I ate chestnuts and I was happy and I was sad. Then I was happy again. And then when I'm dead, people, mourn and tell these stories, but they are their stories.

[25:41]

This wasn't my life. My life was like this. I ate prunes and I was laughing and I was sad. But they're stories. So nobody can tell the story of your life. We can't even really tell the story of our life. We can tell parts of the story of our life because it's much better than everything. bigger than any story, but we can feel when we are living our life, the life that is given to us and expresses itself, and that's kind of a miraculous event and in some ways an unlimited event. Our life is limitless. It's so connected to the whole universe that We have a limited body which has a shape, but its connection and the life that goes through it is not limited.

[26:45]

That is not just like a source of stream. So we could say practicing embodiment is practicing unconditional love. It's getting in touch with unconditional love. Kind of letting go. To do that, we have to let go of all the ideas we have about anything. And really, because our bodies have the capacity for understanding immediate experience that's not mediated by a running commentary of what's going on and how does it feel in anything. It has the capacity for immediate connection.

[27:51]

And that's what we're kind of just endeavoring to see if we can get a little closer to that, if we can... find that in our body, that capacity. It's almost time to stop for today. I want to read the poem again, and then there's a little time for questions or comments if you have any. We, unaccustomed to courage, exiles from delight, live coiled in shells of loneliness. We, unaccustomed to courage, exiles from delight, live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.

[28:58]

Love arrives, And in its train come ecstasies, old memories of pleasure, ancient histories of pain. Yet, if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls. We are weaned from our timidity. In the flush of love's light, we dare be brave. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be, yet it is only love which sets us free. And suddenly we see that love costs all we are and will ever be, yet it is only love which sets us free. And that's in some ways what These teachings are about, in Buddhism too, that we have to go beyond ideas and conditionings and habits to get to the place where we are free and we have the capacity as human beings to get there.

[30:19]

Everybody has this capacity as being born as a human being. So thank you very much for taking your time to be here. And if there are any questions, we have like 10 minutes or comments. So I wish you all a safe way home if you're going home, a safe way to bed if your bed is close by.

[31:22]

And be well and be appreciating the body you have because it allowed you to come here and it allows you to go home and it allows you to wake up hopefully tomorrow morning. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[32:07]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.94