good afternoon friends good to see you all again i hope you can all hear me well if you're having any trouble please let me know and uh it's a joy to be together with you once again for our online practice sessions uh it's always a for me uh it feels like a gift and an honor to be together in this way to support each other in our practice and to create a virtual community in this way. So, our online virtual zender, as we say. So, I don't know how many of you are here for the first time, and there may be, I've seen quite a number of you here before. I see someone, Laurel, here for the first time. Welcome. Just to give you a little overview of what we're going to do during this hour together is we'll start with about a 25-minute period of a zazen or silent meditation. And for anyone who's new, I will be offering a few guiding words, kind of lead us into the period of zazen and then eventually taper off into silence together.

[01:37]

And I'll start the period by ringing three bells and I'll end the period by ringing one bell. And then after our meditation around six o'clock, we'll transition into what I call a dharmet, a brief dharma encouragement. And that will go on for about, say, about 15 minutes or so. And then after that, we'll open up the space for all of you to bring forward anything that you'd like to bring forward in terms of what's coming up for you in your practice at this time. Anything maybe from my darn net that may have brought questions or inspired you to share something. And then our usual goal is to wrap up around 6.30 or so. So that's what kind of the general flow of our time together will be. And without further ado, let's go ahead and begin our practice of Zazen together. So I encourage you to find a posture that will work for you, that kind of offers a sense of upright attentiveness.

[02:45]

So whether or not you're sitting on a chair, on a cushion, in a wheelchair, or if you need to lay down on the floor, do whatever you need to do to accommodate your body. But again, bringing a sense of attentiveness and awareness throughout the whole body during this period of time. So you really want to give yourself over to both the physical and mental posture that is attentive and yet relaxed. And for some of you, you might be familiar with the traditional mudra that we use, the hand position, kind of creating a small oval. You can place that in your lap. And or otherwise, just rest your hands as supports you. And I encourage you to kind of have the sense of lengthening the back of the neck up. So the crown of the head is reaching towards the sky. Tuck your chin a little bit. Rest your tongue at the top. the roof of your mouth, and lips just, you know, resting gently, slowly apart, and breathing in through the nose, breathing in and exhaling through the nose.

[03:58]

And I'm going to ring the bell, and as I do so, allow your awareness to gently accompany the vibrational sound, the felt sense of the bell. And of course, with Zoom, sometimes the bell is kind of all over the place, so we'll see what happens today, so. And as you listen to the bell, draw your senses back into the body. So kind of disconnecting from external, the external environment and bring awareness into the body with the sound of the bell.

[05:07]

We're allowing the body to be relaxed. So being uprights, In whatever way that is in this moment for you. And get grounded. And become aware of the felt sense of the body's weight. Right here, connecting to the earth. having allowed the sound to resonate through the body. And feeling the presence of the body, bringing that awareness of the body both in contact to the environment, but also a sense of contact within. Going more deeply into awareness of the internal space of the body.

[06:10]

As you do so, allowing the body to relax a little bit more deeply. Settle more, a little bit more deeply into where you are in this present moment. Now allowing yourself to become aware of and connect with and relax into your present moment experience. This is an opportunity to gather your attention from wherever it's been during the day, the kind of busyness, whatever it's been preoccupied with, and allowing it to come back and abide in the momentary experience of just being here, right here, right now. Using awareness of the body as a touchstone.

[07:15]

Letting bodily presence be the prevailing ground of your experience. Represencing the body by being aware of the embodied experience. If it's helpful, you might wish to use the breath as a touchstone, allowing awareness of the breath to gently accompany the natural rhythms of breathing in and breathing out. So focus on the tactile experience of breathing, not the thought of the breath, but the actual sensations accompanying the flow and rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.

[08:21]

There's a sense of continuity of awareness of the breath. And if becoming aware of the breath is too much in terms of the tactile sensation, you might wish to explore just being aware of the sound of the breath. even if that seems a little bit too much to be occupied, just allow yourself to just come back again to resting in awareness of being here in this present moment bodied experience. So we're serving an intention. the mind to be present in the present moment using the embodied experience as a touchstone, using the breath as a touchstone.

[09:29]

And whenever the mind wonders, for whatever reason, minds do that. They have a tendency to wonder. Distracted by a fault, a tension, a pain in the body, maybe a sense of heartache or fear, anxiety, whatever distracts the mind. Simply notice when this has happened. That moment of noticing is a moment of awakening, an opportunity to return to our initial intention of being present as best we can. So presence is the willingness to come back, to come back to whatever we're experiencing, to actually feel it, to know it, to be intimate with this present moment experience. And to know it is not identified with it.

[10:35]

It's simply to observe it, to be aware and allow it to flow and to change moment by moment. Whatever it is arising in awareness, kind of like a cloud arising in an open sky, abiding for a period of time, making itself known, whatever way it's making itself known, as a thought, as a body sensation, as an emotion, as a perception of some sort. And then entirely letting it dissipate, letting it pass, letting it dissolve. As usual, something else will come forward to make itself now. Simply observing what is happening now without grasping onto it, fixing it, reifying, identifying with it anyway.

[11:36]

Coming back to the present moment experience and feeling it. Allow yourself to be able to experience. Those of you who've heard Paul Howler speak, he often says to allow yourself to experience the experience that you're experiencing. This is a compassionate, kind allowing the experience to be known, not to resist it. to be so vast and open and receptive as the boundless sky. Learn all experience that simply pass through

[12:53]

The same way that you loud the sound of the bell to pass through your being, to pass through awareness, to simply resonate for moments, make itself known, and then be released. Meditation was simply the field, the spaciousness through which our experience passes through. Continuing now for the rest of the period, simply resting as awareness, knowing that whenever the mind wanders, you can, if you need, if it's helpful, use the touchstone of the breath or the embodied experience to come back to the present moment, to rest in the now.

[14:04]

Allow the mind in time to come to silence and stillness, which is the fundamental nature of mind. Allow yourself to be deeply nourished and restored through this practice of awareness. Thank you, everyone.

[30:23]

I always find sitting Zazen in this way is wonderfully refreshing for my whole body-mind, especially after a long and somewhat strenuous day. It's a wonderful way to end the workday, I feel. So, the theme for today's Dharamette is resilience. And I'd like to start by sharing a poem about resilience by a friend of mine, Jane Hirschfield, who is also a Zen practitioner and someone who studied and lived at San Francisco Zen Center for a number of years. And the title of her poem is Optimism. More and more, I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose phone returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree.

[31:26]

Finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true, that of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs. all this resinous, retractable earth. I'll read that again. More and more, I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree, Finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs.

[32:35]

All this resinous, unretractable earth. So over the last several months, I've been reflecting on resilience and how it is that we might rely on our practice to cultivate various aspects of resilience. And due to the coronavirus pandemic and other ongoing forms of distress at this time, including racial injustice, climate change, economic inequality, many of us are continuing to feel a sense of uncertainty and balance and destabilization. And at least I am. I imagine that none of you are feeling the same thing, at least what I've heard from my friends, that it's a persistent sense of instability. And how each of us navigates this time of sustained distress, uncertainty, is based in part on our own ability to self-regulate

[33:48]

to regain an internal sense of composure, uprightness, and purpose. Our resilience when encountering stress, adversity, change, depends on our inner resources. And how we acknowledge, work with, and recover from adversity will determine the degree of its lasting impact, including the degree that we might feel traumatized by the circumstances. Rather than fall apart when encountering adversity, when we are resilient, we can become stronger as we face it and learn from it. Wisdom and spiritual maturity can be found through cultivating our capacity for resilience. Resilience is a powerful and essential part of Buddhist practice, which means it's an essential part of life, because that's basically what Buddhist practice is about, how to live this human life.

[35:02]

So the dictionary defines resilience as the power or ability to return to the original form, position, et cetera, after being bent, compressed, or stretched. And also it says... Bringing back into shape, elasticity. And ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like. Buoyancy. So resilience is the act of rebounding, of being buoyant, to jump or take a leap, to be flexible. So resilience. Resilience is also both an innate capacity, it's something that we're born with to varying degrees, and one that we can cultivate with practice. Resilience is related to perseverance, which is also critical for the spiritual path.

[36:06]

In order to make progress on the path, if you can even say that in Zen, you know, when we say you make progress on the path, but to be able to maintain our practice You need to be able to persevere. And finally, I would like to suggest that resilience is a manifestation of emptiness. Because it recognizes that all things are empty of an inherent fixed existence. You could say that dependent origination and impermanence are the ground from which resilience is made possible. So now it's possible to explore resilience from any number of different angles. And for the purpose of today's Dharmed, I'd like to briefly offer five key resilience skills using a Buddhist lens. The first skill necessary for resilience is that of self-awareness.

[37:09]

And self-awareness is foundational because it's the first step in moving out of reactivity when we encounter adversity. and into responsiveness. If we're aware of what's going on in our bodies and our minds and our hearts, including our feelings, our motives and desires, and we are able to meet it with a measure of self-acceptance, then we're able to better discern what we might need in the moment in order to take care of ourselves. So obviously having a regular meditation practice supports us in cultivating self-awareness because it supports us to tune into, to notice, and stay open to whatever experience we might be having. That's why I've been in meditation this evening when I started off. I was saying, can you be open? Can you allow yourself to experience the experience that you're experiencing?

[38:13]

Become aware of it first. Open to it. Tune into it. Notice its nature. Notice its quality. The second skill supporting resilience is attention. Attention is the capacity to have both stability and flexibility in terms of one's focus. Attention or mindfulness is essential in being able to maintain stability and constancy of awareness, to be able to track what is happening right here, right now, without becoming distracted. And when I think of attention, the word comes from Latin, which basically means to tie to, right? So there's a way that the mind's awareness is tethered to an object of awareness and being able to have that constancy of awareness or the touch point. is a very important part of helping the mind to stabilize and to settle.

[39:20]

So when we're able, for example, to maintain our focus on our practice intentions, whatever that may be, whether it's simply staying focused on the breath and meditating, or maybe bowing to meet others who we find irritating and disagreeable, you know, with our intention of patience and compassion, coming back to that, allowing that to be a supportive through line or touchstone in some way to help us really stay grounded in the midst of whatever distress or uncertainty might be arising for us. And there's a lot of teaching in Buddhism and Zen about cultivating flexibility or pliancy within our mind. a softness, a suppleness, which has the capacity to, you know, when we have this kind of mind, it has the capacity to bend and respond in accord with the present moment. So it's not a brittle mind. It's a flexible mind.

[40:23]

It's got some give to it. Acceptance allows that ability to be with, but not lose contact with what's happening. And rather than habitually reacting based on past experiences that we kind of unconsciously overlay on the current moment reality, we're instead able to respond in accord with what's actually happening now. And this is, you know, this is important to not see the present moment through a past understanding or a past overlay or past kind of judgments. but really see the truth of the present moment, the direct experience of the present moment. Then we cultivate this capacity in zazen, this capacity to see clearly what's happening now. And as we do this, we develop a mind that's stable, that's equanimous, and in time we begin to discover that there is

[41:33]

Space and time within which to see clearly what's happening and then move with intention, not reactivity, but with intention, with purpose. A third skill related to cultivating resilience is that of letting go, of not holding on. And this letting go is on both a physical and a mental level. On a physical level, we allow ourselves to relax and release throughout the body. This is what, again, when I was giving the meditation instruction at the beginning, really encouraging you to find a way to allow the body to release whatever it's holding on to, any tensions, to kind of do a scan of the body, to notice the places where we're holding tension, anxiety, some sense of grasping of aversion. And seeing as we breathe that we can simply allow that space to soften a little bit.

[42:38]

And often just the simple act of bringing awareness to these places in the body that are tight in some way helps them to release. I've spoken about this a few times now, the way in which simply bringing awareness to areas of contraction, tension, or holding of the body can allow them to release and let go. And last week, I used the analogy of the snowman, right? The way in which so much of our identity and mental habit patterns are kind of frozen, you know, in our body. It's in a contracted, frozen way. And how it is that just by using the warm sunlight of awareness, shining on those kind of frozen, contracted places, those areas begin to melt. They begin to soften. So these old frozen karmic conditioning and energy in the body is released, softened and released and allowed to flow again.

[43:42]

And as we do this, this form of letting go in the body is tapping into a sense of deeper rest and ease that's actually inherent. It's a natural part of our body. So it's a way that we come home back to the true foundation of our bodies. And the other level of letting go is mental one. And it's important during times like these to also be able to let go of the various thoughts, the stories, the narratives, the opinions, judgments, the worries, et cetera, all that we have, right? all that we have about the situation, about ourselves, about others, to let it go and instead rest in a direct awareness or a direct experiencing of the present moment. So in meditation, we're encouraged to let go of thinking, to allow the mind to rest, to have a break from its usual chatter, and to be able to return to silence, the inherent silence of the open,

[44:55]

spacious mind. When we're caught in our diluted stream of thoughts and emotions, our reactivities and beliefs, and then we're tethered to this kind of old and great habit patterns, there's very little resilience we're going to feel or experience. And letting go is rooted in one of the key principles of Buddhism, which is impermanence. Another way to think of impermanence is as the capacity for new beginnings. So we often have kind of sometimes a negative connotation of impermanence. It means envy, it means death, you know. But actually impermanence also means freshness, aliveness, newness, possibility for new beginnings. For example, when we meditate and have lots of wondering thoughts, We can recognize that each thought is a new thought. It's a new wondering thought.

[45:57]

And it's a new beginning. Even if you think you've heard the same thought again before, it's still a new thought in this moment. All thoughts come and go. And when we see this, when we study the nature of thoughts, then we can also have a new beginning. All we need to do is consciously, effortlessly, effortlessly bring ourselves back to the present moment. And when we do this, in this sense, all thoughts liberate themselves in the present. There's nothing you really need to do about thoughts. They liberate themselves when we're simply present. Moment by moment, all thoughts dissipate due to impermanence. In a meditation, all you have to do, or even outside of your meditation, every moment, all you have to do is effortlessly bring yourself to your immediate sensate experience and consciously participate in the present.

[47:01]

Consciously be here. Be fully engaged in the present. And when you do this, then thoughts liberate themselves. You can't really let go of thoughts. When the next thought comes, thought after thought comes and they liberate themselves one after another. Again, there's nothing you need to do. And when we do this in time, we see that our sense of well-being is no longer dependent on or rooted in what kind of thoughts we have or think we have to have or how it is that we tend to feel in any particular moments. Resting our sense of well-being based on what we think or feel is precarious. Because our thoughts and feelings are unstable, not dependable, and not reliable. They're not truth. They are not really the truth of the present moment.

[48:04]

They are of the present moment. They're not really the truth of what's happening in the present moment. And thoughts often have this tendency, you know, to hijack or influence, you know, or I should say the thoughts themselves are being hijacked or influenced by the conditions of the external world, right? When things are going well, for example, when they're favorable, when everything is good, right? You know, then we're like, you know, great, this is wonderful. But if things aren't going so well, if they're getting worse, you know, and they're not so good, then we become depressed, right? If they're good, we want to hold on to them. If they're not so good, we might get rid of them. This isn't a good way to live, right? This kind of being tossed back and forth. We want to be in a place in which even when everything is not going well, there's still a sense of hope, a possibility. Why? Because everything is a new beginning.

[49:04]

Each moment is new. We're never stuck here in that sense. This is what practice is about. It's always taking a leap into the next moment. Let it go of the last moment. The final skill I'll share today for cultivating resilience is that of assessing and sustaining positive emotion, you could say. And this is the buoyancy aspect of resilience. Not to give in to a negative or sinking mind, we say in Zen. but to connect to a mind of aspiration and possibility. Having positive emotion isn't about being a Pollyanna, not about blind optimism, but it's about having a flexible mind that can reframe the circumstances as practice opportunities. So this means to relate to all types of experience as potential pathways for self-discovery

[50:10]

Add for liberation. What can this situation tell me about my conditioned, limited views and tendency towards self-clinging or tendency to see the world through the scent of the separate self in some way? I might ask myself, how might I reorient my negative mental habit patterns to instead embrace an attitude or attitudes that are loving, compassionate, grateful, inclusive, to see the possibilities, to have a mind of liberation. How can I learn to let go of karmic conditioning and open into possibility? And can I look at whatever is challenging, whatever adversity I'm experiencing in the present moment, as ways to strengthen my practice? to transform harmful mental states and emotions into beneficial orientations focused on truly transformative change.

[51:18]

So these five skills related to cultivating resilience, self-awareness, attention, letting go physically, letting go mentally, and assessing and sustaining positive or a beneficial mind, you could even say joyful mind. These skills allow us to respond rather than react to adverse circumstances. And they support having a sense of personal agency and choicefulness. And having a sense of agency is one of the key factors in not having adverse situations become traumatically embedded in us. The main things that many people who go through difficult situations and not have it kind of traumatize them, is they have a sense of agency and choicefulness in the moment. They're able to tap into something deep within that is able to orientate towards a sense of personal agency and choicefulness.

[52:24]

And that agency often is about, I choose to meet this moment. It doesn't mean I have to like it, you know, but I still choose to turn towards and meet it as best I can. and see what I can learn from it. So while we might not have control over external conditions, like we can't control the coronavirus, you know, the pandemic, for example, we still have, we still can cultivate a capacity for internal regulation. That internal regulation ultimately comes from knowing who we truly are. So it's coming back, it's coming from that place of presence and being and open awareness that's not affected by external circumstances. And I would propose that true resilience is a manifestation of emptiness, of the boundlessness. Spiritual resilience is rooted in the wisdom and compassion that arises from an unlimited, vast Buddha mind

[53:33]

It's what we fundamentally are, our good in nature, the ground of being itself. Oh, dear. I've seen, I've spoken too long once again. I'm so sorry. I've yabbered on. And so I'm going to end there and see if anything, you know, you'd like to bring forward tonight. And Matt's going to help me. And I see two hands. I see Jane McConaugle and then Mary Zoot. Jane, where are you? There you are, Jane. Hello. Thank you. I've been attending these sessions for quite a while now, and this is my first time offering a comment or response. But I first just want to take the opportunity to thank you for doing this during this time. I thought that was such a wonderful exploration of resilience. it seemed to me to speak to something that is often makes the idea of trying to be resilient.

[54:40]

It's a high pressure demand on yourself. The idea that you should get back to where you were. The time in my life when I felt that Zen practice was most helpful was about 10 years ago when I had a traumatic brain injury and I didn't recover in the window of when I was expected to recover. And I tried to use... the practice and Zen teachings to ask myself, if I don't recover, how can I be happy? How can I be of service? And that was what allowed me to get out of the anxiety and depression of not knowing if I would bounce back to normal. And it seems like with the current pandemic, there's a lot of desire to get back to normal, but that in a way that maybe isn't constructive. And and that it makes us do things that are, you know, to open up too soon or take risks or or just be frustrated or sad or stay in the grief of not being able to do what we used to do, have the things we expected to have the events.

[55:47]

And so I think there's almost like a Zen version of resilience that you've spoken to that isn't about the foam pillow returning to its original shape, but like taking a new shape that is as. okay. That is also fine. So thank you for maybe giving a new look at resilience doesn't have to be what it was before. It can go. That's a great sharing. I really appreciate kind of pointing that out because I do think a lot of people, when you hear the definition of resilience as going back to, you know, and that's not what true resilience is about. It's being able to adapt to the new moment. as it is, and finding what is it within that allows us to meet this new moment as a new possibility and not be, you know, that aspect of possibility, you know, resourcefulness, and like you did, you know, what can I do now? And, you know, this, you know, this is, I think this is a prime time to ask ourselves, do we really want to return to what was normal?

[56:56]

Because there's a lot that was normal that wasn't so great, right? So resilience in this case is an opportunity to question ourselves, what do we really want to create in this moment of possibility to create and adapt to, you know, to or adapt to circumstances the way that become actually liberative circumstances in some way. So thank you, Jane. Thank you so much. So I see May and then Brenda. you so much um just every time there's always something and then a very very relevant to my practice um i have a question regarding the third point which is you talk about let it go um physically i mean after practice a while i think the mind has been you know it's a monkey right but monkey seems seems pretty you know settled right now um but actually physically i start to realize it's not that easy because you know the body have a memory which is i have no idea you know how many generations and myself each cell has memory and then uh i i just feel like you know this release um it's not as as the same mechanism just like a mental

[58:25]

I just want to hear some of your own experience. You know, when you release that, I know Tong Lan sounds like to me so far is one of the paths to truly bring awareness to the body, you know, certain part of the body and then to let, because I can't just release and then they just release because you have to dissolve first and then you have to, you know, gradually, you know, It's not that, you know, quick and then it's a process. So I just want to hear your own experience. Thank you. Yeah, I very much agree, you know, that I think it actually takes, I think it takes the body twice as long in some cases to release the karmic conditioning. You know, I think it's much easier for the mind in time to let go, but the body has been wired. that energy has been trapped in the body and the body has kind of developed and grown out of that experience.

[59:31]

So I feel that for decades later, you can mentally have let go of something and then something arises that kind of re-triggers at a very deep physical level, a realization that there's still some holding on, there's some way in which the original pain or resistance or adversity is still frozen somewhere within us and hasn't yet been released or rewired in some way. And a lot of trauma therapy, you know, and anyone who does trauma therapy, that's part of what it's actually looking at. Your somatic experiencing as a therapy focuses on releasing the energy, the old reactive patterns in the body and finding new ways to resource the body and allow the body to kind of rewire the towards a new orientation, right, in some way. And so I find even now sometimes when I kind of just, when I really look at something that's gnawing at me, I can feel this is an old embodied karmic pattern, you know, an old belief or experience that hasn't yet been kind of melted, allowed to, you know, I was talking about the iceberg.

[60:51]

how things are sometimes so deeply frozen from a very young age, five years old, or even childbirth, until they can be brought up to the surface and allow that energy to be released. So there are two different timelines, as you pointed out. And it's important, though, to you can't force your body to let go. And we have to be careful about trying to force us ourselves into feeling different or having the body like resisting, oh, I shouldn't be feeling this in the body. You should let go of this by now. That's the mind doing its thing, right? It has to be this loving awareness, this open, warm sunlight that just continuously shines, doesn't want the experience to be different, allows it, loves it into relaxing, into releasing, right? And that's a whole different process that we can't kind of do up here in the mental way.

[61:54]

Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you, May. And I see Brenda. Yes, thank you, David. I'm from Colombia. Last week, seven soldiers. accepted that they raped a 12-year-old indigenous girl. It was during two days. And, you know, listening to you today was very, very transformative for me. Like, I feel so much pain. you know, in my chest. And I want to point out that what you say before today, how you try, you know, to make yourself out of your own anger or out of your own feelings, you know, and it's not loving.

[63:07]

And there's so much frustration. And when I talk to people and they... I feel like they also want women to like, oh, but you don't have to protect your rights in that way. You cannot show yourself angry. You have to be kind. You have to teach others and you have to explain others and you have to educate others about what's happening. You know, and you have to do it in a calm, lovely, sweet way when you're in so much pain and feeling so much anger and so much distress. So it's really hard. And I really love to hear about resilience today because, yeah, that idea of just like, you know, just let go and forget what were you feeling. But it's not about that, you know. And I can feel that today. Like, I can acknowledge my anger. I don't have to push that away. But I don't want other people to force me, you know, to not be angry either.

[64:12]

So I want to share that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, the wisdom of honoring what you're feeling. Emotions have wisdom, too. They have something to tell us. In this case, that anger tells you how much you care and love and really feel that no one should be treated with such great harm. Hi, everyone.

[65:35]

It looks like we lost Abbott David. Hopefully, he'll sign back in and be back with us in just a minute. Hello, everyone. I'm sorry. The internet kicked me off. So, Brenda, I'm sorry that my internet dropped at that moment, but I think I basically want to appreciate your really acknowledging how important it is to stay with the honesty of your emotion and respect that and honor it and allow to see what the wisdom in it is offering you. To ask, what is the wisdom of this emotion? And how can it guide me back to what I most value, what's most important to me, and how it is that I want to be in this world and connect with others in some way.

[66:44]

So thank you again, Brenda. Thank you, David. And I think there was one more. Joshua. Are you there, Joshua? Yeah, I'm here. Hello. just wanted to say that I really appreciated this conversation on resilience. And Jane McGonigal's comments really resonated with me, as I am also kind of going through a series of events in a pretty fundamental medical crisis and a kind of reorientation to my own consciousness in this time of pandemic and in relation to that. And just resilience more generally in the last few years because I've had these kind of repeated incidents into impermanence that have thrust on me.

[67:45]

Like we lost our family home in the Thomas fire two years ago. My father came down with a prostate cancer. My sister got very serious multiple sclerosis. And then I've been invested a pretty profound brain that had very varied disease. And that just still is a fascinating discussion. And kind of the traditional nature of the miracle back to you, but I'm And Joshua, I'm missing some of what you're saying because the sound is a little bit muffled.

[68:54]

My corpus callosum is all kind of shot up. And it's this incredibly complicated brain hemispheres to matter and I just think of those um whatever it's three or four hundred connections that make this interval power my perception and the changes that have took place and effective experience I guess I'm just trying to get at the fact that it's very relevant and fascinating So one thing to recognize during time of tremendous change, what is it that's unchanging? What is it that's always present that doesn't change, regardless of what the external or even kind of the internal embodied experience, how that changes? There's always something that is unchanging. The other constant state of awareness.

[70:01]

It doesn't go, right? It doesn't go anywhere. It's always here. It's always like the sky is always present, simply receiving this myriad flow of changing causes and conditions, right? But the nature of awareness itself doesn't change. Like the light doesn't change. It's always illuminating. And all experience is made out of the same awareness. So when we're able to just tap into that experience of just being aware, right, to just be being awareness itself, then we're able to kind of rest in that and allow that to inform us and hold us through all kinds of the changes of appearances. So you have a little dog friend there that's very loud.

[71:06]

Sorry about that, everybody. Yeah, and I'm just going to take up one more minute of time, but the other thing that's been really fascinating about this profound brain damage is how it's kind of divorced me from a sense of linear time So I feel this kind of thread of connection to all these prior moments in my life that are divorced from what I would have thought of as my usual self-narrative. So I have a scrambled memory and these really deeply varied images from childhood and different stages of my life keep emerging in this very recontextualized and mixed up form. interesting period to be living through. And I'm just kind of taking place in the context of this incredibly disordered national moment, which has been a reflection of the chaos that I've been experiencing and experiencing on a personal level.

[72:11]

It's just a really fascinating time to be able to practice and have access to all this online content as a result of pandemic. It's one good outcome of this terrible set of circumstances for me. Well, thank you. Take good care, Joshua. One more person and then we'll wrap it up. Max Born. Sorry, unmuting. I just have a really, really brief kind of question, but I think you've answered the question, but I guess it's more like a philosophical, or a theoretical rather, point. It seems like what you're trying to say, where you were talking about resilience, that really everything I'm hearing is stop having a self so much. That's kind of what it all sounds like.

[73:14]

And because, I mean, let's say the one word to go like end of the Zan theory, I understand it. Self really is a non-existent thing. And so there's nothing to be, no thing to be resilient. There's no self, there's no me that needs to be resilient towards anything because I don't have a self and which could be borne out. Like what you were saying about your, what's the word that you use? I think you were really good about how thoughts self-librate themselves. self liberate and self just gets liberated and self which is encoded in one and every thought. Does that sound right to you? Another way to put this would be how to be resilient if you have no self. Let's say one had no self. So it's not that there isn't a self.

[74:19]

It's that the self isn't inherent. It isn't a fixed thing. Our sense of self is conditionally arisen, right? It's an aggregate of multiple experiences that our mind has a tendency to collectively pull together and curate and then identify with. It says these experiences are me. So there's a conditioned self. And all things conditioned are impermanent, you know, not stable, not reliable. There's nothing fixed there. So all of existence is conditioned, right? So the self is conditioned, which is why we shouldn't try to fix onto a sense of a self, because it's not really something we can hold onto. The sense of the self is just water flowing through our experience in this moment. So we can say, oh, there's water flowing and... But the minute we start identifying with certain attributes of the water and say, that's me, we get into trouble.

[75:24]

It doesn't exist. Exactly. So resilience in this case isn't returning to, again, a sense of a separate fixed self, something before, the way that the pillow was before. Because there is no before that we can return to. Heraclitus said, you can't step into the same river twice. All existence is flowing. You can't return to what was normal or to a self that was before. It doesn't exist in that way anymore. But you can stay in the course of this present moment, be with the experience right here and now, and be aware of what's arising and do our best to meet it and be attuned to it and see, as I relate to this experience, Where am I grabbing on? Where am I fixing? Where am I contracting? And where am I relaxed? Where am I opening?

[76:27]

What is a liberative experience here? So, again, studying, I say this often, study contraction in the mind and body. Study the way that we try to fix or freeze something. That tendency to fix or freeze or to hold on, that is the belief of a separate self. That's what we want to dissolve, that belief, that impulse, that tendency to fix experience in any way whatsoever. Does that make sense? It does, it does. I was just trying to put it together in ways that I think. Yeah, yeah. It's always good to try to turn these in and try to find language that works for you or a framework that works for you in some way, right? Yeah, because the way I take what you said was like, there's kind of a larger sense of resilience that there's a part which is in one sense you call it psychological or personal, you know, almost physical.

[77:34]

And there's a larger sense of like circumstantial, like, you know, that your whole circumstance could be, you know, tossed into one form of chaos or another. the resilience of human physically and mentally, which is fine. But the circumstance is a larger circumstance that is, in a sense, it's kind of independent of, you could call it independent of fixed self. So anyway, I'm just kind of thinking through what you're saying and putting it into another way of saying it, but thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, Max. Thank you for your question. Thank you all again. Brenda, I'm sorry again that the line dropped during our exchange. I appreciated hearing from you. Okay, my friends, be well. Oh, I'm going to be on vacation next week, so it could be that someone else will be here on Tuesday, or maybe I'll be here.

[78:38]

We'll see what happens, but my current plan is to be on vacation. And then this Thursday, Nancy... Petron, who is our new head of practice at City Center, will be leading the Thursday session. And she was on tonight. I don't know if you saw her, but just so you know, the Thursday teacher will be Nancy. So be well, friends. Good to be with you all again. Take good care.

[79:06]

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