This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Good morning. I was once introduced as the author of Less. Accomplishing Less by Doing More was what it was. I thought, that's more the Zen style. There used to be a T-shirt that said, working hard, accomplishing nothing. I wanted to start with a quote that jumped out at me a few days ago and that I've been really turning as a kind of a puzzle, a colon, or a directive in how I want to practice and how I want to live my life. Here's the quote. It says, stare.

[01:01]

It is the way to educate our eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. Stare. It is the way to educate our eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. And I was particularly surprised when I found this. This was a quote by Walker Evans, who was a photographer who... Actually, when I was in college, I feel like I was pretty asleep. And there wasn't a lot that got through to me, but one of the books I had to read for... a freshman college class, was a book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

[02:03]

And it was a book of photographs by Walker Evans in which he was going around the country during the Great Depression in like the late 20s and early 30s. And it's a book of just amazing, startling photographs of suffering, but also a kind of dignity and joy often. Sometimes just a lot of suffering, but also sometimes in incredible dignity. And I was thinking that these, partly why these words grab me is that I feel like we're usually taught to not stare, to not eavesdrop, to not pry. And there is, I think, there's a side of Zen practice that is like that. But I think there's another side of this practice, another side of being a human being that is around, you know, not turning away, continuing to turn in toward what is most real, most difficult.

[03:12]

And in a way, that's, you know, when I think about, again, this tradition, this particular tradition has the tradition of wall-gazing or staring, but we're not, you know, we're not staring... At the wall, we're more staring at our own lives, like really paying attention. What is this life? What does it mean to be a human being? And this directive, these last two directives, again, I think are powerful and also kind of mysterious, this die knowing something. This one particularly. What does that mean? What does that mean to die knowing something? And I think what it means is to pay attention to your life, to live knowing something, to really investigate and look at what does it mean to be a full, thriving, free, compassionate human being.

[04:18]

And then this you are not here long. So in some way, this quote, I feel like, epitomizes some of the core, the most basic teachings around Zen practice or Buddhist practice or the practice of being human, that these directives get right at not avoiding difficulty, right? The directive to stare and pry and listen, not avoiding difficulty. And I think... to do it in such a way that is both selfless and also embracing change, embracing the sense of impermanence. And I was trying to think about how to frame, well, what do we do with this quote? How do we actually practice some of these tenets, some of these directives that are being mentioned here?

[05:24]

And I want to talk about seven practices. And I'll tell a little story about where these practices come from. This was a few years ago. As David mentioned, much of my life in the last years has been how to make these practices accessible, especially in the world of work. And I've found myself doing quite a bit of work within Google and different Google campuses around the world. And we've been actually training Google engineers to be meditation teachers as a way of spreading practices inside of the company. And there was a session at Google several years ago in which we invited Norman Fisher. to come and give a talk to about a dozen Google engineers.

[06:29]

And actually what I realized, I was sitting there in the room with about 12 people from Google and a few people on my team, and I noticed, I was looking at what the agenda for this day was going to be, and on the top of the agenda it said, Norman gives short talk. And I had a feeling that no one had showed that to Norman. And as someone else was talking, I put this paper in front of Norman and I pointed to it. And literally, I saw him get, he got out a napkin and a pen. And a few minutes later, Norman gave a talk. No one actually quite remembers what he said, but I took notes. Norman has denied saying the notes that I've taken, but These have now become what I call the seven principles for not only how to teach mindfulness or meditation in a corporate setting, but for how I want people I work with to work together, and even maybe more broadly, how I want to live my life.

[07:43]

And I ended up printing these out and... commenting a little bit. In my workplace at Silly, we say that we're seriously silly at the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. I printed these out, and these are on everyone's desk. I also started writing about these seven, and I called Norman and said, are you okay with me using these? And he said, I have no memory of having ever said these things. But he said they're pretty good. So here are the seven principles for this talk about how to, I think maybe how to embody this quote by Walker Evans, but maybe more broadly how to practice, how to live your life. So the seven are, love the work. Do the work.

[08:44]

Don't become an expert. Feel your own pain. Feel the pain of others. Depend on others. And keep making it simpler. So pretty good, I think. So I'll just talk for, in a way, I feel like I could have picked any one of these to talk a week on. But maybe I'll just, for today, just very briefly touch on these seven and a bit of how they've impacted me and how hopefully you'll, what I'm hoping, I always hope in these talks, you know, that I have this large aspiration, right, that we only have like, you know, 30, 40 minutes together. So it should change your life, right? This talk should change your life. I like to aim high, right? Very high. You can see, right, world peace and all that. But why not?

[09:46]

Why not aim high? And then there's at least, I hope, that you'll come away with maybe an idea for a practice or something that you want to do more of or maybe less of in your daily life. So let's start with love the work. And so this is the work of being human, to love the work of showing up. to love the work of practicing. Practicing in some very basic way is the work of expanding our own awareness and helping others to constantly expand and grow our own awareness, to be able to see our blind spots and patterns. I feel like all day long I notice I'm dealing, I've learned a lot as a business leader, about projection and transference and about patterns and how we bring in these family patterns, these deep family patterns.

[10:58]

And even, I think, patterns maybe that go back before we were born that are just in us. So the work of seeing these patterns, seeing what drives us, understanding our own motivation, and getting more and more as much... clarity as we can muster and helping others. And a real pivotal moment in my own life in loving the work was when I was living here at Zen Center and I got a call from my mother saying that my father was quite ill and was probably dying. And And I immediately flew back to the East Coast to go be with my father. And it's funny, now that I'm a father, I have a much better understanding of... It was a real disappointment for my father that I dropped out of college and came to the Zen Center.

[12:07]

This was not on his wish list of success or what he wanted. And he was actually quite angry. But I went back to be with him. And in part, I had a tremendous support system at Zen Center. There were several different women who I had become very close to who were very instrumental in helping me find my way through the... hospital system and the medical system. And when I went back and walked in the hospital, I found that my father was completely disoriented and was actually being heavily medicated and had been tied to his bed because these medications were making him more and more disoriented. And no one was telling him what was actually happening. No one was telling him that he was gravely ill and probably didn't have much time to live

[13:10]

My mother and brother were there, and somehow there was this sense around not speaking the truth, not saying what was actually happening. And when I arrived, again, with this great support system, my friends, my Zen Center colleagues said, remember, you're in charge. You can fire the doctors. you can untie your father from the bed, you can stop all the medications, and you can actually tell him the truth of what is happening. And with that support, I was able to do that. I was 26 years old at the time. And it was an amazing time of meeting my father in that time and being able to have the conversation with with him around his own dying.

[14:11]

And of course, I tried to hold out some hope that one never knows, but what the doctors were saying was that he probably didn't have more than maybe a few weeks or a few months to live. And my father had been incredibly introverted his whole life, but in hearing this news, about his own shortness of life, I felt almost like he had kind of a tremendous breakthrough in that he asked me to hand him the phone so that he could call everyone he knew and express his love and gratitude. This was nothing like my father had ever done. And then he looked at me and said, you know how angry I've been, but whatever you're doing now Please keep doing it. He says, I don't understand. I have no idea what it is you're doing.

[15:13]

But please keep doing what you're doing. And this was, in a way, this was a huge moment in my love for the work. Because I had no idea that I, you know, at the time I was, you know, I was a kid. I was just loving practicing and loving living in community. and loving the work. At the time, my work was being supposedly in charge of the draft horse farming project at Green Gulch. The horses did not know that I was in charge. They really thought they were in charge. But this moment with my father was huge. And in some way, I feel like the work, the work is how do we meet our lives? How do we meet each situation appropriately, sometimes with fierceness, sometimes with gentleness, but in any case, this sense, I think, of staring and prying and listening and eavesdropping, like to really be, I think this is the work.

[16:22]

So the second, do the work. So in a way, this is the work in a way very simply of actually having a meditation practice. I know that my guess is that people in this room either have a practice or would like to have a practice. And I find more and more as I travel around the world inside of companies, I find there's huge... motivation and inspiration, aspiration for people to want to practice. And yet it's hard. I find that it's hard. And one of the things that I find is that the people that I come across are attempting to practice by themselves, which I sometimes will admit that for the first 10 years of my practice, I don't think I ever sat with less than 50 people.

[17:30]

It seems so strange to me that people would attempt to practice by themselves, and I can understand why that would be so hard. I'm glad. I know Zen Center is doing virtual sittings, because some people just live far away from other people, and you can't maybe sit physically with others. But more and more, I see doing the work, I think the power of community is really important, to sit with others. But doing the work, some of the language that I use about the work is I talk about dedicated practice and integrated practice. So dedicated practice is the practice of sitting. The sitting practice as being so fundamental. But just as fundamental is integrated practice, is how do you take that, whatever those findings, that spirit,

[18:30]

the spirit of practice into your life, into your work, into your relationships, into everything, everything maybe into your art. You know, this word, when we talk about the work, the word that I often use in companies is the word mindfulness, right? That mindfulness has become the kind of more accessible and accepted way to talk about what I think we talk about as practice. And when I describe mindfulness, I say that it's not neutral, that mindfulness includes warm-heartedness, compassion, curiosity. So there's this sense of how doing the work is this combination of... dedicated practice and integrated practice. It also includes doing longer sittings.

[19:34]

For me, part of the practice is not only having a daily practice, but finding the time to do one-day sittings or longer sittings is a really core part, I think, of doing the work. The third of these seven will sound very familiar to many of you, of Don't Become an Expert. Suzuki Roshi, I brought this copy of this book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a collection of his talks. I have no idea how many times I've read this book. It's been countless times. This morning, I picked it up and looked at it in preparing for this talk. I read something that I don't remember ever seeing before. I'm convinced they keep changing this book. It's very odd. The lines that I... I'll read a part, and I'll highlight what I hadn't seen before, where he says, In the beginner's mind, there's no thought.

[20:46]

I have attained something. All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When you have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we're true beginners. Then we can really learn something. The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. I don't remember ever seeing that line before. The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. People often say, well, why don't we talk more about compassion in Zen practice? Zen often seems a little either intellectual or a little cold. But I think it's because compassion is assumed. I think that the tradition assumes compassion is within everything that we do. Why else would we sit? Why would we spend so much time? It's not a self-improvement program. It's a compassion program.

[21:49]

The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless. Our founder, Dogen, always emphasized how important it is to resume our boundless original mind. Then we're always true to ourselves in sympathy with all beings and can actually practice. So the practice of don't become an expert. So again, I thought it was really beautiful. As Norman was teaching, the context that it came from was, as a mindfulness teacher or meditation teacher, we're not trying to become an expert. I've certainly given up trying to become an expert as a leader, as CEO. As CEO of a company, a growing company, it's incredibly humbling.

[22:53]

We just did a well-being survey in my organization in which everyone in the company anonymously rated how they felt about the culture, how they felt about managers, and how they felt about the CEO. And it may be hard for you all to believe, but not everyone loves me. It was really astounding, astounding, and that not everyone thought I was a really great leader. It's like, who are these people? But it made me feel like just how hard it is, how hard it is to influence in a way that is truly effective and compassionate. And I feel like I continue to try. to try harder. And I have these conversations with people I work with. I'm asking, what is it? What could I do?

[23:56]

What could I do better? That this is, for me, my practice of a beginner's mind. So love the work. Do the work. Don't become an expert. Feel your pain. Don't avoid your own pain. This is so basic. This is, I think... again, going back to this Walker Evans quote around listen, listen deeply, train your eye, train your heart to feel your own pain. And this was the, right, so this is the, you know, one of the great teachings of the Buddha was not avoiding difficulty. And that right in the midst of that difficulty is our joy and our freedom. But it's rather paradoxical, because of course we want to be comfortable.

[24:57]

But there is something about actually leaning into and asking, what's not working? What's difficult? And feeling the pain of others. Feeling the pain of others. Again, I feel like this is a great instruction, whatever you're doing as a human being. So often in the world of work, I often have the experience of walking into a group of business leaders who at first all appear to really have it together, especially some of these really successful tech companies. where people make a lot of money and are very successful, and only no success. Through their whole lives, they've been kind of bred to be successful. But I call it looking under the hood of a human being.

[26:01]

What you find is everyone's kind of a mess, actually underneath, in a beautiful way. Everyone is dealing with their own inner critic, their problems that they have, with their boss, with their co-workers, with their parents and families and addiction and mental illness and anxiety. These are all part of the human condition. And to be able to find our own composure and richness right in the midst of feeling our pain and feeling the pain of others. The sixth, and sometimes, I don't know which of these, sometimes some of these feel particularly difficult. But this next one, depend on others. Depend on others, I think, can be really challenging.

[27:04]

I think we're often taught around being our own independence. Do it yourself. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. But no, there's something about actually realizing that almost everything that we do depends on others, from this room and these buildings to these cushions and this watch to our own kind of social condition, that we are so dependent on our relationships. our relationships with others are so core to our own practice, our own happiness, our own being. Yeah, and depending on others, as we want, you know, for influence, for influence to make change, to make our organizations healthier, right?

[28:12]

The At the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, our vision and mission statement is that all leaders in the world are wise and compassionate, thus creating the conditions for world peace. And we say that in this context, everyone is a leader. You're all leaders. We all lead our own lives. We all influence. So the sense of... seeing how allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, allowing ourselves to depend on others. And the seventh is keep making it simpler. Despite everything in our lives these days seems to be about complication. Our addiction to our cell phones or our Facebook or Twitter or whatever,

[29:13]

is happening, the way the technology seems to be going against this idea of living with more simplicity. And I love the... One of my favorite Zen stories around simplicity is the student who enters the monastery and says, please... please give me your teaching to the Zen teacher. And the teacher says, have you eaten your breakfast? And the student says yes. And the teacher says, well, then go wash your bowl. Just go wash your bowl. And to me, this is where the simplicity is. The simplicity is in whether it's the bowl washing or even the emailing or the conversation or... I do a lot of work in how can I make my meetings more simple?

[30:15]

What would a simple meeting look like? How about a simple conversation, even a difficult conversation, to bring a sense of simplicity to it? One of the ways that I... A very kind of simple... model for me around leadership. But again, this is in the context that we're all leaders. Someone recently said to me that leaders just do three things. And maybe you could say humans, we all do three things. We think, we talk, and we hold space. We think, we talk, and we hold space, meaning that we're We're in relationship. It's a pretty simple way of looking at our lives. Or even simpler, the life of someone who practices Zen is described as sitting down and getting up.

[31:21]

I love that about when we do an all-day sitting, you start to feel that rhythm of you're either sitting down or you're getting up. Our work lives are like that. Much of our lives are. are like that. So I want to come back to this idea that I read in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind around compassion. As I understand what compassion is, it has three parts to it. One part One part is actually feeling another person's feelings. The ability, it's kind of empathy practice, feeling someone else's feelings is one part of compassion. The second part is a kind of understanding, the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to actually attempt to understand another person.

[32:34]

And the third is the motivation to help, to actually have an aspiration and motivation to help. So I want to kind of end this morning by having us do maybe 15 seconds, a whole 15 seconds of compassion practice. So here's my suggestion. I want to suggest that if you're up for it, that for 15 seconds, actually look around the room and without, in a stealth way, without anyone knowing who you're looking at, choose a couple of people in the room and just say to yourself, may you be happy. May you be free of suffering. Okay, 15 seconds. I'll time it. Go. okay, how'd that feel?

[33:47]

There's this very famous quote by the Dalai Lama where he says, if you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. And there's actually really interesting science. It's funny, the science of meditation and mindfulness is actually wonderfully breathtaking and wonderfully new in its infancy. But a study that I recently saw showed that when we're just feeling someone else's pain, it's in a part of the brain and a part of our system that can get kind of tired out. that there's a lowering of energy if we're constantly, so like if a therapist or if you're in the nurse or doctor and you're just feeling people's pain, if that's your main operation, it gets really draining and there's some scientific evidence, brain science around that.

[35:06]

But interestingly enough, compassion uses a totally different part of the brain. It draws apart the part of the brain around empathy, but there's another part of the brain around wishing others well that does not seem to have any limit to its energy, its energy as even measured physically in the brain. So please, I hope we can all take, that's one, you know, it's a great stealth practice, this practice of compassion. So stare. It is the way to educate our I and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. We are not here long. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[36:10]

Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge. And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[36:30]

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