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. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Hello from, as Cotto said, Belfast in Northern Ireland, a long way from... where this is being streamed, but also I see on my screen lots of people from this neck of the woods, from Europe. So I really appreciate everybody coming along to support me, come along to take part in this Dharma event. And thank you to Nancy, the head of practice here in City Center, who invited me to speak.

[01:05]

I feel very grateful, very privileged. And thank you to Paul, my teacher, who I can see on my screen. I thought you were in Tassajora. How wonderful. In this digital world that we can connect in this way. So. First, I'm going to invite you to breathe. Let us take a couple of breaths together. Inhale and exhale. Inhale. and exhale and we're doing this in this intimate distant harmony and as we're breathing together we can

[02:30]

reach out in our hearts to each other, mindful of the other rooms, the other bodies, the other time zones, the other countries. So using this digital medium in a way that goes beyond the limitations of its design. So I've been thinking a lot lately about practicing with breath and how in this tradition we're encouraged to be aware of our breath and to use this attention. our breath as an anchor, as a way of rooting ourselves.

[03:40]

I've been teaching newcomers lately. Still online, unfortunately, but this is our world now. And I've been experiencing such joy. helping people figure out that this thing that we carry with us everywhere, our breath, that we don't have to go out and buy or be an experienced practitioner to use. And it doesn't require anything of us except our attentions. So this can be a focus for our practice. This thing that we carry with us in every moment.

[04:48]

And that this attention to the breath can have a stabilizing effect. And it's great to see people realize that. I see people understand this tool is available to help them settle down and steady themselves and turn their attention to something that's happening, as Suzuki Roshi said, just in the place where the outer world becomes the inner world through this doorway, this threshold. this boundary between the outer world and the inner world, and seeing how when we pay attention to it, that boundary becomes blurred. And our interdependence, our interconnection is revealed.

[05:57]

So for many of us, this study of the breath was the first great teaching of meditation. And that first realization that deep in our own wise body, we have the ability to when we awaken it, to be less driven by our reactivity, less quick to panic. And that by focusing again and again on the breath, we slow down our responses to our familiar triggers. And This creates an environment in which we can deal more skillfully, more thoughtfully with whatever arises.

[07:14]

So Paul Haller has been teaching, has been using the Satipatthana Sutta, the broader foundations of mindfulness, as a teaching tool lately. So we've been reading that and benefiting from Paul's investigation of that, exploring that ancient foundational text. So, and when I say foundation, I do read foundation, the four foundations of mindfulness. body, feelings, mind and mental activity. And so the very first part of that really struck by this in the Satipatthana or the Anapanasati Sutta.

[08:18]

The first instruction, the attention to the body and the first part of that is mindfulness of breathing, being mindful of the breath. And in the text, once this has been outlined, there's this very first practical instruction about how to do this, this original instruction about how to practice. And I'm going to, the text we were reading, in other words, But I think it's interesting to use she and experiment with that and see what arises when we hear these texts with the she. I'd like to use they, but then I think it's hard to scan grammatically. So forgive me.

[09:20]

And how, monks, does she... In regard to the body, abide contemplating the body. She sits down, having folded her legs in front of her, mindful she breathes in, mindful she breathes out. So, noticing the long breath, noticing the short breath. This instruction to sit quietly, having folded your legs in front of you, and pay attention to your breath. And in this same sutta that we've been studying, the Satipatthana Sutta, this practice of mindful breathing, the Buddha says, it's the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of suffering and grief, for walking on the path of truth, for the realization of Nibbana.

[10:39]

So that's quite a promise. That's... That's what we'll experience when we pay attention to our breaths. I have this sensation of two and a half thousand years of the Dharma stretching back based on this teaching. using this practice, this sequence of breath. I can't find a metaphor. It's not a bloodline. It's like a pipeline for the breath that reaches from that original teaching right up to the mindfulness practices of the 21st century.

[11:49]

There's a book called Caesar's Last Breath that some of you may be familiar with. Many of us read the synopsis without reading the book, but published a few years ago. And the idea is that the 25 sextillion air molecules, many, many, many, many air molecules, that Julius Caesar exhaled with his last breath, the odds are that at least one is included in your next breath. So it's one of those little factoids about the universe that has a kind of eye-opening effect. Am I breathing in a molecule? of breath that Julius Caesar exhaled.

[12:56]

And I calculate that that goes for the Buddha too. And in fact, for all his monks and everyone on the planet, we are all inhaling and exhaling this air that has passed through. billions and billions of sets of loans. So the tradition of Dharma succession in our lineage is from warm hand to warm hand. So this is another proposition that this passing on to the next person, that The essence of this is the breath that we share.

[13:57]

The way that we exhale and include all beings. And that our ancestors and their exhalations included us. So... I tend to shy away from the etymological analysis of words, like investigating what the roots of this word are, because it doesn't seem to give that much information about how the word is currently used. But I really like that the Latin root of the word spirit is from the root, spiritus, breath, or spirare, to breathe.

[15:04]

The spirit, the breath of God breathing life into the world. The spiritual is the breath. And this root, spirare, or spiritus, shows up in words like inspire and expire, inspire, to put spirit into and expire, to breathe out. And to conspire, to conspire is to breathe together. So I think that sitting together quietly, breathing in a room, we conspire as we breathe together.

[16:09]

And our conspiracy is a plot to save all beings. We're conspiring to help all beings. So there's a pragmatic element of this breathing together which benefited me greatly when I started to sit. And I've been noticing working with newcomers how that element is missing. When I first... which is a few years ago now, one of the things I began to notice when I started sitting in a room with other people, people I didn't know, was that my nervous little body was very conscious of all the other bodies in the room.

[17:26]

And the threat that they represented, I noticed that my shoulders were always raised to brace myself over against any potential attack. And my breathing, because of this, was shallow and panicky. I do now when I sit down to meditate is I drop my shoulders and I exhale. I'm telling my body, this is the position. Drop the shoulders and exhale. And so as my practice continued with groups of people in Sangha, sitting in community, I began to see that under my chatty, wisecracking, story-making persona, there was this frightened person.

[18:44]

So inhaling and exhaling helped Encourage this frightened person to experiment with not bracing myself for attack. I saw that my hair-triggered startle response was very tightly wired. When I was a kid, I was described as highly strong. So, and I saw that in a room of people, that as soon as there was a slightest movement, or even a noise, if someone breathed in a way that was, that drew my attention, that was like, oh, the lights went on again. I went up. My adrenaline,

[19:54]

And I drop the shoulders and exhale and go, it's okay. It's okay. So that experience showed me that experience of sitting with other people. showed me how anxious I was and helped me breathing together with other people, helped me manage my hair trigger response. It was like a training for my heart. I knew intellectually that people were unlikely to attack me. But it took sitting together with silent meditators in a room to begin to believe that they weren't going to attack me.

[21:09]

And yeah, nobody has so far. So groups of people, as the years went by, became friendly. rather than threatening. I feel more supported by groups of people rather than anxious about potential attack. I feel... I've discovered that breathing together with people is really therapeutic. And as I became less panicky, as my startle response reduced, I became more able to listen to other people, listen to the cries of the world.

[22:16]

So the conspiracy, the conspiring, the breathing together, creates a space where bodhisattva activity can arrive as we breathe together and settle down and have faith that other people are good people. So in 2019, which is amazingly two years ago now, and it was about six months before COVID began, my father died. It was the first time I'd been with someone. It's the only time I've been with somebody as they died. And he'd been ill for a long time, and we knew it was going to happen.

[23:24]

So my sister spent the night before with him and my mother and my brother and I were in the room. The care home called us and we came. I came down from Belfast to Dublin and we were there for three or four hours while he died. I had the amazing privilege of being present with my father while he died. And I think, you know, I think all the people during the COVID time who couldn't, who couldn't be there. And I feel, I feel for it. I hadn't ever appreciated how, how meaningful this is. to be there at a death.

[24:25]

My brother had his hand on my father's shoulder. I said this at the funeral, so some people have heard this before. But my father delivered my brother. He was born at home. He brought him into the world. He was there for his first breath. And 58 years later, my brother was there for my father's last breath. So we were... quietly in the room. I was holding Dad's hand and they had taken away all the oxygen machines and all the extra help and there was just this frail body breathing and he would inhale slowly and regularly and then exhale. And it got slower. The gaps between the exhale and the inhale got longer.

[25:28]

And we'd wait for the next inhalation. And then finally, there was an out-breath, and we waited and waited for the next breath, but there was no next breath. In a way, it was very simple, very undramatic. It was that the breath had stopped. This body, this being, was no longer breathing. My father was gone. There was no more. There was no more person there. And I felt very grateful to have had that experience. So it's a different story.

[26:38]

When I was a child, I wasn't just anxious about human beings. I was also afraid of spiders to a really dramatic degree. It was a lot of screaming and standing on chairs and panicking. It was really, really powerful. It was a phobia. It was arachnophobia to an extreme degree. And when I began to practice, I learned to settle down, to steady, to notice my panic and to be less reactive. And it was really helpful. I was like, oh, look, there's a spider. And there's my breath speeding up and my shoulders rising and my tension increasing. And I reduced my reactivity to a point where I didn't really mind spiders that much anymore.

[27:53]

autonomous response, autonomous response, that spiders weren't a threat. Spiders are harmless. Spiders are the good guys. Spiders are on my side in the great scheme of things. And then I went to live in Tassajara about 15 years ago now. And I... It was all new to me and it was a new country and a new world and lots of new flora and fauna. And someone showed up at work circle at our daily meeting one day with a big red swollen lump on his face. And the work leader asked him, goodness, what happened? It was very dramatic. And he said, I was bitten by a spider. And he was a comedian of a kind. He was a very funny man. So I started to laugh because I thought, oh, look, spiders don't bite.

[28:58]

But everybody else was just looking at him solemnly and sympathetically because, of course, he had been bitten by a spider because there were spiders that bit. There still are. There are biting spiders in the U.S., I'm here to tell you, and in other countries too. I mean, Ireland's probably, like not having any snakes, maybe redemptive biting spiders, and we're very fortunate with that. So now I was in a place where my arachnophobia, my panic about spiders, wasn't irrational anymore. It was, there were little creatures that I should be afraid of. But the phobia didn't come back. The panic reaction didn't come back. And that was very interesting to see. The caution around spiders was still there. It was like, that thing.

[30:00]

Stories of fiddlebacks. Spiders that bit in very unpleasant ways. And then the tarantulas showed up. I'm not kidding. There were these... huge, furry, grey creatures as big as my hand. And they're really beautiful, this silken fur. And you pass them by as they made their way slowly up the road. I'd be going for a walk and there'd be three or four tarantulas moving along deliberately. I began to... see them as, like, fellow practitioners, so slow and quiet and serious and intent. They were eight-legged monks doing gay practicing. And I was careful with them, but I wasn't afraid of them.

[31:09]

And I began to notice that I really, I was like, I fell in love with them. I loved these creatures. They were so beautiful. They were such great teachers for me, these tarantulas. It was around this time of year, I think it's mating season, they're looking for love in the Wall Street. So I fell in love with the tarantulas. A spider showed up here the other night. It was quite large for Ireland. And I was like, where are you going? Running out from under the table and then running back in again. And I was like, okay, I think we can live together. I think we can live in harmony. You're not going to bite me. So I feel like I'm calmer now around spiders and humans.

[32:10]

I'm having... an appropriate response. Kind of the point of this story is I have now found myself, like all of us, in a world where every human being, every shared breath is a potential risk. Every unmasked person is a torrential or a potentially life-threatening event. And I notice in that, you know when I leave the house and I go out, that my old PTSD response is still really close to the surface, that habit of, that recoil, that raise my shoulders, pull away from people.

[33:24]

But that still wants to be heard. So I have to work with that. I have to turn towards that and go, it's okay. This panic isn't helping the situation. This being mindfully aware of other people and not being reckless, not being careless around them is, as we would say, an appropriate response to I don't want to get into a space where I'm judging or pushing away my fellow human beings.

[34:28]

I find myself thinking about the shared spaces. that we once inhabited together, all those years we spent breathing the same air together. And I think of that with sadness, with melancholy, longing. We haven't yet reopened the Zendo in Belfast and we're cautiously looking at it. It's quite a small room. The windows don't open. We're figuring out how that will be to be together because not everybody has access to Wi-Fi and computer or even a quiet place.

[35:39]

To sit together, I noticed that the people who want to ask me about reopening are often those with children or demanding jobs or a very small space that they're living in. And I really feel grief for the loss of that opportunity to sit together together. online practice is pretty remarkable as well. I've been watching long-term practitioners like Paul and all these old timers adapting themselves to this new reality with such flexibility.

[36:41]

And such resilience. It's like, okay, here is the new thing. And how can we work with it? How can we practice in this way together? And I feel such admiration. And you feel like, yeah, we can do this. We can be together in this way. One of the other benefits of online practice is that we have people joining us now from all over the world, everywhere on this planet. We sit at 7 a.m. and some of our friends are in San Francisco where that's 11 p.m. For you guys.

[37:42]

And some are in Slovenia. And Berlin. And Spain. Greece. Norway. And how wonderful. How. What privilege this is. To be able to practice like this. With a sangha. that is connected all over the world. Like Indra's net, we have a bubble, all these bright stars all through the world. We are no longer bound by the space. We are no longer limited by our distance. The only limitation is time. Finding time that works in different time zones is the new challenge.

[38:49]

So I'm grieving for what's missing in that. Because it's not quite enough. I enjoy it. And I miss the shared breath. That's what's not here. I think that the presence of other bodies, other quietly breathing bodies in this space, this is what, this is what's no longer there. a shared breath of my friends in the Dharma, a shared breath of all beings, all humans.

[39:53]

So I remind myself that I love the spiders, I love the tarantulas. And when I'm not panicking, But this love for all beings is what arises in this space. So I vow to turn towards the groups of people and cautiously embrace them and welcome them and breathe with them maybe while wearing a mask but breathing wet again and I hope that we can together explore how to create a space where we can conspire conspire and create bodhisattvas

[41:10]

breathe together again in a three-dimensional world. So I'm nearly done. Am I done, Kuda? Is that a good place to end? If you're ready, we can do the Bodhisattva Vows and then transition to Q&A. Yes, would that be okay? Well, that's just... 30 seconds, just breathe together. Will we do that? Just being aware of all the people, all the points of light around the world. Just inhaling. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[42:54]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:57]

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