Good morning. Good morning. I'd like to start, and I will start, with the first couple of lines from a poem by William Stafford called You and Art. Your exact errors make music. Your straying feet find the great dance. And you live on a world where stumbling always leads home. What is it to take the wrong turn and enjoy where you end up? What is it to experience what comes next as an adventure, something to appreciate rather than something that didn't meet your expectations or satisfy your desires?

[01:05]

or settle your fears. What is that way of involving, engaging, appreciating, opening to, being aware of, that allows the very life you're living, the way you're living it, with its own non-perfections, with its own stumbling and errors and wrong turns. How can that very life be lived in a way that rather than causing distress, discomfort, anxiety, that it can have some quality of being nourishing, an unfolding that keeps informing like a work of art.

[02:28]

So in a more classic sense, since then we would say, what is Buddha? What is that way of being? that disposition, that attitude, that state of mind, that state of heart? Is it about wisdom? Is it about compassion? So the method of Zen practice is the very question, just to bring that question up, and to appreciate that it has a deep relevance for living a human life. And to taste that relevance has its own support. Someone came to talk to me recently, and they wanted to talk about their relationship. They've been in a relationship for almost a decade. And it's at a difficult place.

[03:33]

They really love their partner, but they have a hard time living with them. Sometimes it feels like there's a deep, deep bond and connection and togetherness, and then sometimes it feels like there's a deep separation, disconnect, difficulty in communicating. So what to do? Is it time to kind of set boundaries? Listen, here's what I need. And if you can't do this, well, maybe it's over. Or is it time to be patient, accepting?

[04:38]

Nobody's perfect. All relationships go through difficulties. just open, receive, and accept. So life presents us with a challenge. And maybe we fool ourselves into thinking, well, there's a right answer to that question. There is. exactly the right way to make this relationship as i want it to be i think it should be but from that larger question that zen proposes about waking up appreciating a human life engaging it with appreciation

[05:39]

It's almost like, what's underneath this dilemma, this binary notion? Should I stay? Should I go? Nagarjuna, a great scholar, practitioner in Buddhism, said, When the narrative ceases, when the stories we're making up about what reality is, when that ceases, the solidity of life ceases. The yes or no, I should stay or go, those are the two options. Things are going well or things are going badly. I should either love or hate. I should either desire or avoid. When something pauses, and maybe it pauses with, what's underneath this?

[06:55]

How's this being put together? How's this become so solid, so much of an either-or? So just the pause and appreciating the question, which is a bit of a trick. When, as with this person in the midst of the relationship, when the situation is causing you pain and distress and agitation, it's not so easy to bring forth this equanimity, this spacious sense of what's happening. So the wide challenge of Zen is this great question of being alive.

[07:59]

In classic sense, we say, what is Buddha? And then Zen offers a particular approach. Dogen Zenji, the finder of this style of Zen, said, when you find your place where you are, Practice occurs actualizing the fundamental point. When you come into this moment with presence, with connection, with something more than your story about it, something shifts. Something in that connecting starts to reveal and inform how to relate. to the imperfections of a human life. Nobody always does exactly the right thing. No one's omniscient and knows exactly what should happen next.

[09:05]

Nor do they have the capacity to do it even if they did. Always. So we're in the midst of an eight-week intensive, and now we're in the midst of a one-day sitting, engaging this methodology. The methodology has three major factors. First factor is set the stage, create the foundation, create the conditions that support engaging the moment and learning from it. Because each one of those challenges and conundrums in our life, you know, in your relationship, how do you set the stage to have an engagement, an exchange that will open, reveal, allow both of you to discover more deeply what's going on?

[10:12]

And how will you do that in all the aspects of your life? And then specifically within the context of awareness, how will that happen? Should you meditate every morning or evening? And where and when and how? How do you set the stage for awareness? And then what is the skillful way to cultivate awareness? And that's what I'd like to talk about this morning. So the first factor, the first component is called sila, the practice of setting the foundation, of creating the circumstance. And then the second one is called samadhi, making contact.

[11:23]

maybe more particularly you could call samādhi continuous contact with the experience of the moment, which is always changing. So continuous contact with an ever-changing experience. And over the course of 2,500 years and before, But in the 2,500 years of Buddhism and the 1,200 years or so, maybe more, 1,300 years of Zen, different methodologies have come into being. And the one I'd like to talk about this morning is working with the body and working with the breath. Over that period of 2,500 years, this has been... a consistent theme, a consistent methodology that has been prescribed and recommended.

[12:29]

And then within that, there's different approaches. But the one I want to describe has, it carries in it elements that appear in many approaches. And there's something in the methodology of awareness, in the methodology of Zen, that in engaging the breath skillfully and letting it be an agent of awareness, we're also exploring engaging anything skillfully and letting it be an agent of awareness. In a way, we can take William Stafford's poem and just add that to each line. You know? Your errors make music when you engage them skillfully and let them be an agent of awareness.

[13:37]

Your straying feet find the great dance when you engage it skillfully and let it be an agent of awareness. And you live in a world where stumbling always leads home when it's engaged with awareness. So as we engage our world, there is a primary impulse, agenda. We want to suffer less and be happier more. A very reasonable proposition. And yet that stirs up, given the nature of our human existence, a complexity of responses.

[14:47]

And that's why I mentioned relationship, because that's what appears in our relationship with another person, and it also appears in our relationship with ourself, and with all other people. web of attraction and aversion, of ways we think about it and feel about it. So in working with the breath, the first strategy is to bear witness. That we just start to notice what's going on. We start to notice when the breath is rapid, when it's slow, when it's deeply settled and you're breathing from your gut, when it feels like you're breathing from the top inch of your chest.

[15:51]

Just to notice. Just to notice the life you're already living. Just to notice the range of emotions, of feelings, of attitudes. the dominant issues that you think about and how often you think about them. This willingness to be who you are, not as a philosophical point, but as a practice, as an opening to engagement. So in the practice of working with the breath, we explore that willingness to acknowledge and experience. So can we shift from the stories we have about who we are and start to experience who we are?

[16:57]

And as we start to experience it, can we acknowledge it? And we can do this in relationship to the breath, noticing how you're breathing, noticing where it's experienced in the body, noticing in that experiencing what else is happening. And then as you start to become, you start to make contact with the experience of the breath, then you can start to work with it. The first step is maybe the last step, too, in that it's the most significant. It's this willingness to be what is. This is the challenge for us in our human life.

[18:00]

And to sit down or to find a way to pay close attention to let that become a tangible and palpable exploration. That request precedes any technique. This is why often in Zen we say, just sit. Just the willingness to be what is. Then the technique is in the service of that. The technique doesn't have an independent goal. So each time we sit down to meditate, to do Zazen, to remind ourselves as thoroughly as possible of this request, to experience what's already happening, to experience it, to become aware of it, to acknowledge it. and to let the way it ripples through our mind and emotions be noticed too.

[19:09]

And anybody who's meditated discovers that's extraordinarily challenging. It's an extraordinarily challenging proposition. So then the next step of this skillful engagement is to discover how to engage the body as an ally. How our physicality is an expression of direct experiencing that can help us shift out of the complexity of our thoughts and feelings. And as we shift into experiencing the body and our physiology, in the most remarkable way, as we engage it thoroughly, that very process of becoming aware of the body stimulates our physiology towards a calming and settling disposition.

[20:33]

description that I'm offering comes from an early Bula Sutra called Anapanasati, Mindfulness of Breathing. And the instructions are quite terse. They're like this. Breathing in, aware of the whole body. Breathing out, aware of the whole body. where the whole body making the body calm and at peace but it's not so much that I make my body calm it's more that in engaging we see how we stimulate agitation we see how we're holding and as we see it

[21:37]

and we experience it, something extraordinary happens. Something just knows how to release. It's more about giving over than making something happen. It's more about releasing how we're stirring things up and seeing how we do that. In particular, fundamentally experiencing, being willing to experience whatever's happening, but then also in the service of that, inviting the body to breathe fully, inviting the breath to calm the whole way down into the abdomen, inviting the axial to flow the whole way out from the abdomen. and discovering in the practice of it that even though the mind might constantly move away, even though the very process of doing this in a strange way can stir up its own discomfort.

[22:58]

Steady, deliberate involvement. Okay? Just come back. Ram Dass used to tell a funny story where he was doing a meditation retreat in Burma on breathing. And he thought he had this great insight. And he went to the teacher and he said, he was starting to describe to the teacher the great insight he was having. And the teacher said, did that arise on the inhale or the exhale? In becoming aware of the breath, sorry to say it, but your great insights are secondary. As Nagarjuna says, when the narrative is released, something about the way we're holding the world, we're reifying it.

[24:11]

We're holding on to our own story and saying, this is reality. Something about that starts to loosen. And something in that loosening facilitates. It facilitates this deeper appreciation of our life. What I would say is what we're deeply yearning for. but we can't think our way there. We give over to something. So discovering how to let our effort be steady, consistent, and deliberate. We can carry into our effort the way we effort our life. If part of your strategy in your life is try to avoid trouble, that's what you'll do in your meditation.

[25:13]

If part of how you effort your life is try to take control, set goals, and make them happen, that's what you'll do in meditation. So part of the challenge is to slow down, become more deliberate, and when that impulse, when that strategy arises, Just let it be seen, let it be felt, and let it just open up and come back to some simple way of being. And of course, it's not that easy to drop the habits of a lifetime or the strategies of a lifetime. But each time we do it, we reenact this willingness. this fundamental willingness to be what is. So it's not about success and failure. It's about letting this willingness to be alive, which is singular, which is exactly what we've always wanted, letting that be stimulated just through the activity of returning to experience.

[26:32]

And in Zen language, this is the great koan. Whether you want to say, what is Buddha? What is original mind? Or you want to say, what's happening now? How can that come forth as we look at each aspect of our life? Whether it's our relationship, the job we're doing, the place we're living, the friends we have, or whether it's the inhale and the exhale, or the pause in between. And as we make contact, that contact reveals what it is to let something release, to let something come to a place of ease, of rest. And as we do this within the context of the body, we discover how letting the belly soften, letting the breath flow the whole way in and the whole way out, can be an ally, can be an agent of settling.

[27:58]

We discover that settling is no more something you can impose on yourself than happiness is something you can impose on yourself. And then as we explore this, and I would say the spirit of this exploration has two modalities to it. One is it happens exactly in the moment, in the moment of contact. It's not about what you think about it or what conclusion to draw later. It happens in the moment. and then it happens over repeated moments. The benefit of continued practice is something is unlearned, just the same way it was learned, just the same way you have discovered how to bring up a certain emotion in response to certain situations through constant

[29:22]

engagement that way, we discover something else by constant engagement in a different way. And as this calming, as this settling happens, as something in our being is allowed to be itself, there is a nourishing to our being that happens. There's almost like a sense of relief, often accompanied by tears. Often it has this kind of interesting quality of relief and sadness, of appreciation and something not that easy to be with. Maybe it says something about, on the deeper layers, how we're relating to our human life.

[30:33]

And often as we taste this in the realm of feeling, we do have insights about how that appears, how that is a strata underneath many aspects of our life. And in the meditation text it says, let your being be saturated with this relief. It's like soak it up. It uses the analogy of a sponge, like a sponge soaks up water. Enjoy. Enjoy what it is to not suffer. Enjoy what it is to let your being be at ease. And you know, we can practice this throughout the day, in just moments of pausing.

[31:50]

Someone was telling me they were at a medical clinic and they were standing in line to receive medical treatment. And there was a lot of people in line. And the person who was processing the documents was working very hard and getting a lot of, you know, anxiety from the folks. And they were anxious. They had sympathetic anxiety and agitation. And he came to the front of the line eventually. He placed down his medical card, and the person said, they snapped a question at him, to which he didn't know the answer. And his first impulse was to kind of snap back, you know? I think we all know that. And then he paused, and he said, I don't know the answer.

[32:59]

Could you help me find it? And the person stopped, softened, and said, OK. And then together, they figured out the process and what exactly was supposed to happen under these circumstances. And then he thanked them very much. And they smiled and said, oh, my pleasure. This, how our stumbling becomes the great dance. It's available throughout our day. And the extraordinary thing

[34:01]

is that this inner exploration, this inner alignment of working with the breath, of finding the breath in the body, of letting the breath breathe the body the way it has done since we were born, this fundamental workings of being alive can reveal something, not so much just in the realm of ideas, or strategies for how to live a life. It's something fundamental, almost cellular, so that when we meet that moment where life resists, we don't push back. We ask, what's happening now? Oh, a human being who's feeling harried and hassled under the pressures of their job.

[35:02]

Well, who hasn't been in that situation? And who, with a moment's thought, realizes, well, becoming nasty and aggressive isn't really going to get you too far anyway? So the practice of working with the breath, working with the body, educates us in something very fundamental. And it's not because we figure it out. It's because we engage it and let it rework us. And at each stage, at the stage of acknowledging, at the stage of becoming connected, at the stage of learning how to be body breath through experience,

[36:05]

at the stage of letting that create its own release, at the stage of letting that release saturate the body and being, each stage completely offers, in Zen terms, the offering of waking up, of discovering the willingness to be alive. We're still only halfway according to the sutra, although each stage is completely the full way. Then from that more settled disposition, we re-examine, we re-engage the life we're living. On one hand, you could say,

[37:09]

Let go of being stuck in your thoughts and feelings, and then look at your thoughts and feelings. In the process of Anapanasati, letting something soften, and then look at the particulars. What are the patterns of my thoughts and feelings? So right there in Zazen, bearing witness to the activity I cherish and call me. Bearing witness to the world that's created, the self that's created, that's infused with such importance and drama and intrigue. But the skillfulness is...

[38:16]

But previously, we're just swept away by it. We're just caught up in that intrigue, and it takes us into a dream. And we spend five seconds in that dream, five minutes in that dream, a lifetime in that dream. Or not. Or being anchored in the moment, the dream opens up and is seen as the play of mind and emotions right here and now. And so the very particulars of your own being, of your own psychology, of your own habits of thought and feeling, your own ways of engaging and behaving, start to become evident. And as they become evident, rather than becoming something that mysteriously pulls you into a dream, they become something that's educating you in who you are and starting to point towards what it is to be more awake and skillful in the life we're living.

[39:36]

what's happening now, and what is it to practice with it. And in the process of zazen, in the process of working with body and breath, is to just let it be like a flower that has arisen in the moment. Just to be fully appreciated, experienced, and to let it flow through, to let it just be part of the constant interplay of existence. To not grasp it, to not push it away. When wondrous appreciation of the moment the agenda that we bring forth and none other.

[40:51]

It's not only a willingness to live, but an appreciation for living. And that reworks us. That person who told me that story about standing in line in the medical clinic, they were telling me when they first went to Tassajara in the winter as a monastic student, it felt like everything they did was wrong. And not only that, somebody came up and told them so. First of all, they were annoyed. They thought this was ridiculous, inappropriate, people were being overbearing, arrogant, all sorts of things.

[41:58]

Then they started to feel deeply humiliated in respect to their own incompetence, in respect to their own inability to get it right. And then at some point, something shifted. And their attitudes started to be, you know, this is just who I am, and this is the best I can do, and that's just how it is. Really? And if I do it wrong every time, well, okay. That's how it'll be. And as they went with that, then that became almost amusing.

[43:08]

Rather than being painful and humiliating, it became almost amusing, and they discovered that right in that, they could also be sincere, and dedicated to what they were doing. And then they could stand in front of someone who was harried and harassed and aggressive and just say, I don't know. I know you really want me to have the answer to that question. and I don't have it. What is it to be such a one? What is it to discover how to engage the world that allows, that offers

[44:19]

yourself and everybody else that kind of permission that's perfumed with that kind of benevolence and patience and what does William Stafford mean when he says this your exact errors make a music that nobody hears Your straying feet find the great dance, walking alone. And you live on a world where stumbling always leads home. Year after year, fits over your face. When there was youth, your talent was youth. Later, you find your way by touch. And you discover where music begins before it makes any sound, far in the mountains where canyons go, still as the always falling ever new flakes of snow.

[45:32]

Thank you.

[45:34]

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