This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. And welcome on this lovely sunny morning, especially to those of you who haven't been here before. Several weeks ago, I gave a talk along with Philippe Golding on Buddhism and neuroscience in the dining room. And the room was packed. And upon reflection later, I mean, it was a marvelous talk, marvelous to hear Philippe, you know, talk about

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what exactly is the leading edge now in the exploration of the brain and neurology and how it all connects to what we're thinking and feeling and how we're behaving. And I was struck by the fact the room was packed to capacity. And certainly it mirrored my own... interest in the topic. And it set me thinking about, in a somewhat larger context, how mindfulness has become, in the last decade, such a common notion in our way of relating to our lives, for many of us. a Bay Area phenomenon, but it seems to be wider than that.

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I notice now that in many areas, mindfulness has become a standard ingredient. In the whole field of mental health now, mindfulness has established itself as one of the key ingredients is how to promote and sustain mental health. Then what is mental health? I was thinking neurology is the new psychology. I remember decades ago at this point, when Buddhism and psychology, the interface between them was the field of interest.

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And it is true that mindfulness, the capacity to attend to the experience in the moment, and both the aspects of thought, of feeling, of physiology, of behaviors. The capacity to attend to that is in itself, is now we're discovering, therapeutic. And then it's also marvelously adaptive. And it can reveal for us how we suffer and how we can liberate ourselves from suffering. In some ways it carries in that direct expression the fundamental teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha. Let me just mention it in the context of a poem by Rilke.

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You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything. The darkness... that comes with each failure and the shivering light that comes with each awakening. So many live on wanting nothing and are raised to the rank of prince on the slippery ease of their light judgments. But what you love to see are faces that work and feel thirst. You love most those who need you. in the same way they need a useful tool. So within the teachings of Buddhism, this is something to do with the first noble truth. That we want to live.

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We want a lot. Perhaps we want everything. And that sets up a profound dilemma for us. Sets up some sense of failure, some sense of yearning, some sense of fear. There's a psychologist who specializes in emotions, Paul Ekman from Berkeley, a local. And his research across the globe discovered that there's four basic emotions that we all share. Anger, sadness, fear, and enjoyment. And of course, each of them represents a family of emotions, a cluster of emotions. Our anger, our resentment, our bitterness, all that negativity is one cluster.

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our enjoyment, our appreciation, our gratitude, our joys, our happiness, our sympathetic joy. So four clusters. And then out of this common ground arises... another layer of emotion, and then layers of feeling and layers of thought. And so from a Buddhist perspective, from a Zen perspective, the question that arises is, how do we wake up in the middle of that? How do we not just become ensnared

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enmeshed in all the issues and dilemmas that brings up for us. And then there are different formulas, but one key is mindfulness. And then mindfulness has a key. In some ways you could say the key is intention. The intention to be present for what's happening in contrast to being caught up in it. To be present for those clusters of emotion, rather than just act them out. You know, to emote, to set in motion, to set in motion feelings, to set in motion thoughts, to set in motion behaviors, to set in motion a physiological response.

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So how in the midst of that can we wake up, can we pay attention? What is it that brings us to a talk on neuroscience or anything else? What are we hoping to hear or to witness or to experience? And when we've heard it, how will it influence our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors? So these questions and the attitude, the intention, the disposition, the engagement they stimulate is what we commonly call practice.

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That we intentionally engage our human experience to wake up, to suffer less and be happier more. And so in a way, this is the centerpiece of our practice, to come back to that. And then some of the Zen language seems utterly perplexing in relationship to that. You could say Zen practice teaches us how to pay attention, teaches us how to engage with inquiry, and offers us certain behaviors that support the two of them. And in fact, today is the first day of our fall anga, our fall practice period, where a group of us will commit to engaging practice in a way that will support this inquiry, support this process of suffering less, and...

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having more, literally, more enjoyment of our human lives. And then it falls into different categories. One category, cultivating the ability, the capacity to pay attention, both by sitting still and both by tracking into our lives moments of mindfulness. moments of intentional behavior. Moments of behavior that represent, express what we think is important in our lives. Moments that show us what it is and how it is that we wake up. So that's one element. And then the other element is to learn from it as we do it. What are you seeing about yourself?

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What are you discovering about who you are? What helps you to do it? In Buddhism there are many formulations. What helps you to do it? Patience, a benevolent spirit, and a stick-to-it-ness, a discipline. a continuous engagement. One of the attributes of setting aside a period of time is to do it with others. And then, of course, that comes up for us as a particular kind of challenge in our urban life. Here at the center, we meditate in the morning, we meditate in the late afternoon. But everybody has their own restraints and constraints from their schedule.

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So as an organization, what we'd like to hear from you is how can we support you in your practice? How can we support you to engage in this practice period with us in a way that fits in with your schedule. So as part of this practice period, what we'd like to offer you is that you can sign up for the practice period and do most of your sitting at home. And then once a week, come and be part of a practice group. And then within that practice group, you talk to others about your practice. There's something about being in the company of other people who are practicing that supports us, guides us, gives us a certain

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feeling of camaraderie and connection. This seems to be a very helpful element. Today, 65 or so of us are spending the day sitting in a zendo, in a meditation hall. And I think less than a quarter of us, if you said, go do it by yourself, on your own cognizance and on your own motivation, could probably persevere all day. But the fact that we're there together, supporting each other, just with our physical presence, offers us a certain kind of reassurance and support. And I would say similarly in our daily lives, that we all need that kind of reassurance and support in our practice. So when we come together and listen and bear witness to each other, it's a very curious thing.

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There's what we say, there's how we behave, but there's just something about being present with each other. So if you are interested in doing that, you can inquire in the office after the talk. And then along with that, of course, we offer classes, we offer talks like this, one on Saturday, one on Wednesday, and we offer sittings. There's something about the seated posture that creates that creates a groundedness, that creates an energy, that creates a capacity to pay attention to our experience.

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There's something about when we attend to our experience, as now we're discovering in the fields of psychology, that attending to our experience, as I said before, in of itself is therapeutic. And I would say one of the reasons or one of the modes that enables it to be therapeutic is that when we experience directly what happens, we make more sense to ourselves. The world makes more sense to us. When we connect when we experience directly what's happening, in this measure between suffering less and enjoying more, we move towards the enjoying. Sometimes when you come to a Zen center, it may seem peculiar that everything is a big deal. How you walk down the hall, how you hold a cup, how you chant.

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Everything is an opportunity, an expression of intentionality. With nothing to do with good and bad, with success and failure. Just an expression of intentionality. So while the first three attributes may be benevolence, patience and perseverance, discipline. What arises out of that is a certain kind of energy that comes from engagement, a sense of connection, in this intrinsic way that the world starts to make sense to us. In the collections of koans in Zen, in a one koan collection, the first koan is, rather strangely, does a dog have Buddha nature?

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And Jiaoju gives the answer, Mu, which means, in one way, it's a negation, Something not quite no, but more like, that's not it. Both saying, that's not quite how you talk about a dog. That question is not quite the way to inquire about life. And then in a broader sense, anything you hold up as an idea is not quite it. So even though there's a lot of intentionality, there's a lot of direction to our practice, there's no notion that there's a fixed understanding or a fixed consequence.

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The emphasis is more on the process than the outcome. Just the way we invite people to come together in small groups. Then you have bearing witness to who you are and what your experience is. And it doesn't have so much to do with some desired outcome. And as our mind opens in that way, it offers us a clarity about what's going on. We start to see the way we move through our emotional life. We start to see the way our emotional life is related to our behaviors.

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We start to see the way our behaviors and our emotions influence our state of mind, and how our state of mind influences our emotions and our behaviors. And as we start to see this interplay, we start to become more intrigued with the process. And this really is the catalyst of Zen practice, to become intrigued by what's going on. And then as we start to do that, a couple of things happen for us. the way we're directed into our lives, the way we're motivated to relate to our life starts to shift.

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We're less inclined to just simply take things for granted. Just let ourselves fall into a pattern of behavior. Get up from your bed. Go out of your house. Follow the path you know so well. So well that now you see nothing and hear nothing unless something cries out loudly. And maybe there's no cry louder than yours that's been crying as long as you can remember. kind of fierce words, that capacity within us to fall into habit and to allow the reassurance of habit to kind of dampen the natural curiosity of our mind.

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A curiosity that moves towards engagement, that moves towards exploration and inquiry. not because it's got something to overcome or something to create as a consequence, but just that the very process of watching what goes on is more interesting than trying to avoid living our life or trying desperately to create a certain outcome. As the inquiry about our life starts to be stimulated, we start to see patterns like this. We start to see the ways we space out. We go numb. We fall into habit, and habit sort of puts us on automatic.

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In contrast to when we're curious. when our life is genuinely interesting, how that is enlivening. And sometimes we see some things are not so easy. In fact, they may have quite a challenge to them, but they are enlivening. And this is one of the edges we discover in practice. And this is one of the edges we discover in Zezang, in mindfulness practice, in awareness practice. That to sustain the intentionality of awareness, in some ways, it's one of the most difficult things you can try to do. Because it challenges not just your habit energy,

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have your mind go with its desires or its fears to have your to not have your mind space out and go into automatic pilot but it also it challenges the whole narrative you're creating about who you are and what life is and what should happen in the moment And as we challenge that narrative, in addition to being one of the most difficult things we can do as a human, in an utterly paradoxical way, it's one of the most enlivening. And for people who meditate quite a bit, do zazen quite a bit, they come to realize that putting themselves in this crucible, in this container, of staying in the moment, of staying aware of whatever arises, is both extraordinarily challenging and extraordinarily invigorating.

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And then to carry that out into our lives This is what it is, in Zen terms, this is what it is to live, move. Wherever you are, whatever aspect of your life is being experienced, you're not sticking with your fixed idea, your fixed attitude, your fixed response, your habituated response. You're enabling something alive in the moment to happen. And then in your meditation, can you be present for the inhale? Can you be present for the exhale? Can you notice the feeling? Can you notice the sensation in your body? Can you notice the attractiveness of a memory or an anticipation? Without grasping.

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but letting it come and letting it go. This very activity of non-grasping is what's enlivening. And this very activity of non-grasping, in many ways, is one of the most difficult things we can do as a human being, or attempt to do. And this is why we need benevolence, patience, and perseverance. This is why we need the company, the support, and the guidance of others. I was reading recently a book on... Well over a decade ago, someone wrote a book called Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman.

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And then some people took that idea and they applied it to school children, teaching them emotional intelligence, teaching them things like one of the things they did was they used a system, the imagery of traffic lights. When you have a difficult emotion, that's red light, stop. Amber light is notice what you're feeling, notice what you're thinking. And then green light is respond appropriately. And then they would do this each day with the kids, kids ranging from five to ten. And then when they tested them, I'm not sure how they tested them, but they discovered the capacity to learn was enhanced, how they related to each other was enhanced, how they were receptive to instructions was enhanced. It was this long list of positive consequences.

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There's something about as we start to explore what's going on for us and learn how to be adaptive to what we're discovering and let what we're discovering guide who we are, something is liberated. Some sort of suffering that seems to be inherent in our being starts to lessen. And some intentional capacity starts to open up in our life. And this is the essence of practice. And even though we've inherited a system that may turn it into stylized comments like, does a dog have Buddha nature? It's really just an instruction on how to pay attention to the moment.

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It's not some exotic notion, some curious philosophical aspect to muse on. It's something to live and discover in your daily life. And it's something that's eminently practical, because what it does is it links our cognitive process, with our behavioral process, with the capacity to pay attention. And as we do that, that becomes a portable skill. It's not something that you simply aspire to or apply when you're spending your life meditating. It's something that you can bring to your relationships, you can bring to your interactions.

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So part of what we hope to do in this practice period, Vicky and myself who are leading it, is to offer suggestions as to how to bring this essential skill into everyday life. How to see that when you get in your car and pause for five seconds before you turn on the ignition, that can influence your commute. When you make a practice of meeting each person in your day and reminding yourself, this is a human being like me, has the same emotions. has the same wish not to suffer and the same wish to be happy and you meet each person in your day like that something about your patterned way of being something about your emotional life something about your patterns of relating start to shift start to loosen something

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about the natural curiosity of your being opens up, gets stimulated. And then there's something about coming together and sharing our experience that allows something we're experiencing to register. allows it to register and allows it to be digested, metabolized to become part of who we are.

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integration of these experiences feeds back into our experiential learning. And it helps us to see something about that our life in many ways is not so much dependent upon what we know, but much more dependent upon how present we are for the experience we're having.

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As thinking creatures with large brains, what we know in our opinions becomes enormously significant for us. But in many ways, it's quite subservient to the experience we're having. And this process of becoming aware of what we are in the moment offers us this does opportunity engage a process that moves us into a place of enjoyment? What I was trying to do in saying all that

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was to offer some encouragement to practice. So I hope it did. And if it didn't, you can blame me for that. I'm not practicing. And as I say, if you have an interest in joining the practice period, you can talk to the people in the office. And thank you for coming. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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