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. I'm going to talk about Cherishing Lights, and I'll tell you about the three themes that I hope to weave together tonight. But first, just to say it's very auspicious, I think, to be speaking on the day of the full moon. We had a full moon ceremony this morning, and it's a chance to renew our vows to remember the precepts. But this is a special full moon for many reasons. I think there was partial eclipse today. It's also a Buddhist... a holiday called Vesak, which celebrates the Buddha's enlightenment, the Buddha's birth, and the Buddha's... Three things, birth, enlightenment, and the Buddha's parinirvana, or death, and celebrated in many...

[01:25]

Buddhist traditions in different countries around the world. Today is also one day after the one-year anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd. There were many marches and vigils yesterday and also on the weekend. And another I want to mention, It's one of the reasons why Nancy asked me to give this talk tonight is that many of us at San Francisco Dent Center, including Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara, have been taking a class this month with Janae Johnson. The class is called A Time to Heal, Insights on the Path to Healing Racialized Trauma. So I will be... talking about some of the things I've been learning in that class that relate to cherishing life, all life, and also talking about when we are in our experience of this pandemic that we have been living with for over a year, the COVID-19 pandemic, but there have been other very challenging things happening in our country and the world in the last

[02:51]

15 months. And the third theme will be something about the precept of not harming a cherishing life. And I'll be talking about that, referring to the teaching of someone named Bhikkhu Bodhi. So I'll tell you about him. in a few minutes, but first I'd like to invite everyone to just take a moment to notice how you're feeling right now in your body. And if you could name an emotion that you're feeling now, what would that be? Then take a few deep breaths, if you would.

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Feel your feet on the ground. If you're sitting on a cushion, feel the places where your body is touching the cushion. And then I invite you to think of a person or a another sentient being or something else that you appreciate. Just take a moment or two to think about what you appreciate about that being or experience or thing. Take another deep breath. And notice how you're feeling now.

[05:03]

Thank you for bearing with me with that. That is one of the exercises we did in Janae Johnson's class. which I'll say more about, but one of the things that she was teaching about investigating racialized trauma, whatever racialization is, whether we're white or brown or black skinned, it's very important to learn how to find resilience and how to find moments when we can settle into our bodies and find a source of something positive within us. And one of the ways is to physically settle, work with the breath, deep breaths, and think of something that brings positive feelings.

[06:17]

So usually thinking of someone or something that we appreciate as a way of doing that. So I wanted to start by talking a little bit about the pandemic and where we are now. This week at City Center where I live, we had our first in-person work circle on Monday for residents and residents from all of the buildings that we live in on Page Street. There are several, and we have not been merging, not all been in one space for this long period of time. And we were able to gather wearing masks and physically distanced in the city center dining room. And it was just so joyous to be able to look around and see everyone and be, you know,

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be together for the first time. And then we also were able to have Zazen yesterday for the first time in the Zendo. And I just appreciated that after sitting in my room all these months. It was so quiet inside the Zendo. Outside was, you know, the usual city noisiness, but it was so quiet. And so I think we are very slowly moving as a community to come together again. And I appreciate the slow pace of it. It's, you know, each thing we do feels momentous. I don't take anything for granted anymore. And I feel I too are moving slowly in my own coming out. It's a different kind of coming out process. both wanting to see friends and family, but also wanting to do it very carefully and respectfully and noticing some of my friends are not ready, the friends who live in the community, not ready to have visitors yet.

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It's so interesting, everybody's pace is different and so important to respect that. I think that's a way of cherishing life know um and i also know people who are beginning to fly and visit family members they haven't seen in over a year whether it's parents or children or grandchildren these things that weren't possible to do safely for so long And I do think it makes a difference to be fully vaccinated. And I was one of the first people at City Center to be vaccinated because of my age. And I felt a sense of relief. But it's still a very slow process. I wanted to, I would like to share a poem.

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that I wrote in March about this process. It's called My Window Rattles. What will it be like? The first kiss on a cheek, the first embrace. This week, the anniversary of a year of restraint, touching only the clothing I pull on in the morning, the kettle, a serrated knife, my pen, keys. This March morning, wind rattles the panes of my kitchen window. Through the glass, tender leaves quiver on a sycamore's blender branches. What will it be like to walk up Page Street without a mask, to smile at neighbors, see their smiles? How will it be to hold Noah, born the first day of this year?

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His parents trust there will be a future he will live into. I spread avocado on a homemade sesame bagel. Hear the cause of a crow, the hum of the plain. The city awakens. We gingerly emerge from quarantine. Last year we drew in, this year we will slowly open. So, and I'm very aware that as we are slowly opening, there are many parts of the world in which the COVID virus is still killing so many people in India. Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, just to name a few places. And there's so much uncertainty, even in the US about, you know, how this is going to go, whether we'll be able to continue on this path of reopening, or what may happen, the variants, and anyways,

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I think this whole year has been about living with uncertainty and also with a lot of tension in the U.S. around race and inequality and concern about the climate crisis. So it's not an easy time for any of us. And yet I think there's so many ways in which we can experience the fullness of life moment to moment. So I want to move on to my second theme, which came from reading Bhikkhu Bodhi's message. Bhikkhu Bodhi is an American Theravadan Buddhist monk. He was ordained in Sri Lanka many years ago and does a lot of translation of Buddhist suttas and also founded an organization called Buddhist Global Relief. And

[13:14]

His message about this holiday that commemorates the life of the Buddha is about the presence of violence and hatred in today's world and what the Buddha's teachings say and help us address that. I'm going to quote him. He says, the destruction of human life never solves the problem it is intended to resolve, and its consequences are always tragic. It takes just a few seconds to pull the trigger of a gun, but for those who lose a loved one through the bullets, the heartache lasts a lifetime. How can we build a world of peace without war and violence? The Buddha traces the most thorny problems of human life to their deepest roots in the mind. This applies to killing, which is born from hatred and resentment.

[14:20]

The foundation of the Buddhist path is the living of a moral life, a life governed by precepts. And the first precept is to abstain from destroying life, from the destruction of all sentient life, whether humans or animals. So that's G. All of the precepts can be expressed either in prohibitive way, but not to kill or abstain from destroying life. And also in an affirmative way. So one expression of that is not harming and cherishing life. So affirmative. expression of this precept is to cherish life and do all we can to sustain and practice in ways that acknowledge the fragility and the preciousness of each life.

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And that includes not only people, but animals and rivers, oceans, forests, mountains, you know, the natural world, the clear part of it. So, Bhikkhu Bodhi says, taken broadly, the Buddha says, one should refrain from destroying life oneself, encourage others to refrain from killing, speak in praise of abstinence from killing, And rejoice when one learns that others abstain from destroying life. And reflecting on our own basic urge to live, we can realize that every other person also wishes to live and to live well. So that this reflection awakens in us a deep sense of empathy with all humanity and indeed with all other sentient beings.

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that teaching is really relevant to the work we've been doing with Danae Johnson on the title on healing from racialized trauma. And she talks about trauma and resilience and how to face the suffering of racialized trauma. It's interesting because she is speaking from her perspective as an African-American woman. She's someone who teaches mindfulness at the San Francisco Public Health Department, which is really interesting to me that that department promotes the practice of mindfulness.

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And she's also the parent of a teenage son. And she draws from her own life experience and her deep study of mindfulness to bring together an awareness of many things, including white supremacy culture, the nature of trauma, and how to recharge, how to find our resilience in the midst of it. And she also draws on the work of Resmaa Menakem, who's a somatic therapist who wrote a book called My Grandmother's Hands. I'll just quote a few words. I think it was Resmaa Menneken who said, trauma that is not transformed is transmitted.

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So if we don't work to transform the trauma that we experience and that can be directly or indirectly, I have a sense that this year has been traumatic for everyone in this country and around the world. And more so for people of color in this country, for BIPOC people. And that there is a need to learn ways to transform this trauma and not transmitted, not it on to the next generation. And Janae also said that resilience can also be transmitted and that positive emotions energize us.

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So in her classes, she conveyed practices that can help us experience positive emotions. And one of the things she includes in every class is dancing. And her homework after the first class was to put on some music and dance for 10 minutes every day. And I realized I used to love to dance when I was younger. I folk danced quite a bit. And when I was coming out, I used to go to places where I could dance with other women to disco music. And I haven't danced regularly in quite a while. So this has been quite wonderful. It's a way of recharging, she calls, recharging our batteries so we can actually do the work of facing some of the difficult things in events in our time and not either

[21:03]

run away from them or freeze or to kind of be able to engage when we see, and this class in particular is about racism, when we see or hear something that's harmful to another person, particularly a person of color, can we speak up? And this has also been a time when we've been more aware of anti-Asian hatred in this country. And many of us at Senn Center have taken training offered by a nonprofit called Hollebeck in how to engage as bystanders when we see something happening that's harmful. This organization, Hollebeck, does...

[22:04]

many different trainings related to ways in which we can intervene when we see something or hear something. And I think that training dovetails with what we're learning in this class with Janae. Anyway, in terms of how to recharge, she one class spoke about six habits of happiness. So cultivating ways of experiencing and heightening a sense of joy, including just paying attention to what we're seeing, noticing, for example, walking down the street and noticing the trees or flowers in someone's garden or looking up at the sky, noticing the cloud formations.

[23:12]

So paying attention, giving thanks. Thanks for our lives. Thanks for our friends. Thanks for having the place to live and food. Third one is dropping grudges. There's the precept of not holding on to resentment. And we do that. Keeping friends close. And get moving is another one. Move your body. And practicing kindness. Resma Menachem's work, which Janae refers to in the class, is based on our bodies, based in the body.

[24:16]

And one of the things he also talks about is how to cultivate a settled nervous system when we're dealing with racialized trauma. There are some practices... he recommends that are simple ones that he learned as a child, he often sat on his grandmother's lap and she would rock and hum. Sometimes she'd hum a tune, sometimes she would just hum. And so he recommends just taking some time to connect with your breath and then hum a note until you can until you run out of breath and hum again and hum again. And it's also very settling and as is rocking. And he's a somatic therapist.

[25:20]

And what he noticed is when his own nervous system is settled, it helps his clients. settle their nervous systems through repeated contact with him. He says, what takes place is energetic, chemical, biological, a sinking of vibrations and energies. And then he says, my nervous system helps other nervous systems access the same infinite source that mine does. What does that mean? My nervous system helps other nervous systems access the same infinite source that mine does. And that seems to me to be very much what can happen in Zazen, that sense of connectedness with oneself and beyond oneself to others.

[26:31]

in the zendo and beyond the zendo. And they think of Suzuki Roshi's teaching on breath. We breathe in what's outside. We exhale what's inside. And he says the throat is like a swinging door. There's really no inside and no outside. So that sense of of being connected with everything there is. So I thought I might share one other poem that the best of this question, Levitchi. And I think I'm sharing a lot of what Janae has been teaching about resilience, but she also has shared some of the suffering that African-Americans have experienced over centuries in our country.

[27:54]

And in our last class, we watched a video about a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma called Greenwood. That was a neighborhood that had the black neighborhood. And this was after reconstruction that had numerous grocery stores and restaurants and library. It was just a very beautiful place and people who lived there had worked very hard and established businesses and this was so threatening to white people in Tulsa. That place was ransacked and many of the buildings totally leveled and people were left without phones and

[28:57]

as part of the history of our country. And so part of, I feel, what's important for me as a white racialized person is to really learn the history and to also develop an ability to be present and find ways of creating some change in wherever I am located to, you know, it's to enable, and where I'm located is San Francisco, and I think many of us are becoming so much more aware of the work we are doing and need to do in order to make our community

[30:00]

safer place for everyone, including African-Americans, Asian-Americans, all people of color. So I think this class is valuable and it's really helpful that so many people in the community are taking it. So second time, yeah. I think I will end with the poem that, it's been one of my favorite poems for a while, and it's really about cherishing life with an awareness of how fleeting life is. You know, when we went to the Zendo yesterday, there's a new guest

[31:03]

student who saw the message on the Han. It's a wooden board outside the Zendo, and we were talking about it at lunchtime. So for those of you who are not familiar with it, as you go into the Zendo, you read these words. Great is the matter of birth and death. Life is fleeting, gone, gone. Awake, awake, each one. Don't waste. this life. I want to share this poem by Lee Young Lee called From Blossoms. From Blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the boy at the bend in the road where we turn towards signs painting peaches. From laden boughs, from hands, from sweet fellowship in the bins, comes nectar of the roadside.

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Succulent peaches we devour, dusty skin and all. Comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat. Oh, to take what we love inside, to carry within us an orchard. To eat not only the skin, but the shade. Not only the sugar, but the days. To hold the fruit in our hands, adore it. Then bite into the round jubilance of peach. There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background. From joy to joy to joy. From wing Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

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Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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