This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. Welcome to all of you who are guests and are coming to visit us here. Thank you very much for coming. And I'd like to make a special welcome to a group of women vets who is coming to do a retreat with us. Thank you very much for coming. I'm very honored to have you here with us. And the work that you're doing really enriches and supports and encourages our practice here. So thank you very much. Because of your presence and talking with a lot of Students here, I've been very mindful of how much healing happens in this valley, how much goes on here.

[01:06]

Students and guests, you know, this is really a place of healing, this valley. And this valley has been a place of healing for hundreds and hundreds of years, for the Esalen people who came here, for the hot springs, for the people who came as a resort, as a hot springs resort, starting in the 1800s. And as long as it's been Zen Center, it's been a place of healing. The people have come for healing. And I think it's always been a journey to get here. There's always been the mountains. There's always been the road. And whether people traveled in the stage or on horseback or... whatever journeys in their lives they've made, it's always been a journey to get here. There's always been a strong intention to come to this place and to be here. You have to want to be here to get here. It's not a place people generally wander into.

[02:11]

And Tassajara is very conducive to healing on many levels. The natural environment, It's very beautiful and very serene. The hot springs. We're very well fed here. Meals just appear. Wonderful, nourishing meals. It's very safe. There's no really dangerous animals. We don't even have locks on the door. Sometimes that can have surprising outcomes. LAUGHTER And it's a time to disconnect from our usual lives. There's very little electricity here. There's none in the cabins. There's no cell phones. There's no Internet. And when we can unplug from the outer world, we can often connect more deeply with ourselves and with each other.

[03:13]

And there's space here to do that. And it's often very surprising for people what arises just when there's space allowed. for things to arise, for things to come up. Many, many years ago, before Blanche Hartman, who's a former abbot of Zen Center, had ever been to Tassajara, she heard about Tassajara. And she asked her teacher, Sojin Mel Weitzman, everyone's always talking about Tassajara like it's some special place. What's so special about Tassajara? And she said, well, it's a place where Everybody can see your stuff, and you get to, too. That's what's special about Tassajara, kind of nothing special. Just where everybody can see you, and you can see yourself. And it's okay. It might not feel okay at first, but when you realize that it's okay for everybody else, eventually it sinks in that it could be okay for you, too.

[04:19]

It's safe enough to let go of our ideas and our expectations, especially when they get challenged so often by things that are happening around us and when the schedule is so consistent in many ways that we get to come up against the same things over and over and over again until we finally get to see something maybe a little different when we get to allow in even conventional much less absolute reality. Being together so much, we become very intimate with one another. We know each other in some surprising ways. I remember years ago, it was during a practice period, And I was playing the den show, the large bell, standing outside the zendo here.

[05:28]

And out of the corner of my eye, I caught someone just walking out from under the wisteria arbor. So all I could see was this person's feet. The rest of them was covered by the arbor they were walking under. So it was just a person's feet in black robes. Everyone wears black robes during practice period. And out of the corner of my eye, I said, I didn't say, but the awareness arose, oh, that's Anka. And immediately I thought, I can't possibly know that. That's way too little information to identify someone. But I looked and I waited. It was Anka. Like, how do I know that? I don't know what her feet look like from 200 feet away, out of the corner of my eye. but I knew what her feet looked like 200 feet away out of the corner of my eye. So there's an intimacy that we develop with one another, a knowing that we don't even know that we have.

[06:34]

And sometimes it comes into our awareness just how intimate we are with each other. And we're actually quite intimate with many people in our lives. But sometimes it's hard to see. It's hard to see how closely we do know them. And then at moments it becomes aware. And it's very precious, this knowing of one another. It's the basis for trust. It's maybe not yet trust, but there's a basis for trust there. So the question came up for me, what is healing? So I went to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is very fun to look up meanings in. And it said, to become sound or healthy again, to alleviate distress or anguish, to correct or put right an undesirable situation.

[07:40]

I thought that was pretty good. But it seemed incomplete to me from my own experience of healing and the healing that I've seen in other people. Because I don't think healing is limited to some ideal state, like there's some state of health, body or mind or spirit, that we return to or maybe ever had. I don't think there is some unblemished before. So what is healing? One way I could think of it is it's the transformation of suffering. The Buddha said over and over, I teach suffering and the transformation of suffering. And I think the basis for transformation is intention and awareness.

[08:46]

I think what healing is will become more apparent as we talk about the intention and attention. So intend, again, I looked it up, so intend is from intendere, to stretch or tend toward. So there's some sense of directionality, some kind of movement. And sometimes we have... a very detailed intention. I intend to do exactly this. And sometimes, and I think with things like healing, it's much broader because we don't actually know where we're going. We don't have, you know, sometimes if it's our body that's been injured, we have some idea. I want to be how I was before I was injured, or before I had this illness, and it feels very clear. I want to go back. that I think with our hearts healing, we don't have so much of a sense of back.

[09:50]

How could we go back to being a child, even if we were happy and well-loved as children? There has to be a moving forward. So sometimes the movement toward healing is more directional. It's more like if you were trying to climb a mountain, you could say, well, If you're going to climb Hawk Mountain, it's like, okay, you go up this trail and then you take three steps left and you climb over this rock and you do it exactly like this and like this. But if there's no trail, you can just say, keep going up. And sometimes you go up a certain point and you realize, well, I can't get any farther right here, so I'm going to have to go down a little bit and over and cut back and come up again. But the intention is still, I'm going up. I have some sense of where I'm going, and very often that's enough. The Buddha often taught, cultivate what is wholesome and eliminate what is unwholesome.

[11:00]

And wholesome or whole comes from the same root as health and healing. It's from German, heilin or heilin. And I think this idea of wholeness is a lot closer to healing than what we think of as a perfect unblemished health. So wholesome is to promote health and well-being, mind and body. So what is wholesome? I mean, that's fairly easy to think of a whole bunch of wholesome things, kindness, compassion, love, trust, respect. Paying attention, patience, forbearance, effort. The Buddha had many, many lists of wholesome factors to cultivate. And also lists of unwholesome factors to avoid. Again, fairly straightforward. Anger, ill will, hatred, fear, aversion, greed, grasping, ignorance.

[12:12]

delusion, restlessness, agitation. So if you're not sure if something is wholesome or not, you know, you can try it out. Sometimes things like, I don't know, a lot of the technology we have now, sometimes it's a little hard to tell if it's wholesome or not. At least it is for me. Is Facebook wholesome? Are you connecting with people or is it a way of disconnecting with people? Is it a time sink or is it a way of opening the heart? So sometimes you just have to look and see and develop clearer seeing, clearer knowing about what is wholesome, what is unwholesome. So that's kind of the intention part and the conduct part. And then attention, so intention and attention, is to tame the mind and learn to pay attention.

[13:22]

It's very hard to know what's wholesome or unwholesome if we can't even attend to where we are and notice how it affects us and affects others. We have to be present. We have to be present to see the effects of things. The mind is often compared to a jar of pond water that has a bunch of stuff in it, and it's all floating around, and it's cloudy. It's hard to see through. But if you let the jar settle, everything will come to the bottom, and it will be completely clear. The water itself is completely clear, has always been completely clear. It's just that there's little stuff in it. So learning how to allow the mind to settle and not to keep stirring it up is to develop skillful means. When we let it settle, we can see clearly. And with this basic stability, this basic stability of mind and body, we have a lot more capacity to open and turn toward our own experience.

[14:34]

And this is where the healing happens. when we can simply open and be present with things as they are. We don't have to do anything, we don't have to invite things in, we don't have to create anything. Just things as they are, whatever arises, to be able to be present with that is the basis of fearlessness. Not to be afraid of our own experience. Most of the things that we've been afraid of in our life are past now. It's not that other truly fearful things may not happen in the future. But we carry so much fear within us. We carry old wounds and old scars and old stories. I can't imagine there's not a person in this room who doesn't have some scars. And I know that there are many people who have many.

[15:39]

But over and over again, to be able to turn toward the pain, the wound, whatever is arising with a soft mind and an open heart is to transform that suffering. There's a case in the Blue Cliff Record called Medicine and Disease Subdue Each Other. And the case is very short. Yun-men, teaching his community, said, Medicine and disease subdue each other. The whole earth is medicine. What is yourself? And in the commentary, It is said, one day Manjushri ordered Sudhana to pick medicinal herbs.

[16:56]

If there is something that is not medicine, bring it to me. Sudhana searched all over, but there was nothing that was not medicine. Manjushri is the bodhisattva of wisdom. He's the one sitting on the altar in front of the Buddha, raising his sword of wisdom. And Sudhana is a very sincere seeker who searches all over the world, going to many teachers in search of wisdom. So Sudhana searched all over, but there was nothing that was not medicine. So he went back and told Manjushri, there is nothing that is not medicine. Manjushri said, gather something that is medicine. Sudhana then picked up a blade of grass and handed it to Manjushri. Manjushri held it up and showed it to the assembly saying, This medicine can kill people and it can also bring people to life. So medicine and disease are not separate.

[18:07]

Healing and wounds are not separate. If you hold on to one, you get stuck. If you hold on to the other, you get stuck. Some days it's like walking through fire. Three years ago, there was a huge wildfire here, and you can still see many traces of it in the hills. And if you look, you can still see bits of it within Tassajara, charred branches and trees. The amazing thing was that within days of the fire, and it was lunar, it was absolutely black. There was not... anything living anywhere for miles. But within days there were green shoots sprouting at the base of trees. You know, life coming forth again and again so strong, so strong.

[19:14]

And that life comes forth in people also. That won't be denied. And there's still charred branches out there, kind of a lot of them, but it's become part of the landscape. It's now a charred branch on the Kaisando altar. It has some meaning, some significance. So our scars It's too simple to say I wouldn't change the things that happened to me. I wouldn't have it any other way. That's a little too simple. Sometimes I can say that. Sometimes I can say that wholeheartedly, that I actually wouldn't change anything. I can absolutely see how everything that has been in my life has made me who I am, and I cannot possibly wish it otherwise.

[20:23]

because I somehow wouldn't be who I am. And at that moment, I'm completely at peace with who I am. So I couldn't change a bit of it because I couldn't know how that could change me. But it's too simple to hold on to that. If you hold on to that, that just tries to turn everything into some phony medicine and say, yeah, it's all perfect just as it is. It is as it is. And we can be perfect with it. We can have perfect relationship with it just by being with it as it is, which includes rage and tears and doubt and depression and frustration and the whole thing. There is nothing outside of practice. There is nothing outside of medicine. Even when it

[21:25]

feels like everything is poison. And there's no lying to ourselves and pretending it's good when it feels bad. But we don't have to hold on to either one. Courage is not the lack of fear. courage is going forward in the face of fear. So transformation and healing only happens when we're whole, when we bring all of ourselves into our practice, all of ourselves into our lives. Nothing left out. When we bring it all in, then it can all be healed. all the parts of ourselves and all the parts of others and all the parts of the world.

[22:30]

All the world wants to be healed. None of it wants to be left out. And I was looking up meanings, looking up words. I also found that in medicine, there's a term called first intention, which is the healing of a wound by the natural contact of the parts involved. So I guess when two edges come together, that's called first intention. And then there's a second intention, which is when the edges of the wound don't meet or the parts can't connect, and then that space has to fill in with granulation tissue, you know, that healing tissue, and then the new epithelium, the new skin forms across it.

[23:33]

And I thought, sometimes it really feels like that. Sometimes it feels like there's not something to go back to. There's a gap. Something has to cross that gap. Something has to grow in the space in between. But it can. We can't... We can't heal ourselves. Doctors can't heal bodies. They can only create the conditions for healing. You can put a bandage on. You can keep it clean. You can provide rest. You can even do surgery, but you can't heal something. Only the body can heal from inside out when the conditions are such that healing can happen. It's something that we don't know how to do, and we can't know how to do it. but we can trust in that. We can trust in it sometimes just because we can see it happen maybe before in our lives or maybe in other people's lives.

[24:41]

We can watch it happen and maybe we can start to appreciate how it happens in our own lives. We can appreciate the healing that's already happened. So Dogen Zenji, the founder of our school, said, if you want to attain suchness, practice suchness without delay. So if you want to heal, just practice healing. Just practice being. without delay. You don't have to wait for it. Just now.

[25:44]

Just now. There's healing now. There's healing in this room. There's healing wherever you go. There's healing on each breath. And to just come back to that over and over again. It's not that there is not healing or growth but we tend to think it's something else. It's always something else that we're wanting. And a lot of the time it's just this. It's just being completely with this, and that is the healing. Healing and wholeness are the same root. The wholeness is to be complete, and everything is already complete in itself. The artist Jill Johnston said she talked about a whole object complete with missing parts.

[26:50]

And just by virtue of being human beings, we have many missing parts, many broken parts, many slightly bruised and misshapen parts. And I was thinking how many of the things that I have have little dings and dents and marks on them. And I tend to like older things, so they accumulate dings and dents and marks and patinas. And when it first happens, it's really painful. It's like, you know, you have a car that's pretty unblemished, and you get your first scratch, and it's really awful. But after a while, it becomes that that is what it is. You know, and you remember all about that. It's like that's part of it. New lovers often explore and ask about and tell the stories of one another's scars.

[27:55]

How did you get that one? Oh, that was the time when I fell off my bike, when I ran into the wall, when I cut my finger. And when it's our lover, we love all of them. We love all their scars. We find everything beautiful. It's often hard to find ourselves equally beautiful. And if we're very fortunate, we find others who can see that in us and hold that until we can see it in ourselves. Or maybe we had someone in our past who saw that in us and we saw it in their eyes.

[28:56]

Because that's actually the truth. When we touch that, we know it's the truth. we know that all the pain and the unworthiness and all the stories that we're carrying as a burden are not true. And yet this world, this very world, the Buddha called it the Saha world, it means the world of endurance, the world where you actually feel the burdens of your life, It's the only one where we can wake up. All the realms where you're completely sunk in suffering or completely in a bliss realm, we can't wake up there. We can only wake up here in the middle of all the messiness, just the messiness of our lives, all the stuff going on and the reactions and just all of it, just being present for all of it.

[30:08]

That's where we wake up, just moment by moment. And it's actually very precious just to be present, just to be present. So we have time for a few questions. And what?

[31:11]

Did everyone hear the question? The question was, sometimes the mood seems to get worse before it gets better. What? A wound. Yes. I think it's often because we've been holding away awareness of the actual experience of the wound. We've been deadening our feelings of it, not attending to it. So... turning toward it and allowing it to be present, we actually feel the full effect of it. It's like coming out from the anesthesia, coming out from the distraction, and it's really raw, and it's really harsh. But then it has some movement. It allows it to move through and to resolve, but it often does feel more initially. because you're really getting the full effect of it rather than holding it away.

[32:22]

But you can hold it away at a distance for years, and it'll kind of stay stuck at a low level. But very often, when there's a complete turning toward it and a complete release of the resistance, it turns over time more and more quickly. Does that answer? Anything else? Yes? Hmm. Hmm. For me, it took me a long time to feel that.

[33:26]

I had some sense that there was something there. I had that general directionality of, okay, there's a mountain and I want to go up. But I was pretty much at the bottom of the mountain and didn't have much of a sense of what was at the top. It took me a long time to get there. But when I sit here and talk to all of you, I have that feeling now. to facilitate healing, the natural healing. How do you feel with this practice, say Sato Zen practices, Azen, how does that facilitate healing in human beings? Well, you know, there's that old image of putting the snake in the tube. So the snake is like nicely contained and can't move around too much.

[34:28]

That's just like putting a cast on your broken leg. You don't want it to move too much. Actually, they don't put casts on it anymore. They put those kind of support things, which is a little more like the tube. It just kind of holds it in support. It's like, okay, here's your schedule. Here's your work. Here's what you do. And then you get to see your mind. And then you have all these people around you who help you see your mind. It's like, wow, I'm having a completely catastrophic reaction to the fact that someone didn't serve me quite enough soup or this... taste a little different than I wanted it to, or I'm tired, or whatever. It's like, oh. It's not all out there. I'm bringing something to it. And Greg told me once, they make Tassajara really perfect so that you can, if you're having a problem, you can see it's you. It's perfectly suited for that.

[35:29]

And then there's also all these people around you who love you and support you and are there to talk to you, all these practice leaders who are just there to encourage you. Like, where else can you go where you just walk around? It's like, can I talk to you for a minute? Sure. It's like, I'm having a really hard time right now. Tell me about it. And then you go on. It's like, oh, it's possible to go on. It's possible to have a really bad day and keep going. Yeah. That's how it supports me. Thank you. So it's time to end. Thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. 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.

[36:31]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[36:37]

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