This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Well, thank you very much for your kind invitation. And... Just on a personal note, I really love being here. I love being back in San Francisco. I started my practice in 1996 in Green Gulch. I was living 12 blocks up from here on Central Avenue between Haight and Page Street. And my housemate at the time... was a high school teacher in Marin, and she said, you know, why don't you go and come with me, and, you know, there are these Zen lectures on Sunday, and so I didn't have anything better to do, so I went.

[01:16]

And, um, Brad Anderson was giving the talk that day, and I, um, It changed my life completely. When I think back to that time, what I feel now is I was somewhat depressed and confused, not knowing what to do with this life. You know, like that. That was a feeling. And... Somebody kindly gave me zazen and destruction like you still do. And I had an experience right away that changed my life in this profound way. I arrived in a new way in my body. Now I would say, you know, looking back, I say, I felt unapologetically alive.

[02:27]

It's taken me these 26 years to feel more confident in articulating this experience and the practice that unfolds and deepens this experience. But it was there on the first day of my visit to Green Gulch. And it was really kind of dramatic because I bought myself a meditation cushion there and I told my housemate, you know, let's turn the living room into a zendo. You know, you seem to be interested in this, but you're not practicing. And they say, you know, you need to practice. So I started sitting every day on this cushion that I bought in England.

[03:34]

And it wasn't far, you know, riding my bike down here and attend Zazen and workshops and so forth. So then, you know, now I'm back here. It resonates deeply with me. So I want to talk about this workshop this afternoon that I titled Bodyfulness and Practice of Compassion. So I want to use this opportunity this morning to talk about bodyfulness. With this experience in the background of arriving in my body in a new way, with a different experience, sense of aliveness. So, bodyfulness, obviously, if you want to look it up in the dictionary, you won't find that word.

[04:38]

It's a playful way to speak about mindfulness and the role that the body plays in mindfulness practice. But before Before I go into that, let's talk about enlightenment. Why are you laughing? I know, I think I know why. You know, there are schools or practices that push for enlightenment experience, and very important. Without it, the practice is not good. And then there are schools that don't do that.

[05:43]

Like Suzuki Rishi said, it's like walking in the mist and then after a while you find out that you're completely soaked through. Recently I came across or rediscovered Joko Beck's statement about enlightenment. Joko Beck, many of you probably have heard the name, American Zen teacher. She said, enlightenment is the ending in yourself of that hope or something other. than life as it is. So, let that sink in for a moment. Enlightenment is the ending in yourself of that hope for something other than life as it is.

[06:47]

Now, to me, that feels like a very functional view of enlightenment. It doesn't really support any kind of fantasy of a special kind of self-improvement or solving of all of our human problems. But it's very precise. It instructs something very precisely to give up to end in yourself the hope, the fantasy, the idea, the desire for something other than the aliveness that you're feeling, experiencing right now. So even there, you know, to modify what she's saying, if you say life, it's like this long period of

[07:57]

birth to death, but I think we're talking about aliveness right here, now. And to give up the idea that it could be different than it is. Better. I think we should understand our meditation and mindfulness practice in this way, serving this mental posture. So, I don't know, how would you go about speaking about mindfulness practice or what is it? You know, I... have settled on this definition that I give now, so I'll share with you.

[09:02]

Mindfulness is the intention to bring attention to sensation without thinking about it. You've probably heard versions of that before. It's the intention to bring attention to sensation By sensation, I mean here everything that comes through the six senses. And refraining from thinking about it. And it works with this most precious resource we have, which is attention. Where your attention goes, your life goes. You can look at life, I think, as carrying the present into the present through how you give attention from moment to moment.

[10:22]

We live in this attention economy where everybody wants our attention because companies have figured out that not only where your attention goes, your life goes, but where your attention goes, your money goes. Can stick advertising into that process. So intention is a way to... your attention back. Intention is the way we direct attention. I mean, we can direct it to targets that we choose. And the targets are what the senses provide. It could be sights and sounds and smells. And it can be what you feel in the region of your physical body.

[11:29]

The sensations that we feel in the region of our physical body. This domain of body sensations, and specifically, I don't mean touch, when you touch something with your skin. I mean, that which you feel in the region of your physical body, so to speak, on the inside, so to speak. These sensations is what I want to look at with you under this headline of bodyfulness. So as is commonly instructed, you can start with bringing attention to breathing.

[12:37]

But, you know, is there such a thing as the breath? What I think we find when we bring attention to what we call breathing is we're bringing attention to the sensations of breathing. You can do it while I'm speaking. When you bring attention to the sensations of breathing, you feel your abdomen expanding and the chest expanding. And there's a subtle push as you inhale. There's actually a subtle push of sensation that goes further than just the abdomen and the chest it kind of flows into your arms and legs too it's like this it's mysterious because it's we can think about how oxygen when we inhale goes to every cell of our body but if you just study the sensations in the region of your physical body

[13:55]

you find that there's a kind of subtle expansion that goes all the way into your extremities. It may take some time or refinement to start to feel this subtle expansion and contraction that literally touches every cell of your body. Excuse me. If you practice this every day, hundreds and thousands of times, following what we call the sensations that we call inhaling, at some point you feel how you're full and then something turns and there's a contraction and you feel the reverse process until there's a point that you can call empty.

[15:06]

If you do this hundreds and thousands of times, something happens that I would call you're merging breath and attention into breath attention. It becomes a kind of medium that you can work with and you can send to different parts of your body. Maybe you've done some body work, and the body worker asked you to breathe into, I don't know, your hip. It doesn't make sense anatomically, right? Like, because we breathe into our lung, we know that, but it's actually, with the medium of breath attention, it's actually possible to breathe into your hip. You can try it right now.

[16:09]

Or you can try to breathe into your left foot. And as you're breathing into your left foot, it's like breath attention has to flow along the channel of your left leg to touch the foot. And if you want to be subtle about this, you can be more specific about how breath attention flows not just into the foot, but into the big toe and into each of the five toes, touching the very tips of your toes. And you can do the same on the Right side, obviously. And you can do it with your left arm and your right arm. And let breath attention flow into the whole of the body.

[17:15]

Into your face. Into your pelvic floor. It's kind of hard to... find the right metaphors, you know, are you pouring it in? Are you putting attention into a certain part of your body and kind of sucking it toward that area? If you come from an Eastern tradition or you have practiced Qigong or something like that, maybe you would call that Qi. And you start to observe that this breath attention is moving through the body. You can direct it with intention, or you can just observe how it's moving on its own. Now, many of you are probably familiar with a mindfulness practice like the body scan, which is widely taught.

[18:32]

there's a difference. You can put, as it's often said, you can put the flashlight of attention onto these different parts of the body. But I'm observing a difference when you do this with this medium that I've just called breath attention. It's not like you are observing as if, you know, you're living up here and you're observing the different parts of the body with a flashlight of attention. It's like you kind of need to locate yourself in the body and travel with this breath attention. Now, in this process, you know, some of you are completely familiar with it, and some of you are not familiar with it, and you may find somewhere in between, you know, wherever you are with this kind of experience, you may notice that the body isn't just this open space.

[20:07]

there are all kinds of tensions in the body, kind of blockages, you know, pains. I'll just call off all these obstacles, I'll just call them tension for now, okay? So you may feel a knot in your solar plexus or you feel... tightness in your shoulders. They're kind of like they're kind of chronically lifted up or something, not relaxed. What are these tensions? If you're an experienced practitioner, you've been sitting for a long time. you really want your body to be open and pain-free.

[21:17]

Wasn't this the goal? You know, it's like, isn't that what's supposed to happen? What is this tension that we encounter in Lazen practice? You know, it's different for each of us. But I know it's there for you too. Well, one way you could think about it is like, this tension is your hope, is the bodily manifestation of your hope for something other than life as it is. This tension is your gate to enlightenment it's like each tension in the body is a way to contract it's kind of like this way of contracting away from something you don't want to feel

[22:32]

There's that which is the case, there's that which you are feeling, and then there is this layered, you know, it's been going on for decades, this layered attempt of trying not to feel what you're feeling. And... The remedy for that is to allow your experience, including all these tensions, to allow your experience to be exactly what it is at this time. Exactly what it is at this time. No exception. No complaint. Just this experience as it is at this time. This is your enlightenment practice.

[23:42]

To end in yourself this hope for something other than life as it is right now. So maybe, you know, if you've read some Zen teachings or heard Zen teachings or both, you know, you maybe have heard that body and mind are not separate. It's like, yeah, right, they're not separate. Well, they're immediately separate when you try to contract away from your bodily experience as it is at this time, and they're immediately separate. Because you have, whether you're conscious of it or not, you have some idea that you want this bodily experience to be other than it is.

[24:49]

Which is, you could say, the definition of suffering. Suffering is to want the world to be other than it is, to want your experience to be other than it is. We have this, through our practice, we have this medium of breath attention. And then we can discover that the body is this, you know, what can we call it? This attentional sphere. There's a way you practice bringing attention to the body.

[26:01]

This is still a practice in which body and mind are separate because you form the idea, the intention to bring attention to the body as if it is an object. And I think it's useful to begin to observe, have the idea, hold yourself open to the possibility of not attending to the body, but attending with the body. Can you follow me there? Attending with the body. Having attention located in the body sufficiently, you know, by practicing hundreds and thousands of times to attending to the body, to the body, there can be a shift where you're starting to notice that you're attending with the body.

[27:09]

One way I try to speak about this is that the body as this attentional sphere is a resonant body. So whatever happens in your sensorial sphere, it leaves a grace in this resonant body. You think about... you know, two bells, you have a bell and you ring the bell, and then you have a bell of similar build that's sitting next to that bell. It picks up the frequencies of this other bell, right? That's resonance.

[28:15]

Well, I think of each of our bodies as this kind of resonant body. Now, despite all of our differences, we are bells of similar build. We can emphasize the differences. Or we can locate ourselves in this attentional sphere, this resonant body, and study how... the way we're exposed to another person, but it doesn't have to just be a person, it could be any object, modulates this, what you feel in the region of your physical body. This presence in your own

[29:20]

Intentional resonant body is what I think is the practice of intimacy. Well, you know, sometimes people try to talk about it as intimacy. In the workshop this afternoon, that's what I want to explore as the source of compassion. Compassion not as, you know, a virtue that we should have more of. But compassion as this courageous act to be so located in your own felt body that you're willing to feel the resonances that come from the so-called outside world. Willingly feel that stuff. We're not willing to feel our own stuff.

[30:24]

This is the contracting away from your own, you know, feelings that you don't want to feel. And then it's kind of understandable that you don't want to feel other people's stuff. On top of that. To say I should be more compassionate really doesn't help. Because that's another way you deny yourself your actual experience. You think you should be a better person, but that's not accepting how things actually are right now. So that's what I'd like to talk about in the afternoon. Thinking is a way for us to escape the felt body.

[31:32]

If you find yourself thinking, it's the way you can conveniently disconnect from what you're feeling. That's why mindfulness or bodyfulness practice is an important element of this. It's like you feel what you're feeling without thinking about it. Just be so willing to feel exactly what you're feeling at this time, whether you think that it's coming from you or whether you think that it's coming from somewhere else. So this is, I think, how we can understand, open ourselves up to this idea that body and mind are not separate. And we can observe when it happens that we separate body and mind.

[32:40]

One last thing and then I'll close. Maybe some of you are familiar with Dogen's statement that the entire world in the Ten Directions is the true human body. The entire world in the Ten Directions is the true human body. Is this your experience? Do you feel you're inhabiting your true human body as the entire world in the ten directions? If you don't, and you want to take a teaching like this seriously, how do you go about practicing that? I think the reason we don't experience the true human body as...

[33:58]

the entire world in the ten directions is because not only do we feel a separation between mind and body, we also feel a separation between this body-mind and the world. This is my body-mind. I may inhabit it quite, you know, in an advanced way, the way I'm describing, you know, as an intentional sphere and so forth. And I'm resonating with others. But it's still mine, you know, and your other. The entire world in the ten directions. Is this just like physical space? Is Dogen talking about physical space? Like what physicists talk about and what... new telescope is sending us pictures about?

[35:00]

Or is this space that Dogen talks about, is this an attentional space? I think it's an attentional space. It's the realization that the attentional sphere of the body is not limited to the skin bag, it is extended into space. Sometimes I suggest practicing that as an initial step, you can close your eyes and you can feel into the space in front of you. Just feel into the space in front of you. You may not think of this as much, you know, just feel into the space in front of you. It's like extending an invisible hand into space. And then you can do that in the back. You can do it to the two left and right sides.

[36:05]

And the cardinal directions and then the so-called intercardinal directions, you know, just so you feel the whole space. And up and down, those are the ten directions that Dogen talks about. The entire body in the ten, the entire world in the ten directions, but now as... an attentional sphere that you inhabit. You include the visual space into that. You include the oral auditory space into that. You include the space in which you smell into that attentional sphere. Maybe you think that you're doing that already. That's fine. But I know, you know, at the time when I first entered the Zendo in Green Gulch, I was treating this visual space in front of me, I was just treating it as an outside.

[37:16]

It was just outside. I was very separate from that space. But if you feel your attentional sphere extending in this way. It's like the world is on the inside, but this distinction breaks down. So, the point I want to make here and close with is that the attentional body is a spatial body. And this intimacy, which is suffused with our practice over time, I think it develops just gradually over time, with our practice of accepting our experience exactly as it is at this time.

[38:22]

It's like this space is suffused with our willingness to accept. to be intimate with what is actually the case right now. This is all unfolding from this initial seed of bodyfulness. Bringing attention to the sensations of the body. Breathing. bringing attention to the sensations of breathing, bringing attention to the sensations of the body, and then finding that we're attending with the body. And as you're exploring how you're attending with the body, you find yourself in this spatial body in which you feel less separate.

[39:32]

you 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 for more information please visit sfcc.org and click giving may we all fully enjoy the dharma

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