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. Good evening. Is the volume good enough? Yeah. in Buddha Hall of City Center and also everybody who have been joining in from their homes online. My name is Lorenzo, and I am a resident priest here at City Center. And City Center is moving into the final stretch of the winter practice period. entitled Buddha Body, Buddha Mind, and led by senior Dharma teacher Christina Lender.

[01:06]

And in this practice period, I've been invited to be shuso, or head monk. And part of the training of a head monk is to wet one's feet on this platform, in this room, and speak, and begin to give Dharma talks. So... Much, much gratitude to my teacher, Christina, for inviting me to share the Dharma Sit during this practice period. And I also want to thank Tanto Tim and Eno Michael for making it possible for all of us to practice together. During these first eight weeks of the practice period, we have been exposed, hopefully we have received a treasure chest of suggestions and teachings that are all meant to bring us to the present and to connect with our bodies.

[02:16]

And thinking that maybe tonight there are people that are not participants in the practice period, maybe I would mention a few key teachings that are very dear to me and hopefully to many of us that have been given during this time. First and foremost, guess what? Go a little bit slower. Slow down a fraction. And this is such an accessible and simple suggestion and so powerful. when we slow down, even asking the question, may I, in this moment, slow down a fraction, it opens up possibilities that were not visible before. Possibilities about oneself, but also about others, about the environment where we are.

[03:20]

So it's an incredibly powerful teaching and so simple. And hopefully we all in a way or another, are engaging with it. Another teaching that has been given multiple times per week, I would say, during these eight weeks, is to become aware of one's speech with the acronym WAIT. Why am I talking? And maybe the sibling, why am I not talking? And this is just to make us more aware of the powerfulness of speech and to ask ourselves the question, do I need to say what I'm about to say? Can I say it in a better way? Am I being respectful and compassionate to the person I'm talking to?

[04:24]

And so on. And similarly, in one of the classes taught by Mary Stairs, we heard a suggestion about being aware of our listening, excuse me, our capacity in that moment to actually receive from someone else. And I find this particularly helpful, not only as a training of awareness, but also as a way in which we can actually communicate to the person that's speaking to us what our ability to listen is. And maybe find support in saying, you know, I had a very full day. I can't listen to this in this moment. Can we find another moment to talk? Rather than feeling guilty afterwards because we pretended we were listening, but nothing came in. Another teaching or suggestion that I received that I found very powerful is to become aware of our triggers, of when we are triggered, when we are activated, and once again, maybe slow down, maybe stop altogether, and check in with the body, ground oneself before we actually

[05:52]

engage in an action or rather than a reaction that we might regret afterwards. And all of this was kind of wrapped up by another suggestion about checking on our attitude towards anything, ourselves, others, and that was phrased as posture of love versus posture of war. whether we are feeling an openness, a sort of a welcoming attitude, a welcoming posture. No matter what the response is, this also came a part of a class of Mary Stairs. And she was giving an example of a response that she had to give in a particular situation she found herself in. And the response did not necessarily have to be different, but the posture would have made a difference.

[06:56]

And so to just check in and see what sort of openness we have when we face a situation, a person, anything, ourselves. So all of these suggestions and teachings seem to me to have two fundamental outcomes, or maybe even goals. One is, of course, to train ourselves in awareness, to become more aware in general, and also to learn to focus our attention to the body, as the body is the only thing we have that's always in the present. And so as a way of coming back to the present by checking in with the body we have in that moment. And if you think about it, these are the fundamental trainings of zazen. When we sit zazen, what we want, what we hope, is to be awake, to be aware, not only of ourselves, but also of the surroundings, and at the same time, to be present, to be present moment by moment.

[08:11]

And how do we do that? Typically, the suggestion is, follow your breath, stick to your body, focus your attention to your posture, your body. So somehow these teachings that have been given during these eight weeks are all teachings that hopefully, at least for those of us that will soon seek Sesshin, can come with us during those six days of sitting in stillness. And when I thought about all these teachings and I engaged with all these different practices, I realized, though, that it was still my thinking mind that was in the driver's seat.

[09:12]

Somehow it was a training of my thinking mind, my ordinary mind, to focus the attention on the body, on a particular aspect of myself. And I wonder... whether there is more, whether there is a step further we can go to to let the body itself inform the mind rather than the mind training attention to the body. Because my perception is that as the mind, as the ordinary mind, our thinking mind pays attention to the body, some form of conditioning Not that the body is not conditioned, but some form of conditioning of the thinking mind must be present. Some level of interpretation of what's happening must be present. And so my question is, and my wondering is, is there a way in which we can actually directly receive information from how the body is in that particular moment before the thinking mind gets activated?

[10:25]

beneath the thinking mind. And I came across a passage from a chapter by Darlene Cohen in a book called Being Bodies. It's a collection of essays written by various teachers on their relationship with their body. And maybe not everybody is aware of or knows about who Darlene Cohen was, but she was a Dharma teacher in our lineage. She was the founder and guiding teacher of the Russian River Zendo in Sonoma County, and began to sit here in 1970. It was ordained by our first female Abbott Blanche Hartmann in 1999. And when she was in her thirties, she was living at Greengalch at that time. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and spent The rest of her teaching years sort of helping people with practicing with pain and chronic illness.

[11:33]

She passed away in 2011. And this chapter refers to a time in which Darlene was actually living here at City Center in one of the apartments up the street. And this is what she wrote in my classes. I lived half block from the San Francisco Zen Center and used to try to go to dinner there once a week as a treat to myself. I would walk down the hill which brought me to the bottom of a number of steps to the front door. Going up the steps would be the second leg of a laborious journey. Sometimes I would make it all the way to the steps and not be able to go up them. So I would have to strain all the way back up the hill to my apartment.

[12:36]

I asked myself, what is it about my walking that is so tiring? What I called walking, in quotation mark, was the part of the step when my foot met the sidewalk. From the point of view of the joints, And I want to underline this. From the point of view of the joints, that is the most stressful component of walking. The joints get a rest when the foot is in the air, just before it strikes the pavement. I found that when I focused on the foot that was in the air, instead of the foot that was striking the pavement, my stamina would increase enormously. After making this observation, I never again failed to climb the steps to knock at the front door of the Zen center. So when I read this, I thought, how did she hear the message from her joints to try that out, to focus the attention not where this thinking mind was trying to focus, which is, of course, on the painful moment of walking, of when

[13:57]

the foot gets in contact with the pavement, but actually on the foot in the air. How did this information come to Darlene? And this questioning has a lot to do with my experience about checking in with my body. I think I began to be invited to check in with my body maybe 30, 35 years ago. And the typical question, how does this feel? in your body. And just the verbalization of what I was noticing in my body never convinced me 100%, because I always felt like I'm still thinking. I'm still thinking about what's happening in my body. It's not a direct expression of how my body feels. And I never really understood how to get there, if there was a way to get there. Until fairly recently,

[14:58]

I would say about a few months ago, maybe almost a year ago, in a psychotherapy session, I was having a conversation that was very innocuous with my therapist, and then all of a sudden something was said that triggered me, that somehow felt like a threat to some sense of self I was trying to hold on to. I remember my thinking mind immediately trying to strategize to get out of that conversation, try to eliminate that threat. And of course, my therapist, being a good therapist, said, let's check with your body. How is your body doing in this moment? And asked me to verbalize what I was experiencing. What I was experiencing was fairly traumatic because I was kind of stuck at that point that I could not go on with my strategies to get out of the conversation.

[16:04]

This visioning, visions of sort of being on the street in the middle of an earthquake, crumbling buildings, trying to find refuge began to happen. And at the same time, sort of a mirror of this thinking was my body contracting, sweating, feeling hot, feeling cold. And this came sort of in waves. And this therapist kept asking me to continue to communicate with him what was happening. And so more and more, I was asked to pay attention to my body. And I think that somehow these waves began to calm down. And at some point, a very different message came to my mind, which was that I felt completely comfortable and safe where I was, that there was no danger whatsoever, that I was sitting on a couch very comfortably in a very safe room with a very safe person, and there was absolutely nothing to worry about.

[17:10]

And the waves ended. And this really intrigued me, because where did that message come from? I mean, it was... It was the juxtaposition between a mind that very violently, in a sense, went constantly to the future and the past. You know, the experiences of the past sort of came together to create great anxiety about the future, nothing about the present. And then this other part of my mind that reminded me in some way that was able to communicate, you're completely safe in this moment, there is no danger, nothing is happening. You know, the door is closed, the guy is totally safe, I'm sitting on the couch, where I have been sitting for many times before.

[18:12]

And so I became very, very curious about what may be happening when these situations arise and how they can be, supported somehow. And my gut sense was something happens when we calm the thinking mind. When we calm the thinking mind, other possibilities of our mind become hearable somehow. We can become conscious of something else that still belongs to us that is not just a thinking mind. It made me think of a Dharma talk that Christina gave at the beginning of the practice period where she distinguished shamatha and vipassana in the process of sitting and shamatha being a calm in the mind as a sort of prerequisite to vipassana, which is inquiry, which is

[19:26]

wisdom work, which is wise thinking, somehow, that cannot happen if the mind is agitated. I also was thinking of senior Dhamma teacher Paul Haller, who's not here tonight, in a class, in a practice period at Tassajara, spoke about two forms of attention, sort of an attention that's very active and an attention that's completely receptive. And so maybe there is something about the type of attention that we can exercise, we can practice with, that allows us to hear the language of the body, not without the intermediation of the thinking mind. But then I came across someone called Ian McGill Christ. And Ian McGill Christ is sort of a British renaissance man. He began his career as a reader of English literature at the University of Oxford, became really interested in the brain, and then ended up being one of the most well-known psychiatrists, neuroscientists, neuroimaging magician, and

[20:52]

went to medical school and worked in hospitals, etc., etc. Now he lives in the Isle of Skye in Scotland and writes books and does lectures that you can find on YouTube. His name is Ian McGilchrist. And he wrote in 2009 a book called The Master and the Emissary that is centered on the fact that our brain is actually made of two hemispheres. the right hemisphere and the left hemispheres, connected by, of course, the network of the nervous system. And these two hemispheres actually do the same thing. It's our brain, but the way they function is actually different. They actually perceive the reality in very different ways. And so I'm going to read a passage from this book, and then maybe... See if there is any comment or reaction on your side.

[21:56]

He writes, why are the hemispheres separate? The separation of the hemispheres seems not accidental. And the degree of separation is carefully controlled by the band of tissue that connects them. Birds and animals like us have divided hemispheres. we need to be able to be open to whatever there is, and yet, at the same time, to provide a map, a version of the world, which is simpler, clearer, and therefore more useful. Hence, the brain has to attend to the world in two different ways. In the one, we experience the live, complex, embodied world of individual always unique beings, forever in flux, and that of interdependencies, a world with which we are deeply connected.

[22:58]

This is the way reality is perceived by our right hemisphere. In the other, we experience our experience in a special way, a re-presented version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, essentially fragmented entities grouped in classes on which predictions can be based. This kind of attention isolates, fixes and makes each thing explicit by bringing it under the spotlight of attention. But it also enables us for the first time to know and consequently to learn and to make things. This gives us power. And this is predominantly the business of the left hemisphere. These are not different ways of thinking about the world. These are different ways of being in the world.

[24:01]

Last night, Christina had read a passage from Reginald Gray that spoke about the violence we exercise on ourselves and others by being disembodied and the fact that the Western culture has become a history of disembodiment and therefore of violence. And, of course, the situation we are in today seems to suggest something about that. Somehow, Gilchrist speaks about the same thing, but just in a much more sort of neuro-scientific way. by saying that, because fundamentally his point is to say Western culture, since the 1700s at least, has predominantly emphasized the role of the left brain. You know, with scientific research, with measurability of everything, with having to prove everything.

[25:08]

And we have lost the capacity to actually listen to the master, which is the right brain that sees everything in interconnection, embodied, and so on. And so this gave me some sense of relief somehow, because it made me realize, well, then these teachings we are receiving and these trainings we are receiving are training that try to calm the left side of the brain, the thinking mind, the logical mind, strategic mind so that actually what is the perception of the right brain, which has a language that's much simpler and much subtler than the left brain, can be heard. And so maybe there is a step forward from all these trainings to be able to receive directly information from our body without the intermediation of the thinking mind.

[26:13]

which may come naturally by following these practices and trying to calm the mind, the thinking mind, to the point that we can actually register what's really happening in the body. So I wonder if there is any sort of... I know it's late in the evening, and I have no idea what that is. It's 7.13, according to this, so it's really early. I'm sorry. We have an hour and 15 minutes more, an hour and a half more. Prepare yourself. Get coffee out. 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 sfzc.org and click giving.

[27:16]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[27:19]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.12