Well, hello and good afternoon, everybody. I hope you can all hear me okay. Thumbs up, yes. That's great. Okay. Thank you for allowing me to check. And thank you again for being here. I understand there's an echo. Let me see what I can do about that. Not be that I can do much. Everyone is on mute. Oh, it was Barbara herself who was echoing, so good. That's all cleared up. Anyhow, thank you again for joining for our practice session this afternoon. I always find myself compelled at the beginning of each of these lists to express what a joy and an honor it is to be able to host these sessions and be together with you in this particular supportive and encouraging way. So even though you may think... I'm here to support you. In many ways, you're actually here to support me equally.

[02:27]

So thank you for taking up this practice together. I'll just briefly say for anyone who is new to these practice sessions, that we'll begin with about a 25-minute period of zazen or silent meditation. After the period of meditation, then, I'll give what I call a dharmet or a brief dharmet encouragement. And then we'll open up for... time for you to all share to you if you have any questions or something you'd like tipping forward from your practice during this time together or in the previous week. And I'll just note that I seem to be having a little bit of connectivity issues with my internets. So if that happens, I'll apologize in advance. If I disappear for a little bit, hopefully Barbara will be able to, who's helping to host, hold the space until I get to reconnect with Just keep sitting together and we'll see what happens once I'm able to return.

[03:28]

So what I like to do, I enjoy often offering a brief reading or a poem at the beginning of these sessions in order to set the tone or the context for our practice session together before moving into the meditation. And recently I've been resonating with some of the poetry of I think it's Dana, Dana Foltz, and she herself is a meditator and I think a yogi. And I shared a couple of her poems in the last part of the session on Tuesday, and I thought I'd start by offering another one today. And this particular poem is called Trusting Prana. And prana, if you're not familiar with the word, is a Sanskrit word, and it means breath. or life force or life energy. And in the yogic tradition, it's understood to be the vital principle that permeates all reality.

[04:32]

And before I read the poem, I invite you to come settle now into your zazen posture as we'll transition directly into the meditation following the form. So find your posture now so that you're all settled and ready to go. And again, attending to an upright alert posture, having a sense of internal alignments, connecting, drawing up to the sky at the same time, drawing, connecting to the earth. And then just bringing a sense of alert awareness throughout your whole being, your whole body. And what we'll do is after reading the poem, we'll go into the meditation. And as usual, for those who are newer to meditation, I'll offer a few guiding words to get us started. And then eventually fading into silence. And we'll sit the rest of the period in silence. And in Zazen, we open the senses to all of our experience.

[05:35]

To all experience that's arising. And allowing life just to be as it is. It's also that we're awakening to the life energy, to the prana of our body, right? And this life energy reveals the mysterious formless presence that is our source. So here is the poem, Trusting Prana. Trust the energy that courses through your body. Trust. Then take surrender and even deeper. Be the energy. Don't push anything away. Follow each sensation. Follow each sensation with awareness. Back to its source.

[06:40]

to vastness and pure presence. Emerge then so new, so vulnerable, that you don't know who you are. Welcome in the season of monsoons. And I would add, welcome the season of pandemic. Be the bridge across the flooded river and the surging turrent underneath. Be unafraid of consummate wonder. Be the energy and blaze a trail across the clear night sky like lightning. Dare to be your own dare to be your own illumination.

[07:56]

I'll ring the three bells to begin, and then I'll ring one bell at the end. So to begin, I invite you to become aware of your embodied presence. Become aware of your body, present in this moment. Feel what it's like simply to be here, in this particular body.

[09:12]

we've kindly given ourselves precious opportunity to stop, take a pause from our usual activity and busyness in order to come to rest in stillness and silence. And you might find it helpful at the beginning of any meditation period by becoming aware first of the breath. the embodied experience of the breath, the sensations of breathing. It can be helpful to deliberately connect to the breath at the start by taking in three deep inhalations, for example, on the count of four, and then exhaling, extending that exhale twice as long. perhaps for the count of eight.

[10:18]

And with each inhale, in each exhale, you can continue to settle a little bit more deeply into your body, into presence, into being here. breath can serve as a touchstone. Moment after moment. Throughout your meditation, simply allowing awareness to gently accompany the natural rhythm, breathing in and breathing out. You might find it particularly grounding to focus on the sensation of the breath in your hara, which is, say in Zen, the energy source at the center of your body, a couple inches below your belly button, focusing on the experience of the breath right there, as if it was a gateway or a portal to the universe.

[11:42]

All breath comes in and out there from the universe. The universe is breathing you in and out from that particular place. After settling into the breath, three deep inhales and exhale, again allowing it to return to its natural rhythm. Just settling into the experience of breathing, of being breathed by the body, allowing the experience of breath to permeate your whole being. to feel the breath in every part of your body, the crown of your head, all the way down to your toes, as well as into your fingers.

[12:45]

Feel into the various parts of your body, for example, into the palm of your hands, noticing a sense of energy expanding so that they feel lighter and more spacious in some way as... You get the same with your feet, feeling the breath all the way down into the soles of your feet. feeling their sensitivity and expansion as you bring awareness to them. And you can let the sense of space and energy of the breath in your hands and feet kind of spread out from your feet into your legs,

[14:07]

hands to your arms. Taking your time, allowing this growing feeling of live spaciousness of the breath in your limbs to be known. Feel the spaciousness within your body. Again, following that spacelessness, that aliveness, bring your hands into your arms, and then into your shoulders, and to the back of your chest, through to the front of your chest, down into the belly and throughout your whole torso. experiencing the breath as energy, moving throughout the whole body, knowing the whole body.

[15:28]

Then perhaps allowing this aware, spacious energy to rise up to your neck, into your head, making itself known through your face, through the crown of your head, illuminating and warming your face, your scalp, even inside your brain. Then simply allow this alive spacious energy, senses alive, spacious energy throughout your entire body as a whole field of energy. A whole body becoming one entire field of open, alive spaciousness. And spaciousness, that's not divided by concepts, feelings of inner and outer.

[16:36]

Just one nominal field of illuminated life experiencing. Pure presence. Presencing. So continue being aware of the spacious presencing and illumination through the rest of the spirit of zazen. Thank you everyone again for joining in Zazen together.

[30:40]

And now moving into the Darmet. So after, over the last couple of weeks, I've touched upon the beneficial practices of letting go, not knowing, and being comfortable with groundlessness. So when taken up these practices, I would suggest support us in cultivating the resilience necessary to navigate the pandemic in this time of great upheaval and anxiety and uncertainty. And each of these practices, letting go, not knowing, and being comfortable with, being okay with, you know, settling into a sense of groundlessness, require of us a courage, a courage to come to the end of what we know and what we're familiar with, and then willingly extend beyond that into the unfamiliar, into the unknown.

[31:43]

You could say to allow ourselves to stretch and expand and release into the open, undefined space of possibility. And when we're able to do this, we discover a capacity to hold and bear with our experiences. even the painful and difficult ones, and to do so with a greater degree of spaciousness and composure and flexibility and acceptance, even creativity. The space of creativity opens up when we can lead our life in this way. I've also mentioned that the practices of letting go and not knowing and being comfortable with grandness require of us to discover a deeper quality, a deeper sense of trust, right?

[32:44]

And one that is not dependent on external conditions being a certain way. And this innate form of trust requires us to inquire into and honestly access, what is it that we most deeply rely on? What is it that you most deeply trust? What is it that we can have a faith in when the external world of causes and conditions, including all types of disasters, social injustices, the ongoing erratic human behavior, when all of these external conditions fail us in some way. When we learn to recognize a deeper inner sense of trust, that in time we become more able to extend that trust outward to others and to allow it to inform our relationships with each other and the world.

[33:54]

So what I find paradoxical about the practices of letting go, groundlessness, and not knowing is the way in which they curiously give rise to a more profound experience of knowing. A knowing which is integral to having genuine trust. So what is this knowing? What is this knowing we talk about? We talk about not knowing a lot, but we often don't really describe, well, what is knowing itself? And what kind of knowing can we develop or cultivate or have a ground our innate sense of trust in? Dr. Daniel Siegel, many of you might know him, he's a psychiatrist and founder of the Mindsight Institute. He describes this knowing as a non-conceptual inner sense of truth, an intuitive and non-language-based way of perceiving the nature of reality and our place in the larger world and the continuity within the flow of life in which we live.

[35:13]

I'll repeat that. Knowing, according to Daniel Siegel, knowing as a non-conceptual inner sense of truth, an intuitive and non-language-based way of perceiving the nature of reality and our place in this reality, our place in the larger world and the continuity within the flow of life in which we live, in which we find ourselves, which we're never separate from. So this form of knowing is a you could say, an unworded way of coming to the truth of our life. This ought to describe it as a subterranean stream that provides a coherent impression of the world as it is. So what I think Siegel's description of this knowing tells us is that finding the ground of trust,

[36:26]

is basically a matter of coming back to the body and to our direct experience. To experience from an inner dimension instead of an external one. So what is it to be still in silence and intentionally listen deeply to that inner dimension, that embodied experience, that inner voice, that comes from a deeper place in the body. So rather than putting our trust into external conditions, being a certain way, right? And of course, they won't ever be exactly the way we wish them they would be. Even if they're that way for a brief while, eventually everything changes. So instead, we learn to rely on an inner knowing or a wisdom that is rooted in our embodied experience.

[37:30]

In other words, trust is in many ways a deeply somatic experience. It's not based on the conceptual thinking mind, but something else. As Siegel says, on direct, non-conceptual, non-language-based experience. So this type of trust arises from a somatic field of direct experience. Again, from an embodied knowing. And what is What are the key ways to access this embodied knowing or trust? How do we access it? How do we cultivate? How do we come to know it? How do we come in relationship to it?

[38:33]

How do we get familiar with it? Through meditation, of course. The meditation taught by the Buddha and practiced by all our Buddha's ancestors is deeply somatic. It's fully grounded in sensations, sensory experiences, feelings, emotions, and so on. Even thoughts are related to as somatic, as bursts of energy experienced in the body-mind, rather than non-physical phenomena that disconnect us from our soma, our embodied experience. In this most ancient form, Buddhist meditation is a technique for letting us, for letting go of the objectifying tendency of thoughts, the way that our minds make everything an object, and instead enter deeply and fully into communion with our embodied nature, to be at one with our embodied nature.

[39:47]

So what the Buddha basically offered was a systemic process that results in a profound awareness in your body rather than in your head. And this for us, these days, our current society, so much of the time we're up here. We're in our head, above our neck, and we forget we even have a body. So meditation reminds us, come back to the whole body experience, to a knowing that's rooted in your body. direct experience. Not in your thoughts, in your mind, but direct experience. And this process leads to what the Dharma teacher Reggie Ray refers to as touching enlightenment with the body. Or to touch enlightenment in and through the body. So we can say that to be awake, to be enlightened, if you will, is to be fully and completely embodied.

[40:49]

To be fully embodied means to be at one with who we are in every aspect, including our physical being and our emotions and the totality of our karmic situation, whatever it might be. In his book, The Awakening Body, Reggie Ray writes that, When we work deeply with the body, including in Zazen, we make a series of discoveries that bear directly on the fundamental question that practice asks of us. Who am I? An essential discovery we make when we look deeply is that the unknown, or experience of not knowing, is the very center of our somatic being. and the core of our personality. This unknown is open, empty space, simply clear and unobstructed.

[41:54]

As we are able to surrender more and more fully into it, we discover that this ultimate space of the body has no boundaries or limits. In fact, it is absent of any reference point at all, including the concept, that of the concept of self. At the moment of you meeting this space, if you will, there is quite literally no one, no separate subject observing and nothing being observed. So this is how to know the unknown. Knowing the unknown. Not as a concept, but as a direct embodied experience.

[43:00]

Precisely because it cannot be known in any kind of dualistic way. It's not a matter of subject knowing an object. That's not true knowing. That's dualistic. In other words, we can't stand back and observe it as a perceiving, thinking, judging subject, right? Because when we do, when we step back, the knowing actually is gone. The true knowing is gone. Only in the moment of touching this state of being in our body, of touching embodied awakening, you could say, is there the true knowing of our fundamental nature. True knowing. Simply awareness, knowing itself. Or pure presence, knowing itself. This is what all the teachings keep pointing us back to again and again.

[44:01]

Be completely awareness, knowing awareness. Knowing all experience, being known from this place of pure presencing. Non-dualistic. No separation, basically. It comes back to again and again. No separation. Dissolve any sense of separation. That is true liberation. So this brings us again to zazen, to meditation. And as you probably have heard me say many times, zazen is a deliberate exercise in not knowing. When we sit in meditation, our zazen is a stepping back from our conditioning and releasing into the open, intimate space of not knowing. It's stepping into silence, into non-striving. A fundamental instruction for zazen is basically to relax, to do nothing.

[45:05]

And this doing nothing means to not move, not to engage or try to fix or change. or seek anything else. Not to move away from this present moment experiencing. Instead, we're encouraged to simply soften into just being. Allow your whole being to relax. Soften. Let the boundaries dissolve. So there's no resisting, no moving away from what's happening. There's no me here and something happening to a separate self. It's just experiencing a rising. So we make, in Zazen, the effortless effort to just be. Just be the presence you already are. And let everything else be just as it is. So in Zazen, we relax.

[46:10]

We do nothing. We hold no particular view or goal. Simply observe what's happening. As Paul Howler often says, to experience the experience that's being experienced. To note the various experiences. Whatever shape they might take. Images, thoughts, sensations, feelings. Whatever arises as we just sit here. We watch as phenomena moves. Our minds react or not. It's kind of like watching a movie. We don't go up to the screen and get involved in the movie. We stay back and see if we observe the changing colors and shapes moving across the screen. And when our intention is to do nothing, then we can more easily notice how quickly we get pulled off of balance, get pulled into the small self, get pulled into the story or the narrative of what's going on. the story that we have.

[47:10]

It's a conditioned story. It's a made-up story. It's not the fundamental truth of what is. It's like falling into the river. So climbing out of the river, climbing back, and simply observing the flow of experience. However, rather than use conceptual mind or headspace to feel what's going on right now, to feel the truth of reality of this moment, we use the felt sense of the body. So I like to really emphasize, feel what's happening, the felt sense of what's happening. We can take this up as an inquiry. It's not an inquiry leading from an idea or concept of awareness, but with an awareness, a self as a sense organ, right? Awareness as a sense organ of discernment itself. You might say that this is a catesthetic inquiry. rather than a conceptual inquiry. An inquiry that comes from the body itself, rather than the mind.

[48:14]

So Zaza is this form of inquiry. Again, it's not an intellectual, conceptual process. Not thinking about what's happening in Zaza. You would say, we're just listening. We're deeply listening. And this is a listening that's beyond language, beyond words, beyond thoughts. Thoughts arise. Listen beyond them. Don't get caught in them. Don't get caught in the meaning of the narrative, the chatter of the thoughts. Just hear them. It's just sound vibrations felt in the body-mind. The vibration of rising, abiding for a period of time and falling away. Rising. biting, falling away. The same thing, what I suggest at the beginning of meditation, listen to the sound of the bell. It first appears, the body for a period of time, changes maybe throughout, and then eventually it dissolves.

[49:15]

All experience is observed in this same non-attached way in our Zaza. But what does it mean to listen with the body? To listen in such a way in order to get to know each emotion, each experience, that we get to know what's expressing and get to know our tendency to grasp or avert, to push away some aspect of our life with an experience. And to listen to a wisdom that's below the tendency to grasp, a wisdom that offers peace and ease. And freedom. When we settle into trust in Zazen, we can feel it. The body relaxes when we settle into this embodied sense of trust. This is kind of big... It really makes a big difference in our life.

[50:20]

The implication is that we're not just as caught up in the grasping onto things as usual. We let go. So if we remember this principle that's possible to stay in touch with our boundless awareness as an embodied mind experience, then we can imagine not getting caught up in our usual mind stuff, right? Not getting caught up in our usual narratives and reactivity. When we remember this principle, we can train the mind gradually over time to get used to or familiar with this kind of new perspective. coming from the place of awareness, coming from insight, if you will, coming from this place of felt experience of boundless awareness, experiencing and seeing boundless awareness. Typically, we habitually hang out in our concepts, in our thoughts, and we strive to make them true because

[51:27]

because we don't trust life. We just don't trust this moment. We're not ready to relax. We're not ready to let go. We're not ready to give up and give into reality, into things as it is. We want control. We want control now. So we're usually not ready to let go, to trust. To be free. This isn't a combination. It's just that many of us have been conditioned. All of us have been conditioned to grasp and to hold on. At a very young age. Either liberally or unconsciously by those around us. Including society. And in many cases we've been conditioned in violent and oppressive ways. So there's often a good reason why we're not ready to let go, to trust our life.

[52:33]

But what practice offers us is an opportunity to look at that conditioning. We have to understand it. We have to understand the root of it. Understand the source of it. And some of us have been conditioned to harm, to dominate, to oppress, often unknowingly. And we have to look at and see this conditioning for what it is. we don't see it, if we don't explore and understand and release our conditioning, then we're never going to be truly free. We're never going to be able to trust the heart, to trust our true mind, our Buddha mind, to trust life. And this deep desire for happiness and peace will continue to remain out of reach. So what would it mean to trust life?

[53:36]

To trust that life is unfolding. To trust that the life as it is unfolding is enough. The deepest trust in heart and mind entails not grasping. When we don't grasp, then we can become the trust. In that time, in that moment, we literally become the body of trust. said enough. It's gone a little bit longer than usual. My apologies. I wanted to leave some space for questions to answer. So Barbara is going to post instructions for how to raise your hand if you'd like to offer something, questions, or your own experience. And I'd like to hear how it is that you're working with an embodied sense of knowing and trusting, particularly during these challenging and unique types.

[54:38]

So Barbara will help. See if there's anyone who would like to come forward with something. Anyone with a raised hand, I'll see if I can also. I see Lori. Lori, help me. Geoboom, is that? Yes. Okay. Hi, Lori. So, you're talking about the sound of the bell. We always listen to that. It's a wonderful sound. But, What if you don't like a sound, say like your neighbors, and we're all cooked up, and you have to hear your neighbors? How do I work with that? Because for me, it's partly a control issue. I don't want them to make noise. So what is this not liking? Where does that come from? What probably comes from childhood, noise things in my household, but... I've held on to it all these years, many, many years.

[55:41]

So it's a control thing. It's a control thing. And I don't want to hear anybody else's noise unless it's somebody that I know in the household. So part of that right there is a story. It's a narrative. It's a belief. I don't want to experience this. Yes. There should not be. So that's a belief. There should not be this noise. That's a fault. That's a concept. I don't want. The minute you have that thought, you've created a separate self. So there's the experience of the noise, right? There's just sound. And we can register that sound as either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. That's the next kind of layer. And then, usually when we experience it as, for example, unpleasant, a thought comes up, a reaction comes up, an impulse comes up. I don't want this. And there's a narrative that comes with, I don't want this. First narrative is there's an I who doesn't want this separate thing.

[56:44]

And then for whatever reason, you can fill in why I don't want this. It reminds me of my childhood or it makes me, it's unpleasant that I don't want unpleasant things in my life, right? So I'm going to change all the reality to make it all nice and pleasant. I only want to hear chirping birds and beautiful voices and singing of angels or whatever else. You know, because that's how I think reality should be. Right? So it starts with that story. I, a story of an I, a separate self, don't want reality. And the reality that I'm hearing is bad. It's a bad reality. Right? So to come back, to back up a little bit, and just stay with the sensation. Stay with the sound itself. Before you have the story kick in. Before the narrative kicks in. of good or bad, you know, or me and them, or whatever other stories you have about the experience. Come back just to the felt sense in the body of the vibration of sound itself.

[57:50]

So go back to that source. Go back to the original experience. You could say pure experience. I'm careful to use that word, but a more original experience. experience before the mind, before thinking kicks in with its conditioned narrative that overlays on top of the sound. So my felt feeling, maybe I go to this too quickly, is that my body tenses up. Yeah, and that's fine. So you notice, oh, tension in the body. Yes. There's the sound. Yes. And then the sound is felt as unpleasant. Okay. And when I notice something unpleasant in the body, the body reacts with tension. Okay. That's what's happening. Okay. Can I be with the tension? Can I be with the tension without adding a story on top of it? Can it just be tension in the body? Just notice the tension with kind of kindness, with compassion.

[58:57]

Oh, tension. Oh, yes, I know that. Yeah, it's not so pleasant. So can you befriend the tension? Rather than making something you want to push away, because it's there, it's reality. In this moment, it's reality. Reality is manifesting, showing itself in your body as tension. Oh, look, there's tension. So bring in curiosity to it, bring in kindness. Oh, okay, tension. Hello, tension. What's going on? How can I be with you? How can we just rest in this moment? What would be helpful? Maybe just breathing with the tension, right? So we're not making it an enemy. We're not making the tension bad, because then oftentimes what we have in it, we make the tension bad, then we make ourselves bad. Ooh, I shouldn't be having this tension. I'm a bad meditator. I should be a better Buddhist. I'm not supposed to have any tension in my life, you know? That's right. Like, right, we go down this whole other, you know, story lane, you know, and we're carried off way into the distance. Come back to the original experience.

[60:02]

Oh, tension. Where do I notice that tension in the body? How does it make itself now? And you can notice, is there a narrative? Is there a story related to that tension? Sometimes that's, you know, the tension may have a deeper story about something that happened to us very, very young when we were young, years ago, right? And it's not so much about what's happening now, but it's about an embodied story. that's kind of been literally kind of wired into us through conditioning. So if we can stay with the tension and just befriend it, be kind, be loving towards it, it may in time release or let go. Either because we're not reinforcing the tension, or just because in its own time, like all things, it will... the experience, not trying to change reality.

[61:08]

Notice, when do we add a story on top of our experience? And it's usually the story that exasperates our suffering. Suffering almost always has a story with it that creates a dualism between the original experience and then our perception, our concept of the experience. Does that help at all? It does so much. Thank you so much. You're welcome. You can't see me, but I'm balanced. Thank you. Thank you, Laurie. Mei, Mei Zhu. Thank you, David, for offering this knowing, this wrong truth. How about love? And is love is still a concept or a notion? How does love fit into this spacious, unlimited space? So where is love? Is it wind or light?

[62:09]

Yeah. I've been entertaining for a while now a definition of love as the knowing of our shared being. Right? So this is this quality of knowing non-separation, knowing our interconnectedness, knowing our oneness. So this knowing is awareness itself. Love is awareness itself. And it's an awareness of our connectedness, our vast, our deep intimacy. So there's no separation there. So that's how I would kind of understand love. It's not something that we do. Love is something we already are. And Oftentimes we separate ourselves from what we already are by going into our minds or seeing, perceiving the world from a place of separation. We're already intimate and connected. We already live a shared life, right?

[63:12]

And so, you know, so often love is this romantic thing of me over here going to get that thing over there, that person, right? And we're separate and I have to get you and I have to merge with you or whatever. And that's a misperception, a misunderstanding of fear of love. So if we come back to this definition of love, it's the knowing of our shared being. And that knowing is always true. It's what we are, awareness of our shared being. Then we're always fundamentally a state of love. And we just have to discover how do we act from that place? How do we meet the world? connect to the world from that place of love. What keeps us from loving, from being loving. You're welcome, Nick. Thank you. Fred? Just a first name.

[64:17]

Hi, Fred. Thank you. So just along these same... principles about how does teaching and learning get into this space how does dharma enter into this space your sound was a little bit off how does dharma how does teaching how does the study of the of the buddhist teachings did you say enter into this faith or this space yes into this construction to what we constructed today, how would we visualize based on these principles, teaching, learning, and transmitting? So as I kind of understand it, I don't kind of see myself so much as teaching.

[65:19]

I actually, and I think most Well, I can't say that bad. I would imagine many Dharma teachers, what we see ourselves doing is sharing our experience, sharing our understanding of the teachings and sharing our reality. I hear some sound there. I don't know if that's, there we go. Sharing our own inner knowing, what we've discovered through our practice, right? And so we share that and then you get to try it on. You could say, huh, that's interesting. I never thought of it that way. Let me try that out. I'm going to try that in my Zazen. I'm going to try that in my daily life. I'm going to turn it over and look at it in different ways. I'm going to maybe compare what some other people doing, but I'm going to try it on. When I try on the teachings and the pointers, I find out for myself, is this true for me? Is what this person is saying and what they're sharing about their own experience,

[66:23]

Is it true for me? And so when you try it on and you discover for yourself, is that true? What David's saying about knowing and embody trust and awareness, ourselves being love and love being the knowing of our shared being, if I turn that over and in my practice discover that for myself, be true for myself, then I'm discovering my own embodied wisdom. So I see practice, everyone becomes their own teacher. Everyone discovers from themselves what is truth from their own embodied experience, right? So you're tapping into a natural wisdom that you already have that maybe though is, for many of us, We have different ways that it's obscured or clouded over by our conditioned thinking, our misperceptions, sometimes what we call Buddhism, our ignorance, our reactivity.

[67:35]

So the more we try on the teachings and the more we can begin to see things more clearly, not from a conditioned mind, but from a place of open awareness, we begin to Meet the world from that open place. And we begin to meet everything as a teacher. All experience becomes your teacher. All experience is a Dharma gate. The pandemic, for example, is a Dharma gate. It's a pretty amazing teacher, right? The pandemic is a powerful teacher. COVID-19, you should bow down to this Dharma teacher. It is teaching us so much about practice, about what it is to be human, about how to navigate difficulties, right? I had that same, you know, the same thing with the fire, the Tassajara fire that I shared with you in the past in 2008.

[68:38]

Difficulty is a powerful teacher. And sometimes it takes us the most deep into the question of who am I? And how do I want to live this life? So holding that, relating to any Dharma talk, anything you read in terms of the Buddhist text, as something to try on, explore, experiment with, find out if it's true for you. Even the Buddha said, just because I say it, don't accept that it's true. He said that. Even just because I, the Buddha, said it, don't believe it. You've got to try it on. You have to discover from your own being, is this true for you? Because that's the only wisdom that matters. Your truth that comes through knowing reality as it is by deep inquiring. Does that help at all?

[69:44]

Thank you, Fred. I noticed that we are out of time and I made a promise that I would try not to go over it because I really wanna honor our timeframe and many of you probably wanna go to dinner. So I'm gonna kind of wrap it up there. And again, thank you so much for our time together. It's been very nourishing for me and I really appreciate connecting with you all in this way. And I really wanna encourage you to really practice with staying embodied. And it's so easy during this time of uncertainty and pandemic to go out of our bodies, right? Not to feel what we're feeling, but the body has wisdom and it's waiting for you to come back and to listen deeply to that wisdom. And that wisdom might be, you need to rest more. You need to do less. You need to go outside and get some rest.

[70:48]

that exercise. Yes, you're missing touch. Yes, you're missing being able to hug and be in the presence of others. Yes, that's true. That's true. It's okay. That's true. And there's a wisdom in that. So we can honor that and then do what we can to take care of ourselves and take care of each other during this time. So come back to knowing your embodied experience. Stay in the body and befriend your experience. It doesn't mean you're gonna like it. It doesn't mean it's gonna be comfortable. It doesn't mean it's gonna be joyful and pleasant all the time. But being able to be with the experience without trying to change it is the place of liberation. It's the place of not suffering as much. And I don't know about you, but I certainly, I don't want to suffer so much.

[71:53]

And I actually don't want all of you to be suffering so much. So when we together make this vow to support each other, to explore the teachings, to apply what we've heard and read and find out what's true for us, and find out in that, is there pointers to liberation for us? If it helps you to be free, great. If it doesn't help you to be free, put it aside. You know, maybe come back to it later, or maybe never come back to it. So in each moment, what brings you, what helps you to know your most profound liberation, your most profound liberated states? It's always here, even in the midst of difficulty, that knowing awake presence is here. We can rest in that. We rest in love.

[72:54]

We rest in light. We rest in freedom. And we rest in peace. So I wish you a good evening. May you all rest well. And thank you again. Good night, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, David.

[73:22]

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