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. Nice to be with you all. Nice to have a chance to visit and talk about death. Oh. Good afternoon. It's good after dinner conversation. So about 25 years ago, I came to Zen Center. And Yvonne and Leslie and Norman and Martha and Meg Porter and I formed a little group to start the Zen Hospice Project. And Leslie... I am really grateful to Leslie, because she was the president of Zen Center then, and she was my stalwart supporter.

[01:07]

And if not for Leslie, I don't think they would have been a Zen Hospice Project, so I want to give her the credit. She brought me to a little room upstairs, one of the students' rooms upstairs, and I had shag carpeting, I remember, and one old chair in it. And she said, this will be your office. This will be the home of Zen Hospice Project. I have to go now." And one of the things that we've been looking at in the last few days with our group of people is, what are the lessons you learn at the time of dying that have relevance for all of us in living a more loving and wise life? And why would we want to wait until the moment of dying to embody those lessons? For me, dying is at its heart a sacred act.

[02:10]

It is a time and a place and a process of transformation. So we can help people move from what we normally think of as tragedy to transformation. And in order to do that, what's required is a complete trust of the process of dying. to recognize that dying is completely trustworthy, that it has inherent in it the conditions that are conducive, supportive of our waking up. To see the sacred, as I explained to our group yesterday, is not so much about seeing new things as much as it is about seeing things in a new way. And years ago I was walking down the hospice unit. Catherine knows it. She was there. 30 beds, 40 beds in one room. A gauntlet of beds. Nothing like it this side of Calcutta.

[03:14]

This is where we began our work in one of the nation's largest public long-term care facilities, Laguna Honda Hospital. And I was walking down this gauntlet of beds and there was an older African-American man that was there that was clearly dying. He was perspiring. He was breathing with a great deal of difficulty. And so I went over and I sat down beside him. And after a few minutes I said to him, you look like you're working really hard. And he said, yeah. And he pointed like that. He said, just got to get there. Like that. And I said, oh. I said, if I promise to keep up, can I go? And he said, yeah. And he grabbed my hand. And we started. I said to him, I forgot my glasses. I can't see there into the distance. Can you see? And he said, sure. I said, well, describe it to me. And he described a sloping hillside to a kind of flat plateau.

[04:16]

And so I said, do you want to go? Yeah. And we started walking up this hillside and we got to this plateau. And it was clear by his breath that we'd reached this plateau. And I said, can you see further there into the distance? And he said, yeah. And he described for me a one-room red schoolhouse. the three steps in the door. I said, you want to go? Yeah. Okay. Grabbed my hand. Now I could have said to him at this point, you're disoriented as a result of the morphine. You're in Laguna Honda Hospital. This is a result of the brain metastasis. You're disoriented times three. But none of that was really what was true. What was true is that we were going to a little red schoolhouse. They were the steps. I said, there's the door. You want to go in? Yeah. I said, can I go? He said, no. I said, okay, then you go. And a few minutes later, he died very peacefully.

[05:18]

And to see the sacred is to see things in a new way. It's not to see new things. It's to see things in a new way. The same thing. the ordinary things of our life, the everyday things of our life, actually. And the sacred's there. It's not separate or different than these ordinary, everyday things. It's hidden in them. And so the process of dying is an opportunity or a process of uncovering, we could say, uncovering and revealing what was there all the time, much like our practice. So to be with people at this juncture of their life, if we're going to be of any really useful support, there are three characteristics that seem important. And the first of those is to have a willingness to be compassionately present for suffering.

[06:22]

There is suffering. There's a labor to die. It's hard work. And it's often accompanied with suffering. And there has to be room in our hearts for that suffering. And we have to see it also as our suffering. And the second is that to have the willingness to release ourself and others from the limitations of roles. You know, if I'm going to be the helper, somebody's got to be helpless. You know, if I'm going to put them as the dying person, they're stuck in that role. To really free... themselves and myself in the prison of that particular role. And the third I've already mentioned, which is rather two points we could say to the third, which is first is to have a deep and abiding trust in the process of dying itself. And the second is to really have confidence that we're not the separate self we've taken ourselves to be.

[07:22]

These two things are enormously helpful. then we can be a truly compassionate companion. We can be a valuable presence for whatever needs to happen. You know, at Zen Center, when we started the hospice and later we built the hospice at the guest house across the street from City Center, my basic rule was whatever needs to happen can happen. We create an environment in which whatever needs to happen can happen. As part of the Hospice Project, we developed a few simple precepts that guided our work, that helped us to understand and have a focus, just like we have the five training precepts that help guide our practice. So I thought tonight it might be useful to just review those.

[08:25]

Because I think they have application, obviously, in the time of dying, but I believe that they have application for the rest of us, as I said earlier, in living a more wise and compassionate life. So we could think of these as slogans or precepts. I prefer precepts because I think of them as bottomless. I think that in order to really understand them, we have to live into them. We can't just, you know, have an intellectual appreciation of them. So the first precept was, welcome everything, push away nothing. This sounds really good, right? It would make a good bumper sticker. Welcome everything, push away nothing. But how do we do that? Well, as I said a moment ago, first we create an environment, a loving environment, in which whatever needs to happen can happen. To welcome everything and push away nothing doesn't mean that we have to like what comes, nor does it mean we have to agree with what comes.

[09:32]

It just means we have to be willing to meet it, no matter what shows up, and to have confidence, actually, in the very process that it's showing up in. Really, what this precept is asking of us is a kind of fearless receptivity. It doesn't mean, of course, that we won't be afraid. just means we're willing to meet the experience, including the experience of our own fear. A few years ago, my brother died. He was my younger brother. He'd had a really tough life. He'd been a street alcoholic and long-time drug user. He used to live in a horse barn above the horses and lived on and off the streets for 20 years. Periodically he'd pull his life together and he'd get a house or a place to rent.

[10:37]

At one point he got married and had a child. And he'd go in and out of halfway houses. And this one time he'd come out of a halfway house and he was at home with his daughter who was five years old. And He had a heart attack and he died. And his daughter found him. And it was her that called 911. My other brother telephoned me to let me know that this had happened and he said, explained, and I'd been waiting for this for years in a way, you know, and yet I was still shocked by it. So I said, I'll be there tomorrow and tell the funeral director I'd like to just be with his body. And they said, well, why would you want to do that? And I said, well, it's just a California thing. So I arrived at this funeral home in Lexington, Kentucky. And my brother was in a room on a gurney.

[11:41]

He hadn't been touched. He had a toe tag on his toes. And the sheets were pulled up over his head. And I walked in and I pulled the covers down. and I pulled up a chair like this, and I sat next to my brother. And all I wanted to do was to sit with my brother. It is dying. And after just a few minutes of doing that, the door burst open, and into the room came his ex-wife, who was also a long-time drug user, and was high as a kite on speed. And she rushed up to the gurney and she started shaking him. She pulled up the sheets and looked at his feet and said, what's that tag for and what's going on? We're in his glasses here. Why don't he have his glasses on? What's that scratch on his face? Who are going to shave him? I don't know what's going to happen. Where are his shoes? Shouldn't he have shoes? I think, what's happened?

[12:42]

How did he die anyway? And it went on like this. And I was so angry. I was so angry. I just wanted to be with my brother, you know. I just wanted her to go away. And then sitting there, you know, and in my own soul, I heard myself say, Frank, welcome, everything, push away, nothing. I stood up, and I stood next to her. And when she would ask me questions, I would respond when I could, and when I couldn't, I just stayed silent. And it went on like this for quite a long time. And then after about an hour of this, she stopped and she left the room. And I thought, okay now. I pulled my chair up to my brother and the funeral director walked in and said, I'm sorry, we're closing the funeral home.

[13:44]

You have to leave now. And that was it. That was all the time I had. The next day he was cremated. And we had a short ceremony in this cemetery with my other two brothers and one or two family friends. There wasn't much of a turnout. But one of the people that was there was his five-year-old daughter. And my brother said, you should say some things. You know about these things. And I said, okay. And I thought, well, maybe I would talk about forgiveness a little bit because That was so much a need in our family. And I started to speak and this little girl was about for me to where Catherine is now. She stood up in her chair so she could be at the same eye level with me and she looked at me and she said, why did my daddy die? I can't answer this with cliches, you know.

[14:49]

And I just looked at her and I said, I don't know. I don't know. But would you like to help me? And she came, she jumped off the chair and we took her hands and we took my brother's ashes and we walked around this cherry tree in the cemetery and we scattered his ashes around this cherry tree. And while she wasn't quite sure what we were doing in a way, what this was, these ashes, she was five after all, she wanted to come with me. She wanted to stay close to me. And at the end of it, I looked down at my shoes, my black shoes, and they were covered in my brother's ashes. And I thought to myself, he's still clinging to me. And then this little girl, she did the most amazing thing. She leaned down on my shoes and she drew two hearts in the ashes on my shoes. And if any of you have had little children, you understand how difficult it was for her because she drew them upside down.

[15:56]

She drew them so that the hearts would be facing me, not her. Welcome everything. Push away nothing. Welcome everything. Push away nothing. The second precept is bring your whole self to the experience. Bring your whole self to the experience. Wait, I want to say something else about this other one first. Because there's a deeper dimension to this welcome everything, push away nothing that I don't want to skip over. It's not just a matter of not having preferences. We have to really ask ourselves, who will do this? Who will welcome everything and push away nothing? It can't just be our personality doing this.

[16:57]

That won't be enough. We have to be in contact with our very nature. Only this will be able to welcome everything and push away nothing. Only the openness of awareness will be able to do this. Only the awareness will have the room for whatever arises. So the second precept is bring your whole self to the experience. A lot of times, you know, when we go to help somebody, we imagine it's our strength that will help our expertise. And those things do help, and we need to bring those forward. But it's not just our expertise or our strength that helps. Our weakness also helps. Our fear also helps. Our wounds also help. They serve as meeting places with the people that we're working with.

[18:05]

So in order to really be of service to others, we have to do our homework. We have to explore our own relationship to sickness, old age and death. To bring your whole self to the experience is a recognition that you're on this continuous journey and you have no idea how it's going to turn out. And it will require you to risk constantly, open constantly, forgive constantly. We don't get to manage this. years ago I had a very dear friend who was dying of AIDS and a group of us were taking care of him and this one afternoon was my day to take care of him and so I was at his house and we went through the night fine came the next morning we woke up with this strange neurological phenomenon and in one morning

[19:22]

He'd lost his ability to stand or to hold a fork or to speak in any intelligent way. Just gobbledygook would come out of his mouth. And I remember sitting across the kitchen table from him wondering, where has my friend gone? He was just here last night. Where did he go? And I was so confused, you know, sitting across the table from him. And so we went through the day, you know, caring for him, doing the hard work, caring for somebody. Not easy work. It doesn't feel romantic to me. And I'm embarrassed to say, but it's true, I was quite manipulative, actually. I was paternalistic at times. I treated him like an infant. And I'm not proud of that, but it's what I did. And the night, the afternoon rolled into the night, and night into the early hours of the morning, and I just wanted to go to bed, you know.

[20:24]

John had these anal fistulas like tumors and constant diarrhea and taking care of him was a huge amount of work. And so we moved from the toilet to the bath and back to the toilet dozens and dozens of times, sometimes every, you know, dozen times every hour. And it was a huge amount of work and I just wanted him to go to bed and to wake up in the morning and somehow this nightmare be over. And I remember he was sitting on the toilet and I was looking in the vanity of the mirror, you know, opposite, directly opposite the toilet. I looked in the mirror and I could see his face. And he was mouthing to me, you know, trying too hard. And I was, much too hard, trying to be somebody, you know, me, Mr. Hospice, trying to be somebody special. And I remember I stopped and I just sat down next to the toilet And I just cried.

[21:26]

Oh, I cried so hard. And this moment, him sitting on the toilet, me next to it crying. This was the most intimate moment of our whole relationship. Right there in that moment. Because you see, in that moment, we weren't so separate. We were completely a mess together. You know, John was really helpless. And I was afraid to go into that territory. I was afraid that if I went in there, we'd both get lost. But actually now here we were, completely helpless together, sitting next to the toilet. And we didn't stay helpless forever. The situation itself showed us what to do next. But we couldn't have seen that from any other vantage point than the territory of helplessness. We had to be willing to go to that territory. So if we're busy trying to be a helper, you know, we trap other people in helper's prison.

[22:39]

To bring your whole self to the experiences, to bring the whole, all of it, the beauty and the horror, the strength and the weakness, all of it. Trusting, really trusting in the unfolding, trusting that we don't know exactly what we need. So let's not eliminate anything. We don't know what's going to wake us up. So let's not use our little intelligence to sort and shift and decide in advance what's needed and what's not needed. And the third precept is don't wait. Don't wait. My favorite one. Don't wait. Waiting is different. Well, waiting is full of expectation. Waiting for the next moment to arrive, we miss this one.

[23:43]

I can't tell you how many people I've been with, families I've been with, who've said to me, when is my dad going to die? When is my mother going to die? And waiting for the moment to die, we miss all the moments in between. So don't wait. Don't wait to tell someone you love that you love them. Tell them now, immediately and with passion. Don't wait to learn the lessons that the dying has to teach until you find yourself on your own deathbed. I mean, to imagine that we will have the strength of body, the emotional balance, the mental clarity at that juncture to do a lifetime's worth of work is an absurd gamble. It's an absurd gamble. Please don't wait for this. My friend Larry called me one day and he said, the doctors tell me my mother has six weeks to live.

[24:54]

She lives in Toronto. I live in San Francisco. What should I do? When should I go? This is a quandary a lot of us find ourselves in when we live a distance from our families. I said, well, I don't know, but why don't you come over? We'll talk about it. He came over to the house and we visited him. And as we sat, I asked him to tell me what the doctors had said. He told me that. And I asked him about his relationship with his mother. He started to talk about her. And as he talked, I just watched his body. And I looked at his face and I noticed that his... chin was quivering a little bit and tone of his skin was changing. And I said, I think you should go tonight. And he said, oh, I can't. I have business tomorrow. I said, no, you should go tonight. Take the red eye, fly to Toronto, go. He said, really? I said, yeah. So he did. And he flew from San Francisco to Toronto and arrived at 10 o'clock in the morning and took the taxi and went through the

[25:58]

his mother's house, and at one o'clock in the afternoon he was sitting by her side when she died. Don't wait. Suzuki Roshi used to speak of constancy, actually. Constancy. A continuous contact with our experience. There's no waiting in that. This precept is pointing us to a kind of immediacy. of living in the immediacy. And when we're living through our concepts, we're not living in the immediacy. We lost contact with the immediacy of our life. And so this precept is really reminding us that the only place any healing can happen is here and now. The only place we can do any real good is here and now. The fourth precept is find a place of rest in the middle of things. This is a good counselor for people working in the guest season in Dasahara.

[27:01]

Because you don't get much time off. So we really have to find a place to rest right in the middle of our activity. And how do we do that? We do that in part by bringing our attention fully and completely to what we're doing. Instead of being scattered in six different directions or multitasking. I want us to try unitasking. I'm going to start a new website for this. Unitasking. So to find a place of rest in the middle of things, you imagine we'll find that when we go on vacation or when the work is done or when we go on retreat or when our list gets checked off. But I don't know about you, but my list never gets checked off. So if I wait for this, I'm in trouble. So I have to find it here and now somehow. There was a woman at the hospice She was a tough old bird, we would say.

[28:04]

She was 86 years old, Russian-Jewish lady, about as tough as they come. Her name was Adele. And Adele and I got to be pretty good friends. The kind of person I really like to work with. Tough, tough cookie, you know. And the night she was dying, they called me. could I come to the hospice? And I did. And I came in and Adele was sitting on the bed in her hospital dressing gown with her feet sort of dangling off the edge of the bed. And she was breathing with great difficulty. There's a phenomenon called chain-stoke breathing. It's when the breath is quite erratic and it can be long gaps between the breath or very short breaths or rapid breaths and long gaps between the breath. She was really laboring with the breath. And there was a very kind home health aide that was sitting with her.

[29:06]

And so I just came in and took my usual position, which is on the couch in the corner. Because I think it's really important to see if anything's needed before we jump in to help. So I sat there in the corner and I just watched for a while. This very well-meaning and wonderful health aide, Pat, at one point she turned to Adele and she said, Adele, you don't have to worry. You don't have to be frightened. We're right here with you. You're not alone. And Adele, who was this tough cookie, she turned to her and she said, honey, if this was happening to you, you'd be scared. You'd be worried. Wow, huh? So I stayed on the couch. Tough, huh? So I watched, I continued to watch, and at one point Pat said to her, you look a little cold, would you like a blanket?

[30:10]

How about if I wrap a blanket around you? Adele shot back, of course I'm cold, I'm almost dead. Yeah. Huh? Wow. I hope I have half her tenacity when I'm dying. But I noticed two things as I sat there. Maybe you noticed them even in the story. And the first was that Adele obviously didn't want any nonsense. She didn't want to talk about bardos or tunnels of light or, you know, none of that stuff. She wanted honest, straightforward talk. She wanted somebody who was completely authentic with her. And the second thing I noticed was that there was labor. There was suffering. There's always suffering. And in this case, the suffering was manifesting in the breath. So I pulled my chair up close to her and I said, we knew each other pretty well, so I could be honest with her.

[31:16]

I said, Adele, would you like to suffer a little less? She said, yes. I said, okay. Now we'd made all the appropriate interventions. She had morphine on board and oxygen and all the right things. But still, there's a suffering. There's a labor to die. There isn't always suffering. There's a labor to dying, we could say. Sometimes it manifests as suffering. So I said, you know, I noticed there as you were breathing that there was this little gap, this little pause at the end of the exhale. She had quite a long gap, actually. And I said, I wonder what it would be like if you could just put your attention there for just a little bit. I'll do it with you. Now remember, this is this 86-year-old Russian Jewish lady. She doesn't care beans about Buddhism or meditation or any of these things, you know. But she's highly motivated in this moment to be free of suffering, which has probably got most of us to sit on our cushions in the first place. So I said, come on, I'll do it with you. I didn't guide her. I didn't try and have her breathe in a particular way.

[32:18]

None of that. I just, as she would breathe in, I would breathe in. As she would breathe out, I would breathe out. Just that simple attunement. But I noticed that... As we were doing this, you could see her attention just begin to fall into the gap. Really just rest there. And as this happened, you could see this fear and this worry and this tightness that had been so characterizing her face just begin to wash away. You breathe like that for a while. And then she laid back on her pillow and she died very peacefully. I think Adele found a place of rest in the middle of things. Do you understand? You see, all the conditions were still the same. She was still dying. The breath was still erratic. All the conditions remained. And yet, in the middle of those conditions, in the middle of that chaos, she found a place of rest.

[33:19]

She found it in the gap at the end of the exhale. Where do you find it in your life? That's the question we have to ask ourselves. Where can we find a true place of rest, a place of rest that's never sick and doesn't die? I was teaching a program for doctors and nurses just a couple of years ago now on compassion. We had about 80 physicians and nurses and such. And in the middle of a dialogue I was having with Ram Dass, actually, I had a heart attack. And I went to the hospital and resulted in triple bypass surgery. And it was a big deal. You know, when they cut you in a heart attack, they split you open like a crab.

[34:22]

And the resulting experience is one of feeling very, very vulnerable. And when I came home, they also damaged my lung in the surgery, so I couldn't breathe out of one lung. And that took me a long time to recover. And lying in bed one night, I was awake in the middle of the night at 3 in the morning, as we will when we're in pain. I remember waking up and I was in so much pain, you know. And again, I heard myself, you know, preaching to myself. Find a place of rest in the middle of things, Frank. Like that, you know. And I thought, okay, right. That's what I should do. I should try and find a place of rest in the middle of things. But how do we try to do that? If we start trying to do it, we're lost. We're lost. All that trying, all that efforting, all that striving, we get lost.

[35:25]

So many of us like to identify ourselves as seekers. And in the seeking, we get lost. There's no rest in the seeking. Seeking is full of anxiousness and worry, agitation. That kind of restlessness that we feel in a certain kind of seeking. There's another kind of seeking that doesn't have that. There's a kind of seeking that feels more like love. but we just want to be close to what we love the most, the truth. So to find a place of rest in the middle of things is to, I think, find that love, that love of what matters most to us, and to give our attention fully and completely to that. the fifth and final precept. I felt obliged to put something Zen-like in it.

[36:33]

We were the Zen Hospice Project. So I used the famous cultivate, don't know mind. This seemed really important when we were working with something over which we had absolutely no control. Dying. So to cultivate, don't know mind, of course, you understand this in your practice. It's not a mind of ignorance. It's a mind really of openness, or we could say wonder or curiosity, a mind that's receptive to whatever shows up. There's the corollary teaching that we've heard many times, not knowing is nearest, or translated in a different way, not knowing is most intimate. One understanding of that is not knowing is as close as we can get to describing it. Another way to understand it on a relative level is just, we don't know something, we have to stay very close to it in order to know it. You know, if you go into a room at night where there's no light, or into a cave and you don't have a torch or a flashlight, you have to feel your way along through the experience to learn the way.

[37:44]

You feel your way along the walls somehow. My teacher used to say, in this work, we follow the Braille method. So to cultivate don't know mind is to have this sense of wonder. I was telling someone at dinner tonight a story that the night before my surgery, my son, who I love young compare, and I had a very heart-to-heart talk, full of love and compassion. He was naturally very worried for me. At one point he said to me, Dad, are you going to live through this? That is my son, you know. I love him dearly and I wanted to reassure him, of course. And so I started to say something reassuring, like, of course. But out of my mouth I heard myself say, I'm not taking sides. And it completely shocked me, actually.

[38:49]

It literally shocked me that it came out of my mouth. I thought, who said that? not my personality, I can tell you that, really shocked me. I wasn't taking sides. And I really felt it to be true. And you know, it was so true that it was undeniable. And it was so true that he was reassured by it. And he relaxed, actually, because he heard something that was true. That's what happens for us. Not knowing is most intimate. This is completely uncontrollable. We have no idea how it will turn out. People used to come to me all the time in my office and say, John's dying. What should we do? And I say, I don't know. Go ask John. He knows. He knows. Any ideas, any kind of formulas that we try to place on this experience just get batted away by death. So welcome everything, push away nothing.

[39:55]

Bring your whole self to the experience. Don't wait. Find a place of rest in the middle of things. Cultivate don't know mind. These have been the precepts we used for many, many years at Zen Hospice. They still use them there even though I'm long gone. But they still guide our work there. But as I said at the beginning, I think and hope that these have application to other domains of our life, other aspects of our life. So I offer them to you, and you take them up, and if they taste good to you, chew on them for a while. If they taste good, swallow. If they don't taste good, please spit them out. So I want to thank you for this. And maybe we have a few minutes if there's some questions or comments or disagreements or epiphanies or anything like this.

[40:59]

Yes? I couldn't hear you. What would you like to know about it? What happens when you're afraid? What do you notice? You push it away? Yeah, where? Where do you push it to? Okay, good. So first of all, that's a good practice, just to sense the body and see what the body's doing in the relationship to the fear. I think that's important, you know, what happens in our bodies, you know? Does our tongue stick to the roof of our mouth? Our toes start to curl? What happens? Can we get so familiar with this that we know it intimately? So that, like my teacher used to say, can we sit down with it and have a cup of tea, get to know it really well?

[42:05]

And when we do come to know it really well, and we have a familiarity with it, it doesn't have such a stranglehold on us. So I think that's the most useful thing we could say about it. But I also don't have any expectation it will go away. And we spend an awful lot of time efforting to try and make fear go away. And it's not my experience that it does. I mean, there are glimpses, of course. There are moments when we don't have fear, of course. But that doesn't mean it's been banished from consciousness. So I don't know what's going to wake me up. And I have to realize that even fear might be part of that. So I'm not one for trying to get rid of anything, actually. It hasn't been, it hasn't seemed to work. You know, I'm old now. Really old. And I haven't gotten rid of one single neuroses.

[43:08]

I mean, all these years, I think I'd have gotten rid of a few of them. Not one. Not one. I mean, I'm not so... identify with them as I once was, but I haven't gotten rid of them. They're still all around. So, get to know it. Really get to know it. Okay? Yes, please. It was such a great attempt to sanitize. Especially at the day that she was actually down. I thought that there was more attention on the monitors in the hospital, the vital signs, and that's about the actual body. And of course she looked really bad. I mean, it's very striking to me how kind of absurd, it just seems so absurd, like the more suffering that I had at that time, and there's a lot of things that are like the death, but the more suffering, it just helps serve, help this, you know, distraction.

[44:26]

Yes. Yeah, it can be really challenging, I think. I mean, perhaps what's helpful is to understand... just how scared people are of this experience and how out of control it feels to us and how that's a threat to our sense of competency and our very sense of self. And so when we have monitors, they give us the semblance of measurement. They tell us, oh, it's happening now. When it goes flatline, that means she's dead. Now, you could just check her breath. You could see the same thing. But we're not accustomed to that. You know, we've lost contact with that. You know, we've made death a technological thing. We've over-professionalized the care of the dying. And so in the process, we've forgotten how natural it is for us. And in that forgetting, we became frightened.

[45:27]

Yeah. And so I think I always like to remind people that you know how to do this, that this is in your bones. You can completely trust your innate generosity and kindness and wisdom. But, you know, we get scared. And for me, the only thing I can do in those situations is to recognize that everybody in the room is suffering. The person who's dying, sometimes they're suffering the least, actually. The family members, the nurses, everybody's suffering. And can we open our heart to this suffering, no matter what it is? Instead of, you know, we might have displeasure around it. It may not suit our way of being, but can we still open our hearts to it? There was a woman in the hospice who had a really difficult time with her mother. And she slipped into a kind of coma-like state.

[46:30]

And her mother came to be, flew across the country to be with her. to kind of reconcile a very, very difficult relationship. It was a very abusive relationship, horrible relationship. And the daughter hadn't spoken for a few days, and the mother came to her bedside and sat at her bedside and just poured out her heart to her. I mean, unbelievable sadness and remorse. Crying, asking for forgiveness, really apologizing for the misdeeds she had done. And in the middle of this upheaval, the daughter sat up in bed like a rocket. She just sat up straight in bed, and she hadn't moved or spoken in days. And she looked at her mother, and she looked at her straight in the eye, and she said, I hate you. I've always hated you. And then she died. I have so much suffering in the room.

[47:33]

So much suffering in the room. Can our hearts open to this? Can we make room for this? We won't be able to do that out of our puny little personalities, but our nature can open to this. So for me, that's been the continuous challenge to see how can I keep my heart open in hell. Please. Please. Oh, I'm just speaking without getting too technical here, just how we conventionally think of ourselves. Let's think of it that way. Yeah. Small, limited self, sense of self. You know, when I say bring your whole self to the experience, I mean your whole self. I mean everything. You know, what's amazing to me is not that we can expand and we can have states of spaciousness or boundlessness.

[48:36]

This is not amazing to me. Not anymore. What's amazing to me is that we take this boundlessness of who we actually are and we shrink it down to such a limited picture. That's amazing to me. That we get ourselves into such a small box and then confuse that with who we actually are. Anything else in your hearts, your minds? Well, you know, chances are you will forget.

[49:39]

That's why we have each other. We can't do this alone. We cannot do this alone. This is why we have each other. If you think you're practicing for yourself at any time, please pull the rug out from underneath this idea that we're doing this for ourselves and doing it only for ourselves. We cannot do it alone. We can only do this with each other. So we remind each other. hopefully with kindness, you know, and tenderness and mercy, love. That's all. And then, you know, we keep training. We keep training to bring ourselves back a thousand times, right? And in crisis, we often fall to our training. We fall right through all our beliefs, right into our training. The habits of our life have a very, very, very strong momentum.

[50:43]

Trust me. I've watched them play out and people are dying. They have a powerful momentum. And so the question we have to ask ourselves is, what habits do I want to create? Because that's what's going to show up. So, each other and our training. That's what we have. That's all we have, actually. I want to tell you that despite my tone of voice, perhaps, being with people who are dying is the most alive thing I've ever done. I've never experienced as much joy in the inexperience. I've never felt so much love. And I've never found a mirror that was clearer in terms of it showing me myself. In other words, I said to our group the other day that the eyes of a dying patient are the clearest mirrors that I've ever gazed into because in their gaze there is no place to hide.

[51:51]

And so it will show you all your versions and all your clinging and also all your beauty. And so I've had a dual practice, I feel, sitting on the cushion and sitting at the bedside. The same practice, you know. Mel once said to me, We turn and we face the white wall and then we turn away from the wall and we face the world. Same practice. He said, just remember the wall is always with you. Well, that was really helpful. Is that enough? Yeah? Enough to get something to chew on? Good. That's important. Yes, ma'am. A mistake, probably. No, I want to answer your question seriously. You know, Tagore wrote a beautiful short story once about the children in the villages in India and how they walked barefoot.

[53:08]

And as a result of walking barefoot, the paths were always meandering. And then they got shoes and the paths became straight. And I felt like I walked barefoot for a long time. But honestly, the real honest answer is I got into it to try and avoid my own pain. I thought that if I was with somebody else's pain it was worse than mine. Mine might not seem so bad. But it didn't work. At some juncture, as you've taught us, we have to turn around and come face to face with what hurts. And that's the ground of compassion. And so I kept trying to run away from it. And then it didn't work. And then I turned around. And then there were all these other people who were suffering. And turning around, what else are you going to do, right? You just start taking care of people. Blanche asked Mel that wonderful question at his mountain seat ceremony.

[54:10]

What does the Dharma have to teach me about serving others. And Mel shot back something like, what others? Serve yourself. And then Blanche persisted and said, well, how do I serve myself? And of course Mel answered, take care of others. And it was like that. In terms of activities, my own parents died when I was quite young. That was one of the many influences. Dharma, continually studying impermanence, another influence. I worked in refugee camps where I saw a lot of horrible dying and felt completely helpless in it. Those were big factors. The AIDS epidemic hit San Francisco and none of us knew what to do. And so we just responded. And Zen Hospice and my work is an outgrowth of all that. Well, the most useful thing to say in the end is that I went on the Oprah Winfrey show once.

[55:27]

It's true. I was on Oprah. It was after the events of 9-11, and there was a lot of fear in the country, as you may remember, and not that that's gone away, but it was pretty strong then. And Oprah was doing a series of shows to try and bring some calmness to America. And it was a noble effort, actually. And so she invited me on the show, or her people invited me on the show, and I got to do an interview with Oprah talking about dying and how do we work with our fear around this, because this is what everyone was scared of, of course. And... as part of that discussion that went on for a while, but as part of the discussion, I said to Oprah, there are only really two questions that show up for people at the end of their life that have any real merit. And the first one is, am I loved? And the second is, did I love well? Those seem to be the only two questions that really matter a whole lot. Am I loved? Did I love well? And everything else is gravy. So don't wait to answer those questions.

[56:33]

Please. Thanks 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, visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[57:05]

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