This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Good morning, everybody here and everybody online. My name is Lorenzo and this is the second day of a three-day session in the middle of our winter practice period. Tomorrow will be also a one-day sit. And this is my first Dharma talk. So first of all, please make yourself comfortable. I know that the tummy mat can be hard. especially after a full day of sitting.

[01:00]

So please make sure your body is feeling comfortable enough. So the topic of this Dharma talk has a lot to do with the fact that I'm actually sitting here today. On Wednesday evening at dinner, I received an invitation to give a Dharma talk today. And if you think about what happened between dinner of Wednesday and now, there was not much time to prepare. Right? There was orientation, and then there was a full day of sitting yesterday. To tell the truth, I was also given the option of saying no. And we always have the option to say no. But saying no is not a very popular Zen thing to say.

[02:02]

And it's also very, very nice to say yes, which, of course, can get us in trouble. And so last night, I confirmed, and I said, OK, I'll do it. And it feels very much like jumping off the 200-foot pole. And the pole is very much the mountain of expectations on myself that I have built in 64 years on this planet. And, of course, these expectations on myself come from all sorts of karmic conditioning, outside, from inside, internalized. But it certainly feels like a mountain. And if you may remember from my way-seeking mind talk a couple, three weeks ago maybe, I was born after my mom lost a stillborn two years before I was born.

[03:14]

And now there is quite a bit of research on what happens to the child that is born or what characterizes typically what sort of patterns exist in children that are born after a stillborn. And one of the things that they found was that parents, of course not in a conscious way, place impossible expectations on this child that lives as some sort of unconscious comparison happens with the dream baby that never had the opportunity to actually show their own imperfections. So there is this perfect image of a child that was lost. And often, I imagine not always, but often expectations of matching that image are placed on the child that is born afterwards.

[04:20]

And another pattern that seems to happen is something that they call always second syndrome. The fact that the child that actually lives always feels second, no matter how high the expectations are and how much effort is placed to meet those expectations. And I think my teacher, Christina, knows very well about that mountain of expectations I live with and offered kind of the perfect medicine, right? To notice them and maybe to let them go at least a little bit. So thank you, Christina, for inviting me to speak today. And we'll see how it goes.

[05:25]

And I also want to say that like every medicine, it goes down much better with a little bit of sugar, right? And the sugar in this case is very much the support I feel in this practice period, the warmth that seems to be generated by just our practicing together. It was moving this morning to be in Buddha Hall and hear the chanting of everybody at the unison and loud and energetic. It was really beautiful, and I feel that. That is the sugar that makes it easier to say yes. So thank you, all of you. So as you can imagine, today I would like to talk about expectations and share some thoughts about how they interact with our practice and, I would say, with our life.

[06:49]

Yesterday, Christina taught us about shamatha, calming the mind, and vipassana, insight, and explained to us that calming the mind is very much a prerequisite to gaining insight, and explained how thoughts and feelings interact with calming the mind, and how to deal with them, fundamentally noticing them, and then letting them be as much as we can. And expectations are fundamentally a class of a category of thoughts. It's a particular category of thoughts that seems to lay low, seems to lay beneath our active mind, and especially expectations that we place on ourselves are very insidious because they affect the way we actually perceive what we experience and also color everything that we experience with how things should be, with how we expect things to be.

[08:09]

When we expect something to go in a certain way, and then we receive something else, we are disappointed. And that's a source of suffering. We'll go back to that probably a little bit later. If you have come across a taste of ice cream that you really love, and then you go and get an ice cream of that taste, and you find that the ice cream you receive has to be an additional ingredient that makes it different from the taste you are so fond of, it's very difficult to actually taste that new ice cream for what it really is. You may find yourself saying, hmm, there is a little bit too much sugar, or hmm, it's softer than... So somehow having an expectation, even as simple as

[09:16]

a taste of an ice cream, modifies the way we actually perceive the experience itself. So they are powerful. And to be closer to the topic of our practice period, which is welcoming and accepting and leaving the body we are given moment by moment Reginald Ray, who is the author of one of the books that Christina actually recommended for this practice period, Touching Enlightenment, shares that many of his students, many of his practitioners, come to him saying, my body betrayed me. Or my body is betraying me. And how can that be?

[10:19]

How can the body betray you? The body is you. The body you have is you. You are the body you have. So how can that be that the body feels like the body betrays you? So I would like to offer maybe a couple of minutes of reflection here. Have you ever experienced that? Have you ever experienced feeling betrayed by your body. Maybe when was the last time you felt betrayed by your body? So let's keep quiet maybe for a couple of minutes so that we can connect with that possibility. I guess we got the bell.

[12:25]

Thank you. Oh, yes. Can everybody hear me? Thank you. Yeah. I wonder if anybody has anything to share about an experience of... Becky, please. Oh, you need the mic. Sorry, you need the speaker. I have to say... Thank you. This might be better? Yeah, perfect. Yes. I'm not the only person here aging. But as the aging gets more, it goes faster. So the chances to experience this wonderful sense of how can my body have done this to me? To me.

[13:26]

The eternal me. Right? It's like... Dharma gets concentrated. Thank you for bringing it up, but I have to say, none of us are going to escape this if we are lucky enough to live. Thank you. Thank you. I think I also feel like my mind betrays me sometimes. There's something I think I should be able to do easily, or I feel anxious about it, or feel some resistance or lack of motivation, and then I'm like, why is my mind betraying what I should be able to do? And where does that should come from? That's a good question. Yes, okay.

[14:28]

Maybe one comes. Thank you. The same limitation. I wanted to be able to lift that heavy thing or I wanted my body to be able to do something athletic that couldn't do. You know, limitation. I do feel betrayed every time I can't sleep. You can't sleep? I so relate to that. It's a bad time. So I have felt betrayed by my body in many points in my life, but lately I have realized that my body is perfectly good at keeping me alive, which is what it's supposed to do. And that really what happens when I feel betrayed is that there's a mismatch of the expectations of what I want my body to do, or what I think my body should be doing, or what others tells me my body should look like do,

[15:40]

be able to accomplish. And when my body is able to do that, I feel betrayed. But really, it has to do with the expectations that I accept from others and from myself to impose on the body. That's what I've been learning this practice period. Thank you. Yes, I think this practice period is very much pointing us towards this. separation somehow, this gap between expectations we have of ourselves, and we can say of ourselves, including the mind, and the body itself includes mind as a sense organ, but anyway, and the body, and the sense of self we have. And how difficult it is to let go of that sense of self and accept and open to what we actually are moment by moment.

[16:45]

Thank you. Anybody else? It occurred to me that one way that I feel recently that I've experienced feeling my body betraying me is when I can't stay awake. Especially if it's something that I'm interested in or sitting or whatever. I was hit by a car a few years ago and I broke my leg and I have a rod going through my femur. pins and I didn't know they put that in there I found out about it like a couple months later and it was very violating and I feel like you know there's still some funky things that happen with my knee and with my leg and still feeling like weaker than I did before before the accident and I think like

[18:00]

I get stuck in between like, is my body betraying me? Or like, is, you know, with these metal pieces in my body, like what is my body? Is that my body now? So a lot of confusion and like alienation and betrayal. Yeah. Yeah. I can feel what you're saying and maybe starting with loving it and see what happens. Anybody else? My body betrayed me yesterday. Darn it. I had a procedure, not to put too fine a point on it, a colonoscopy. And they put you under. And I never had a bad reaction to anesthesia. And I felt like I wasn't even in my body. And I felt very unstable and frightened. And...

[19:03]

But it came back today. So it's sort of like, OK, well, everything is temporary. But I just feel so much more comfortable, and I'm not going to fall over or cut myself with a knife in the kitchen. So it was an outside force, but it was powerful. It was really, as I say, it was quite frightening. Yeah. Please, yeah, Kathleen. I'm going to bring up the other side of a coin. I actually have done that to my body. Like, I have arthritis in my spine, but I earned it. I mean, it sounds really like a funny thing to say, but I've worked my body very hard. Actually, I think my body has put up with me. I drag it places. I do things with it. It just comes along. I get a weird whim. It does it. I don't even think about it. until I hurt later. So a lot of it is, I think, my body is just very compassionate to me.

[20:08]

Rather than the other way around. And yet you and your body are the same thing. But I think that that is the risk we run. right when we separate ourselves from our body and enter this form of thinking of a body that can betray you. The other side of the coin, as Kathleen suggested, is not paying attention to the body and just, as long as it works, not even connect with it, just use it as an instrument. But the body is a fragile thing, as we are, right? And at some point, it can happen. So it sounds like this is an experience that many of us have had in a way or in another of feeling like, hmm, I wish my body complied, did what I asked it to do.

[21:14]

And there is separation there. And I think that what we are trying to cultivate in this practice period is very much to reduce that separation, to make us closer to our body and welcome it and accept it in a much more open way, which to me has something to do with tackling expectations, figuring out what to do, how to relate to these ideas we have, that because it went well for a day, for a week, for 20 years, for 64 years, then it should continue. Otherwise, it betrays me, right? And expectations are impossible to eliminate. I don't know if you're familiar with Daniel Kahneman. He is an Israeli-American psychologist. He actually won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work in behavioral psychology.

[22:21]

And he did quite a bit of work on expectations and what he calls predictions. In fact, he was then borrowed by economics quite widely and created a new subfield of economics called behavioral economics that came from him. And he suggested them Quoting, expectations are not just mental forecasts, but active reference points that define how we experience reality. Instead of evaluating outcomes in absolute terms, so in the way they actually are, our brains calculate the gap between what we expected and what actually happens. So that idea of feeling betrayed is sort of feeling like there is a gap. And that's how I'm relating to my body. And one of his latest contributions, he passed away in 2024, by the way, is something called the fast brain that he defines as an intuitive part of the mind that automatically and instantly forms predictions and continuously compares reality to them.

[23:43]

It is inevitable to have expectations. So probably this has something to do with a survival mechanism of expecting what's next and training the mind to continuously predict. So the point is not so much like how not to have expectations, like thinking The mind is made to think. The mind seems to be made to actually formulate expectations. But it's more like what to do with them, how to relate to them, which is often sort of the endpoint or a way of our practice. How do we relate to feelings? How do we relate to thoughts? How do we relate to the fact that we constantly produce expectations? Psychology and Buddhism go hand in hand up to a certain point.

[24:47]

Both psychology and Buddhism tend to think that expectations are a source of suffering, are a source of disappointment, and a source of suffering. Where they differ is how to deal with them. So Kahneman and behavioral psychologists suggest to hold predictions probabilistically and update expectations constantly with the new evidence as new evidence becomes available. So in the case of the story of the ice cream, so if you know that you have this taste in your mind that you really like, and then more or less 20% of the times you find that shops put an additional ingredient, then you would adapt your expectation thinking that there is an 80% likelihood that you're going to get the taste you really like.

[25:49]

That's kind of the idea of Kahneman and behavioral psychology of how to deal with expectations. The problem is to keep them rigid in their mind, and so to have a flexible cognitive mind that can adapt to the evidence that we receive. kind of rejuvenate, constantly rejuvenate the expectations. But you still have expectations, right? And things can change. So up to now, it was 20% of the time ice cream parlors would put an additional ingredient. Tomorrow it would be 25%. So the likelihood of disappointment is there. What they suggest, fundamentally, is that we keep adapting.

[26:53]

So as we age, we adapt your expectations. But aging also is full of surprises. You can adapt as much as you want, but tomorrow could be the hip doesn't really flex, or whatever it might be that happens. And in Buddhism, and especially in Zen, That is, expectations or predictions, per se, are a point of disappointment and suffering. And so for Zen, it's very much like, how do we relate to them? And the idea is fundamentally always the same. It's, we notice them, we welcome them, and we let them be. We don't engage with them. We know we have them, but we jump. We jump from the 200 football. and say, I know I expect this for myself, might just not happen. Just let that not hook us. We may expect pleasure, stability.

[27:59]

We can expect confirmation of our sense of identity. I think that's perhaps one of the most important aspects. And these easily turn into wanting things to be the way we want them to be. And so there is a loss of openness. We miss out reality left and right. Think about perhaps the most famous sentence of Suzuki Roshi, in the beginner's mind there are infinite possibilities, in the expert's mind few. that expert mind is the mind that has already supposedly acquired enough knowledge to have a full set of expectations about what may happen next. And the possibilities the expert mind sees are restricted by this belief or by relying on the fact that with that knowledge,

[29:10]

things should go in a particular way. And then, as we know, rarely they do. But there is another aspect that I think was mentioned also by Christina yesterday that can really help us in our practice with expectations. And this brought back to my mind an experience i've had with a group of students so when i when i was still teaching in college i used to a couple of times i took students to green garch as guest students i used to teach a course called way seeking mind in the in the religious studies department and it was during a may term may term in my university was a an intense term where students would take only one class. And so it was perfect to do travel courses or take students away, because that's all they were taking.

[30:17]

And when we went to Greengalch, students had the opportunity to be in classes led by Tenshin Reb Anderson, who Schroeder, I can't remember others, but Diagon, Lueck. Anyway, these glasses were just for them. And so there were often questions and answers. And I remember this student who asked Reb what she should do because she wanted to be generous. It was a 17-year-old student. students, 18-year-old students. And she wanted to be generous. She wanted to look good. But she felt like she was doing nothing whenever she was not acknowledged, whenever there was not a confirmation that this actions or this whatever she did was received and effective.

[31:24]

And she was really miserable for that. And now she's a nun. So she followed the path. So that's good. And I remember Red simply saying, do it as if there is nothing to gain from it. Just do it. Just offer it. And for myself, I mean, I thought about that quite a bit since Wednesday night. What if I offer it? I mean, with the mind of not getting anything out of it. And that's super powerful because it's not that the expectations are not there, but they're put aside in some way. There is another part of the brain and another part of the mind that almost takes over and carries you. So nothing to attain, I think that's what Christina mentioned yesterday, or thinking of not getting anything out of it, which is a teaching that

[32:34]

applies to everything we do, from half an hour of zazen to anything, may be quite effective ways, actually, to deal with expectations when we have the opportunity, when we have the gift of noticing them, which is perhaps one of the most difficult things. Not getting angry at them, but actually welcoming them, and then letting them be. I'm doing it anyway and see what happens. It opens up to a curious mind and perhaps even to a relaxed mind. So I would like to close by reading another passage from Reginald Ray that I find very instructive. I'll put my glasses for this. And that I think, links quite nicely this topic of expectations to our bodies.

[33:40]

It's at the end of chapter 20, if you have the book. He writes, the body receives experience in a completely open and nonjudgmental way. But because of our investment in who we think we are or want to be, in relationship to our hopes and fears about me, or our attempts to maintain this self, we refuse to receive a great part of what the body knows and feels and understands. Here, we means our conscious self, our conscious mind, our ego. This is the process. Something happens. The totality of experience is registered on a somatic level, and our conscious mind says, no. Or we say, I want this part of what happened, but not that part.

[34:44]

Thus, our ego consciousness doesn't simply receive what the body knows. We don't receive the somatic information it is trying to deliver in a complete and straightforward way. This is what Buddhism calls ignorance. The ignorance is not being unintelligent or uninformed. It is the act of blocking our knowledge and wisdom, received by the body and abiding in it, that is inconsistent with our self-image. Ignorance is actually incredibly intelligent. The activity of ignorance knows exactly what to accept and what to reject in order to keep the illusion of our unity and consistent self intact. In Buddhism, ignorance is considered one of the three basic mental poisons that operate to protect ourself.

[35:50]

The process of ignoring described above also involves the two other poisons, passion and aggression. Using passion or desire, we try to draw in and latch on to those small portions of our somatic experience that seems to reinforce our self towards our consciousness. Using aggression, we try to deny, negate, or destroy whatever in our body's knowledge is inconsistent with what we are trying to maintain. Our aggression especially sets up a deep conflict not so much with outside situations and other people, though we may view it in that way, but with our body itself, with information about reality that it is trying to deliver. This is why people who are overcome with strong habitual aggression so often live in a hellish experience of life and die in misery.

[36:54]

They are a deep war with their own physical embodiment. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:26]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.04