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. Good evening. Just thinking it's the little things that bring joy, like this light. I'm used to the kerosene lantern behind and just not being able to see my notes and Shundo's steel blue painted toenails. CMSE delivered the podium to me, so. Sorry, an outage. So, my name is David Zimmerman, and I have lived and worked at the San Francisco Zenfone for the last 15 years. eight of which I spent here at Tassajara, and the other part of the time I have spent at City Center.

[01:05]

So I've been at City Center basically since the spring of 2010. I'm delighted to be here again. It's always a joy, and I want to thank the head of practice, Greg Fain, for inviting me to Streak, I think. You know, It's the usual. I don't like public speaking. It makes me nervous, yada, yada, yada. And I wrote at the top of my notes, be presence, come from a place of love and connection. So that's hopefully a helpful reminder to me what my intention is here. So if anything else comes forward, makes any sense, great. If it doesn't, then you know that was my intention. So please take that away with you, if nothing else. So... I'm here co-leading a Zen and Yoga retreat with my dear friend, Letitia Bartlett. We've been doing this for several years, and it's a great joy to co-lead with her again. And the theme of the retreat is Balanced and Awake, Harmonizing Body and Mind.

[02:10]

And I think a lot of people come to Tasahara for Zen and Yoga, particularly because it's a beautiful, complimentary way that these two practices, Zen and you know, awareness practice, presence practice, and then yoga, which is in the body, you know, presence and awareness practice work together. So, and, you know, obviously a lot of us come here feeling that we're very much off balance in some way, very chaotic lives, sense of instability, amount of pressures and responsibilities and commitments and this way in which we feel at least I do, overextended, even here at Zen Center, believe it or not, overextended in our lives, you know, in some way. And it's hard for us to find where is my place of stability. So it's great to come back to the mountains and have the mountains themselves as the body of practice, sitting upright, stable, still, you know, not moving, a reminder of our fundamental practice of Zaza.

[03:14]

So I just, every time I come here, having lived here for eight years, it's in my body. You know, and for anyone who has, you know, anyone who's here now for the summer, stay. Stay until this mountain presence of Zazen is actually in your body, that it takes root. And then when you go out, so-called, into the world, it's with you in some way. It's always there for you to return to. Um... But you know what? Tonight, what I wanted to talk about, or attempt to talk about, is, even though the retreat was about returning to balance, I want to talk about falling out of balance. And the value of groundlessness is another way of saying that. And how we might appreciate certain sets of groundlessness. Here is a quote by Shinriyo Suzuki Roshi from Zen Mind Beginner's Mind on the value of losing our balance. To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being, moments after moments.

[04:22]

When we lose our balance, we die. And at the same time, to lose our balance, sometimes, means to develop ourselves or to grow. If we are in perfect balance, we cannot live as a small being. So wherever we look, we see that things are changing. losing their balance. Why everything looks beautiful is because it is something out of balance. But its background is always in perfect harmony. And on this perfect harmony everything exists, losing its balance. This is how everything exists in the realm of big Buddha nature. So if you see things without knowing, Without realizing Buddha nature, everything is in the form of suffering. But if you understand the background of everything, which looks like suffering, suffering itself is how we live, how we extend our life.

[05:28]

So in Zen, sometimes we emphasize the valid balance or disorder. I think Suzugi Roshi is basically reminding us that everything is beautiful because of impermanence. Everything is beautiful because of impermanence. Nothing is stuck, fixed in a stable position, and as such is continuing falling out of balance. And it is, in a certain sense, this balancing and unbalancing act in which moves our life forward. I was telling the retreat participants today, it's a little bit like walking. Do you ever notice you stand on one foot and you're on balance for a moment? And in order to take the next step, you have to fall literally out of balance in order to take that next step. And then regain balance and then fall out of balance. Regain balance, fall out of balance.

[06:30]

This is how we make the path before us. Continuously. In balance, falling out. In balance, falling out. And this is also the way that life and death works. We might think that life is a place of balance, here, stable, now. And we might think that death is a place of imbalance or disorder. But this dance of life and death, and in some ways you might say, it's just really life. Death is a part of life. It's this dance that allows the blossoming of life itself to constantly come forward. So if we are to truly enjoy and appreciate our life, we must then learn to be comfortable with all things, including ourselves, constantly falling out of balance.

[07:31]

But I think if we're very honest with ourselves, and we look deeply into our experience of life, most of us are aware to some degree of a deeper sense of ungroundedness, a sense that there is nothing ultimately which we can rely on. And Zen Buddhism often points to this very fact, teaching the view that all things lack inherent existence. Everything, all phenomenon, is empty of own being. or self-being. There is no separate thing here that you can separate off and call mine, me, solid. Nothing here that you can grasp and own, per se. But the most problematical emptiness and the lack for us has to do with a sense of our own self.

[08:43]

Because it lacks any reality of its own, any stable ground, this sense of self is haunted by a sense of lack. Do any of you experience this sense of lack? I see a few heads going. Where do you feel this sense of lack? How does it arise for you? Anyone can say something. We bring this dharma talk together forward. Where do you notice it? Yes. It's lonely. Say again. It's lonely. Loneliness. It's lost. Lost. Lost. The sense of feeling lost. Where am I? What's here? What's missing in my life? Do you feel that in the body? Where do you feel lack in the body? in the stomach.

[09:49]

You know, often at the center of our being, right here, there's the sense of a hole in some way. And what do we do when we have the sense of lack or hole? Eat. Eat. That's my number one addiction, eating. Fill that hole. Because that's how I learned to be loved. Anyone else? How do you feel your sense of lack, emptiness, ungroundedness? What do you do? Breathe. What's that? Breathe. Breathe. Oh, that's a good practice. Does anyone go shopping? Does anyone find a new boyfriend or girlfriend? Distraction. Distraction. Social media is great for that sense of lack and emptiness. How to, you know, turn our eyes away from actually seeing and feeling it in ourselves. Baking. Baking. Any activity, if you do it from a place of, I don't want to feel my life in some deep way, if I am trying to fill something up, make something solid in my being, some way to reify my sense of self, that I am truly here, that is coming from that place of lack, of ungroundedness.

[11:18]

And so we study that in our practice. That's what we're doing here. We are studying how does the sense of lack arise from me, this perception of lack, emptiness, ungroundness, and how do I react to it? What do I do? How do I engage myself? And what habitual ways have I been engaging myself for years and years and years as a way to deal with this sense of lack? But you know, this sense of ungroundedness is, while it's a problem, it's also an opportunity. So if we can open up to the truth of this fundamental sense of ungroundedness at the core of our being, if we can let it go and yield to that experience, then we find that it's also the source of our creativity and the source of our spirituality.

[12:28]

That at the very core of our being there's something else there, something formless that cannot be grasped, something that transcends the self, and yet is the ground of self. I think the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart expressed it in a lovely way. He said, God is closer to me than I am to myself. And if you want, you can replace God with Thura is closer to me than I am to myself. And that emphasis on I, and I, the ego self, am to myself. So the question is, What can we do to open up to our ungroundedness, to this sense of lack, in order for that to manifest in me, as me, and thus in the world?

[13:35]

I read somewhere once that a student came to the Zen teacher, Charlotte Jocko Beck, complaining about episodes of vertigo, and this... disorientation that seemed to somehow be triggered by her zazen practice. And the student was quite unnerved about this experience and didn't quite understand what was happening and wondered if maybe she should stop doing zazen because of it. And it's said that Joko Beck responded to the student that Zen practice actually requires that we get used to the sensation of falling. Zen practice requires that we get used to the sensation of falling. So what does it mean to get used to the sensation of falling? Falling through ungroundedness. What does it mean to have nothing fundamental to rely on and still live your life as best you can?

[14:47]

So I spent the last several months in Brooklyn, New York. I was honored to be able to go there as part of a teaching fellowship through the San Francisco Zen Center, and I was at the Brooklyn Zen Center, and there are a number of people here from the Brooklyn Zen Center, including Ian, somewhere. I love the Brooklyn Zen Center. If you ever have a chance, you guys, you have to go visit. It's a wonderful, sweet crew. Sangha, I should say. Not crew, but sangha. And after my three months, one of the things I did is take some extra vacation time, because I actually like New York, and I'm a bit of a city boy, which is kind of ironic, given that I spent eight years here in the wilderness. I don't know how that happened. But yeah, that's what happened. So I stayed on, and part of my vacation, I made some excursions, and one of the excursions I made was to Coney Island. Anyone been to Coney Island? Yes. Anyone like amusement parks or thrill rides, particularly roller coasters?

[15:51]

Anyone who really do not like roller coasters would not be caught dead on it? Exactly. There seems to be two kinds of people. Those who really like thrill rides and those who will not actually go on a thrill ride. My friend Lee wonders, why would you actually want to go on a thrill ride? Life is an up-and-down roller coaster, and I have If there's enough anxiety and fear and excitement, why do you need to add to it by getting onto a thrill ride playing out loud? And they all kind of end the same, right? You come around to the same place and then it stops. So why do it? She's got a certain point. But I have a love-hate with thrill rides. And part of it is because I... I actually have a certain fear of heights. So what I try to do is go on the rides that kind of take me up and really drop me down really fast.

[16:57]

And when I do this, I resist the urge to close my eyes. So not to see how quickly I'm falling to the ground or how quickly I'm falling into space. So I really challenge and test myself by going on these rides. I actually push myself to go on to them just to test my level of comfort, you know, the extent which I can be okay with being in this kind of disorientation, groundlessness. Kind of why I agreed to do this Dharma talk. Kind of the same thing. So I went on to this, I went on seven rides, right, you know, thrill rides. I picked the top thrill rides. And the very last one was one called Zenobia. I have no idea when it was called Zenobia. But I have to go, if I'm a Zen priest, I have to go to a ride that says Zenobia. And it's this ride, it's basically a hundred foot long steel beam with two seats on the end that kind of rotates.

[17:58]

And then the whole thing is kind of elevated up and it somersaults around up to 130 feet off the ground at 60 miles an hour. And so while it's going around this way, the seats are going around this way, forward and backwards, right? So you're just spinning around in total disordination, falling again and again, you know? And it's really hard not to go, not to be, you know, like, oh my God, what did I do? Why did I really do this? This is crazy, you know? And as you're doing it, you can see... the ground, and then the sky, and then you see the amusement park, and you see beyond, and then the ground, and the sky, other people screaming, and other, you know. It's kind of like life, you know? So, at one point in the ride, it actually stops at the highest point, you know, because this is two things. It stops in order to let the people at one end, oh, you know, Newport.

[19:00]

So, you know, I'm Finally, it stops. I've gone around a number of times. I'm like, oh my God, thank God. But then that stops, and the thing is still swinging back and forth 130 feet off the ground, right? And I'm kind of like having a slight panic attack because I'm so high up. I can feel the anxiety and fear happening in my stomach. And I'm just like, okay, I'm going to do some zazen now. I'm just going to sit here, follow my breath. You know, do some zazen and just kind of settle down and see, you know, I can rest. So I did for a little bit and then I was like, okay, I'm okay now. I'm okay, I'm okay. I'm not going to throw up, you know. And so what I did next was look outward and extend my view as far as I could. You know, and I could see all the neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I could see even Manhattan in one direction to my right. And on the other direction, I could see the beach. You know, Coney Island Beach and the ocean and people and the sun and the clouds. So this wide extended view was so lovely. As long as I was looking out that way, it was okay.

[20:01]

The minute I looked down and narrowed my view, that sense of ungroundedness hit me in the stomach again and started lining up. So at one point I said, I'm going to test myself. Because I was holding onto the bar like this, and my feet were curved underneath the seat. I was grasping on for life, which a lot of us were doing through life. And I said, okay, I'm going to test myself. I'm going to let go of the bar, and I'm going to let my feet come out and dangle in space. So I'm here like... And suddenly I hear this click and... And I was like, oh shit. This is it. This is the end. Okay, so let me pause for a second and say that the practice of zazen itself is this act of intentionally becoming intimate with the experience of groundlessness. Our practice of zazen entails what Dogen described as dropping away a body and mind.

[21:08]

basically dropping away of our identification, our grasping with body and mind, and opening to a larger sense of being and presence and awareness. So Zazen is letting go, completely letting go, surrendering into this moment, into the experience of this moment in whatever way it's appearing and manifesting and arising. It's not trying to control or manipulate any of your experience. We're not doing anything in Zazen. It's total non-doing. So in a sense, we're continually falling through the sky of experience, moment after moment, as it's manifesting, not holding on. And the minute we see any tendency to hold on and grasp, any sense of contraction, we study that. And I often encourage people, study contractions in the mind and body. That's where your practice is.

[22:10]

Any place in the body you feel a contraction at any point, study that. What is that contraction about? Where is it? How is it arising for me? Is there a story behind that contraction? And then we study the contractions in the mind. What is that about? What is that story? Pulling away. And contraction is also leaning in. There's the grasping contraction. I want desire. And there's the aversion contraction, I don't want. So we watch this pulling away and pushing and grasping, you know, how we become unstabilized by our contractions in life. What is it to find those contractions and soften into them? To be able to stay close to the edges of them, to test the limits and the borders, to be close to them and then see, can I soften just a little bit more, can I release just a little bit more into that place of discomfort, disease, unknowing?

[23:22]

Can I just a little bit more bear that ungroundedness in this particular aspect of my being at this point in time? That's how we become bigger human beings. That's how we develop big mind, letting go of the contracted self and opening to a larger self, into our spacious Buddha mind, into our natural state of spacious awareness, which is what we truly are. We're just this sky-like, open, spacious, boundless, luminous awareness. Are you willing to fall through that sky of luminosity? Are you willing to take the risk? What holds you back? What holds you back? What do you have to lose? This?

[24:26]

This? You want to hold on to this your whole life? What truly do you have to lose? by falling into emptiness, by falling into awareness. You could even say by dancing into emptiness, dancing into awareness. You have a choice. You have a choice. So you might imagine that a Zen priest in the face of fear, in the face of the sense of groundlessness, would be kind of like, okay, I should just buck up and keep it together and not look like I'm losing my nerves or whatever. We're all supposed to be walking around calm and okay and nothing's bothering us. It's often kind of a stereotype that comes with Zen people. Nothing bothers us. We're all cool and unruffled and non-emotional state of indifference.

[25:29]

If you see anyone like that, smack them. Really, smack them. You know, they're not living. They're not truly, you know. And this is sometimes mistaken for a sense of equanimity. Oh, look, they're so equanimous. The Theravannan monk Bhikkhu Bodhi says of upekka, which is the Pali word for equanimity, it is evenness of mind, unshakable freedom of mind, a state of inner equipose, that cannot be upset by gain and loss, honor and dishonor, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Upaka is freedom from all points of self-reference. It is indifference only to the demands of the ego self. With its craving for pleasure and position, not to the well-being of one's fellow human beings.

[26:34]

And the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says that the upeksha, which is the Sanskrit word for equanimity, same thing, means equanimity, non-attachment, non-discrimination, even-mindedness, or letting go. So the word upa means over. over and iksha means to look so in other words you climb the mountain to be able to look over the whole situation not bound by one side or another this is basically to rise above duality equanimity is this capacity to rise above duality that something is separate from me that there are other things It's this capacity to actually let go of any perception of separation and instead see our dependent core rising, how we are interdependently woven together.

[27:41]

We are one life coming forward. One expression of sky with many appearances coming through moment to moment. There is no separate thing. Rising above duality. And so we rise above our conditioned karmic views, and then we can gain a wider liberated view. And this liberated view is one that sees things as it is. Clear seeing, right view, perfect view, whole, complete. Nothing is missing. Nothing is lacking in this view. Nothing is lacking. Everything is seen. So in other words, don't use your sense of self as a guidepost. Don't use it as a place of orientation. Don't use it as a way to measure up and down, right or wrong.

[28:43]

Any of those dualities, any time you try to meet the world from that sense of separate self and affirm some duality, you're going to suffer. What is it to climb above? those dualities in your day-to-day life. How would you do that? And this doesn't mean climb above our suffering and pain per se. We still need to feel that. We still need to go through it. We still need to honor it. It's a part of our experience, a part of our being. Pema Chodron reminds us, if we're willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax. with the groundlessness of our situation. I kind of think that in the Absolute Realm, there is no up and down. In the Absolute Realm, there's up and down. In space, you want to think of it that way, there is no up and down.

[29:47]

So what is it to fall through space if there is no up and down? Are you truly fallen? Back to Coney Island. As I was sitting there in the seat, trying to keep from having a panic attack, by me being able to extend my view out, got that far, got even as far enough to raise my hands and let go, a particular poem came to me. I did. Like, it's always an idea to slip in a poem somewhere into a Dharma talk. But this is a poem that was given to me by a friend during my first year up here at Tassajara, and it's always called A Special Place for Me. So this is the poem. Sometimes in the open you look up to see a whirl of clouds dragging and furling your whole inventoried history.

[30:58]

You look up from where you're standing, say, among the stolid mountains. And in that moment, your life becomes the margin of what matters. And solid earth you love dizzies away from you, like the wet shoreline sucked back by that other eternity, the sea. At times, the spinning earth shrugs you off balance. Gravity loosens its fist, hoists you into the sky, And you might spend your life trying to recover this nearness to flight. Sometimes you look up to see a whirl of clouds dragging and furling your whole immatoid history. And this is the clouds of self, our stories, our ideas, our concepts, this weight and baggage that we drag with us, our karmic conditioning, our whole life.

[32:01]

whirling behind us. You look up from where you're standing, from wherever you are in your place in life. Say, among the stolid mountains, among the cause of the conditions. Maybe you look up one day at work and say, what is this? What am I doing here? Or you decide to come here to Tassajara to take a vacation or retreat to get a different perspective. And in that moment, when you stop and pause and say, what is this really going on here? Your life becomes the margin of what matters. You ever recognize that just being alive is enough? Just being alive is enough. You don't have to do anything to prove your worth.

[33:04]

There's nothing you need to do to deserve your life. What is it to just rest with that truth? Can you be okay with that? Just this breath, just this body, just this mind in this moment. That's what we're doing in Zaza, just being this life. It's all that matters. And the solid earth, everything that is familiar to you, everything that you have held onto as you, dizzies away, falls away, like the wet shoreline sucked by that other eternity, the sea. Everything recedes into the ocean of time, the ocean of being. At times, the spinning earth shrugs you off balance. In other words, impermanence, it's constantly shrugging us off balance. Gravity loosens its fists.

[34:10]

The weight of our ideas of self open. The hand opens. And that moment in which all that weight is let go hoists us up into the sky. and you might try to spend your whole life trying to recover that nearness to flights. That nearness to flights, that sense of ungroundness, is the doorway to presence. We can't be truly present until we are completely open. Open, boundless, spacious sky. Not clinging on to anything, not protecting anything, not establishing some sense of separation.

[35:13]

What is it to be fully present as we fall through this life together, in one life? So in case you're wondering, I started falling out of my seats in the Zenobia. And it just so happened that the reality was just as I put my hand up and I was letting go, the ride started again to come down to do another series of rounds in order to finish up at the end and drop me off. So don't be fooled by appearances. Don't be tricked by what you think is happening. Basically, I just want to encourage you to challenge your complacency. Challenge those places where you are holding on and clinging. Be willing to explore falling into your life, whatever that means for you. Test the boundaries of self.

[36:17]

Test the boundaries of what you believe. Test the boundaries of limits in your body and mind. open, soften into that space. So you can eventually just come from this total place of love. Total place of open love. Open connection. One final poem. Well, actually it's not a poem, it's a quote from Pema Chodron. When we resist change, it's called suffering. When we when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that's called enlightenment. So I want to thank you for your presence. I don't know if we... Maybe one or two questions or responses or... What's that?

[37:20]

Where am I looking? Ino-san. Yes, it is time to close. It is time to close. So we are now going to fall into the next activity, which is going to bed. So thank you, everyone, for your presence. Thank you for your generosity. And I survived this particular ride. Now I can go and eat dessert. That's what I did. I didn't eat the whole day when I was on the island. I finished all the rides, and then I ate. I went to Nathan's. You know Nathan's? You know? So, okay. Thank you. 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 sfcc.org and click Giving.

[38:24]

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