This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So good to be with all of you. Is anyone here for the first time? Welcome. And welcome to everybody. And... Gratitude is going to be an undercurrent in my talk, and it'll surface directly a few times. And I want to start with gratitude because my heart feels very full, kind of overflowing with thanks. And I want to start with expressing gratitude to each and every one of you and all of you because you're what a Zen center is, what a temple is.

[01:02]

And I also want to express gratitude to David Zimmerman for asking me to speak and for Tova for taking care of me. And Darlene Cohen was my heart teacher. She died on January 12, 2011 of ovarian cancer. Her dharma name was Suray Kinpo, which means great spirit manifesting dharma. And... We used to have a study week every summer at Tassajara, and at the end of one really, really hot week, we had been very dialed into Dogen. We did Jindo, and we bowed out, and I don't know where she hid it, but she pulled out a huge water gun, and she doused all of us, for which we were very grateful, because it felt like it was about 150 humid... hot Tassajara degrees. I also want to express gratitude for my mentor, Lee Lipp.

[02:09]

She died on August 17, 2017, of breast, lung, and brain cancer. She was 79. Darlene was 68. They both had so much more life in them and teaching, and I'm very grateful to both of them. more about Lee in a few moments. And I want to express gratitude to the Buddhas and ancestors. Can you feel them here? I can. They're hovering around. And to my Buddhas and my ancestors, the Hoffmans and the Freedmans. And I feel them around too. My grandmothers, my grandfathers, a long lineage of Jewish mensches. And in a couple of weeks, on September 23rd at Green Gulch, thank you, Paul Irving, who is a wonderful Vipassana teacher, and I are going to teach a workshop that's called Finding Ease, a Zen and Mindfulness Approach to Anxiety.

[03:23]

And it's one of two teachings, two workshops that that Lee Lip created. The other is called Transforming Depression and Anxiety, A Path of Skillful Compassion. They have such long titles that even after teaching them for four years, I don't always remember the precise subtitles. And so I have Lee, and I have the topic of finding ease in my mind and in my heart. both because I'm getting ready to teach this workshop, and because of what's happening in the world, and because of some experiences, some suffering that friends and family are going through right now. I want to tell you a little bit about Lee. She was a Zen N of a Pasana teacher. She lived here at City Center for many years, and then

[04:27]

across the street nearby. She was a Jewish mother, probably about five foot two with very short gray hair and bright eyes. And we met about 25 years ago and she came up to me and she said, you are really cute and we're going to be great friends. And we were. And then about four years ago, she came up to me and she said, I want to teach with you. And I just felt so lucky. And that's how I started teaching these workshops with her. She was asked by her teacher, Gil Fronsdale, to create these workshops. She was a psychotherapist as well as a vipassana and a Zen teacher. And so creating these offerings brought together her Buddhist teaching, her... and compassionate practice as a psychotherapist and her lifelong practice with depression and anxiety.

[05:36]

And it was so amazing to me that she invited me to teach with her because I've had a lifelong practice with depression and anxiety. And so to have this opportunity to teach with an elder and learn from her and extend this offering... to Zen students to... I've found that clients and executive directors and development directors I work with started showing up at the workshops when I started letting them know I was teaching them. And... So these workshops meet a deep need. And ease and finding ease is on my mind One reason is that I just spent a week and a half with my 86-year-old father. And he's been a competitive athlete his whole life.

[06:43]

My brother, it's complicated, not my father's son, came and visited him near LA one year. many years ago and tried to find a sport that he could beat my dad at. And he was naming things like archery and polo and what's that sport, croquet. And my father would say, taught that, was on a team for that, taught tennis, competed in tournaments. And so his aging process is a really profound adjustment. He's had to let go of basketball, which he loves. We watch the Warriors finals every year together, either in person or I'm on the phone with him during the commercials. And now he's grappling with a body that's weakening, a lot less energy, some other health issues. And what is this life when what you've identified yourself with starts to fall away?

[07:51]

One thing he did that I really love and I find incredibly inspiring is he has his own little ping-pong community center in his recreation room. So he and three or four friends several times a week get together and they play table tennis. And they connect. And they find ease in their aging process through just being together. Darlene called it body-to-body practice. Nothing special and everything special. And the day I left, that was on Monday, a member of his table tennis community unexpectedly died. He was 90. And at this moment, a dear friend of mine is at the bedside of our stepfather. He's in hospice. and she's taking care of him as he is leaving this world.

[08:55]

So how do we find ease with sickness, old age, and death? A very close relative of mine just discovered that their 30-year-old daughter has become a meth addict. She's gotten engaged to the person who introduced the drug to her, And they've become homeless. And this is 10 years of back and forth with various kinds of addictions. And my beloved relatives have realized that there's nothing they can do for her at this point. But let her go for now. Let her know that when she wants to get into treatment, they are right there. But they won't give her money so that she can take meth and live that kind of life. So I want to tell you a little bit about how we offer finding ease to the people who come to our workshops, and some of what I want to share is what we teach, and some of it is what has just grown within me from this experience.

[10:14]

How to find ease and in the face of anxiety or depression or loneliness, in the face of not being able to help your child from a really desperate life. One of the first things that we offer, of course, is meditation, and our workshops consist of sometimes students from Zen Center, often people who don't have a meditation practice, people who've had decades of a meditation practice, but want to learn more and cultivate practices and create tools for being in this life with what's real for them. And so we turn to the present moment together in finding ease, and we sit down with what's happening, with anxiety, with depression,

[11:19]

with joy. And we together watch it come and go. And we see the impermanence of thoughts and feelings, even big ones and strong ones, and have this experience of groundedness, of learning that It comes and it passes. And being in this body creates a foundation for that to happen. And I witnessed this as I visited with Lee in the last few months of her life when she was in physical pain and she would become agitated and fearful. So we would just sit together. There wasn't much else she was able to do, but she was conscious.

[12:19]

She was present. And she'd say, I understand that this is my life. This is what's happening now. This is what it means to be human. And this is what I get to be present with now. And she'd say, I don't like it. And I accept it. And then, the next moment, that experience would pass. And we'd look at each other And I'd say, cheesecake? And she'd say, yes. And I'd walk over to David's Delicatessen and I'd get two big pieces of cheesecake and bring them back. And she would eat that cheesecake with relish. And that is how I experienced her sitting down with her own dine process and experiencing it with curiosity and with allowing.

[13:28]

Now I'm fearful. Now I'm agitated. Now I'm full of joy because my granddaughter is coming to town. Now I'm full of delight because Lisa's shown up with cherry cheesecake. And it was such a profound lesson to me that she could sit with all of this the way we sit in the zendo in the morning, the way I sit in my home temple. Another thing we teach in our workshop is both focusing and expanding awareness. So, shikintaza, we sit openly with what is, and then we gather our consciousness and focus it on the body and on what's happening right now. And for those of us who are dealing with difficult life experiences, who perhaps are overwhelmed with agitated moods, sitting in the body allows us to open up to that coming and going, to realizing that even really deep, strong feelings

[14:49]

They arise and they pass. And so we sit together. We call it a mindfulness pause. We breathe. We notice what's happening right now. What are the thoughts? What are the feelings? Settle in the body. Focus on this very moment. And then we open up our consciousness, our meditation to the wider world, our wider experience again. So we focus and we expand our awareness and live the difference between direct experience and thoughts and feelings and reactions to direct experience. The difference between, I'm really scared, and this is what's happening now, and eating cheesecake. We also practice compassion together in our Finding Ease workshops because many of us are pretty hard on ourselves.

[16:03]

People come to our workshops and often are pretty critical of themselves. Self-judgmental, kind of feeling like, I shouldn't be anxious. I should be strong. I should be this way. I should be that way. And so we share with each other what our experience is, what our suffering is. Just witnessing, just listening, not trying to fix, not trying to give solutions. And we learn what it's like just to be together, to be a witness, like Avalokiteshvara, she who hears the cries of the world. And that brings enormous healing into the room.

[17:09]

For many people, it's the first time they've simply shared, here's how I feel, here are the thoughts that come up, here's my experience with someone who simply quietly listens. And it opens up this experience of generosity, of the generosity of presence, the generosity of offering ourselves, offering myself just as we are, just as I am. And when I think about practicing generosity, when I think about gratitude, I come back to my dad. because his whole adult life, he's always taken care of one person a lot younger than him and one person a lot older than him. Just his way of giving quietly, person to person, body to body.

[18:13]

And for the people who've been younger than him, it's been hitting a tennis ball, back and forth, sharing some life experience. And for the person who's older than him, it's been helping them, helping them go through their mail, mowing their lawn, going shopping for them. And he's not able to do that anymore because he needs a little bit of help sometimes. But we went to the hospital because he needed a procedure while I was visiting, and he opened... the door to the hospital, for some reason it wasn't an automatic door, for every person who walked in front of them, especially people in wheelchairs and people using walkers. And then when we went to the elevator, he made sure he was the last person on, and he kind of kept his hand in the door to make sure it didn't close on the people in wheelchairs and walkers and moving slowly.

[19:20]

And I just thought, Here is my father who in his quiet way offers all the time, practices generosity. And he told me I feel such deep gratitude because I'm able to share what I learn in life and I have gotten to see what aging is because when he was 40, he helped someone who was 70 and when he was 60, He helped someone who was 80, and he said, part of it is because I want to make a difference, and part of it is because I want to understand what my future is. I want to be as ready as I can be. And so I, spending time with him, he's completely honest about his experience of aging. and about his losses, and about his joys.

[20:26]

His tennis friends, the 30 minutes or so of table tennis that he can play a few times a week, brings him enormous energy and joy, and he's very clear and says, I know this will go away, and it's probably going to go away soon, and I will enjoy every hit of that ball. and especially the sound. You know, ping pong balls make that special sound. So compassion and generosity. And when I think of those teachings, I also come back to Lee, because one thing she was very upfront about was her love of cookies. At every workshop, she loves Zen Center workshops because of our baked cookies. And... always brought them out with a flourish when it was time for tea and cookies. And when she entered hospice, the first time I went there, there was literally a mountain of cookies on a table in her room.

[21:31]

And she was able to eat them a little bit. And as her process unfolded, I realized that she was even when unconscious, able to do one of the things she really loved to do with cookies, which was share them. Because everybody left with a bunch of cookies who visited her. And so her generosity of spirit, of teaching, of wisdom, is something I feel really honored to continue and to offer through these workshops. And I hope... the people that I work with, whether it's sense students or non-profit executive directors, who often call me crying, but that's a whole other conversation. And the other thing that we teach in finding ease with anxiety and depression and suffering is to know what our stories are.

[22:39]

Here at Zen Center, we call them mental formations. What are my ideas about you? What are my ideas about myself? And how do they color or condition the way I move through the world, the way I see you, the way I see myself? And as we become aware of those stories, for example, if I am someone who's really insecure and I pass... let's say an acquaintance who gives away but doesn't look me in the eye, just a little encounter like that, we can be off and running. They don't like me, what did I do? I must have hurt their feelings, I must have insulted them. But all they did was not make eye contact. And so just to know, hey, I tend towards insecurity, and maybe set that aside and bring that curiosity to bear.

[23:46]

Maybe this person's having a really hard day. Maybe they just visited their aging father and are having a hard time keeping it together. If they made eye contact with me, maybe they'd start crying in the middle of the street. Maybe I ought to text them and check in. So knowing our stories, knowing our mental formations can really offer the opportunity to interrupt what can be really a highway to hell. Because making up what you think is happening with someone or what you think an interaction is about is a recipe for suffering. And so we work with the people who come these sessions to just look at what do we bring to our lives and what intention do we want to create?

[24:49]

What viewpoint do we want to cultivate and how will that viewpoint affect what I think and what I say and what I do, maybe even my work? And if you're hearing a little whisper of the Eightfold Noble Path, you're on the right track. So the Buddha's teachings are what help us cultivate the finding of ease, knowing ourselves, sitting down with what is, practicing impermanence. really seeing that feelings, thoughts, even the intense ones, come and go. And my point of view is just my point of view. And as soon as I become aware of it, there's spaciousness. Doesn't mean it doesn't come up and I don't project and I don't think I know what's motivating you.

[25:59]

But perhaps if I notice my point of view, I might also ask you, what's going on with you? And then I might get to help you or chat with you or go have a cup of tea. So I told David when he asked me to talk, he said, you should... end at 8.30 or even a little bit earlier in case there are questions or comments. So I said, well, I tend to give short talks. And he said, there will be no complaints. So I'm going to end on that note of gratitude and thinking again about my dad, just expressing profound gratitude for being alive, for us having a 10-day visit.

[27:01]

for him being able to wiggle his toes. And the night before I left, we had such a moment. My grandfather lived to be 103. He was a kind of a stoic German firstborn and not given to emotion. But the last three years of his life, he lived in Florida. My dad visited him a lot more often And he would start crying when my dad left. And I have never seen my dad cry, even though he's a lot more emotional than my grandfather was. The night before I left, he looked at me and he said, now I understand why my father would cry. And he started crying. We cried together. And they were tears of gratitude and appreciation. And this deep feeling of this one wild, precious life that's gone like that.

[28:12]

So let's live it together, okay? I did want to see if there were any questions or comments. I just really love this. One of Tony's Sangha members made it for me. And Beata Chapman, we received Dharma Transmission together. So any questions or comments? Oh, yeah. Oh, Mark, hi. Hi. I took Lee's class online. I'm just curious, is that still a possibility? Oh, it is. In fact, it's an offering on her website, leelip.com.

[29:15]

And for a gift, you can take it online anytime you want and repeat it. And then you can experience her directly. Yeah, it's a wonderful class. You know, I have to share one more thing with you all. In case you had any doubt that this is a 21st century temple, I was sitting at my desk at 510, and I got a text, and I ignored it for a minute, but then I looked at it, and it was Mark, and he wanted to know, do you need a chair or a zafu? I just thought that was great. Thank you. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[30:22]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[30:25]

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