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. Hi, everybody. Who is coming to Zen Center, San Francisco Zen Center, for the first time? Can I see all of you? Great. Welcome. And I haven't been here for 30 years for a Saturday lecture. That was the last time. Can you let me know if this is okay? Great. That's how long it's been since I lived in this building. My name is Grace Dammon. Hello. I'm here. I had the fortune of being in a head-on collision on the Golden Gate Bridge. That's why I'm in a wheelchair. And I'm in a rotten wheelchair today because I wrecked my good wheelchair.

[01:03]

Anyway, so it goes. And that happened about 11 years ago. And I'm so grateful to you, Christina, my Dharma friend, my sister, my one-time roommate, for inviting me to speak about awake mind, awake body, awake body, awake mind, embodying the Buddha way. and she's leading a wonderful practice period, of which I'm a part online participant, by the same title, Awake Body, Awake Mind, Embodying Buddha Way. There's still time to sign up, isn't there? Now, what is awakening, and what is Buddha's Way? Well, I don't really have the answer, but the miracle of Buddha... Buddhism is about love and compassion. And the path or the way... The path or the way... We're going to have these.

[02:11]

Sorry, you guys. The path or the way... So the path or the way of Buddhism is one of awakening. And awakening happens here and now, in this moment, in this very body, not yesterday, not tomorrow, but in this moment with all of your feelings, thoughts, formations, consciousness, sensations. And how do we come awake to... the love and compassion of Buddhism. We do that by developing skillful means. How do skillful means develop? That, in turn, is a question. That is the big question. That is why most of us who are here practicing and have been practicing for years do practice. Skillful means is developed through practice.

[03:12]

And what does practice mean? From my perspective, what practice means is looking at the contents of your own mind, and trying to untangle those particular stories you tell yourself that obstruct your love for your fellow being or fellow traveler. We all do that. We all tell stories. We tell stories every minute of every day. At Zen Center here, we perform these acts communally. At the end of this lecture, we will chant these vows. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Buddhist way is unpassable. I vow to become it. And I left something out. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Everyone, every night during the practice period at Green Gulch, I'm sure it's true here, you chant the refuges.

[04:17]

And by refuge, I mean I take refuge in Buddha, I take refuge in Dharma, I take refuge in Sangha. And then in every ceremony that we have all the time, for example, a funeral, a wedding, it doesn't matter what, an ordination, the full moon, when the moon gets full, we chant the precepts. So at this point, the vows, the refuges, and the precepts are really in my body. They're encoded in my body. It takes time, but they definitely are encoded. In the 11 years since my accident, I've learned that there really is no way to separate the transition and migration of body and mind, particularly where awakening is concerned. I'm going to speak a little about how I look back on the various stages of my own integration. and lack thereof.

[05:17]

Because every step of the way, both my body and mind, of course, were inseparable. We're trying to achieve liberation at their own level, at their own functional level. So they had different requirements and benefits of practice. And what was the evolution of my body and state of mind? What has it taught me? It has taught me so much that I can feel happy, or anybody actually can feel happy at any level, any state of existence, but practice really makes a difference. Now, practice is my low star. What do I mean by practice? Once again, it's looking at the contents of my own mind. trying to figure out what stories I tell, and recognizing my stories as much as my current state of health allows, and changing them where I'm able.

[06:25]

We do this, it's helpful to do this by creating a container, and practice period allows a container to be developed, and the practice period container, as you all, how many people here are in the practice period? Good number of you, okay. Practice period consists of sitting zazen, getting to the zendo to sit zazen, not getting to the zendo to sit zazen, serving oriyaki meals, doing one day sits, performing our job, most of all interacting with each other. We watch the stories we tell ourselves, we renew our vows, daily, if not more often than daily. And we look again at our deepest intention. Practice also teaches us about the constancy of change, emptiness, and codependent arising.

[07:30]

But I'm going to leave that to somebody else to talk about. I'm sure there are more of them willing to talk about. I'm sure Paul must be talking about it. I've described my state of mind... my state of body and awakening into four phases. The first was my state of coma, which lasted about two months. Second was the state of profound cognitive disorganization and physical impairment and disability, which lasted about three years. I'm kidding. It lasted about five years. State of adjustment, both cognitive and physical, to loss, which lasted about... still going on, and my state of reorganization to a new body, a seeming new body in my only seeming, which is still going on right now. I speak as if these are distinct phases. Of course they're not. There's nothing linear about this process.

[08:33]

My experience in all of this is heightened by the fact that by profession, I'm a physician still practicing medicine. I've also been a Buddhist practitioner, somewhat so. Living at Green Gulch for 27 years, I couldn't do one without the other. That's just who I am. Medicine and Buddhism exerted equally strong pulls on my psyche, my heart, my soul. And my intention, which I was born with, or seemingly had from the very beginning, was to be of service. And That just happened because of the parents I had, because of the grandparents I had, maybe because my school motto from the time I was four was to live is to serve, and maybe my Quaker education. But again, all things everywhere conspired to just reinforce that intention.

[09:35]

Let's go through the four stages, one step. And I hope that you guys can learn something from this. And I hope it's helpful for your own awakening. I have particular Lojong-like saying, or Mary had her teachers saying, that I repeated for each phase just because it worked for me and it formed part of my practice. So the first state began on May 21, 2008. That was... four days before my daughter's 14th birthday, we were driving on the Golden Gate Bridge. For those of you who don't know the story, I'm just briefly going to go through it. My daughter was riding in the front seat. Our dog was riding right between us in the well. It was an old Honda Civic. We were talking about the French Revolution. I don't remember beyond that. But I know it was the French Revolution. And in any case, unbeknownst to a driver...

[10:38]

going south, we were going north on the Golden Gate Bridge. He went into atrial fibrillation. He was only 40 years old, passed out at the wheel, drove across four lanes of traffic, hit my car on the driver's side. Unfortunately, I didn't have airbag on the side doors. So we were suddenly in stop zone. And it took hours to clear the bridge. But nonetheless, And it took about an hour to cut me out. But I knew that Sabrina was going to go to Marin General. Mac, our dog, ran out of the car and was picked up at the Marin end of the bridge where somebody recognized him and luckily took him to the emergency hospital in San Rafael. And I knew I was being teleported or heliported to John Muir Walnut Creek Hospital. because my injuries demanded another level of treatment.

[11:43]

So I asked the highway patrol not to let me pass out until I got to the emergency room. I needed to know that Sabrina was okay. And to the first responders on the bridge, I gave them Arlene and Fu's telephone number. I gave them, because you know, if you need something done immediately, Arlene is the person to get it done. I gave them the name of Sabrina's doctor, all of her medication, etc., etc., etc. My blood loss was profound, however, and by the time I hit the emergency room at John Muir Hospital, I was about to pass out. I had no blood pressure. But because of my insistence, I was still able to give them all of the cell phone numbers and landlines for Sabrina's grandparents. And I did find out that Sabrina was okay. They told me, just as I was about to pass out, that she had gotten to Marin General, and she was conscious.

[12:47]

And because I'm a doctor, I knew that that meant that she was going to be okay. My body was trashed. My mind stayed fully functional until I could go offline, thank God. And once I heard that she was okay, I passed out. the mother in me just said, I'm out of here. That began the first segment of my recovery, which I call, and this was the stage in which both my body and mind were kind of gone from the earth. Thich Nhat Hanh, when discussing the Abhidharma, says that there are four levels of consciousness, mind consciousness, sense consciousness, alaya or storehouse consciousness, and manas consciousness. or become mental formation. At this stage, I was actually in mind consciousness, or lack thereof, phase. As Christina has taught you, my limbic brain and my neocortex went totally offline, probably my brainstem also a little bit.

[13:52]

When I first woke up singing You Are My Sunshine two months later, about two verses, I still knew... two complete verses. I was dying to figure out where I had been in those two months in which I was unconscious. But I quickly decided that maybe my body had done me a great mitzvah by having me go unconscious, that there really was no need for me to understand what that unconscious phase was all about. In other words, I had no need to be awake. That is really important. Waking up does not always have to happen. My body knew exactly what it needed to do just to survive, and I felt that it protected my mind and heart beautifully. It expressed the bodhisattva intention, which saved me, just as my concern for Sabrina kept me awake and alert and functioning.

[15:00]

not going unconscious until I could. My body protected my mind by going unconscious. My slogan for this phrase is, when you're alive or dead, but dead, just be a mother or whatever, just be completely dead but alive, comatose or whatever. I have no associated mood or feeling flavors associated with this faith. but probably I do have intense PTSD. The second phase of my recovery lasted for about four years. It was characterized by profound cognitive and physical dependency. I had an additional four more operations, five hospitalizations, and my slogans for this phase were, just say yes. Nothing lasts forever, which I really picked up in my Buddhist practice.

[16:04]

I was hoping that was true. Really hoping. The Bodhisattva bow, and hallelujah. Hallelujah in a big-time way. I got so bored with myself while people would come and visit me, asking me how I was, that I decided to turn the tables very quickly. So I'd always ask them, and you know how true it is, that everybody in California suffers from relationship and or work angst. So I would ask them, how do you like your work? How do you like your relationship? And that would bring me at least an hour worth of listening time. If they said something like, I think I could get better work or I could do better in relationship, I would say, get out while the going's possible. get out and do something you really love. That was the big argument. And I said, if you don't like the person, if you're not willing to marry the person you're with, just get out.

[17:08]

You have no business being in an uncommitted relationship. Be happy. Just be happy. Take responsibility for being happy. For some reason, I developed a real reputation as a soothsayer. So... Fu had to put a limit on the number of people I could see every day. And because I didn't know better, I was just saying yes to virtually everything that was asked of me. At one point, Isabel Allende, Sabrina's grandma, asked me to switch with her and make the keynote address at the Unsung Heroes of Compassion luncheon, even though she gave speeches all the time. I had a menial task assigned to me, which was to hand out the katas. You know, katas are those white prayer shawls, which the Dalai Lama was going to hand to me. And I was going to hand to the honorees, the 50 honorees. It didn't matter that I couldn't move my arms.

[18:10]

But anyway, so I said yes. Now, why I said yes and why I agreed... To give this speech is a long story, but basically it had to do with the fact that my brain was still mush. I mean, when I was first admitted to rehab, I could not piece together two sentences, much less write a 10-minute talk. So I arrived at the hotel after being discharged from the hospital, the Ritz-Carlton, and everything looked so... We've got a technical problem. Small technical problem. Thanks. And everybody's dressed. This is at the Ritz-Carlton. I mean, you can't imagine what it was like to come out of a hospital where everything is pale green into a place like the Ritz-Carlton where everybody was dressed in saris so magnificently.

[19:18]

The color of everything was totally... transformative. I was totally blissed out. I said, hallelujah, hallelujah. I looked at the tangas. I looked at the food. I couldn't believe how great everything looked. I mean, I was so loving it. Anyway, but then I happened to watch His Holiness walk up on stage, and my bliss turned to total horror, because when he was walking, he looked as if he was totally in heart failure, and I thought, this guy is going to die on my watch. What am I going to do? And, you know, I had not run a Code Blue for at least two years at that point. So I'm sitting there going over Code Blue scenarios. He's sitting there trying to adjust my microphone because I couldn't even move my hand. I mean, Mary luckily was here. But anyway, he finally had to call the tech people up. And he said, just wait, Grace. And so I gave my talk.

[20:18]

And we nuzzled forehead to forehead. And in that space and moment of mutual appreciation, apparently we lit up the room according to feedback that we both got later on. I decided that if he, with his history, trauma, strife, could be as magnanimous, fun, loving, and totally present as he was, then practice really had to be worth something. Now, of course, I'd been practicing that. about 25 years. One would have thought I would have learned that, but I didn't learn that so intently as I did then. I talked for about 10 minutes on the importance of combining compassion with wisdom. I have no remembrance of what I said, but Fu said it was okay. She's a pretty good judge. People who talked about him later said that he obviously had come alive when I walked in needing his help.

[21:20]

And I, of course, thought that he might need my help. I forgot that he's got all this big Secret Service entourage, and they're all trained as first responders. So I really didn't need to be thinking about Code Blue's scenario. But nonetheless, I was. And I thought, again, on that stage, in that moment... I can do this, and if he can do it, in spite of our mutual trauma, our mutual inabilities right now, then maybe practice really is the most important thing in the world. Seriously. Maybe it can make all the difference in the world. So what characterizes this phase for me is bliss. I have never lived so consistently in the present. The third stage, the one of adjustment... to both cognitive and physical loss, however, was the longest, by far the longest and the most complex. I had to feel the grief.

[22:21]

I had to feel the loss of my best friend, my body. Fortunately, by just saying yes in the previous phase, I had inadvertently set things in motion, which gave me a way to carry myself forward. When all I really wanted to do was to surf again, and cry because I couldn't practice medicine again, and cry because I couldn't love again, and cry because I didn't seem to be able to. Sabrina and I had brought a suit against the Golden Gate Bridge District, out of which came the median barrier. And also, Sabrina convinced two of my friends to make a movie about us, and out of that came a great movie, I think. gives me pause every time I have to see it. I really am a shy, non-disclosing person. You wouldn't know it by seeing that movie. But both happened because I'd taken vows at some point.

[23:23]

My bodhisattva vow. And I was bound and determined to have come out of this accident, both a median barrier to avoid collisions on the Golden Gate Bridge and to avoid isolation that comes from rapid change in fortune. such as I had experienced or my family had experienced. My slogans for this phase were, if you can, you must, and live into just having said yes. But there's no way of getting around how long and dark those nights were. I had to face things just as they were, which I did kind of well. Let's say intermittently well. I had a job running a pain clinic, and when I'd been asked to start the clinic for people with chronic pain, I thought, you've got to be kidding. Given what I've gone to in the last two years, this is the last thing I want.

[24:25]

I hate pain. I'm avoiding pain. I won't deal with pain. And I thought, luckily, I remembered that my Buddhist practice had told me to take a deep breath before I ever made a decision. My mother had also taught me, and I never paid attention to this before in my life, don't forget, don't make any big decision without sleeping on it. So I slept on it, and I took a deep breath, and I sat up on the edge of my bed the next day, and I meditated, and I thought, tell me what I'm supposed to do, thinking I was going to get the answer. Just go out and buy a pair of pants, get a haircut, go sit, go read a book. But no, the voice said, just say yes. This phase or phrase of just say yes has been my lodestar for the last many years. And it doesn't mean say yes and love it.

[25:26]

It does mean just say yes, because this is what's happening. This is what's facing you. This is what's in front of you. And this is what is, therefore. That, at the very least, gave me something to do. And I learned as a patient myself that the most healing force in the hospital is happiness on the part of the providers, the staff taking care. I would literally pull the blankets up over my head and feign sleep when either my doctor came in, the blood drawer came in, anybody who was depressed came in. I didn't care. I was equally unavailable. And it probably went back to my bodhisattva vow together with my own experience. But when I went back to work, I put the staff's happiness first. And I had to recognize that my own happiness mattered. I couldn't really say to my staff, don't come to work if you're depressed. You can come to work if you've got a cold or the flu.

[26:30]

We'll mask you up. That's preventable. But don't come to work. Take a sick day. Get the help you need. because you can't be of any service if you're depressed. So we constructed a program based on making life good for ourselves. So we begin each morning with a check-in. We pray for everybody in our family who's in trouble, which there are many, many people. And we sit there for about 10 minutes, both morning and afternoon. And then we meditate with the patient or the clients for about... 25 minutes mid-morning, all of which we get paid to do. On the city dollar, we're meditating an hour a day. So these are our collective practices. And we, the patients and team alike, are learning to redirect our feelings away from pain and suffering toward well-being and joy. And we're having so much fun. Western medicine is horrible at taking care of chronic pain.

[27:34]

I don't know if any of you experienced it. chronic pain. But one day, for example, we decided to do laughing yoga, which would require that everybody burst into laughter at some unknown time in the middle of whatever they were doing. We all tried to beg off. We thought it was horrible. Nobody wanted to do it. But luckily, nobody could get out of it. So you would find people laughing uproariously in the elevator. And just watch what happened. The most difficult thing about this phase was how erratic my mood states were. Some days I was devastated by all the seeming losses of my body, my family, my ability to get up and go, my independent status. I really had no idea what adjusting to this phase might entail. But some days I felt totally capable of doing everything

[28:34]

Anything. I felt completely empowered. I mean, I never dreamt of myself as a disabled person. I was always surfing, surfing, surfing. You know, you would have thought of being Dolly Parton. That's really who I wanted to be in my next life. It didn't help. But when I finally had to pay attention to what my body looked like as a physician, I was horrified. I mean, when I watched and read my own... case history, I was horrified. I couldn't understand how I could still be alive. And I remember saying to Fu many too many times, if I get any more dependent, I do not want to live. And that is a horrible thing to say to your primary caregiver. No joke. A caregiver should not have to deal with that. She did have to deal with that. And then finally, at some point, it hit me. that I owed everything to the life force.

[29:36]

And in gratitude to the life force, I regave myself to life. It's the only way I can say it. I recommitted myself to life. Again, I had structured it so that I would be forced to do this. Meaning, I'd chosen, and not really chosen, but my caregiver was somebody clearly had other things to do, number one. And number two, most of all, I loved flowers. I loved the drops of rain. I loved feeling water on my head during a shower. I loved the feeling of the air getting heavier as I zipped down through the garden at Green Gulch to the beach. I loved that. I mean, I... Really, really loved that. And I loved not being on the treadmill that I'd been on for so many years.

[30:39]

And it turns out that I'd gone that morning, the morning of the accident, to the retirement board for the city. And I said, just to figure out how soon I could retire with a pension. And I had decided, I told a friend of mine when I came back from the retirement board, that I was going to retire the next year. And I was going to finish my priest training at Green Gulch. So it goes for very well-laid plants. I did get a lot out of the accident, meaning that I did get time off. But I couldn't imagine that I was ever going to be in a community again that felt like sangha. I couldn't imagine having a sense of family like I'd had or love and be loved in the ways in which I had felt loved and be loved. And while I had sewn my priest, Okesa, Raksu and Zagu, as soon as I got back from the hospital, Christina had to show me how I could sew it because I was getting so seasick, nauseated each time I would put a stitch in, you know, Namukie Butsu, that I couldn't really do it.

[31:51]

And I was getting, I almost had to take anti-nausea medication just to go down and sew. But nonetheless, I loved it. And while I had been in priest training forever, or what felt like forever, Reb and I had decided that I was going to get ordained on the day of my funeral. So I wasn't able to put in IVs, do lumbar punctures, or perform any medical procedures. I had no real idea of how my life was going forward. And I... languished for not being able to imagine for a while anything else. I did move into a senior living facility, the Redwoods, where the average age of my section is now 94. I'm 72. And that scared the heck out of me. The inability not to imagine was not a constant state.

[32:53]

It was more like sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha, and my body was changing nanosecond by nanosecond. Let me talk about this, because I think it's illustrative of how the embodied body both wakes up and doesn't wake up. So I'd like to share with you a koan that I found particularly helpful in those days. It's case three of the Blue Cliff Record, and I think case 36 of the Book of Serenity. It's called Master Ma Was Unwell. So the monastery superintendent asked, Master, how is your health these days? The great teacher said, sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha. What in the hell does that mean? It helps to know two things to make some sense of this koan. The first is that Master Ma was a very revered Zen teacher, number one. Number two, he was big, and I think that matters.

[33:55]

Number three, he had... a gaze like a tiger. Number four, he was really strong. Number five, he had 139 transmitted disciples, like brown-robed priests. That's the equivalent of having 300 children as a single parent in terms of the energy that it takes to raise them. And the other item that it's helpful to know is that sun-faced Buddha lived for 1,800 years, and moon-faced Buddha only lived for a night and a day. So in other words, both are Buddha. So I get hit driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, moon-faced Buddha. No doctor, nurse, or anybody taking care of me. In that first two months, I was in the intensive care unit where they perform about 250 procedures a day, any of which can go wrong. And about 10% do go wrong. Nobody made... and especially important mistake, so therefore I'm alive.

[34:59]

And I'm here today, that sun-faced Buddha, and I spent the worst of that period in an unconscious, as we say, moon-faced Buddha. How does any of this relate to all of us? We are all both sun-faced and moon-faced. and live through moments that are sun-faced and moon-faced. And if we can embrace both our moon-faced and our sun-faced, where we are living those moment to moment, then we are practicing living moment to moment, which is exactly what awakening is about. It would allow us, in the face of death, to face anything, as Master Ba was, with equanimity. There's no way to say... that I wouldn't rather be walking. It's ludicrous that I can't put a stethoscope in my ear to this day. And I can't surf.

[36:01]

But I hope I can someday. Anyway, not to say that I wouldn't rather be walking. Of course I would. But I wouldn't trade anything about my current life for anything else because what I've found is so much richer than anything I could have gotten by having it be another way. It's richer than anything that I could have imagined or probably ordered at the French Laundry. And it's, I was thinking, I'm out of here if someone else needs to wipe my bed, I'm out of here if something happens to my daughter, or whatever it is, this whatever it is never ends. But the absolute wonder of that first shower and the fact that my body survived. Not only that, I had a fellow doctor say, you must have gotten some work done on your face when you were in the ICU. And I said, why do you say that? She said, because you don't have any wrinkles anymore.

[37:06]

So in other words, the fact that I had no wrinkles or that I could laugh uproariously while chairing an ethics committee meeting with five attorneys present and no reason for laughing, There's nothing short of miraculous. So the emotional phase, the flavor of this particular phase was grief and relief. Now phase four, the current phase I'm in, involves integrating this body and its quirkiness with the mind and its quirkiness. I've got to say as I get older, my mind gets quirkier. How many older people would say that's true? Yeah, okay. Okay. Sometimes I say I am really settling in, meaning I'm settling into this body. Every time I say that, Fu will say, you've said that for the last 11 years.

[38:07]

I can't remember a time when you didn't say that. So anyway, I won't say that today. But I did return to Green Gulch Farm last fall to be head student for the practice period. And... I said in my way-seeking mind talk, because usually the head student is looked at as the purveyor of form, said, do not look at me. You've got the king and queen of forms, Linda Ruth and Reb here. Do not look at me. I have no idea what I'm doing. I can't do anything. How I had to do everything, just like today, was improvised and fun, I must say. And I had... the loving support of practice period, my teacher, the sangha as a whole. And it took me some time to recognize that they're just white forms that I simply could not do. And practice period students got me up in the morning, put me to bed at night, dressed, helped me dress. They would give me food when I went to the dining room.

[39:09]

But I could, for example, no longer eat oreochi in the dining room. I mean, in the zendo. Now, Think about this, if you've ever been soku. How many of you have been soku? I was shaking so much that there was no hope that I wasn't going to drop everything that I picked up. So anyway, and that's just the way it was. And anybody who sat a one-day sitting knows exactly what that means. The soku has to take the chopstick or the knife or the fork up to the altar, purify it, at the altar, bring it back to the person. Meanwhile, everything stops. And if that goes on five or six times during one meal, both adds time to the meal, makes everybody really grumpy. Mostly me is so who I hated. So therefore, I decided I would upset myself from the zendo, except for doing my task, which was to lead this chanting.

[40:12]

In other words, during this phase, my true job was was to see exactly what my body could do, what my mind could do, and be gone with the rest of it. Now, there was a really funny part of this that happened during the Shusau ceremony. How many of you have been to a Shusau ceremony? Great. You're going to have one in the practice period. Anyway, it's one of the last ceremonies in the practice period, and it's also the coming of You know, it's the rite of passage for the chuseau. So everybody asked the chuseau question. So Sarah Davis, and I'm sure she wouldn't mind this, asked me this question that I had no idea what it meant. She said, Grace, I don't have enough carrots. And I thought, why are you asking me about carrots? Quickly thinking in my brain, that must mean that she's working in the kitchen and she's topping carrots and they run short on carrots.

[41:13]

And so I said, hi. And I said, look, I'm happy to come with you to chop carrots. I will do that. And Linda Ruth, who was sitting about where Aaron Merck is sitting right now, meaning she was stage left to me, said in a very loud stage left whisper, Grace, she didn't say carrots. She said courage. That was... So then... So then I had to improvise an answer. So I said, I would love to talk to you about courage over chopping carrots. You are very courageous. I neglected to say, and I'm so sorry that I'm either too broke or vain to have gotten earphones, but I'm not sure that's the problem. I think I can't distinguish between words, and that's because of my brain injury. That's one of the important things about this current phase is I really feel like it's important to have a certain amount of levity about all of this.

[42:19]

I mean, it's kind of like my saying to my staff, don't come to work if you're depressed. You can't be a healing force if you don't take care of your depression. Levity and joys are one of the ways that we take care of the Four Noble Truths, the truth of suffering, the truth of causes of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the Eightfold Path. I mean, I no longer think that I should... So this put me right back on the edge of practice. And I no longer think, for example, that I should absent myself from normal day-to-day activities like I'd been doing. For example, giving this lecture, which requires a fair amount of improv from everybody involved, or going to Tai Chi classes, or... where I can do exactly zero poses out of... I don't know how many they do, but it's a one-hour class. So I have to do this. And proceeding with Dharma and my calling to it, there are examples.

[43:24]

This current phase is mostly characterized by a whole new, seemingly whole new body and mind. I've noticed what I've noticed, and I apologize to... Miles and to Nancy, because they heard this when I said this at a Dharma talk three weeks ago at Green Gulch. But one of my goals or how my intentions have changed as a result of all of this during this phase is that I want to see myself as having loved well. When I die, I want to see myself as having loved well. Now, what do I mean by loving well? I think what I mean is I want to be able to teach, act, and otherwise support the awakening of all sentient beings. As you and I well know, and how will I know when I've done that? I will ask you guys as members of the Sangha.

[44:27]

I will ask my daughter. I will ask the sun in the earth below. I will ask my friends. And I still feel the need and feel... the desire to acknowledge my great gratitude to Zen Center and to Fu, who's the Abbas at Green Gulch, and my one-time current family member. She gave me five precious years of her life, and Zen Center gave me Dharma and Sangha. It also supported us to adopt and care for her, who was once a really sick little girl And now as a powerhouse of a 26-year-old woman, finally, Zen Center allowed me a safe harbor in which to heal enough so that I could go out and find an independent living situation that really worked for me. Especially when I was Shuso, I realized how much I'd come to love this practice and practitioner.

[45:30]

I looked out on your backs, and by you, I mean all practice period people. and felt such love. I felt such incredible gratitude for your willingness to do the practice. And so my slogan for this faith is, if you're alive, say hallelujah, and yes to what is, and if you can just live into the essence you've said, which you must, you will be saving all sentient beings and each other. Practice really does help. The feeling tone of this space is one of challenge, excitement, dread, gratitude, and joy. Suzuki Roshi said, and I'm ending, if you can enjoy your life in its true sense, then even if you injure your body, it is all right. Even if you die, it is all right.

[46:31]

When you are encouraged by everything, then there is no difference whether you are alive or dead. It is all right, quite all right. Practice is what opens up this perspective. Thank you very much for your kind attention. May you live into your yeses with an open heart. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:17]

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